THE PHANTOM FREEHOLD

PROPERTY 6 

I moved into my capacious duplex in the summer of 1992. As I was within walking distance of two Northern line stations, I had an easy commute to Waterloo. I was editing extra fiction specials, earning enough for many jolly nights out in restaurants and wine bars and lots of holidays in Greece and Turkey.

Then, in 1994, I was made redundant when my title was sold off to another publisher, who gave his wife my job! I received a redundancy payout but, instead of going on a prolonged holiday, which is what I felt like doing after the stress of having my staff of 14 cut to five and having to come in on Sundays to read through heaps of submissions, I started applying for jobs and casting around for freelance work. I had a £60,000 mortgage to support, after all.

Almost immediately, I seemed to strike lucky when a Swedish publisher of a similar magazine asked me to put together a monthly short story magazine similar to the one I used to edit. The budget was tight and my fee was £2000 per issue. To save money, I wrote a lot of the stories myself but I also bought some from writers I knew. I sent off the first issue and waited for my payment to arrive. It never did. I rang, I wrote, but I could never get to speak to the man who had commissioned me. I consulted a solicitor who told me to put it down to experience as the costs of retrieving the money from Sweden would come to far more than what I was owed.

I was left way out of pocket as I still had to pay the writers. I had done a month's hard work for nothing - and there was nothing else in the pipeline. The redundancy money was slowly being spent... and then a miracle occurred. A publisher I had freelanced for in the past commissioned me to write four racy 85,000 word books at a flat fee of £4,500 each. I had a year to do them in. How I enjoyed that year!

Once the noisy bastard downstairs who left his telly blaring to keep his dog company had moved out, after giving me a year of hell when I had to sleep upstairs on the sofa, as the main bedroom downstairs was over his lounge, I had four wonderful years in that flat. It was in Croftdown Road, NW5, right next to Hampstead Heath, great for daily walks.

Of course, being so close to the Heath had its downside, too, in that friends would often drop in en route, oblivious to the fact that I was trying to keep office hours. It's the curse of being a freelancer. People think, 'She's bound to be at home, I'll just call in for a cuppa.' They never think I might be working to a 5 pm copy deadline, or right in the middle of a dramatic section of Chapter 15!

When I bought the flat, the vendor, who was a solicitor, told me that if I paid £3000 over what I had offered, he would throw in a share of the freehold. What I didn't bargain for was that every time anything needed doing, such as redecoration of the common parts, the onus was on me to organise it as he had moved out of London whilst hanging onto his part of the freehold.

Two of the flats were rented out, as the owners lived in Athens and New York respectively. You can imagine the difficulties involved in choosing a new stair carpet and deciding what shade to paint the walls and the woodwork whilst pinging emails back and forth. Even more difficult was extracting their share of the cash. Yet, when the tiles on the flat roof started to disintegrate, making me itch every time I sat up there, nobody would pay a share of the £3000 cost as they said only I had use of it as a roof terrace, so why should they pay? My wail of, 'Hey, the roof covers all of us, doesn't it?' cut no ice. I had to fork out.

When my mother passed away unexpectedly in 1996, I began to think of moving again. It's a habit of mine. If something awful happens while I am living somewhere, I instantly want a change of scene. Meeting a man from Hillingdon, who told me I could afford a wonderful detached house near him for less than I would get for the sale of the flat, was a catalyst.

I sold up - and later had a phone call from the woman who had bought the flat, telling me that my share of the freehold had never existed. The paperwork had never been signed. I had done all that organising  for nothing and been conned out of the three grand for my supposed SOF. My lousy property luck had struck again!

Dark times: from Crouch End to Dartmouth Park

BETWIXT AND BETWEEN

Easter 1992 was not a good time to get kicked out. When the sale of my house went through, I couldn't have had an easier move. The large articles went into storage but I carried everything else into the furnished house next door, which was currently empty.

No sooner had I got settled in, though, when I was informed by the rather scatty owner, who lived elsewhere, that she had completely forgotten that she had some American academics coming over for a month and I would have to get out. This was a major blow, but the builder of the houses, who had by now moved into one of them, said I could have his back bedroom.

With my belongings piled up to the ceiling, there was just enough room for a single bed and me. I was still commuting to my magazine publishing job on the South Bank every day and could have done without all the upheaval. But a phone call from my mother made everything ten times worse. "Can you come up?" she said. "Something's happened to your dad."

