New Year was a great time to be at Shotley
Gate. We sat on a little peninsula where
the Rivers Stour and Orwell met. Looking
out to sea, on our right hand side, we had the port of Harwich and, on our left
hand side, we had the port of Felixstowe.
At midnight, on New Year’s Eve,
every vessel in port would sound their horn.
If it was a clear night with all the lights and horns it was a fantastic
atmosphere. After joining in with the
passing of the hour we would all then turn to the serious business of getting
legless. I had been elevated in the
local civilian society and had been asked to join in with the private party at
the local pub. This was a lavish affair,
with free booze and free food until you could no longer walk. My sort of party.
Somewhere around dawn we decided that we should
all go to someone’s house for breakfast.
Chris and Aurora invited a good half dozen of us to their house. which
was quite close and so we all staggered off in that general direction. We were all in good form and were monkeying around;
in fact Chris took it one step further and climbed up the tree in his front
garden imitating a baboon. Normally, well;
the results of most of the scientific experiments I had carried out on behalf
of, and for the benefit of, mankind, proved that the consumption of vast
amounts of alcohol brought about rubber bone syndrome. It’s very technical so I shall not bore you
with the thesis but suffice to say this time my research was proven to be
incomplete, for when Chris fell out of his tree, he didn’t bounce, as one might
have expected, nor did his bones have any degree of flexibility, for he broke
both of his legs. I can remember the
snap and the yell quite clearly.
As you may expect breakfast was ruined, so was Chris’s
life, because I was introduced to the reality of civilian life, something that I
had never been exposed to before and something I was reasonably unaware
of. Chris lived in a small bungalow that
he had bought. He had also bought a Thames
barge which was moored at Pin Mill and which he would spend his non-drinking
free time working on. The plan was to convert the barge into a four bedroomed domestic
vessel, a house boat. Chris was a self-employed
pipe fitter and welder who worked in London, leaving Shotley, early on a Monday
morning, sleeping on friend’s floors in London during the week and returning on
a Friday evening. Now, with two broken
legs he couldn’t drive to London, couldn’t work, so couldn’t earn, couldn’t pay
the mortgage and, in what seemed to be quite a short amount of time, was having
his house repossessed.
Chris was a lovely straight talking fellow so
for him this was not an embarrassment but a mere fact of life. The emphasis was now to complete the Thames
barge project so that on eviction he his wife and child would have somewhere to
live. And with no money coming in this
would have to be done on the cheap. The air
force took up the challenge and offered to help him in any way that they could,
the air force didn’t know this, but I’m sure if they had they would have been
very proud of themselves. No one even
questioned why battle fight needed anti-fouling
paint, a specialist paint used on the hull of boats and ships to add to their
durability and act as a barrier against corrosion. The barge when complete was to be lived in,
so I was able to provide a good deal of the basics ranging from beds and blankets
to even the most basic cooking utensils.
The scrounging, I felt, was taken to another
level for whole bathroom suites were turning up and he even managed to get his
hands on an actual bar counter that had been taken out of a pub undergoing
renovation. It was interesting to see
how everyone else reacted to Chris and his situation; it was as if it were a
shot across the bows for most of them, as what had happened to Chris could
happen to any of them. It couldn’t
happen to me, because I was living in air force married quarters and when we
got to Ireland all I needed was a field and I would build my own house. While most people in the UK were busy ‘investing
in property’ and ‘climbing the property ladder’ while discussing their equity
some of us, Wing commander Operations and myself, were busy researching how to
build our own house.
There seemed to be a madness surrounding the
property market and because I was involved arranging mortgages for people I was
lucky enough to be exposed to a lot of property deals. I couldn’t believe the ridiculous prices some
people were paying for houses and the absolute bollocks they would use to
validate their purchase. Initially I
looked at actually building my own house brick by brick, I couldn’t see why
anyone would move into a house that nearly suited their needs, why not design
your own house, build it and then move in?
I had been studying some books one day in flight planning when the Wing
Commander came in. He explained that he
too was interested in building his own house and we began to discuss ideas and problems
that we thought we might encounter.
My greatest problem was that I had no construction
skills and I wasn’t convinced that I could master enough of those skills to produce
a suitable house so I would have to employ professional builders. I could see that the organisation and coordination
would be enormous and although I could see that it would be one massive
headache, I could also see that you could end up with exactly the house you wanted
to have and save a few hundred thousand into the bargain. But I came across a company called Heritage
Potton. They produced timber framed, prefabricated,
houses to order and I promise you their brochure ( http://www.potton.co.uk/ ) would have most interested people drooling. You could design your own house, which they would
construct and deliver to anywhere in the world.
You could employ your own construction team or they would do it for you. For me this was the perfect solution to my
problem.
So as you can see, all I needed when I got to Ireland
was a field, I already had my house.
Irene and I had spent many an evening and quite a few bottles of wine planning
and dreaming about our perfect house. I
never knew exactly how much Rioja was involved in the planning process, but we
battled on regardless. We had eventually
agreed on the final design, knew the cost and the time limitations and all we
had to do now was find a field and build the thing. Of course there would be minor details like
planning permission and the like but those sorts of problems I could take in my
stride. I had no intention of joining
the property market or climbing any fecking ladders. I was going to build a house that would suit
our needs and live in the thing. Because
I was the only one of the three youngest family members interested in returning
to Ireland I had been told that our family house in Glenarm would be given to
me on the death of my aunt who was living there.
The house in Glenarm was so much more than a house. I was normally a little uncomfortable when
there for I knew I was not on my own, there was more than memories living in
that house, but nothing that worried or scared me. You just knew that you were not alone. To sit in the front room with just the tick
tock of the large grandfather clock in the hall echo through the house would be
a perfect way to spend a few quiet hours.
Lying on a straw mattress reading Don Quixote, under the yellow light of
a ginormous light bulb, would be my first and perhaps fondest memory of the
place. The house would be passed on to
my youngest child, when the time came, and I would have expected them to follow
suit, property markets and property ladders were not in my world.
All the clocks in my world were ticking, from
the grandfather clock in Glenarm to the clock that was counting down the time I
had left in the air force. In fact the
day that I could actually stop going in to work with the air force was fast approaching
and it was something I was looking forward to.
So it was no surprise to find Tim Hirschman turn up at Tony’s one day,
with the standard bottle of single malt, that he seemed to use as a business card. The three of us sat in Tony’s living room and
raised a glass to ourselves and wishing luck on all present when Tim
apologised. Ever feel the life drain out
of you from the tip of your head downwards?
That's what it felt like, like sitting in a bath while the water drained
out, the life just flowed right out of me.
Tim Hirschman was apologising, the bottom had fallen out of the market, something
called a recession was hitting the markets, he couldn’t afford to pay his salesmen
in England so there was no way he could even consider sending me to
Ireland. There was no job, no way of
stopping the clocks and most certainly no way of turning any of them back.
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