Chapter
Nineteen - Above Us the Callgirls
I know medical bits are boring, but I should mention that at this time I had my corn operated on. You may remember it was the one Douglas had kissed when I was nineteen. They put a pin in my toe to straighten it, which had to be kept in for several weeks. I got fed up staying at home walking round with a pudding basin tied on to the end of my foot to stop it getting knocked and one day went as far as to help Ted's daughter Lesley move to her new home in Epsom. I couldn't go on a train with the pudding basin contraption so just tried to be very careful. You know how it is whenever one has a injured part, that is always the very part which does get knocked and this was no exception.
On the train, although I thought both my feet were firmly under the seat in front, a refreshment trolley being pushed down the centre aisle swivelled and crushed my toe, pin and all. This meant that when the V shaped pin was extracted, it was exceedingly painful and my toe is more crippled than ever. Still, Lesley settled in nicely with Lauren and they had a small garden. I thought it was a very difficult residential area to reach, but it was definitely what would be considered a 'good' area.
Apart from my toe, life was fairly quiet for a month or two and then one night at about 2 am, our doorbuzzer was sounded. We slept at the front of the flat so both got a fright at the sudden loudness. We whispered to each other and decided not to answer. Then we heard voices and the new lady upstairs on the ground floor, talking to the men who sounded foreign. They were saying something about 'girls' and we both realised at the same time that they had been given the address of prostitutes. Perhaps they were seamen from Shoreham harbour. The woman seemed to be sending them to another address. A day or two later a man who said he lived down the road also knocked at my door. He said that some men had knocked at his door in the middle of the night and were looking for prostitutes and had said that they had been sent there by a woman downstairs at our number. He seemed very annoyed. I told him I suspected it was the woman on the ground floor who must have been trying to get them to go away at any cost and did not want any disturbance which other people would hear at that hour.
He said he had complained to the managing agents of our building so I realised I had better also lodge a complaint in case there was any confusion about the ground floor and basement floor of the building. This I did. They said they had already written to Dominic who should not have been sub-letting anyway and had asked him to deal with the matter.
A few days later, at about 7.30 am, our door buzzer sounded and I went to the door, wondering if it was the postman, and a well-dressed man was standing there who looked rather puzzled when he saw me and asked doubtfully 'Are you Roxanne?' I said 'Certainly not' and closed the door firmly. Lesley and Lauren came down for the day and they went out with Ted for a walk and on this walk picked up a phone booth card which read 'Roxanne's back' with a photo of a beautiful girl with cascading hair and the card had Dominic's phone number on it. Up until that time, I had always thought the police would help and that setting up a brothel in an ordinary building occupied by respectable people would not be tolerated. However, I could tell that the police were simply going through the motions of making a note of what I said and looking at the card, and were not in the least interested.
I suppose the real problem started because 'Roxanne' must have been telling clients who phoned that they must ring the bottom bell, meaning the bottom bell at the main front door on ground level. Then some clients obviously thought they should come down the steps to our separate bell in the basement. It became more and more disturbing as there were so many mistakes made. When Ted went out on his overnight shift, I turned off all the lights at the front and hid in the back. Then when we had further disturbance during the night, we had to disconnect the bell entirely which was hardly satisfactory as we would not have known if there had been genuine callers.
Once, coming home on a dark late afternoon, I met a man coming up the basement stairs as I was going down. I looked coldly at him and said 'what do you want?' And he looked very embarrassed and said he was looking for a friend of his. I said 'there's no one here except our family', and he sidled away.
There were two women up there, one older and a younger one. Neither looked anything like the glamorous girl on the card. Maybe one was simply a minder. I was rather nervous of them and never spoke to them directly. As their clientele built up, the disturbance to my sleep at night became worse. It was not that I could hear the traditional sounds one might expect from the carrying out of their business, but it was the footsteps and voices. On and off all through the night people were coming and going and being shown in and out. Chairs were scraped, cups or glasses clinked and as we had already learned when Dominic had given parties, these flats were simply not built for multi-occupation by people with different sleeping routines. If they had only worked until say 10 pm at night, I would not have minded nearly as much, except for the fact that our doorbell had to remain disconnected, but they obviously worked harder during the early hours than at any other time. I began to hate them - being deprived of sleep makes one feel very vicious towards the perpetrator of the disturbance.
