‘Hello, there. Anyone in?’ No one answers. ‘Must be out. Do you want to just have a look around on your own?’ The man yawns. Probably thinking of his Maxwell House, undrunk and cooling on the filing cabinet back in Acre Lane.
‘Flats, is it?’
‘No, but I think they let rooms out. There are a couple of lodgers or tenants at the top, far as I know. They’ve got notice to leave.’
‘Who owns it?’
‘Someone called Reynolds. But I don’t think the owner’s in the country. Mrs Ricketts is who I’ve been dealing with.’
‘What do you think he’d accept for it?’
‘She. You’re thinking of offering?’
‘I’ll make an offer today.’
The man blinks his eyes as if he thinks John’s sending him up. ‘You haven’t even seen upstairs.’
‘Thirty-two? Do you think they’d accept thirty-two?’
A plump West Indian woman comes creaking down the stairs. She’s wearing slippers, a low-cut top, gold earrings, and she’s carrying a pile of dirty towels that she chucks into a corner of the hall. Behind her a teenage girl is standing in the shadows with a metal dustpan in her hand.
‘My God, I did not hear the door, I am so sorry.’
‘I think we have someone interested in the property, Mrs Ricketts.’
Chapter Three THE WRONG GERALD SHERRIF, THE RIGHT THOMAS KYLE, AND THE GIRL WHO TOUCHED SNOW
Veronica and Doreen Ricketts, Alvin Reynolds, Gerald Sherrif, and Thomas H. Kyle 1976–1980
So take a breath, Number 34 Lillieshall Road, and brace yourself, because you’ve jumped back in time now and – whoosh! – the homely white Leyland gloss from the Pidgeon era is gone. In its place, orange peeling paint and murky dimpled glass. Next door has not yet been attacked with a sledgehammer and surrendered its parts as replacements – that’s still a few years in the future.
The hall’s lost its airy, family feel and has instead gone back to being the dark, tired, melancholy place John Pidgeon saw on that first day, with its Anaglypta walls and a biro-written notice that says: Thank You For Wiping Your Feet – even though the doormat’s worn to nothing and no one ever has or will.
Old cigarette smoke taints the air. Dirt and grit are trodden into the shag pile of the carpet. John Pidgeon was right – this house has never yet seen a hoover. The thick old stair carpet is done on a weekly basis with a brush and dustpan, a Bissell carpet sweeper used in the larger rooms. The dado is thick with grease and dust.
Look, Number 34, you’re not so beautiful any more – not so much a house to fall in love with on a breathless late summer afternoon, more a bunch of rented rooms, a place where folk mark time, grateful for a key, a roof, a place to sleep and wait for luck and life to move them on to somewhere better.
Be brave now, Number 34. Say goodbye to the expensive conversions, the sun terrace overlooking the back garden and the terracotta tiles in the kitchen. All those loving improvements – the big glass doors into the yard, the pistachio bathroom with its great big mirror, the louvred cupboards in the bedroom and the giant, low built-in bed – are in the future. The rag-rolling and sponging and the ice-cream colours are gone, the holiday-bought kilims and the halogen lights. In fact, the latter aren’t even invented yet.
But the big brick fireplace is back – oh no, sorry, it’s not. Not yet. Waiting to be discovered by the Pidgeons, it’s currently boarded up, suffocating under brown painted chipboard, a small gas fire with a row of weedy mauve flames lodged in its centre. A flimsy door separates this room from the draughty one behind that contains an old iron bath with a brown stain under the taps, a tumble, twist bathmat that could itself do with a wash.
The water takes ages to heat up but that’s not your fault, Number 34: the Ascot boiler’s on its last legs. A copy of the News of the World from a fortnight ago – its edges frazzled with damp – sits on the old washstand and the door in the corner leads to an old outdoor toilet with rolls of hard, shiny Jeyes Izal paper and a chain you have to pull hard to give a proper flush.
The brightly painted top back bedroom, Lucy Pidgeon’s room, with its views over Battersea to the Power Station and beyond – that’s dark and gloomy again, floored in lino. There’s a narrow bed with nylon sheets, beside it a mahogany bedside table that’s seen better days. On it, a bottle of pills, a pack of Rennies, a dusty copy of Archbold on Evidence.
Next door, no one’s even thought about Spurs wallpaper. The grey speckled pattern on the lino can’t really disguise the peppered scorch-marks of a hundred dropped or stubbed-out cigarettes. There’s no central heating, just a paraffin heater or two – Andy’s Gas delivers the canisters every Tuesday, though sometimes, if it runs out early, a teenage girl struggles back home with one from the petrol station at the end of Orlando Road.
It’s a house of discomforts, a house of extremes. In winter ice coats the inside of the bedroom panes. In summer bluebottles fuss at the shabby wood frames. The curtains are grubby white net. What’s the point in washing them when every other tenant is a smoker?
Sitting room, you’re not sponge-effect apricot and lemon with matching curtains. You’re just a dingy, dark room with a maroon-and-gold zigzag paper on the walls, a brown Dralon three-piece suite taking most of the space, the light draining as another crushing November dusk descends. Your antique stripped pine doors are clothed again – panelled over and painted sludge brown. Your carpet is purple with big orange swirls – cheery, someone thought at the time. On the marble mantelpiece, a lace doily or two, a row of Afro hair products, a wooden notice that reads: ‘When God Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade’. But there’s not much sign of lemonade being made in here. In fact, let’s be blunt. You’re not going to be a sitting room for several years yet: right now, you’re a lounge.
The tiny room on the first-floor landing – the room where John Pidgeon wrote his lyrics for Island Records and his book about Slade, and where I sit now writing this – serves as both kitchen and bathroom for the upstairs lodgers. It’s been like this for thirty years. A bath along the left-hand wall has a wooden counter, which, when pulled down, can take a camping stove and pans.
There’s a sink in the corner just big enough to wash up in, but mostly the gentleman lodger from upstairs doesn’t bother much with cooking. Instead he just keeps a bottle of milk and some Crackerbarrel cheese in the fridge, a loaf of Slimcea in the bread bin. He’ll stand in there, eating his lonely sandwich. Then he’ll take a mug of tea back up to his rooms on the top floor.
Garden, get ready to lose your mature magnolia, your yellow climbing rose, your tangle of honeysuckle and jasmine and scented lilac, and your curvy, lovingly dug figure-of-eight lawn. That’s still many summers, hours of labour, and eight dozen rolls of turf away. The cat sitting washing itself on the garden shed isn’t born yet and the shed’s still flat packed in a warehouse somewhere.
It’s still some years before bees will hover and sip from your lilies, red admirals tip their wings on your lilac, and little kids will shriek and splash in a blue Early Learning Centre paddling pool while their mothers discuss local primary schools on a canopied swing seat. Sorry, but right now you’re back to being exactly what you always knew you were: a scrubby, muddy dumping ground with a concrete path down the left-hand side, an apology for a lawn, and a few straggling clumps of dandelions and groundsel – and the charred remains of a bonfire down at the bottom.
So here you are, Number 34, on a dull Sunday morning in October 1978. Callaghan’s Winter of Discontent looms. Downstairs someone is frying a watery slab of gammon. A radio is on – hymns playing, someone singing along. A tall man with greying hair is walking down the stairs, very slow,