A Life in the Day

by Hunter Davies

  There has hardly been a week in the last fifty-five years since we bought our London house in which I have not managed to drag in how much we paid for it. I do it to annoy, to piss off the neighbours, boast, make people jealous, show how clever we were, which of course we were not. It was just how it was, at that time, in that place, at that stage we were at.

  Today a young London couple, on average London wages, would have to save for forty years to acquire an average London property, which in 2016 was around £550,000. Probably over £600k by the time you get to the end of this sentence. And for that of course, you would be unlikely to acquire a whole house but have to be content to scrabble for a flat in a crummy area.

  The London property world has gone mad, everyone knows it, everyone says it, and it means that the average young couple of the present and next generation is unlikely ever to be property owners. They will have to rent all their lives, or move out of London. London will become a ghetto for the rich.

  When I start my spiel, boasting to the neighbours, I end it by saying that of course we did not think it was easy back in 1962, oh no, it seemed a hell of a struggle, there were loads of obstacles and problems, don’t think it was a doddle, oh no, which of course they don’t want to hear. They just roll their eyes and mutter lucky bastards.

  Towards the end of 1962, after two years of saving hard, we had amassed the sum of £1,500 in a building society account. This was to be our deposit. Our first desire was to stay in Hampstead. Obviously. Lovely place, lovely houses, ideally somewhere near the Heath. Dream on.

  We looked at Flask Walk, in the middle of the village, just off the High Street, where the houses appeared to be artisan terrace houses, nothing special, small front gardens, no side passages, all a bit cramped. Then we found out they started at around £7,500. Christ Church Hill was nearer £10,000 while houses in Downshire Hill, the street we really, really ogled most of all, were going for nearer £15,000.

  It soon became clear that our target would have to be £5,000 houses, max. The rule of thumb at the time was that, to get a mortgage, you needed a deposit of one-third. We might increase marginally our £1,500 deposit by the time we found somewhere, but it was clear we had to aim for houses no more than £5,000.

  We looked at a map of the Heath, decided the so-called wrong side, the Kentish Town side, would be the best bet, as it would still be near the Heath. If and when we ever made any money, we vowed to come back to Hampstead, our spiritual home, so we imagined, so we told ourselves.

  Moving to the Kentish Town side would be a bit like slumming. We did not know anybody, had never been there. Even walking the whole circuit of the Heath, which we always did at the weekend, right round the boundaries, right up to Golders Green, which could last three hours, the Kentish Town side always seemed a bit scruffy, the people not as, how to put this, refined as on the Hampstead side.

  We had referred to it till then as the Kentish Town side, but KT is technically further south, which just appeared to be one busy, scruffy, noisy High Road before you get to Camden Town. We soon discovered that the area we fancied, simply because it seemed achievable, was called Parliament Hill Fields. That’s what it still says on the C2 bus which has its terminus at Parliament Hill. Local people, in the local streets, who had been there for some time, always talked at the time about going on the Heath as ‘going over the Fields’. It made it sound rural and agrarian, as if they were all farm workers.

  We got a list from a local estate, Jennings and Samson in Fortess Road, a scruffy, duplicated, badly typed sheet with no photos, no full addresses and certainly no flowery prose. There were whole houses available in Tufnell Park and in Camden for about £5,500 – all vacant, i.e. with no tenants. In 1962 almost every house in our area had been divided into flats with one or two sitting tenants who had been there forever and were protected by law.

  The one that caught our eye was very near the Heath, in Parliament Hill Fields. ‘Ideally suited for the discriminating buyer who is desirous of carrying out repairs and re-decoration to his own requirements.’ Notice the use of the word ‘he’ which they would never use today – and I should think not.

  It was three storeys high, flat-fronted, with a neat little iron balcony on the first floor outside the main drawing room, which was the handsomest room in the house with double windows. The house looked as if it was in a terrace but was in fact semi-detached, which meant we had a side passage to the left of the front door, which was a great help when the builders started.