Making my excuses at work, I was on the next train to Liverpool and found my father in bed with both his arms paralysed. My mother was in the early stages of vascular dementia and couldn't cope. My father's regular GP was away, but a locum visited and agreed that my 86-year-old father might have had a stroke and should be admitted to hospital.

The news wasn't good. A scan revealed that it wasn't a stroke, but very advanced lung cancer. The tumour was pressing on nerves which controlled my father's arm movements. The next five weeks were harrowing. My boss was screaming at me about publishing deadlines, so I had to return to London, leaving it to my sister to ferry Mum to the hospital every day.

On Good Friday, I had an overwhelming feeling that I MUST get up to the hospital and see my dad. It was a strong instinct, impossible to ignore. But fate decreed otherwise. My temporary landlord had been asking his girlfriend to move in for months and at last she had agreed. I was out. He gave me till the following day to move myself and my stuff - and all the while this instinct was screaming at me to get to the Royal Liverpool Hospital without delay.

I rang some numbers in the local paper and, to my relief, found a flat down the road which I could move into the next day. It was a miracle. I met the landlady, handed over a large check and mustered friends with cars (I don't drive) to help me move in.

Then I rang my mother. Dad had lapsed into a coma. I had missed my very last chance of speaking to him. I was desolate. It was my worst Easter ever.

My rented flat was in a 1930s block on the main road. There was a lot of traffic noise and one of the windows was jammed open. I had to sleep on a mattress in the lounge. All the other residents were elderly and had been there for years. There was a smell of boiled cabbage and cats. The corridors were dark and creepy. It was the kind of building where you expected bodies to fall out of wardrobes.

My father passed away from pneumonia a few days later. Once the funeral was over and the worst of my grief had passed, I started flat-hunting again. I didn't want to stay in Crouch End, the scene of so many distressing things (including a miscarriage, but that story will be told elsewhere). I viewed a flat in Croftdown Road, Dartmouth Park, NW5. It was on two floors and had two terraces, one of which was the flat roof of the house. The kitchen was squashed under the sloping roof but I reckoned I could manage.

I put in an offer which was to include a share of the freehold. Soon, I was in.

The albino fox and me

PROPERTY 5

I answered an ad for houses in Crouch End for sale and it led to a bearded man with a plastered leg - not drunk, but broken! He had bought a piece of land off Haringey Park in Crouch End, N8 and built six houses. One was earmarked for him and the rest were for sale. I picked the one right at the end, with a rowan tree in the front garden and moved in as soon as the builders had left. The back garden was just bare earth but I looked forward to the challenge.

To go from a poky one-bed flat to a brand new three-bed house with its own car port and a utility room gave me a huge sense of freedom. I was literally dancing from room to room, crowing, "Mine, all mine!"

The tiled kitchen floor was a bit of a disaster. Two or three tiles soon developed cracks and of course anything you dropped, from an egg to a mug, promptly smashed. I was forever vacuuming up shards of glass and chunks of pottery and didn't dare walk around in bare feet in case I'd missed any.

When I moved in, the other houses were unoccupied. I was all alone in this small close with landscaped gardens in front of the houses. There was no street lighting and it was pitch dark at night. I used to leave the brightly lit street and dive into the darkness, running like hell for my front door, until the security light I'd had fitted over the car port came on and provided a blessed pool of light so I could see to get my key in the lock. But at night it was so quiet, you could, to quote a friend who stayed the night, 'hear the ants bonking at the bottom of the garden'.

I set to work creating a garden, but something kept digging a hole under the fence on one side. As fast as I blocked it up, it was dug out again. One Sunday afternoon I met the culprit. At first, I didn't know what kind of animal it was. It was curled up in the shrubbery at the front of the house like a large golden cat, but it had a big, bushy tail. I opened the front door and crept forwards. It didn't move. I thought it might be dead. Then it opened a golden eye, stood up and shook itself and I could see it was a fox, but I had never seen one that colour before. It was yellowish white, as if nicotine-stained.

It trotted right past me, squeezed under the side gate and I guessed from there, it went through the hole under the fence into one of the large, overgrown gardens at the back. I wish I had taken some photos of it. I saw it many times during the months I was in that house.

So, if it was such a peaceful, natural paradise, why did I leave? Blame the local council, who, a few months after I moved in, decided to house a problem family in a house that backed onto the close. They had seven feral brats, all boys aged from around 4 to 14 and they made my life hell. The parents would lock them out and they would come swarming over the fence, break branches off the trees, come into my garden and bash all my newly planted flowers to bits, moon in front of the windows, throw stuff, bang on the door and windows, any time from around 6.30 am on. I rang the police several times but they said they couldn't do anything unless they caught them at it, and of course the visitations and the damage were unpredictable and irregular.

