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| Crowborough War Memorial Hospital |
My mum and dad took me home to the house where I lived for the next twelve years, Greenways, Luxford Road, Crowborough, which didn't look much like this then...
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| Luxford Road, Crowborough, Sussex |
When they bought it, the year before I was born, for £1,800 (imagine...) it was called No.1 Something-Or-Other Villas, but it was the next-to-last house in the road, with a nursery behind its 200 foot garden and fields across the road, so they called it Greenways. It was a three-bedroom semi with a separate kitchen and larder, which we had knocked into one when I was about ten. The garden might have been 200 feet long but it was only as wide as the house, so our balls kept straying into the neighbours gardens, much to their annoyance. I think the record was four gardens away - that one we never got back because there was a miserable old woman with a bulldog who lived there. And next door, after my best friend Mark and his family moved to a big house on the other side of town in 1964, was a landscape gardener who toiled for many years (in vain, I might add) to repair the long privet hedge that separated our gardens. Poor chap, but as far as I know he still sends a Christmas card to my mum every year.
When I was 12, we upped sticks and moved to Porlock in Somerset, after we'd fallen in love with Exmoor during a week's holiday at Dunster Beach. We sold Greenways for £9,995 and bought Worthycote for £8,500 (I remember these things...).
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| Doverhay, Porlock, Somerset |
This became the family house for the next 16 years, although I only lived there for the next seven, after which I went off to seek my fortune in the big city. Worthycote was another semi-detached, but a fair bit bigger, with two rooms on the second floor, that we always referred to as the attic, even though there was a proper staircase that led there, and a window on the landing that can be seen from this picture.
To start with there was no road down the side of the house, there was the local butcher's slaughterhouse, from which came the most horrendous noises on Mondays. It was a place of life too - the butcher kept horses, and he boarded racehorses there off season. there was nothing my dog Danny liked more than to leap up against the seven-foot wall that ran down the side of the yard and nip an inquisitive horse on the nose. Below the back garden there was an orchard, also belonging to the butcher, and we could walk down through it to get to the recreation ground, which is where I spent every minute I could in my early teens, playing football or cricket with the village lads, or practising my putting on the little green that was once there. This house was also the next-to-last in the street, but in this street what came after the houses was a very steep hill to Worthy Combe, which led up on top of Exmoor.
Across the road there was a farm, owned by the National Trust, but run by three ageing sisters, Dorrie, the oldest, who walked with two sticks and really did hold her coat together with bailer twine, Clarrie who was in the middle, and Sylvie, who was the youngest sibling, but probably still about 65 when we arrived. They also had a brother, David, who had a farm down on the marshes, and he came by from time to time to deliver stuff because none of the sisters had a car. They all spoke in voices reminiscent of a Monty Python housewife, went to bed at about eight o'clock in the evening and were up long before I was in the mornings.
And then someone in the district council decided to zone the butcher's orchard as development land. He retired gratefully rich to dedicate his time to hinting with the Devon & Somerset Staghounds, and fifty-seven terrraced houses were built between us and the rec, in a development that became known locally as White City.
The building work was still going on when I left home, and after a brief six-month stay in a chalet in Minehead, I found a job working for a bank in London, and another job as "village caretaker" for a place called Little Berkhamsted about twenty miles north of London in the Hertfordshire countryside. The advantage of the second job was that it came with a little one-bedroomed cottage, no.7 Church Road, attached to the end of the village hall.
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| Little Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire |
Well, it might look pretty, but I can honestly say that I have never lived in another house, before or since, that was as prone to ice on the inside walls in the winter. It had a tiny living room, ten foot square, and a tiny bedroom the same size upstairs. That tiny bedroom soon had a double bed and a cot in it, after my son Ben was born, And it also had a rather unstable ceiling in the living room, and about a quarter of it fell down on our heads one evening.
After three years of permanent fan-heaters, which eventually necessitated a third job - this time playing four nights a week in a band based over in Romford - my first real relationship came to an end, and I headed off from Hertfordshire. After a couple of months sleeping in an armchair in my guitarist's terraced house in Romford I quit the bank and joined a professional band. A spell in Munich followed, after which I found myself in Edinburgh, where the band had picke up a residency at a night club. It lasted for about six months, playing six nights every week, but in th end the band and I decided that we were no longer right for each other, and I looked around Edinburgh for something else to do. Six months of unemployment was followed by a job selling cars at a city-centre garage, following which I somehow landed a job in a stockbroker's office and my new career was launched. After a couple of years of renting and living with my girlfriend's parents, it was time to be a homeowner for the first time. And the first ever true "chez moi" was a two bedroom flat, 4 Cleikiminrig, Edinburgh built by Barrett Homes, on the outskirts of the city. It cost £25,500 and came complete with a fully fitted kitchen and a little postage stamp of a garden at the back.
