‘Where do we go from here?’ Laura had asked.
Southport was the answer and it came from Laura’s younger sister, Katie, who was a nurse at the local hospital there. She had gone to live there with her husband, Stuart, after their grown-up son, Robert, had gone to work as a teacher in Barcelona. Billy and Laura had visited Southport several times and had come to love the place. When they expressed an interest in moving to the area, Katie began house hunting for a smaller and less expensive house for them. Apart from anything else, the one in Manchester with its six bedrooms had become too big for two people. The resort was located on the Lancashire coast about twenty-five miles north of Liverpool and was popular with the citizens of that city because of its proximity. It was popular also with other people from the north-west because it had a carefully cultivated reputation for gentility, offering a sedate atmosphere as a holiday resort and a retirement town, as evidenced by the number of homes with names like ‘Dunroamin’,‘Rose Cottage’ and ‘Home At Last’. Generally speaking, it was seen as less flashy than rival Blackpool with its rumbustious pleasure beach and its brash Golden Mile. One wag had described Southport as ‘Blackpool with O levels’ and it was
the butt of many jokes about the sea being a long way out.
‘I saw the sea once at Southport,’ said a lugubrious comedian as an opening to his act. ‘It’s in the Guinness Book of Records. And it’s such a lifeless place, they don’t bury the dead. They stand ’em up in bus shelters with a bingo ticket in their ’and.’
All nonsense of course, since it was a beautiful town and an attractive shopping and recreation centre for east Lancashire. And it may have been their imagination, but the weather seemed better, the skies bluer and more open. It was definitely cleaner and less congested than dear mucky old Manchester.
Billy and Laura made the forty-mile trip several times to inspect various houses but none was quite what they were looking for. One had excellent accommodation but backed onto a busy main road; one turned out to have dry rot, another serious subsidence.
Then one day Katie phoned, all excited. ‘I’ve found the perfect house for you,’ she said. ‘It’s a corner house set back from the main road and the side entrance is on a quiet avenue lined with trees. It has three large bedrooms, two entertainment rooms, beautiful gardens, double garage suitable for a car and a workshop.’
They drove over to look at it and they loved it from the start and agreed to buy. It would involve a temporary bridging loan on top of the loan Billy already had with the bank. It didn’t present a major problem since the sale of the Manchester house would clear the debts and once more they’d be in the black. There was a niggling negative thought at the back of his brain, however. Supposing the Manchester house took longer to sell than they thought or, horror of horrors, didn’t sell at all? He’d be up that familiar creek without a paddle. It didn’t bear thinking about. In addition, the Southport house needed a few minor repairs which the owner’s young daughter obligingly pointed out, much to the chagrin of her mother.
‘The back gate doesn’t close properly,’ the young girl said, ‘and it needs a new lock.’
‘All right, Marlene,’ said her mother, looking daggers at her. ‘That’s enough. You go inside and do your homework.’
‘Already done it.’
‘Well, go and do it again.’
They had the impression that the young girl didn’t want to move house as she continued to make them aware of the flaws.
‘Our dog’s put millions of scratches on the paintwork of the kitchen door; it does that when it wants out.You can see them there. Another thing: we’re next door to my junior school and there’s always lots and lots of noise coming from the playground. At four o’clock the side road outside is always parked up with cars and you can’t get in or out.’
But these adverse comments didn’t matter. Nothing could put them off. This was exactly the house they’d been looking for and with a little money spent on it would be perfect, or so they thought. They hadn’t bargained for the major survey which pointed out a number of serious repairs that were required: the need for pointing and painting, the renewal of gutters, and replacement of some window frames, new pathways. The value of the Southport house was much less than their own in Manchester, but it was still necessary to take out a small mortgage of .£3,000 as the bank insisted on the most serious of the repairs being carried out as a condition of the loan. They went ahead with the purchase although completion had to wait until the building work had been finished. The less important repairs like gates and fencing had to be put on hold for the time being.
Meanwhile they had to sell their own house. Mark still worked at the Manchester estate agency and advised them to save on commission charges by selling it themselves privately. He supplied them with the usual estate agent jargon: attractive property affording spacious accommodation of six bedrooms, two magnificent entertaining rooms, capacious dry cellars,
large mature gardens and so on. The surveyor who inspected the property spotted some slight subsidence on an outside wall but nothing too serious.They had never noticed it themselves and they hoped it wouldn’t put people off.
The surveyor valued the house at somewhere between £75,000 and £80,000.