  There was a sitting tenant whom the agent explained was an old lady, currently in America living with her daughter, who had the top floor and paid 32/6 a week rent. The agent said she would probably never come back, which of course I did not believe, being cynical about all estate agents, even in those days, when I had met so few.

  The asking price was £5,250. I offered £5,000 and it was immediately accepted, a clear sign, which I did not translate at that time, that the old woman would come back and that the condition of the house was probably even worse than they had suggested.

  I found a lawyer, John Carey, of Moon Beever and Kinsey – purely because he lived in the street where we were buying the house and someone gave me his name. I paid the 10 per cent deposit of £500 in December 1962.

  When I went to my building society, the one we had been saving with for two years, on the understanding that they would provide us with a mortgage in due course, they said oh sorry, we are no longer giving mortgages on pre-1900 houses. Our house was 1860s. They had never told us that, bastards. So I was left with having paid a £500 deposit – but was now unable to get a mortgage.

  I went to the Sunday Times personnel department and they recommended another company, the Norwich Union, whom they used, saying they would act as my reference. They organised a survey of the house and agreed yes, they would give us a twenty-year mortgage. Twenty years! Would we live that long? Would the world live that long?

  We moved in in late January 1963 without having yet seen the garden. It had been covered in snow when we looked at the house in December, so we had no idea what it contained.

  Spring was a constant delight. It was such a surprise as pears and apple trees emerged, plants and bushes shot up, flowers appeared which we had never imagined were there. Even more amazing, an Anderson air raid shelter was revealed at the bottom of the garden, up against the back wall.

  Anderson shelters were the wartime shelters half dug into the ground, with corrugated iron on top over which soil and turf was usually laid, which was why we had not identified it, thinking it was a mound at the bottom of the garden. The shelters that were erected inside your house, and which we had in Carlisle during the war, were known as Morrison shelters. They were like a steel coffin, under your kitchen table. Hell to get into, hell to sleep in and liable to knock you out flat if you happened to get up quickly without ducking your head.

  Frank Herrmann, a young photographer on the Sunday Times, one of my closest friends on the paper, with whom I often contrived to work, was around the same time paying £7,500 to buy his first house not far away in Highgate. I could not work out how he could afford so much more than me – till I discovered he had family help. I thought this was cheating. I was a bit jealous of course, but then rationalised it, feeling pleased that we had bought ours all on our own, from scratch. Even if it was not in such a desirable area as Highgate.

  At that time, Frank and I buying houses in what is roughly inner London, was fairly unusual. Not in buying a house, at our age, but the norm among my contemporaries, when they tried to get their first steps on the housing ladder and think about a family, was to move out to the suburbs. Another of my friends on the paper, Mike Hamlyn, an Oxford graduate, had, like us, a flat in Hampstead when he first got married, but when it came to a buying a house, they moved out to Beckenham. We went there for a meal once. It seemed to take forever and I got totally lost. When I got there, I still felt lost. It was one vast, featureless suburbia.

  Most subs on most papers,
as they had been in Manchester, lived out in the suburbs, wanting a semi-rural life, nicer houses, bigger gardens. We so-called writers, like me and ahead of me Nick Tomalin, rather looked down on subs for having no imagination – and being frightfully provincial. We wanted to be in inner London, among real people, from all classes, even if the area had its scruffy, scary, low-life element, though naturally we would be looking for a bijou Georgian gem, a Regency square or a spacious Victorian terrace.

  I never for one moment contemplated the idea of commuting from the suburbs. I felt instinctively an inner Londoner. There was no real reason for this, I don’t know where I got it from, nor Margaret, as we had lived almost all our lives in the North and London was still much of a mystery to us. We just loved being in the heart of the capital. Charing Cross, the traditional centre of London, was just four miles away. In the suburbs, we would have got a whole, empty house for £5,000 and had green fields within walking distance, yet we had 800 open acres of the Heath on our doorstep. It was well worth having the inconvenience of a sitting tenant. Whom we were still hoping would never actually appear.