I planned to tear down all the cards from the phone boxes in Brighton and Hove so that less people would ring them. I was furious when I found they had added to the card 'open late, no problem'. 'There bloody well is a problem' I thought. One day I went out wearing a coat with large pockets and I determinedly walked the length of Western Road, going into every telephone box and removing every 'Roxanne' card. I must have looked very furtive. I would pretend to be making a call, lift the handset and then whip off the relevant card or cards and put them in my pocket. Sometimes it was too difficult if I thought anyone was watching me. I was also worried that an onlooker might think I was a rival Madame trying to stop business reaching the competition. On that one day, I retrieved 73 Roxanne cards. Roger warned me to stop taking them down and said that the people involved would be quite ruthless and it might be quite dangerous to be seen removing cards. So I stopped, but it made me very angry that BT did not seem to be able to do anything about the cards. I felt sure that if I had advertised a washing machine for sale in a phone box, a complaint would have been made to me.
G2 booked me for 'Eastenders' as one of the dozens of parent-types to appear at Michelle Fowler's graduation in the Elstree area. They even arranged that I could get a lift with three other women of my age, who all happened to belong to the local operatic society. I had to be at the Portslade house of the car driver by 5.45 am which meant catching the first train out of Hove. It was a particularly busy night for the hookers and I was very tired and had a slight headache by dawn. Despite this, I had a nice day; the other ladies on the journey there were quite friendly to me as I was not one of their rivals in the Society, but were rather bitchy about everyone else. I remembered similar people in the various operatic societies I had been in and thought this type of cattiness and jealousy must be the same in amateur musical societies the world over.
Music is a large part of Ted's life and always will be. He has an acute ear for music. He can recognise and place jazz recordings, and recognise the style of individual musicians and even know the dates that the music was recorded. Although jazz is his greatest interest and the big band days of music, he is also extremely knowledgeable about classical music and often knows what a piece is from hearing only a few notes. From the 1960s he became uninterested in contemporary music, but even still seems to recognise a lot of it. He likes to have the radio on most of the time and in this respect reminds me of John (sorry Sep), though Sep had very different tastes. I used to be so glad to turn off the radio immediately Sep left the house because, well naturally because I was happier when he was not there, and this is something that has had a lasting effect on me. As soon as Ted leaves, I still turn off the radio straight away. I love music too but would rather choose something I want to hear and play when alone, like perhaps my 'Mack and Mabel' LP. Music comes first with Ted. This can be irritating when one is trying to organise something practical and somtimes urgent and yet one can see that he is not concentrating but is saying things like 'that must be Benny Goodman in about 1943'.
Anyway, Ted had no formal tuition in music at his schools as I did, and had never learned to read music at all, but he had once as a youth had a few trombone lessons. He joined the Brighton Buses Training Band where he was lent a trombone. There were a lot of youngsters in it but he was helped there and gradually improved. He was extremely enthusiastic about it and practised constantly before tea time, whenever his shifts permitted it. I hope it bothered the women upstairs if they were trying to rest. I presume they must have rested at some time during 24 hours.
Although they moved out at the end of their six months' tenancy, Ted and I decided that we would have to put the flat on the market and try and buy a house where this problem of noisy people above could not occur. A lone man moved in upstairs and although the noise was not quite as frequent as previously, we still had the problem of hearing him come home at about 2 am, and then from the sound of it, unpacking his shopping and rolling potatoes on the floor above our heads. Why, I wondered, couldn't normal people who worked during the day and slept at night, come and live above us.