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| Cleikiminrig, Edinburgh |
Not only did I have a brand new house (or rather flat), I also had a brand new car - a Fiat Uno. All on credit, of course. The finances were helped somewhat by supplementing my salary with playing in a band three nights every week. Firstly in the working mens' clubs around the city, but later we graduated to the hotel circuit, and got a residency at Gleneagles, where amongst others I met Ringo Starr and Diana Rigg. We also backed Bob Monkhouse in cabaret once - and I was hugely surprised to find that his real-life stage show was a hundred times more funny than I ever thought he was on TV. If only I could still remember the jokes...
And then, alone again, and I decided to chance my luck back in the big city down south. The flat was sold for exactly the same as I'd paid for it, and I was on my way,
After renting a completely unaffordable bungalow in Wadhurst for a few months, the next house that had my name on the deeds was a two and a half bedroomed semi detached bungalow in Crowborough. Back to my roots...
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| Western Road, Crowborough, Sussex |
Alvern Hay, Western Road, had front and back gardens and big 16 foot square kitchen diner, and a garage! Not that it was very useable, for some reason there was always a lake inside it, even in the summer. But in the end it didn't stick around very long, because after the stock exchange crash and the hurricane (now that was something...) I was soon on my way to the Isle of Man. And on the first visit there, I fell in love with a bungalow overlooking the sea. Alvern Hay went after just nine months, and Gulls Way, Croit-e-Quill Road, Isle of Man became the new residence.
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| Croit-e-Quill Road, Isle of Man |
This is the view of the back of the house. It cost just £1,500 more than the place in Crowborough. The electric door on the garage was a bit of a novelty, as was the 1/3 of an acre of garden, complete with palm tree and fish pond on the seaward side, that fell in a steepening slope and seemed to end in the sea, a couple of hundred feet below. Unfortunately, interest rates chose that moment to rise to 15%, and the fuse under the keg of gunpowder called finances was lit. Despite those interest rates though, the Isle of Man was becoming a very desirable place to live for people selling their businesses and avoiding capital gains tax, and house prices rocketed. Just two years after moving in, it sold for 50% more than it had cost, and in the resulting downsizing operation, I signed the conveyance on a house that included a covenant forbidding the production of alcohol on the premises.
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| Converted Wesleyan Chapel, Isle of Man |
No.2 Wesley Court, in the same street, was half of a former chapel, that had been converted using lots of the wood from the original pews. It was a strange, quirky place, The sale was agreed with the vendor, who was leaving for South Africa in a hurry, on the day it was first advertised in the local paper. Two weeks from offer to completion. The kitchen and living room were both 23 feet long by 8 feet wide, and there was a big entrance hall in between them. It was a bit like living in a succession of railway carriages, until you looked through that big round window on the first floor landing. But it did have one problem, it didn't have a garden, and after Gulls Way, that was a bit of a drawback. Still, it was only ever meant to be an interim home, and six months later it was sold again, and a little house in the country, south of Peel on the other side of the island, became home for the next ten years.
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| Patrick, Isle of Man |
Hillside View was a little two-bedroomed cottage with a pokey donwstairs bathroom in 1990, with a flat-roof utility at the back and a flat-roof conservatory at the side, and it sat in a quarter of an acre. In 1997, an extension was built - the part on the left of the picure, which doubled the living space to 1,800 square feet. A deal with the local farmer added about a third again to the garden. By the time it was sold, the whole of the downstairs was a split-level open-plan arrangement ending in a 20'x16' sitting room with a modern inglenook fireplace and six big windows around it. In fact, if I'm counting right, there were 23 windows in all, and four external doors. It was a very bright house. it was noisy though - cows, sheep and crows formed the dawn chorus and they kept it up all day long. But I really loved that spot in the country, looking out across the hills, where I headed on my mountain bike at every available opportunity. It was sold to a director of a building firm when it was time to say au revoir to the Island and head back to London. And in Tonbridge, 30-odd miles south of the big smoke, something very different awaited...
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| Mortley Close, Tonbridge, Kent |
Two houses in fairly rapid succession, in fact, and next door to each other. The first was a three-bedroom terrace in Mortley Close, bought in 2001. The four bedroom end of terrace house next door was more attractive, but at the time it was being used by the builders as their showhouse, so was off limits. Six months later, it went up for sale and was promptly snapped up, The three-bed sold and the four-bed house was bought for 10% more. It was a much bigger house, with a big L-shaped living room on the first floor overlooking the river and a 24 foot kitchen big enough to house a sofa in the bay window at the end. Of course, it didn't have a garden to speak of, just a bit of grass on the river-bank to hoover once in a while, so a static mobile home in the Cotswolds became the weekend haunt in the summer, but it was a nice place to live, close to the town centre but quiet all the same. I was always worried about the river, and the possibility of flooding, but it didn't happen in the two years before a change of plan resulted in a move to France, and a temporary end to the day-job. Why France? Well, it was cheap, to say the least... and the proceeds from the house in Tonbridge brought some interesting possibilities for a change of lifestyle, even if there was a biggish mortgage to pay off.