  We found a local builder, J. P. Brown, who lived nearby in Fortess Road. He was a stage Irishman, and all his workers were stage Irish. He was full of blarney and delighted in ignoring all safety rules, climbing on broken roofs, walking over sky lights, always cheerful.

  I went round one day to his house to find out why he had not turned up. In the basement I could see benches, little more than large shelves, where two Irish workmen were asleep. At one time, Kentish Town and Camden Town had large Irish populations, most of them in the building trade. Now the Irish have gone, replaced by Poles. Probably still sleeping on the same shelves.

  JP ripped the house apart, put in central heating and tore out fireplaces – which in a few years we bitterly regretted. We had never had central heating in our own homes in Carlisle and assumed you always had to get rid of fireplaces to install CH, as we began to call it.

  Mrs Hall, the sitting tenant, did eventually return. She turned out to be Irish as well, though she denied it, for some reason. She had a strong Irish accent and all her friends who came to visit her were Irish women, several of them retired nurses, always addressed as Nursey. Mrs Hall was about seventy, lean, grim-looking, a bit like Old Mother Riley but without the laughs.

  She suddenly appeared in our kitchen one evening, while we were eating, asking me to come up at once and mend her leaking tap. Margaret got up, showed her the kitchen door, and told her never to do that again. She was always coming down to complain about something, or stopping us on the stairs while we were going up and down, our stairs of course, to moan on.

  Mrs Hall had the whole of the top floor to herself, three rooms and a kitchen on the landing, but she shared our lavatory which was on the middle floor. Every time she used it, she insisted on spraying it with the most revoltingly scented spray. Her only entrance was through our house, sharing the front door, which was endlessly annoying, giving us no privacy in our own house. She would stagger her way past our bedroom door every evening, heaving and sighing, dear God this, dear God that, or sometimes Sister of Mercy.

  Margaret became pregnant in the autumn of 1963, at the end of our first year in our house. We had waited to have a house of our own, and a garden, which we never had in the Vale of Health, before starting a family.

  One day I got a letter from the Royal Free Hospital, addressed to me, as the father to be, asking if I would like to attend a fathers’ class. This was the first such class they had organised. I wondered what they could teach me, as surely I had already done my bit, but then I thought, brilliant, that must be 1,000 words. A cry which has crept out of my lips ever since, whenever anything remotely interesting, however personal, or trivial, ever happens to me.

  I rushed along to the first fathers’ class to find a young BBC reporter, Wilfred De’Ath, was already there, his tape recorder at the ready, also hoping to get a feature out of it.

  I didn’t actually witness the birth. Despite it being the early sixties, a time of endless novelties and innovations, or so we thought, the fathers’ classes did not lead to fathers being present at the birth.

  In fact I wasn’t even in the hospital when Margaret gave birth on 6 March 1964. I had been sitting in the hospital with her all night, holding her hand and other manly contributions, but nothing appeared to be happening. By the morning, I was fed up and hungry so I decided to go into Hampstead Heath Street to buy a pie. When I got back, Caitlin had been born, weighing 8 lbs 31/2 ounces, with incredibly thick black shiny hair – which is what I used to have, er, many decades ago.

  Caitlin had been top of our list for girls’ names. We had got into our head it was Welsh, and would go well with Davies, thinking of Caitlin Thomas, wife of Dylan Thomas, not realising that she was Irish.

  I was never forgiven for missing Caitlin’s birth, especially for such a prosaic and unromantic reason as buying a pork pie.

  But I was there two years later for the birth of our second child, Jake, born in 1966 on 24 May, the day before Margaret’s twenty-eighth birthday. So that was a nice present for herself.

  We decided to have a home birth this time. By now we had most of the downstairs alterations completed, to our part of the house. A little outside room downstairs in the back addition, which had been a coal hole when we moved in, had been converted into our spare bedroom.