However, we never complained about the new man because I had been warned that when selling a leasehold property nowadays, one had to state if there had been problems with other tenants and also one had to declare whether the managing agents had been consulted. By putting up with the thumps in the early hours, I knew I could truthfully say that we had only complained about previous tenants, who had since left.
Property values had again dropped and my flat went on the market for about £15,000 less than I had paid for it. I owned the flat outright but naturally Ted wanted to have something to leave for his daughters so he said he would take out a mortgage for whatever balance we would need in order to buy a house and we would have a legal document drawn up to show what proportion of the house each of us owned. A few viewers came around but there were no offers.
That Christmas Jennifer was in the pantomime at the Bristol Old Vic. For the first time she was not Alice Fitzwarren in Dick Whittington, but was the Principal Girl in Jack and the Beanstalk. Roger looked after Ben at home first, then later joined her. When Roger also got a part in a play, I went to Bristol for about a week until the nanny Jennifer had hired had got used to Ben and vice versa.
It was a pity that I didn't know at that time that Ted's forebears came from Bristol as I would have wandered around a lot more and looked at certain areas and the parish churches there. Of course it would not have been easy to do any real research whilst looking after Ben anyway.
I was always vaguely looking for a part-time job as it was difficult managing on my very small BT pension. Ted found me one but it was about the most unsuitable job I have ever had. A deli in Brighton wanted an assistant four mornings a week. Ted seemed to think it would quite easy and Cathy said something about shop work being 'boring but ok'. Boring? Incredible that anyone could find such stressful work boring! When I went and enquired about the job, feeling sure I would be instantly refused when I said I had never done any shop work, had never used a till or given change and knew very little about anything to do with delicatessens, I was amazed that he in fact took me on straight away. I gathered that there had must have been no response to his advert and he was desperate.
The deli was run by two gay men who lived above the shop. One followed his own occupation in London during the week and helped on Saturdays and the other, Ray, ran the shop during the week. It was a very good deli, though small, and not only sold the usual exotic, rare and foreign foods, but also had a hectic lunch period where fresh rolls, sandwiches and hot pies were sold. There was a very competent lady assistant on the days I was not there.
It is difficult to know where to begin about all the new things I had to learn. I broke the cheese wire the first time I used it. When I tried to grind coffee beans and hold the packet underneath, somehow a lot of the coffee would spill on the floor. Once I tried to scoop up the top of the heap without Ray noticing, then worried as the beans had been weighed first, so the customer would think he had been cheated, but that was perhaps better than being made ill by the addition of floor fluff and general dirt. I could never open the plastic bags that the various foods were put into. I sort of licked my fingers first as I always did in a supermarket with my own shopping, but Ray said this was unhygienic and I must never do it. I thought that Ray should not as he did, count out the money before going to the bank on the board we used to cut sandwiches on, nor did I think I should be handling money whilst touching the take away food, but I suppose we all have different ideas about what is hygienically acceptable.
Sometimes it took three times as long to open the plastic bag as it did to prepare, weigh and serve the food that went into the bag. The tills were a nightmare, different items had codes, some had added VAT and some did not. A different till was used for the lunchtime snacks. There was a higher price for a heated sausage roll or pie than for a cold one. I also had to learn the prices of things like bread which were not ticket stamped. I was not even particularly adept at using the ticket stamping gun on the items that were priced. I made a note of certain prices in a little book which I kept in the pocket of the apron I had to wear and that helped a bit, but having to look things up made me slow of course.
When Ray went to the bank, I was left alone in the shop, which terrified me. He went at the same time every day and I thought someone might realise this and come and start shoplifting or creating havoc in his absence. Brighton is full of weird people and one couldn't be sure that one of them mightn't come into the shop while I was alone.
I kept saying to Ray that I did not think I was suitable for the job and that apart from anything else it was not doing my arthritic knees any good. After standing for hours, I found I could hardly walk when I left the shop and felt like a stiff zombie. He said he would put another advert in a shop window, but no one ever applied that I knew of. He was fussy about who he took and I think he knew I was too stupid to know how to cheat him as regards the till, as it was such a strain to work it at all. Maybe he had previously had trouble with dishonest assistants.