I got so distressed that I started seeing a therapist to help me to cope. I was still the only person living in the close so I was a sitting duck. I loved that house. I had made it my home, filled it with lovely things, but I couldn't stay there. I couldn't relax as I never knew when the onslaught would commence. I couldn't play my piano or do any writing. I was shaking with nerves. I couldn't sleep. I cried all the time. Talk about a wreck!

I put the house up for sale and one couple seemed very interested but didn't make an offer. About ten months later, on a day when the mini marauders were thankfully nowhere in sight, they knocked on my door and asked if it was still for sale as they had just lost another house they were buying. I could have hugged and kissed them, I was so grateful. I just prayed they wouldn't want to come back for another look on a day when the kids were on the rampage.

The couple had nothing to sell so it all went through quickly. Three days after we exchanged contracts, a neighbour told me that the council had moved the problem family elsewhere. I could have stayed. I was heartbroken. But there was no going back.

This wasn't the end of my bad luck. I hadn't read the small print of my mortgage deal properly and wasn't aware that there was a penalty for paying it off early. Because I had had the mortgage for barely eighteen months, I had to pay almost £7,000 back to the Abbey National. I certainly didn't make a profit on that sale.

Waves in the loo!

PROPERTY 4

There is a reason why I'm running through my property history to date and that is to show you where I'm coming from and why my current search is accompanied by so many tears, tantrums, self-beatings and recriminations. It's a case of riches to rags... or maybe bricks to sticks. But first, let's move on to purchase number three.

Nassington Road, in South End Green, NW3 sounds posh, but in 1987 it was full of interesting, arty types. I counted a jazz keyboard player and two pianists amongst my neighbours. I bought a tiny attic flat with an amazing view over the rooftops of London. I could see all the way to St Paul's and beyond. There was no outside space but I put in plans for a balcony. Some of the neighbours had them. The houses overlooked nothing but gardens, allotments and the railway line.

My application was turned down twice and I gave up. Now, one of the flat-owners further down the road has gained permission for a swimming pool, yet I wasn't allowed a small, unobtrusive balcony. Humph.

Being constructed from the roof space of the house, there wasn't much brick holding the flat together; it was mostly timber and roofing tiles. Every time a train rumbled past, everything shook. But worst was the train and trundled past weekly, late at night, carrying nuclear waste. It was heavy and consisted of countless coaches and the shakings and wobblings inside my flat were of earthquake proportions.

But there was worse to come. I was there on the night of the 1987 hurricane and it was one of the most terrifying nights of my life. The flat shook so hard, I thought it was going to fly off the top of the house and carry me with it. I heard a radio news broadcaster telling everyone to stay in their homes and then, first one by one and then street by street, area by area, from my lofty perch I watched the lights go out all over London as the power lines came down with the trees.

I went in the bathroom and the water in the loo had waves on it. I crouched at the foot of the stairs, terrified, convinced that the nuclear waste train had crashed and that this was no ordinary gale but a nuclear wind and we were all soon to be dead.

When daylight came, I looked out and saw scenes of devastation all around me. Trees sticking through windows and roofs, crushed cars. And silence. A dreadful silence. I knew there was no point in going to work as there would be no transport and so, ducking beneath and scrambling over, I made my way onto Hampstead Heath, where I was horrified at the huge number of venerable trees that were lying with roots exposed. There was something naked and obscene about it. White roots poking up like dead limbs. It was a day for talking to strangers and sharing stories. "Was anyone killed?" "Have you still got your roof/windows/car/shed?" "It's going to take weeks to clear this lot."

In fact, it took just days where I lived... Days of whining saws and lorries full of logs. The following spring, new trees were planted on the Heath to take the place of the flattened ones and early one April morning, around 6 am, as I went for a walk before work, I encountered sinister men with rifles. Brazenly, I marched up to one and asked what was going on, to be told it was a squirrel cull. Apparently, the furry beasts had been stuffing themselves with the new tree shoots.

I stayed a couple of years in that flat. I liked it, I got on well with the downstairs neighbour, I loved the view, but in the end the weekly nuclear earthquake got too much for me. It was time to move on and to try a different area.

Moths, rot and total collapse!

