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.