‘But there’s no such thing as intrinsic value,’ he told them. ‘Any commodity is only worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. So the value of your house may be a little lower or even a little higher. Who knows? Ask for eighty-five thousand and let the buyer beat you down to the price you’re hoping for. That always makes him feel good and he congratulates himself on what a wonderful bargainer he imagines himself to be.’
They placed an ad in the Manchester Evening News and soon had a stream of interested purchasers on the phone making appointments to inspect. For several weeks, they found themselves repeating the same old spiel over and over again until they’d memorized it. They had lots of visitors but no takers. Until one day a young man who introduced himself as Mr Andrews came with his wife and three young daughters. He had a secure job at the Education Offices in Manchester and the family glowed with pleasure and murmured approval as they visited and examined each room.
‘Exactly what we’ve been dreaming of,’ the wife said. They were loud in their praises as they discussed how they would allocate the various bedrooms. They, the parents, would have the large bedroom and the girls a bedroom each. One of the rooms would be reserved for the wife’s mother.
Laura and Billy exchanged glances. If the visitors had already begun imagining themselves in the house, then it was practically sold. At the end of the tour, the young man turned to Billy.
‘Consider the house sold,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Let’s shake and make a gentleman’s agreement here and now
that you will not offer it to anyone else. As soon as we have seen our solicitor, we’ll be back and make the whole thing formal with the necessary deposit.’
When their visitors had gone, Laura and he rejoiced.They’d soon be in a position to make final arrangements on the Southport house and, most important, clear their debt with the bank. They had several more inquiries but they turned them away with apologies. ‘Sorry,’ they told callers. ‘The house is sold.’
Mark warned them not to be so optimistic at this early stage of the negotiations but they felt he was being overcautious and typical of someone working in the estate agency business.
Ten days passed and, hearing nothing more from their prospective purchasers, they began to be seriously concerned. Then much to their relief they received a phone call from Mr Andrews, still as friendly and affable as ever.
‘We’d like to come and make a final inspection with the wife’s mother, if that’s OK,’ he said breezily. Of course they readily agreed.
One afternoon, he arrived with his whole family, wife, three daughters and mother-in-law. Billy didn’t like the look of the latter one bit. Unsmiling and sharp-featured, she walked through the house slating everything her eye alighted on. Nothing escaped her censorious tongue.
‘The windows are stuck with old paint,’ she snapped. ‘The doors are skew-whiff and do not close properly. The floorboards creak and that’s something I could not live with. The whole house needs redecorating.’
Next day, they were not surprised to hear that the sale was off and they were back to square one.
Through a contact at the Education Offices, Billy learned later that what had really happened was that Andrews had been turned down for a mortgage because of inadequate salary. His mother-in-law had come to pull his chestnuts out
of the fire by picking holes in everything that came under her scrutiny.
‘I did warn you,’ Mark said philosophically ‘At least you’ve learned something we estate agents are only too aware of: never count your chickens until they’re hatched and you have formally and officially exchanged contracts.’
A few weeks passed by, things went quiet and the inquiries dried up.
They were despondent. There they were, just the two of them, in a big house with six bedrooms, and a huge debt at the bank. This couldn’t go on and Billy saw debtor’s prison looming. Surely their luck had to change!
Then it did. Out of the blue, like the proverbial cavalry, the aptly named Catholic Rescue Society came riding onto the scene when it began buying big houses like theirs for conversion to nursing homes. The organization first bought Dr Gillespie’s house next door and then it was their turn. Two smartly dressed men, one young, the other elderly, came round, not primarily to inspect but to negotiate. Billy took them on a tour of the house from cellar to attic.
‘Not really necessary,’ the younger one said. ‘We’ve already seen Dr Gillespie’s and it’s more or less the same kind of accommodation.’
Billy thought he’d be honest and tell them about the reported subsidence. ‘Best to tell them, Laura,’ he said. ‘They’d have found out later in any case when their own surveyor inspected.’
‘Minor subsidence doesn’t matter in the least,’ the older man said. ‘We’ve no choice, we’ve simply got to have this house in order to complete our plans for the block.’
His younger companion threw him a withering look. ‘Not quite true,’ he said. ‘Our plans are still flexible and we have other properties to look at.’
They adjourned to the lounge and Laura went into the kitchen to make tea for everyone. There then followed a great
deal of irrelevant chit-chat, about the weather, the virtues and drawbacks of the Manchester football teams, City and United, about the pieces of antique furniture that Laura had inherited from her parents.
It was only after tea and biscuits that the guests came round to the real point of their visit. From thereon, it was like a game of poker.
