It was late May and it was the
hottest day of the year so far, and I had the day off work, which I should have
been enjoying.
I should have been sitting on the patio beneath the clear blue sky with a cold
beer and the newspaper, but no it was not to be.
Instead I had spent the entirety of that beautiful day in May in the car with
my wife Roz, with the hot sun burning my face through the windscreen and her
constant wittering burning my ears, and the reason for wasting that beautiful
day was the fact that we were house hunting and the reason we had been at it
all day seeing a succession of unsuitable properties was that we had different
expectations of what our next home should be.
I very much liked the house we had just sold as it met all our needs when we
moved into it and we had had very happy times there, but our growing family
meant we needed a bigger home which was a shame as we had the house and garden
just how we liked it and we had really made our mark on the place.
I remember that I liked the look of the house the moment I saw it and it was in
a perfect location as it was on the right side of town for me getting to work
and it was modern.
I like modern, modern is good, modern is practical, modern is simple, modern is
low maintenance, I really loved that house and I wanted the same again only
bigger.
My wife on the other hand wanted character and apparently you only get
character in a property when the people who built it are dead, so we kept
looking and looking and looking.
It was late in the afternoon by the time we turned into the narrow road in the
old part of town and pulled up to a stop at the kerbside.
Ahead of us the road split left and right and then the two roads turned at
right angles and ran parallel to each other either side of a broad strip of
grass about 25 to 30 yards wide and with a few mature trees at one end.
The two roads and the grass strip separated two long rows of pre-war semi
detached houses that faced each other across the “no man’s land” in between.
Roz and I looked at each other and we both nodded agreement and we drove off in
the direction of our objective which was about half way down on the left hand
side and we pulled up outside number 52 and I switched off the engine.
I looked around me and despite my favouring the modern I liked the situation
very much, it had a wide open feel about it and there was plenty of parking and
somewhere for the kids to play and I had to concede that you wouldn’t have got
space like that in a modern development.
However I then looked at the house and a feeling of foreboding came over me, I
don’t know if it was the flaking paintwork, the pebble dash cladding, the ill
fitted windows or what looked like the original seventy year old guttering.
The sun was still hot and there was not a breath of wind blowing as we got out
of the car and my mind wandered back to that cold beer that I wasn’t sat at
home drinking.
I could tell by my wife’s demeanour as she stood looking at the house that she
liked what she saw and this was confirmed a moment later when she said
“It’s lovely isn’t it? Look it even
has a happy face” I looked at it and only saw a sneer.
I was spared having to comment by the
arrival of the agent well dressed and oily like most of his ilk and deeply
apologetic for his tardiness.
As we entered through the front door I was sure I felt an icy chill come over
me despite the heat of the day, I should have taken that as a sign.
We stepped into the tight cramped hallway and, obviously viewing it through
rose tinted glasses, Roz said
“Isn’t it light and airy?”
So I was not encouraged.
We had the full tour with the agent where he put a positive spin on every
aspect of the property and my wife gushed
“Oh I love this” and “Oh look at
that” and “now that’s what I mean by character”
She got worse with each successive
room we entered and where she saw charm, potential and character I saw only
dingy, tatty and old.
I tried in vain to point out that the house we were viewing bore no resemblance
to the one whose details she had gripped in her fist but it was all to no avail
and I knew my protestations were falling on deaf ears.
When we got out into the garden I couldn’t tell if the agent’s details
exaggerated the dimensions or not as I couldn’t see the end of the garden not
because it was particularly long but because it was so overgrown, and I half
expected a Japanese soldier to cut his way through the jungle and surrender to
me.
Again my poor deluded wife saw potential.
Next we viewed the detached garage
which was situated in the back garden but was accessed from the front of the
house via the drive way at the side of the property.
My wife enthused at the sheer size of the tandem garage and how we could get
both of our cars in it at the same time.
I pointed out that if she had an Austin A30 and I had a Ford Prefect we could
indeed get both cars in the garage at the same time but that any car made after
1959, with the possible exception of the original shaped Mini or a Smart car,
wouldn’t get up the narrow drive.
She dismissed my points with a loud tut and a hand gesture that said “Whatever”.
I knew at that point that I was fighting a losing battle and quite frankly I
was losing the will to live to boot.
I knew there was nothing to be done as she had clearly fallen in love with the
house.
On the way home in the car Roz went
through her list of positives and disregarded my list of negatives and in
closing she simply said you get more for your money with an older property we
would have to pay another twenty thousand to get a modern house with that much
space.
I didn’t even bother to point out that the reason you can get an older house
for less than a modern one is that they cost so much to maintain.
Although we fundamentally disagreed on what constituted the right house we did
both agree that the situation was perfect and in the spirit of compromise we
did acknowledge each other’s point of view taking fully on board each other’s
pro’s and con’s.
Suffice is to say we bought the house.
It was the middle of July when we
moved in, and the move from the old house went relatively well, at least as
well as these things ever do go, and then I arrived at the new house to find
the meter reader from the electric company waiting on the door step.
As I took a box of essentials from the car, tea, coffee, kettle etc, I looked
up at the house and it still appeared to be sneering.
I produced a door key that Roz had had cut that morning and much to my
embarrassment it wouldn’t open the door.
It still wouldn’t open the door as the removal van pulled up, nor five minutes
later when the meter reader left in a huff after telling me that she had more
important things to do.
To add to my embarrassment five minutes after that Roz arrived, took the key
from my sweaty hand and opened the door first time.
I couldn’t believe it and was so embarrassed as the removal men laughed behind
their hands, so I skulked into the kitchen to put the kettle on.
I took the lid off the kettle and put it under the tap then as I turned the tap
on the whole thing came off in my hand spraying water all over me and half the
kitchen.
My darling wife was less than sympathetic, laughing at me in front of the
removal men and serving me a large slice of tongue pie when we were alone.
After that there was a succession of minor irritants during the rest of the day,
the worst of which was that the Gas boiler wouldn’t light which was apparently
my fault because I was the only one in the house at the time.
In addition the sofa wouldn’t fit through the hall, this was the same hall that
Roz thought was light and airy when we viewed the property and I thought was
cramped, I decided to say nothing.
At the end of the day I sat in the garden reviewing the events of the day and I
was forced to conclude that the house remembered my hostility towards it and it
had decided to make me suffer and over ten long years I have truly suffered.
Every petty little job in the house has cost three times what it should have
because each minor improvement we tried to make revealed previously unseen
problems.
Now you might think that blaming this on the house is bordering on paranoia but
you didn’t have to experience it.
Whenever I was alone in the house the fabric of the building made noises it
never normally made when other people were in the house, they were like growls
of disapproval and then the boiler would stop working or the electrics would
trip and when I called an engineer out to investigate the problem they could
never find a cause.
Again you might put this down to paranoia or an over active imagination but the
house’s malevolence towards me also took on physical form.
The simple act of walking from one room to another became a trial, because the
door handles would snag on my clothes or catch on my pockets, normally when I
was carrying hot drinks.
Gutters would conveniently empty themselves just as I walked beneath them.
Invisible hazards would trip me on the stairs and cupboards and drawers would
be open for me to wound varying parts of my body on, when I was sure I had
closed them.
But the worst of all was a low concrete beam in the garage on which I would
always crack my head, no matter how low I ducked and my head bares the physical
scars to prove it.
I tried once to tell my wife how much I hated the house and that I wanted to
move but she loved the house so much and wouldn’t hear of it, so I have to
accept now as I look back that I was totally irrational and that the house
didn’t in fact hate me at all, but rather I hated the house.
Roz and I are divorced now and guess what? I let her keep the house.
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