PROPERTY 3

After the experiences of bongs, bongos and spontaneous fountains, I was naturally rather cautious when it came to looking for my next place. The trek from West Ealing to Waterloo was taking far too big a bite out of my day. Not only that, but the Piccadilly Line was always clogged with travellers going to and from Heathrow with enormous suitcases that took up all the space in the carriages. The last straw was when some green-about-the-gills guy who had probably eaten something dodgy on the plane threw up all over my boyfriend’s new suede shoes.

I ditched both Ealing and the boyfriend, but kept the job and moved to Belsize Park, still quite a grotty and bedsit-riddled area then, where I paid £64,000 for an enormous one-bed flat with a garden. I loved the area, but, yet again, the flat was blighted. The first weekend after I had moved in, the carpet came to life. It moved, it wriggled, it flew. It was infested with carpet moths, in every stage of their ghastly little lives, from white grubs poking their snouts up through the dark brown wool tufts like maggots on the hide of a rotting buffalo, to horrid little cocoons and hideous flying beasties.

I plugged in the vacuum, turned it on: nothing. My vacuum cleaner had died. I walked a mile to an electrical goods store and lugged a huge box containing a new one all the way back, staggering under the weight and resting it on garden walls every few minutes to ease my aching arms. I got it home, ripped open the box, uncoiled the flex of my shiny new Hoover, plugged it in and… nothing. That’s when I realised the electric socket was faulty and not my machines. I was now stuck with two vacuums and a house full of moths.

Not to mention a herd of elephants. When I came to view the flat, the owners had been able to assure me that the household was blissfully quiet and they never heard a thing. I found out later that it was because the flat upstairs had been empty for a year. A few days before I moved in, three clog-dancers also moved in and took over the upstairs flat. Two men and a girl, all in their late twenties, they were very nice, very lively and extremely noisy, clumping around as if they had bricks attached to each foot. I couldn’t go to sleep at night until I had heard the last brick being kicked off and landing with a thunk on the floor. It was misery. Then, to cap it all, the next door neighbours decided to remodel their flat and relocated their kitchen next to my bedroom. They were fond of midnight snacks and I heard every cupboard door bang, the taps being turned on and off, their jolly chatter, the radio blaring... I just couldn't live there, so I splashed a bit of paint around and put it back on the market.

And then, as I was about to start the viewings, I hit another snag. The bathroom was right at the back, in a grotty extension built out into the garden. It was accessed down a long corridor, to the left of which were a couple of cupboards I had never investigated. It was just as well that I did, because, on opening the first door I was greeted by a terrifying orange fungus, bubbling out of the wall like something in a horror movie. It was the dreaded dry rot. How my surveyor had missed it, I shall never know. I called Mr Bodge the Builder, who I'd met in a pub, and he came round, hacked off six feet of plaster, treated it with a noxious chemical and I crossed my fingers that the beast was dead. 

The flat took a year of sleepless nights to sell. About three months after I'd got rid of it, I took a walk past my old flat and saw that the front wall was propped up by stout beams and girders. The house had developed subsidence. I had got out just in time.

1979: no mortgages for women!

PROPERTY 1

I bought my first flat in 1979, a two-bed first floor purpose built maisonette in South Ealing. It cost £16,000 and I was earning about £6,500 pa at the time. I had saved up a deposit of £1,000 and my boss kindly matched it with a £1,000 loan, but raising the missing £14,000 was like trying to raise the Titanic with a fishing rod!

In the late ‘70s, the world of loans and mortgages was completely male-dominated. We women weren’t deemed sensible enough to handle a mortgage. Even renting a telly was a problem. When I went to hire one (renting TV's, fridges, etc. was the norm in those days - my parents had a rented telly all their lives - I was told that a man had to countersign the form as guarantor in case I defaulted on the payments of a few piddly pounds a month! So when it came to applying for a mortgage, I had to jump through all kinds of hoops.

Time and time again, I was told by lenders, ‘We don’t give mortgages to women’. Unbelievable! We had jobs, we could vote, but we couldn’t buy a house or rent a TV or get a loan for a car. One lender even suggested I lied my way through the application process, bumping up my wages and putting my dad’s name on the forms instead of my own, as we both had the same initial and surname.

In the end, good old Nationwide came to my rescue and gave me a mortgage of £14,000 and the flat was mine, complete with woodworm in the cupboard, a bongo-playing drug dealer downstairs and someone across the street who took pot-shots at the living room window with an air rifle. I found a lodger for the second bedroom and decorated and bought furniture in several shades of 1970s brown.

