Mary Ann died in April 1973. The condition of Joe’s will was that on her death the property would go to an animal charity who sold it to my friend John.
We had been at college together and sometime in the spring of 1974, John Mike and Lois moved in and so began five brief years of the house’s history set against the growing industrial unrest of the 1970s.
I have to say I have fond memories of the period and have never thought of it as one of those “low dishonest decades”. It was after all when I became an adult, graduated, got married and began work. All of which meant it was a fairly exciting time with of course the odd dull bits.
And much of that same optimistic energy was directed by John at stamping his identity on the house. Down came the picture rails and out went the open fireplaces to be replaced by smooth plastered walls from floor to ceiling covered in woodchip which was the great favourite of the time. Cheap to buy, easy to put up because there was no pattern to worry about and ready for any colour of emulsion paint you wanted. Bright but neutral was what John choose for everywhere in the house.
It became an advert for Habitat living, clean modern and bright a blank landscape to show off the habitat light fittings, pictures and furniture. We were the Habitat generation in love with Conran’s simple design and above all attracted to what was then cheap.
But there was a downside, with the old fire places ripped out and no central heating we survived with one gas fire in the front room. In the winter months we huddled around that fire and fiercely contested whose turn it was to make the coffee, for this involved leaving the comfort zone and enter a zone of intense cold which began in the front room just beyond the sofa.
The rest of the house would be even colder. I remember washing up in the kitchen with all four gas burners going and pans of boiling water because the immersion heater was never turned on. Showers were something you did as quickly as possible and the bedrooms resembled an igloo.
I moved in during the December of 1976 and it was a wonderful time. I was divorced still smarting from the pain of it and here I was back in a community which was almost like being a student again, except because we were all working we had had money.
And so the house took on an almost endless round of fun, whether it was the nightly trips to the pub returning with a carry out, or the evenings friends came round for meals. The high point was always the Christmas dinner eaten as it had been since we were students just a few days before everyone went off home to spend the holiday with family.
There was no getting away from serious side of things. 1974 was the year of the two elections. The Conservative Government had taken on the miners and gone to the country for an electoral mandate to continue the fight, and they lost. It has to be said only marginally and the victorious new Labour administration called a fresh election in the October to secure a majority.
The country was divided and so were we with furious arguments usually late at night fuelled by an evening in the pub. Mike always took the side on the Tories more to wind me up and Lois would shout down contributions from upstairs while I held good to the cause of the Left.
But this was also the time John built a boat. Parts of the frame were screwed for a while to the dining room floor while they were shaped, which was a process I didn’t really understand. At the same time great quantities of blue resin were applied to things in the cellar and slowly the hull began to take shape in the back garden. Even now thirty six years later there are still blobs of the blue resin in the cellar and the odd bit of glass fibre turns up in the garden.
During the course of the boat building period we made friends with Jack Harker who was retired and with time on his hands volunteered to help John and soon became a part of the household.
So in the fullness of time we had the boat turning day when one Sunday a gang of us turned the boat in the garden right side up followed by one of Lois’s buffet’s and later still the day the side wall came down to allow the boat to be craned out. I might add I only got round to putting the wall back last February.
In the course of those five years many people came and went, some just passing through and others staying for a while. I guess there will be many who will have some memory of the place. So much so that when one friend was sat in the garden, the little old lady at 43 was heard to mutter “I wonder which one that is?”
There were the French friends who Lois John and Mike had met one summer who regularly visited, and Whispering Dave, who worked with John and came to help with the boat and others like me who came for a few weeks, stayed four months and eventually returned in the summer of ’82 as the new owner of Scot’s house.
Pictures; The house in the summer of 1974, the boat in the garden 1977, Jack on the boat during the winter of 1978 and the Christmas of 1977, from the collection of Lois Sparshot
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