MOVING HOUSE

When I was about five years old we moved into a new house, we used to live in a flat, but as my sisters started to come along the family needed somewhere bigger to expand into.

Before we moved dad had to go through the process of looking for somewhere new to live. He had enough money to buy a house outright, yet despite having the offer of a couple of remarkable stone built Victorian villas he was also looking at the possibility of a council house, because there was the opportunity to ‘do a swap.’ What that meant was that he could swap his council flat for a council house. In those days, at the beginning of the 1960s, housing was in short supply and nobody was too bothered what kind of property they lived in so long as they had somewhere decent to live, and in 1962 the best possible property to have was a council house.

It’s important to understand that dad went looking for houses, mum didn’t go with him on his many jaunts around the neighbourhood (and beyond) when she realised that the exercise had developed into a perfect excuse for dad to spend his free time nosing around other peoples’ houses. (These days you can have much the same experience watching the ‘property’ programmes on television or looking through properties for sale via the Internet.) I was occasionally dragged along to view the various properties. I remember being very taken by one house; it had a stone flagged kitchen floor, a roaring fire and a big black Labrador dog. I was given a large drink of fizzy pop and got to play with the dog whilst dad was shown around. I thought it was the best house that I had ever seen; I was very enthusiastic about moving in straight away, until I was told that the dog didn’t come as part of the package.

So, after dad had eventually, and reluctantly, been forced by mum to stop nosing around in other peoples’ houses he chose our new abode and we moved house. Not far as it turned out, you could see where we had moved from by looking over the garden fence.

Our new home was indeed a council house, it had the advantage of being modern, rather than Victorian which, at the time, was about the worst thing that you could say about anything. Antique dealers described that unfortunate part of their stock that had been the fashion in the reign of Queen Victoria as ‘Victoriana.’

Our house was modern, well modernish. It had been built in the last year of World War II, what was still referred to as ‘The war,’ something that I had no idea about, The war had ended a good twelve years before I had begun, so although it loomed large in my early life I had no idea what it was about except that grown ups always went on and on about The war. Grown ups seemed to have a great love of ‘The war,’ it was mentioned with a great sense of nostalgia, I only had to leave the crust off of one corner of a sandwich and someone would say, “We’d have been glad of that in The war.”

When we moved house there was, thankfully, no trace of ‘The war.’ There was, however, many a trace of the taste (I use the term loosely) of the previous occupants, with whom my parents had ‘swapped.’ My mother was a Yorkshire miner’s daughter and like a lot of people who had been brought up ‘poor, but decent’ by proud God-fearing parents during the economic depression of the 1930s, had a sense of propriety that meant she would tidy up a hotel room, not just when she left, but upon arriving she would make the bed and clean the bathroom. When (much later) we went on a family holiday, staying in a cottage in Wales, mum spent the first three days cleaning from top to bottom to make the place fit for us to live in and she spent the final couple of days cleaning up, not for the next occupants, but to show the landlord that we were decent people who left a place in better condition than we found it. So it was when she moved house. We left our flat as clean as it could be, mum was still cleaning and had to almost be dragged out so that the new people could move in, but it went further than that, she had insisted that dad had to decorate every room to make the flat ‘decent’ before we left.

So we left a pristine and newly decorated flat to move into our new home.

It was a great disappointment to mum. The people we swapped with had moved out in haste, they bequeathed us their dust, grime and some spooky décor. The kitchen wallpaper depicted an apparently infinite tropical scene of sun, sea, palm trees and pirates replete with sword, eye patch, peg-leg, crutch and parrot. All the paintwork was brown, not just brown, but brown in a faux woodgrain pattern, every door, skirting board, window frame and even the stair rail was painted in an obviously fake woodgrain pattern. Added to this scene was the matt green paint on most of the other walls in the house, apparently this was due in no small part to the fact that the previous tenant worked for the local council, to be more accurate he worked for the parks department and so our house was decked out in the same paint that adorned all the exterior woodwork in the local municipal parks and gardens.

Mum and my younger sisters had gone to visit my recently widowed grandmother in Yorkshire leaving dad to get on with the process of moving house. I remember that my elder brother and I stayed at home to experience the move, at least I remember the spectacle of the moving van first as its driver tried to negotiate turning around in the cul-de-sac where we moved from only to discover that we were moving to another equally impenetrable dead end.

When mum came back from Yorkshire she went up the wall (as soon as she saw it) and threatened to round all us kids up and get the next bus back to her mother’s house in Woombwell.

Dad was appalled, “A house with three bedrooms, you should think yourself lucky,” he said, and, sounding disappointed, “There was nothing like this for us before ‘The war.’”

That should have been the end of the story, but when we redecorated the kitchen a few years ago there was a stubborn patch of amazing orange 1970s wallpaper that had survived over the years, it was very reluctant to be moved as if it had been stuck down with glue rather than paste and we had to resort to the wallpaper steamer to remove it. Underneath was a smaller piece of wallpaper that seemed to have been protected by the patch that had been put over it, when it was revealed there was the perfectly preserved image of a pirate. When I showed it to mum she said that dad must have left it there deliberately.