One day, I received a call at work from my lodger, who had a day off and had kindly offered to do some gardening on my tiny patch of weeds. Whilst digging a border, his spade hit something with a metallic clang. He cleared soil off the top and took a few steps back when he realised the object looked horribly like an unexploded WW2 bomb! 

He rang the police who sent the bomb squad round. Plans were made to evacuate the surrounding houses, if not the whole street! Luckily, it was a false alarm as the metal cylinder turned out to be an old fence post base, upside-down. Phew!

It was great to have my own place, but the downsides - chiefly the lack of soundproofing between the flats - started to get me down. The crunch came when I was awoken in the wee small hours yet again by all manner of disturbances downstairs. Banging doors, loud voices... it sounded as if they were having a party. In the morning, I thrust an angry note under the door of Flat 1. That evening, an equally angry occupant, the boyfriend of the girl who owned it, came to see me and informed me that the 3 am racket was in fact paramedics collecting his girlfriend and taking her off to hospital, as she had developed appendicitis! 

Shamefaced, I retreated and began to plan my next move...

PROPERTY 2

... was a terraced cottage in Northfields, West Ealing, where Concorde scraped the chimney twice a day and the man next door played hymns on the organ and had a collie dog that lay in wait to try and roger me. It cost £23,000 and was cursed with water problems. A blocked loo overflow pipe caused a Niagara Falls to cascade through the dining room ceiling and every so often some subterranean whale would send a waterspout through the cork tiles on the kitchen floor.

In 1994, I applied for and, to my amazement, got a job as fiction editor with a publishing company on the South Bank. My days in Ealing were over.

Best bids hell

THE PRESENT SITUATION

At the giant age of 70, I am trying to buy a flat after being out of the property market for eight years - a period which has seen enormous hikes in house prices, to the point where I don't know if I can afford to stay in the London area. I have been viewing flats and houses and putting in offers for the last three years and have found the experience unbelievably frustrating.

For a start, I live three miles from a station and an hour on the Tube from Kings Cross, so each trip to view one of the pitifully few properties in my price range that are coming onto the market is a day out of my freelance writing time. Yes, I am picky, too. I think that at my age, I deserve to be. I want a quiet, roomy home, with outside space, near a tube and close to my friends. But do you think I can find it? Even when I find something that almost matches all my tick boxes and whack in a full asking price offer, already planning where my writing desk will go, I inevitably get a call from the agent next day informing me that they've had several offers at the asking price and it's going to the iniquitous 'best bids' and I have to get my ultimate offer in by 5 pm.

As they have already had my 'best bid' - the asking price - I never succeed in winning the property. Buying a house or a flat anywhere in Greater London has become a competition that only those with deeper pockets than the next person can possibly win. Someone on a pension and a small freelance income doesn't stand a chance.

What about shared ownership, where you buy a percentage of the property and pay rent on the rest? Various friends have suggested that and when I started looking into it, I thought it might be the answer, but I was wrong. The small print on the last set of details I looked at told me that in order to buy a flat in that particular development, I needed an annual income of £60,000. WHAAAAT? I've never earned £60k pa in my life! I thought shared ownership deals were for people on low incomes. What's it all about?

'How about a nice retirement flat?' suggested another helpful soul. Well, I'm afraid my life just cannot fit into the cramped confines of the average retirement flat. Where would I put my piano and my three guitars? My 36 boxes of boxes that are currently filling up a garden shed? My desk, filing cabinets and heaps of box files and manuscripts? My cat? And where would I grow my plants and herbs?

I need my own space. I need quiet neighbours. Barking dogs, thumping music and noisy children should be in the next district, or even the next county, but not the next-door house. That's the trouble with being a writer. You live half the time in your own head space, creating worlds and situations and populating them with characters and dreaming up alternative existences. I really need a sound-proofed ivory tower or a house on top of a hill, where I can sit and dream undisturbed to my heart's content. But the countryside is out as I don't drive and ivory towers are not only non-PC, but have too many stairs for my ageing knees!

I am currently sharing a boyfriend's house. He's grumpy, the house is freezing and the station is too far away. I am working in my bedroom and all my books, paintings and papers are in the afore-mentioned shed.

But before I started charting the ups and downs of my recent attempts at buying my own place, let's take a trip into the past, back to my first ever property, purchased in 1979....