‘So, what figure did you have in mind, Mr Hopkins?’ asked the younger one.
‘Dunno really. How much are you prepared to offer?’
‘That depends on the figure you have in mind.’
‘We’ve got to have the house, no matter what,’ the old bloke added, putting his foot in it once again.
His companion scowled at him. ‘We don’t have to buy this particular house; we do have alternatives, if need be.’
This verbal interplay went on for some time while they drank more tea and ate more biscuits.
What figure should I go for? Billy asked himself. I don’t want to overplay my hand and so blow the deal. But then the old bloke did say they had no choice and they had to have the house as part of a bigger plan. But who will blink first?
‘So how much are you offering?’
‘So how much do you want, Mr Hopkins?’
This subtle interaction continued for another half hour, neither of them willing to show his hand.
This can go on forever, Billy thought. So, losing patience, he decided to throw in an unrealistically high figure to start the haggling off.
‘We won’t take a penny less than eighty-five thousand,’ he declared.
As soon as they heard this, the eyes of the visitors lit up. Joy and relief flooded their features. And Billy knew he’d asked too little. Hadn’t the senior man said they had to have the house to complete their plans, no matter what? He could have asked for £90,000, even £100,000, and he had the feeling they’d
have paid it. This became only too apparent later in the year when the Rescue Society began building a huge extension which must have cost around half a million.
‘Business was never your forte,’ Laura said.
To save money on the removal, they hired two large trucks from Salford Van Hire to be driven by Matthew and Mark They gave away many items of furniture to the family since they were moving to a smaller house. Then it was all hands to the pump as they loaded up the vans.
‘Whenever I see the sign for this company,’ Mark grinned, ‘I always think of the great Dutch masters like Van Gogh, Van Dyck, Van Eyck. And now this one, the great Salford Van Heere.’
Came the sad day when they said goodbye to their old home. Though they’d be exchanging the built-up area of Manchester for the blue skies and open spaces of the seaside, it was still a sorrowful occasion. Moving after twenty-one years from a house they had come to love and with which they had so many associations was bound to be a melancholy business. They looked back and remembered the years they’d spent there: the glad times like when they’d first moved in and the whole family had rolled up its sleeves and got down to painting and decorating; the sad times when young John had been seriously ill and they’d feared leukaemia; the bad times like the airship fiasco; and the mad times when the kids had got up to crazy pranks on April Fool’s day, John ending up with a saucepan stuck on his head and having to go to hospital to have it removed. The kaleidoscope of memories flowed through their minds, and as they reversed out of the driveway, Billy felt a lump in his throat and the tears rolled down Laura’s cheeks.
‘The end of an era,’ she sighed.
‘A turning point in our lives and a fresh start,’ Billy added, his voice a little choked.
★ ★ ★
For the first few weeks in Southport after the family had departed, they felt lost, just the two of them in their new, strange surroundings.
‘It’s not as if we were abroad, Laura,’ Billy said to console her. ‘We’re only forty-odd miles from Manchester and we’ll have plenty of visits, especially as we now have the added attraction of living at the seaside.’
The family did enjoy their trips to see their parents at the coast. Rather than descend en masse, they decided among themselves to stagger their visits so they could meet up on a regular basis. However, big occasions like Christmas, Easter, birthdays, Mother’s and Father’s days were different. On these occasions they got together and went to Southport in a body.
Billy and Laura kept themselves busy putting the house in order: arranging furniture and allocating knick-knacks to the various rooms. Laura did the planning and the designing; Billy followed orders, lugging stuff around and hanging and rehanging pictures. Reproductions, of course.
‘I think we’ll put Monet’s Waterlily Pond in the hallway and Holbein’s Ambassadors in the lounge.’
Billy obeyed the commands, including those relating to the extremely fine adjustments required to ensure the pictures were hung with precise horizontality until she changed her mind, as he knew she would.
‘No, put the Ambassadors in the hall and the Waterlily Pond in the lounge.’
Ja, mein Fuehrer .’
When it came to the garden, Laura was not only in her element, she was the boss. It was beautifully laid out with several trees and bushes whose names Billy could not remember though he did know that one of them produced sour green apples. They made several visits to the local Ladygreen Garden Centre and came back with dozens of plants and flowers whose names were all Greek to him. Laura had green fingers and whatever plant she tended, flourished.
Billy had red fingers and whatever he touched tended to wither on the vine. Understandably his job was confined to turning over the soil in preparation and cutting the grass with their new motorized lawnmower. He could see that when the Southport Flower Show came round in the summer, he was going to be kept busy as Laura would no doubt come home loaded up with all kinds of exotic plants.