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| 6 Rue Basse, Sonnac, France |
After all, where else could you buy two houses, a walled garden, with a big barn and a big double garage for less than £100,000? Unfortunately, the description "habitable" means something rather different when applied to a house in France that what it might mean in the UK. For example, it had two WCs. The main one sat over a big tank in the cellar, that needed to be emptied by the local farmer with his dung-spreader every ten weeks or so, whilst the other one, in the bathroom, was equipped with a macerator unit that sent the waste the same way as the bath-water. Some weeks after moving in, I noticed some relatively macerated toilet paper flowing down the gulley that ran between the house and the road, before passing beneath the roadway in a little culvert and emerging as a "stream" on the other side, next to the garage. On tracing it back, I realised that it came from the loo in the bathroom. Hmmm. French country plumbing, top notch stuff.
In any case, I wasn't there very long, because life was turned upside down, and after a few months living in the little house rather than the big one, I met Patricia, and moved my world and my piano to an appartment in La Rochelle.
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| Rue Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, La Rochelle, France |
A fourth-floor appartment "sans ascenseur", which means that the 76 steps up to the front door kept me relatively fit while we were living there. On the fourth floor, you could leave the french windows between the bedroom and the loggia open all night, all summer long. The mosquitoes were too lazy to fly up four floors, they preferred things at grass level down below. The night-time noise of various neighbourhood cats was quite off-putting from time to time, but it was really handy - a big supermarket car-park behind the building which made parking very easy, and the supermarket was pretty useful too. And my bike, which was parked down in the cellar, was easy to get out for a sunny ride along the cliffs at L'Houmeau, or over the bridge to the Ile de Ré, or across town to Les Minimes, the "port de plaisance", a huge marina around the coast from the old port. And sitting out front of a café down by the old port, watching the world go by, was a favourite occupation too. I was flying to London and back every week. To begin with I drove to Nantes and caught a 7am flight, but then Air France stopped their flights to London from regional airports, But after a while, I even got used to the foibles of Ryanair, flying from La Rochelle. But after a few short years, we hatched a new plan.
From time to time I flew from Bordeaux instead of La Rochelle, because the flight times were more convenient - there was an early-ish morning flight instead of late afternoon. If I did that, Patricia would drive me down the 150kms for my morning flight - the airport was on the city's ring-road or rocade - and then drive back to La Rochelle, coming to pick me up on my return later in the week. Except one Thursday when I was coming back there was snow everywhere so I said I'd get the train home. That meant catching a bus into the middle of Bordeaux city, and what I saw pretty much took my breath away. I couldn't stop raving about it. We'd been thinking of finding a house to buy around La Rochelle instead of the appartment, but the prices there were a bit eye-watering. Then we discovered that Bordeaux was about 30% cheaper, and we decided to go and have a look around. The very first day, we found it. In the Rue Lecocq, about 500 metres from the cathedral and the Hotel de Ville but a relatively quiet setting. A stone-built terraced house with a courtyard at the back, a cellar, a convertible attic and 12' high ceilings. It had been inhabited by an old lady whose son had already retired. It was advertised as "habitable" but I'd already learned what that meant. In reality it was a big renovation project, but it became a labour of love which took a year or so to get finished.
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| Rue Lecocq, Bordeaux, France |
And there we would have lived for a long time, had it not been for two or three events that started to make us nervous. One, the cellar, which I'd fitted out as my music studio, was flooded by the efffects of a big summer hailstorm in 2008. Two, the financial crisis arrived later that year and the pounds I earned to pay the mortgage and other expenses with were suddenly worth 30% less in euros. Three, another summer storm in 2011 flooded my studio once again. And the cost of it all began to stop making sense - I was never going to be able to retire if we stayed where we were. And from somewhere hatched a plan of self-sufficiency or as near to it as might be possible, and in the autumn of 2012, we left the house empty, apart for the furniture, and started our search for a house in the south-west of England. Three months later, armed with a signed compromis de vente for the house in Bordeaux, we agreed to buy Vexford House, and started on our plans for the house and the garden.
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| Vexford House |
And here it is, and there's a whole blog about it here: http://vexfordhouse.canalblog.com/
As long as you understand French...
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