It might sound as if I am making a fuss over the difficulties of working in a deli. But it is different from a shop where you simply pick up the article asked for and wrap it. I always admire people now when I buy anything from a deli counter as I know how many things one has to know regarding weights and thickness of slices of meats and all the little extra things like having to weigh a carton before you fill it with say, taramasalata so that the weight is nett. In the nine weeks that I was there, I did actually get better at guessing how much cheese to slice if someone asked for six ounces and I started to remember the prices of some of the breads and cakes.
The worst thing that ever happened was when I was putting a heavy glass jar of olives back through the gap between the glass top and side of the cold counter and knocked it so that broken glass and olives poured all over the posh array of cheeses in the cold counter. Ray wouldn't even let me clear it up. He gritted his teeth and muttered 'serve the customers' and he proceeded to clear the whole appalling mess up. Luckily the cheeses were wrapped in clingfilm and some were saved by wiping the outside of the film.
I had always told Ray that I worked for G2 and did have odd days where I would not be able to come in. However he did not like this when it actually happened. They wanted me to go to a casting in Soho. I felt I ought to go as one never knew who the clients were looking for and there was always that chance one would get picked. I think G2 sent as many people as possible hoping that someone from their agency would get the job. It was usually a bit of a waste of money but on that particular day Dawn was arriving from South Africa, together with her daughter Tracey and baby grandchild, so I was going to London to see them on their arrival anyway.
Dawn had never been out of South Africa before so had rung me excitedly a few weeks earlier. The reason for the trip was that Tracey's husband had been shot in a road rage incident soon after Michaela's birth. He had then had a minor stroke from which he was recovering, but the stroke had affected his mind and he no longer liked or wanted Tracey. She worked in insurance and had collected a large sum of money from a policy she had taken out on his behalf. Apparently he had suggested that she took her mother and her baby for a holiday abroad as it was due to her that they had all the money.
I went from the casting to the hotel in Russell Square where they were staying. I actually got there first and waited in the foyer. When they arrived, Tracey was wildly excited and after we found somewhere for lunch near Holborn, Tracey wanted to go for a walk and take the baby with her. She suggested I went out sightseeing with Dawn. Tracey had inherited a lot of her temperament from Eric. She was boisterous and confident and Dawn always seemed worried Tracey would denigrate her for doing something vague or stupid. We separated and I took Dawn on a bus to the Tower of London, passing St Paul's on the way. She saw the Yeomen of the Guard and we had tea in the Tower Hotel.
Then we went back by underground so she could see what it was like and learn about standing on the right and that sort of thing. There wasn't much time to do more on one afternoon. Tracey wanted to hire a car and was keen to see Cornwall and the Lake District. She did not seem a bit worried about finding her way out of London. Their plan was that after a few days' sightseeing in London, they would go on this trip and then on their return would come down to Sussex to stay with us for a few days.
I realised how painful my knees were that day as I had coped with stairs and
escalators and it had been quite a hectic day. The following day I found I
could hardly walk and had to hold on to the furniture and pull myself around
the flat. I rang Ray and said I just couldn't come in that day. He sounded very
annoyed and unsympathetic. For a few days I rested. I wrote to Ray and
apologised but he never rang or wrote back to me. After a few days I was all
right to hobble down to the osteopath who previously had helped with my knees
and gradually went back to my normal arthritic state which was not too bad if I
was careful not to do too much (or too little!) I just never went back to the
deli. Ray had seemed so uninterested, uncaring and annoyed I just felt I
couldn't face him again, so that was that.
