During the course of our current house hunting we’ve entered an enormous variety of homes & wandered, largely disconsolately, through the rooms. We’ve peered at the family photographs, skimmed the CD cases (marvelling that anyone would want to own everything that Phil Collins ever recorded), tried to stand two abreast in the minute kitchen or one abreast in the toilet whilst throughout the process a 14-year-old estate agent’s runner would babble manically & incessantly in the peculiar patois they all affect. (“We’ve had agreeance from the vendors to take consideration of an offer so if yourselves would like to suggest a figure…”).
It’s been a full & tiring week but not without possibilities. An entirely sensible young man, fluent in the kind of English that the rest of us speak, showed us around a small, utterly plain terraced ex-council house in a village near Hitchin called Great Offley. Normally we wouldn’t have looked twice at the specs sent by the Agents, but the place was unusually cheap & Emma slowly evolved the notion (as we looked for the second time at the specs) that we could buy this one without needing to takeout a mortgage. If we eventually manage to sell her house for the asking price, the Great Offley house would cost us 10 grand less. With the spare cash we could do the place up & then, in the increasingly likely eventuality of my not finding employment post-retirement, we could exist in reasonable comfort until I become the nation’s first millionaire poet.
Great Offley is a very pretty village with its origins in Saxon times. There is some possibility that Offa, the King of Mercia is buried there & that the village draws its name from him. The house is situated in a quiet cul-de-sac amongst trees. The garden joins a strip of common land bisected by a sluggish stream & beyond that there lies a ploughed field. We calculated that with the removal of some walls we could create a large living space downstairs &, upstairs, room for all three of us.
So we’ve made an offer & ourselves now await the vendors’ agreeance. We’re looking over it again tomorrow, hopefully with a builder, who will give us an estimate for all the work needed. If the offer is accepted we then have to redirect our energies into getting Emma’s house sold. The New Dispensation at our school has informed us that not only will we have to leave the apartment that I have rented from them for the last 13 years (we had assumed that Emma would be able to take over the rental after my retirement), but that they want to re-possess early in the summer so as to do it up as a lure for possible incoming teaching staff. So there is some current urgency which, as time passes, will become more acute.
One feature of this house is a garden shed. The relationship between British men & their sheds is a curious phenomenon. The shed remains, even in these times of relative sexual equality, the sanctum sanctorum for the British male. Whilst a female might be permitted to enter the shed briefly, carrying a cup of tea or a cheese roll, a prolonged presence would be unthinkable. It is within the shed that the male might saw a piece of wood in half, tinker in vain with a broken toaster, sharpen his chisels yet again on the piece of broken carborundum wheel that his grandfather handed down. Or he may just dream awhile, whistling tunelessly through his teeth…
THE SHEDS
Sheds: haunches nestled into
banked earth. Cow parsley, ragwort,
bedding high sides. Blunt faces
nose-ringed with hanging padlocks.
Inside, a stook of exhausted
spades, a knackered
wheelbarrow, face-down,
a crippled bike, kept for spares.
Here, where the sheds are,
clocks run slow. One man,
slouched in a doorway,
hand-rolls a cigarette.
Another taps out a briar
onto a windowsill
and then repacks the bowl.
Rapt, he stares across the match flame.
Kids roll and scatter,
break like high-tide
at the allotment's edge.
They watch, uncomprehending,
the semaphore of sweet-peas
rocking, bean-rows, carrot-tops;
the closed and secret faces
of the sheds.
The sun goes down
behind the recreation ground,
Breaking ranks, shadow-wrapped,
the houses sidle in.
