Hills and Hoodies

Property No. 8

After my other homes in North London, Muswell Hill seemed quite a way out, especially as it wasn't on the tube. But I soon learned a short-cut through Cranley Gardens of multi-murderer Dennis Nilsen fame, (last year, I saw a lovely looking flat on the market, rang the agent and lo and behold, it was Nilsen's old flat. No way!), which got me to the station in about fifteen minutes with a few creepy shudders along the way.

It was an end-of-terrace three-bedroomed ex-council house with the most spectacular garden, with a pergola that ran up the side of the house and was draped with clematis and jasmine in summer. It also had a raised pond with a brick surround where you could sit with a glass of wine, watching the... well, watching nothing, actually, as there were no fish in it and it didn't cross my mind to buy any, so it was just water and duckweed. 

My long-suffering boyfriend laid a laminate floor  in the living room for me. I bought a comfy, squishy orange sofa and armchair as I had donated my previous sofa to my god-daughter. I made my own curtains and bedspread and transformed the smallest bedroom into a study.

Within weeks, it all started to go wrong. The house faced onto a small green with a huge holm oak on it, right in front of my front door, to the right of which was an alley leading to the next street. I soon realised that after dark, that tree was a meeting place for the local hoody brigade and I witnessed spliff-smoking and various drug deals going down. It got so that I was scared to come home and would literally race to my door, heart hammering as I yammered ostentatiously into my mobile phone, hoping that it would put off would-be muggers.

There was also a lot of noise from the house adjoining mine, which housed a tenant who looked after a mentally ill relative who did a lot of shouting. The nail in the coffin was the wretched steep hill itself, up which I had to climb in order to reach the shops. It went on and on and on. It felt as if I was toiling up Everest without crampons. It did my ankle in. A ligament got stretched and I wore an elastic bandage for months - and God, I was too bloody YOUNG for an elastic ankle bandage! It didn't suit my hip image one little bit. After all, I was only 50!

After a year, I realised I simply had to move again, but not before I was filmed there as part of a Channel 4 (I think) TV series called Home Stories, about serial house movers like myself. 

I wasn't sad to bid that house farewell. I should have listened to my dear, sensible friend who, when she drove me there while the purchase was going through. so I could show her where I was moving to, said, "My God, that's a hell of a hill. Are you sure you're not making an awful mistake?" 

She couldn't say that about my next purchase. Not only was it in a non-hilly street, it was in a part of London that was to capture my heart - a place I yearn to return to, though the lottery win is taking a long time coming: Highgate. 

Omens and atmospheres

Property 7

My partner reckoned my flat in Dartmouth Park, London NW5 must have had elastic walls, so much came out of it. In fact, its deep under-eaves cupboards housed boxes of books (copies of my own and a collection of books penned by friends), paintings I'd bought here and there at private views and charity shops and my collection of Art Deco pots.

The day I collected the keys to my neat detached house in a tiny cul-de-sac in UB10, which seemed like the back of beyond to someone used to being able to get to the West End of London by bus in half an hour, I decided to explore. I crossed the front lawn and as I was about to walk up the side of the house, I noticed a black and white cat lying on the grass.

My boyfriend had two black and white cats at the time, called Bastard and Trollop. Tuxedo cats were my favourites. I stepped towards it and suddenly, my bloke grabbed my arm. "Leave it," he said. "Go back in the house."

Confused, I did as I was told. After a while, he came back in. "It was dead," he said. "I think it had been poisoned."

I gasped and tears sprang to my eyes. "I can't move in," I said. "I can't live here. A dead cat in the garden on my first day? It's a terrible omen." But it was too late. The removal van was just pulling up in the street.

It was the second time I had wanted to move out before I had even moved in. The last time was Property 3, the Belsize Park flat with the herd of elephants crashing around upstairs. So once again, I moved in with a heavy heart, feeling I had made a huge mistake.

There was nothing wrong with the house itself. It was a typical, solid 3-bed house built by local building firm W. E. Black. The room sizes were reasonable and the garden was manageable. I changed the brown swirly carpeting for equally ill-advised beige carpet with a navy pattern that looked like paw prints. It suited my animal-loving nature. But I couldn't get the image of that poor, dead cat out of my mind. It blighted the place for me. If only it had been there when I came to view the property, I would never have made the offer.

It wasn't just the cat that affected me, though. There was something deeply sad in the atmosphere of the house. Normally, I am quick to pick up on atmospheres but on my viewing, I had been distracted by my boyfriend's loud, cheerful conversation about local property with the estate agent. They were saying things like, "Houses coming up for sale in this street are as rare as hens' teeth," so I thought I was on to a good thing and my intuitive antennae were switched off.

I owned that house for a year and only ever spent one night in it, as the boyfriend lived just around the corner and he had the cats and the fabulous kitchen and we were still in the throws of passion. And that one night was because we'd had a row. But I had turned one room into a study and had a commission for a children's book, so I worked there every day. And every day without fail, I would burst into tears at some point, as the atmosphere got to me.

I had never lived in a small cul-de-sac before. It was twitching-curtain territory. No comings and goings went unnoticed. The couple opposite had a rocky marriage and the wife drank. Several times, there were screaming rows which ended with her running naked out of the house and hiding in the rhododendrons. God only knows what they had been doing before the argument started. Had she refused to put on the gimp mask?

On one memorable occasion, the husband was up a ladder, using a blow lamp to burn off the old paint on his garage. My boyfriend had just picked me up and we were sitting in the car, ready to leave, but found ourselves gazing open-mouthed in paralysed horror as sparks from the blow torch ignited the dust sheet he had placed on the ground and flames licked up the rungs and set his trouser bottoms on fire. We watched, still unable to move, as he performed a kind of war dance on the top step of the ladder, smacking his trouser legs with his hand. And then we laughed... and laughed.

Another day, I had been about to leave the house when I noticed a car parked by the fence with several bulky men in it. A closer inspection told me they were police officers in body armour - and then, when I noticed the weapons they were packing, I scuttled back indoors. I found out later that they were preparing to arrest someone in the next street who was apparently armed. It was very scary.

After a few months of unhappy living - I had no friends in the area and I felt cut-off and isolated, so far from the nearest station - I put the house on the market. First to view were the lovely Asian couple who ran the local post office. They liked the house but shook their heads over the garden. It was wedge shaped, wide at the front and tapering to a point at the end, and the wife told me that the shape was unlucky: it represented good luck and prosperity draining away.

At that point, my spirits were draining away, too. I thought I would be stuck with this unhappy home for ever. But eventually I sold it for the same amount I had paid for it. The costs of buying and selling meant I had lost money on property for the first time.

When I told my next-door neighbours that I was leaving, they asked why I was going so soon, only a year after I had moved in. I told them that I had felt miserable from Day One, and they fell silent for a moment. Then the wife told me the history of the house. Like them, the previous owners had moved in as soon as the houses were built. But both of them had met tragic ends. The husband had woken up one night, had a coughing fit and choked to death in the bedroom - the room I had only slept in once. The wife, distraught at the sudden death of her spouse, had fallen ill a year or so later with a particularly nasty and long-drawn-out form of cancer. She had passed away in the kitchen. No wonder there was a sad atmosphere.

I was so, so glad to leave that house - and even gladder to leave Hillingdon. It also meant leaving the boyfriend behind, though we would still continue to see each other. I was headed back to my old stomping ground of North London, to a tiny house at the foot of a steep road in Muswell Hill. I would be getting my old life back. Whoopee!

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.