  The midwife was delayed, and so was the doctor. Jake came out so quickly he got the cord stuck round his neck. He could well have strangled himself, coming out so quickly, but I managed to untangle him. Thus my fathers’ day classes had not been wasted. The midwife and doctor both eventually came and said jolly well done.

  After Margaret, and the baby, had been cleaned up, I asked the midwife to give me the placenta. She asked why I wanted it, but I did not reveal the reason. Just said I was going to bury it in the garden, saving her the bother of disposing of it. She said it had to be destroyed or buried properly, to make sure no rats got at it. Government rules.

  I had read somewhere about a woman in America who had eaten her own placenta – fried it with onions and pronounced it tasty, a bit like liver.

  Naturally my thoughts were on a thousand words. I did get a piece out of it for the Women’s pages of the Sunday Times. I cooked it in the frying pan, and I did eat a bit of it, but not much. Liver is one of the very few foods I have never cared for.

  So now, with two young children, it meant that Mrs Hall had more space proportionally in our house than we had. The four of us – two adults, a baby and a toddler – shared two floors, while she on her own had one whole floor to herself. We explained the situation, as if she didn’t know it already, but she would not move. She was protected by law. We did not have the financial resources to offer her a suitable bribe, I mean inducement. So that was it.

  When I boast endlessly today about how little I paid for our house, what a bargain, doesn’t it make you sick, clever old us, I do tend to forget about all those years in which I was driven mad by Mrs Hall. I did begin to think at the time that perhaps we hadn’t got such a bargain after all. Unless somehow, from somewhere, we ever got the money to buy her out, we could end up with this old grumpy woman being part of our household for ever and ever.

  The very primitive, cheapo estate agent’s handout details of our house in 1962 – just think what a glossy brochure they would produce today. It is the one at the top, in Parliament Hill Fields. I got them down to £5,000.

  5

  WRITING LIVES

  One reason we did not have such an active social life as Nick Tomalin was not just because we were saving money but that after about a year in the Vale of Health, after a hard day at work for each of us, we had started writing. All our spare time, and every weekend, we were writing away. Margaret at the kitchen table with her fountain pen and me in the living room, on my portable typewriter, sitting at the repro Sheraton bureau.

  Margaret started first. She had got over what she considered had bee
n the disaster of her first attempt at a novel, and had decided to try again, writing a different sort of novel, a lighter, more amusing story based on the sort of people she knew, not what she had imagined had been the life and feelings of the French family she had lived with in Bordeaux.

  She was so disciplined, so organised, doing a thousand words almost every day after work. I was so impressed I decided I would have a go as well, at so-called creative writing, as opposed to journalism. Not that I would have used the term creative writing, being wary of all pretentions. Anyway, isn’t all writing creative? The page is blank, till you create some words on it.

  I decided against fiction, believing I did not have the right sort of imagination. So I started a TV script, a series about a school, called Silver Street.

  There were lots of police dramas at the time on TV, such as Z Cars, which had begun in 1962 and was incredibly popular, and Dixon of Dock Green, which began in 1955, still limping on, and being mocked for being old-fashioned. Not that I knew much about TV. In the Vale of Health we never had a TV set, nor later in our Boscastle Road house for many years. It wasn’t snobbery, which was prevalent at the time, with the aspiring middle classes looking down on everything on TV, boasting how they never watched the box. It was just that it didn’t fit in with our lives. But I had picked up that there was nothing much about schools on TV and thought a staff room was a naturally dramatic setting.

  So there we sat in our Vale of Health flat, in 1961 and 1962, night after night, bashing away. No one had asked us. No one was waiting for us to finish. No one except each other knew what we were doing. Or cared.

  I have no memory of either of us, when we first met and were courting, telling the other that really, pet, what I want to do in life is write. The subject was never mentioned. Margaret read avidly, but that was after she had done her school or college work. At Durham, I did write a fairly pretentious story once which was published in New Durham, a literary magazine, but I did not put my name to it. I think I thought it was too soppy – and anyway I saw myself as a humorous writer.