In the evenings, though, when he relaxed under a cloudless blue sky on the new sun lounger with a glass of cold Chardonnay in his hand, he thought that he’d died and gone to heaven.
As for the Southport town centre, Katie was most anxious to boast and show off the high-class and expensive shopping facilities along the tree-lined boulevards. Especially Lord Street with its Victorian arcades and passageways, and the fact that its three-mile length was covered by glass and iron canopies.
‘It’s a little known fact,’ Katie enthused, ‘that LouisNapoleon Bonaparte once lived in exile on Lord Street before becoming Napoleon the Third, Emperor of France in eighteen fifty-one. A year later he set Baron George Haussman the task of redesigning Paris. Much of the medieval centre was replaced with broad, tree-lined boulevards, covered walkways and arcades, just like Lord Street. It may be mere coincidence but it has been claimed that the redevelopment of Paris may have been inspired by his memories of Southport’s town centre.’
‘Tell me another,’ Billy laughed. ‘I find that story a bit hard to swallow.’
‘It’s certainly true that he stayed in Southport,’ Katie giggled, ‘though maybe the claim that Paris architecture was influenced by what he saw here is a little over the top.’
‘Still, it makes a good story,’ said Laura.
In those early days they developed the habit of going into Southport together, sometimes by car but more often by taxi as parking had become something of a nightmare with the
recent introduction of‘Pay and Display’ parking meters which had sprung up like mushrooms all round the town.
If there was one group of people in society that was despised, apart from lager louts who littered the streets with empty beer cans and the yobs who spattered the pavements with their discarded chewing gum, it was traffic wardens. In the town centre there seemed to be dozens of them swarming on the streets where police officers were rarely seen since most of them were busy back at their station desks filling out forms. The wardens appeared to take a perverse delight in slapping tickets on cars the moment they overstayed their time. No excuses and no mercy. It was not unknown for them to give a ticket to a waiting funeral cortege or a wedding limousine outside a church. Stop for a couple of seconds to post a letter, say, and before you could get back to your vehicle there’d be a penalty notice on your windscreen.This was supposed to avoid congestion and keep traffic flowing but there was a strong suspicion among motorists that the real rationale behind it was to raise revenue for the local authority which seemed to regard it as a licence to print money.
In his naivety, Billy accompanied Laura and Katie on their window-shopping expeditions. Big mistake. As the reader is aware, Billy hated shopping but if there was one kind of shopping for which he retained a particular loathing, it was window-shopping. He’d never been able to understand the concept; in Laura’s and Katie’s case, it involved examining every garment and every shoe shop along the length of Lord Street without actually buying anything.The word ‘examine’ is used in its loosest sense since Laura and her sister had a compulsion to feel and finger the texture of every article of clothing hung up on every rack in every store. Billy suspected, though Laura denied it, that he once saw her carry out a nasal inspection of a woollen jumper by sniffing at it. Without the slightest embarrassment, the pair were prepared to ask a harassed shop assistant to show them fifty pairs of shoes and
then decide that none of them suited after all. How different from a man like me, he reflected, who will ask to try on one pair of shoes and if they fitted, buy them without more ado.
‘But aren’t you going to try on other shoes?’ Laura would ask.
‘Why should I? These are comfortable. Why complicate matters?’
The two ladies may have been captivated by the clothing shops but for Billy, Southport’s biggest attraction was the book shops. While the ladies wandered through the emporiums along Chapel Street, he found his happiness among the books. As well as the usual Waterstone’s, Hammick’s, andW.H. Smith, Southport boasted a number of superb antiquarian book shops, and one of his chief delights was browsing through the hundreds of second-hand and fine old books and magazines displayed on their shelves. When not perusing the book shops, he was equally attracted to the ‘gadget and gizmo’ shops that stocked the most ingenious but useless items that eccentric inventors had dreamed up in their backyard workshops. He never purchased any of the articles but was intrigued by the notion that somewhere, someone thought that the world was waiting for such things as: a desktop singing football; an ashtray that coughed when ash was deposited in it; a Poweriser with springs that enabled you to leap six feet in the air and run with nine-foot strides; an inflatable referee costume; and perhaps most fascinating of all, a book with the suggestive title of 101 Things To Do In A Shed which promised ‘hours of fun in your little safe haven’. He almost bought it but decided against it in the end. Justifying it to Laura might have proved too much of a problem.