In early 1995, Ted's daughter Joanne met her second husband to be, Rob. Her
marriage had broken up a few years before. Apparently her first husband who Ted
had greatly approved of, and who I thought seemed quite pleasant, was gay and
had been quite nasty to Joanne, I suppose due to frustration. They had married
quite young and presumably before he realised what he really needed. In the
last year or two she had had an unfortunate love affair so it was nice that she
seemed now to have met someone decent who got on well with her two little girls
and was ready to settle down. We met Rob when they came down to Brighton during
the Festival in May that year when the Hanover area in which Jennifer and Roger
lived, had a Fun Day with a lot of street entertainment and refreshments. Very
soon, Joanne announced that she was expecting a baby the following March and
then Jennifer said that she was too. The expected arrival dates were very
close.
Dawn and Tracey eventually phoned to say they were on their way back. I asked them if they had seen the Lake District and Dawn said no, they had gone to Wiltshire instead and she would explain when they reached us. It turned out that the confident Tracey had not managed nearly as well as she had anticipated and they had got completely lost and eventually given up. However they had really liked Wiltshire!
We had a pleasant few days with them. Barbra came down one day when I was looking after Ben, and we all had a day in Brighton. The only person who was not happy about them was Ben. He was absolutely terrified of Michaela who was the most beautiful doll-like baby and at five months was practising making roaring noises in her throat. He clung to me in the cafe and held my hand tightly and tried to keep as far as possible from her. It was not only on this day either. When he found they were in my flat later, he wanted to get outside and away from them. He was not good at saying his Gs and said desperately 'doe in the darden, danny' and I had to go out and sit with him until Roger took him home. He was very pleased when I told him the baby was soon going up in a plane and far away. For a long time afterwards, if I asked him where Michaela was he would point up to the sky with satisfaction.
I think that Dawn and Tracey had a very nice time in England and wished they could stay longer. At Heathrow whilst I was seeing them off, Dawn was upset about the rude and bossy way Tracey spoke to her and said she wished she could stay with me. It was not as if Eric was such a treasure to her, but she adored Michaela and she also had her other two sons in South Africa.
Cathy and John were already planning their wedding which would be on a Sunday in July the following year, but the reason for the choice of Sunday was different from Jennifer's. The Priest they liked was going to Ireland on the Monday for his annual break and was fully booked on the Saturday. I never realised how early people had to book their weddings.
The next time I went to Bath to see Cathy, she wanted to go shopping to look for a wedding dress. I was already getting worried about the expense of her coming wedding. They planned to have the reception in a very posh hotel at Limpley Stoke outside Bath. They were going to invite about 50 people to the reception meal and then about 100 people to the evening barn dance, which hopefully would take place outside. John knew musicians who organised barn dances. Ellie and Cathy's friend Denise were to be the bridesmaids and Cathy hoped to have mauve dresses for them. This was obviously going to be a very different sort of affair from Jennifer's jolly but homely wedding. Cathy had always been very good at spending money, I remembered my father talking about the six year old Cathy and saying that she would have to marry a very big spender. To be fair, she never got into debt, she just enjoyed spending any money she had quickly, and always justified her spending on any purchase by assuring everyone how absolutely necessary it was and also what an incredible bargain it was. I do this too, as most people do, of course, and Cathy was particularly good at it.
She would not have been happy with a second hand wedding dress or a reception in a room above a pub. This was to be a traditional wedding with all the trimmings. At least that was what I thought then, not being particularly experienced about weddings. I did realise later that some weddings cost an awful lot more than Cathy's did and that perhaps compared to some of her friends' occasions, it might have been considered quite modest.
We went into the Pronuptia bridal shop in Bath because a cheaper shop nearby was closed for lunch. Cathy looked at several dresses but didn't particularly like them. We started to leave and the assistant stopped us and asked if we wanted to look at their sale rack. Cathy immediately pulled out a certain dress and said that it was the sort she liked. It looked a little Victorian and was white rather than the apparently more fashionable cream or ivory that year. This dress had been reduced two or three times. It had actually been in stock about three years. I looked quickly at the price tag and it was £94 but originally had been about £700. 'I'll get it for you now' I said quickly and scrabbled hurriedly for my Barclaycard. The dress was too big, but they said it could be altered for about £30. It had a beautiful train and was very pretty from the back. I also bought a headdress with pearls to match the pearls on the dress which was also in the sale and felt we had really achieved something.