One day he came out of the shop just in time to see a traffic warden about to slap a ticket on the car parked outside. He consulted his watch and checked the time on the paid display ticket. The car was seven minutes overdue.
‘Surely you’re not going to impose a fine for a mere seven minutes?’ he said. ‘Have a heart! Show a bit of mercy.’
‘Rules are rules,’ she said, continuing to write out the ticket.
‘That is pernicious,’ he said. ‘You obviously have a nasty streak in your personality. Maybe you were dropped on your head as a baby.’
‘Not only is the time up,’ she said, looking more closely at the windscreen, ‘the display is upside down and that means an extra fine for failing to display the payment in the accepted manner.’
‘This is nothing but petty bureaucracy,’ Billy snapped. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’
Then she noticed that the tax disc was a month out of date.
‘I shall have to report this expired tax disc as well,’ she said triumphantly.
‘I give up,’ Billy seethed. ‘The country’s gone to the dogs.’
He stalked off angrily.
Thank the Lord, he said to himself, that we came into Southport today by taxi but I can’t help feeling sorry for the poor bloke who owns the car.
Billy usually met up with the ladies for lunch in a small cafe overlooking the promenade where they favoured the baked potato with a selection of fillings and he went for the Welsh rarebit. In the afternoon, they explored the antique shops with which Southport was abundantly provided. Once or twice they almost bought something.
Ainsdale where their home was located was a delightful village which catered for their immediate needs. It had one main street leading to the railway station on the SouthportLiverpool line.The village had the usual amenities: churches of the major denominations, two banks, a couple of supermarkets, pharmacies, travel agents, hairdressers, a DIY/garden centre, medical and dental practices, a public library and a police station. What made the place distinctive was its friendly, sociable atmosphere where people knew each other and
actually exchanged greetings in the street, something that would be almost unknown in a big city. This neighbourliness was brought home to Billy on one of those rare occasions when he went out to do the shopping. Outside the greengrocer’s he hesitated before the fruit section, undecided as to whether he should buy Conference or William pears.
‘Your wife always buys the Conference,’ said the greengrocer, coming to his aid.
He was taken aback. He didn’t know the lady knew him or that he was married to Laura and that she had a preference for a particular kind of pear. Small world. But he liked it.
Window-shopping and browsing in Southport were all very fine and for the first few years, they were in clover. But as time went by, the novelty, that first flush of moving and exploring their new surroundings, began to wear off a little, at least for him, and the old craving or ‘divine discontent’ began to manifest itself. Sitting in the garden sipping wine and browsing through musty old books was all very well but there remained the big question of what he was going to do to keep himself not only busy but challenged. Laura didn’t have this problem; she was happy looking after house and garden, she had her art and had recently taken up playing the recorder as well.
‘How am I going to spend my leisure hours?’ he asked. ‘I’ve tried private tutoring, supply teaching, woodcraft, and dabbling in the stock market. All came to grief.’
He had recently watched the film On Golden Pond and, like the old character Norman, played by Henry Fonda, was ready to admit defeat. What’s the point in trying? he asked himself. Everything I touch turns to dust in my hand.
‘Why not continue with that autobiography you began all those years ago after your release from hospital?’ Laura suggested.‘It looked most promising and you have the memory of an elephant. Who knows? It might lead to fame and fortune.’
‘You mean the one I entitled Our Kid ? I started the first chapter and then gave up.’While twiddling his thumbs in his
cubbyhole that had served as his office in his last college, Billy had begun penning his memoirs but hadn’t got very far with that idea either. At the time, he couldn’t see the point of taking on such a Herculean task.
‘Then forget about fame and fortune,’ Laura urged. ‘Write it for the family and our descendants. I’d give anything to be able to read the written memoirs of our great-grandparents on either side of the family. To know what they thought, what they felt, what worried them, and what made them laugh.’
‘You’ve got a point there, Laura. I’ve often wondered myself what their concerns were and what kind of thing amused them. Maybe you’re right and I should write my memoirs at least for our children and grandchildren. But who’s to say I have the talent for tackling such a hefty piece of work?’
‘I’m sure you have,’ she said. ‘After all, have you not kissed the Blarney Stone?’
Billy still wasn’t too confident about the idea of undertaking a lengthy piece of writing at his age — after all, he was approaching his mid-sixties. But Laura’s positive manner sowed a small seed somewhere in his brain and got him thinking. Maybe he really could write his autobiography — but for family only. Why, he didn’t even have to show it to anybody if he didn’t feel like it. So what was the harm in having a go?
\