Cathy found dresses she would like for the bridesmaids at Laura Ashley and they cost £120 each, more than the wedding dress. However, Laura Ashley had a sale and I telephoned round the country trying to find two of the right size in the mauve colour that were being sold at half price. In the end, only the London shop had both sizes in the right colour. Roger was at an audition in the West End that day and agreed to pick them up. I paid by Barclaycard over the phone and Barbra said she would pay for one of them so with a 'phew' I thought 'that's another major item out of the way'.
At last a young woman viewed the flat, and put in an offer. She was in the navy and based at Portsmouth but wanted a place to put her furniture near to her family who lived in Hove. We were very excited and started to look again for a suitable house in Shoreham which we felt was a little cheaper than the Brighton area and yet was a nice place with a slightly villagy atmosphere. We had looked previously and had actually found a lovely house quite near the station but naturally had lost it when we did not have a buyer for the flat.
This time there was not much that was suitable. We found a house in the
right place but the survey said it was dangerous and a supporting wall had been
removed without the construction being made safe. We realised it would cost too
much to put things right
and prices in Shoreham seemed to be going up now we were trying to buy rather
than sell, a case of sod's law and all that! The one thing we couldn't do was
lose a buyer and she wanted to move in soon.
We started to look in Lancing which was adjacent to Shoreham and was slightly cheaper. I hoped it would only be a temporary move as more London trains stopped at Shoreham and the buses from Brighton also went that far. One day Ted and I viewed a little house which was convenient for Lancing station and we both thought we would put in an offer for it. Then Ted had to leave me and go to work and I said I would look at one more estate agent before deciding. In the window of the next estate agent I saw a house with three bedrooms for less than the one we had just seen which had only two. I phoned Jennifer and asked if she and Roger were free to come with me to view it that afternoon. They had Ellie and Chris with them but said they would come. So we all went together about an hour later and we all thought the house was very nice. It was further from the station than I would have liked, but the garden was so lovely and secluded and the little summerhouse so appealing that I was sure Ted would be pleased with it too. He had wanted a greenhouse and there was a small one of these too, and a space for growing vegetables.
There was no central heating unfortunately and I had always thought I would never buy anything again without it, but this was so cheap I thought we could manage to put heating in quite soon. At least there were two gas fires downstairs and an electric wall fire in the bathroom. It was a pretty pretty sort of house with looped net curtains, frills and flowers everywhere. Not until we moved in much later did I realise quite how frilly it all was. There was even a wide lace bow tied round the cistern pipe in the downstairs toilet, and plastic flowers twisted around the sides of the greenhouse and one plastic plant at the back of the flower border. Anyway, when Ted saw the house, he was very keen too, and we went ahead. However, knowing how long the legal side was likely to take, we realised we would have to put our furniture into storage and live with Jenny and Herbie for a while. Luckily they had stopped having regular students to stay so there would be a big room vacant as well as Paul's old teeny room to store luggage in.
Meanwhile Granddad was not only terrible unhappy, he also was ill. Barbra was told he had cancer in several places and she was naturally terribly upset. So were we all. I tried to visit him once or twice a week and helped with his evening meal on days when Barbra or John were not able to. I don't think he knew he was so seriously ill and kept talking about wanting to be able to drive again. I read homeopathy books and sent him various remedies. His deterioration seemed so quick. First he coped with cooking and walking the dog over the fields nearby, then he could only get around the block with the dog, then just to the end of the road and finally not at all. People from the nearby chapel came to see him as well as bereavement counsellors. I was so upset I used to feel I couldn't bear it. Barbra and I had a row over the question of going into a hospice. I knew how peaceful and painless Eileen's end had been in a hospice, but Barbra said the word 'hospice' would upset him. I just couldn't face the awfulness of seeing someone decline in an ordinary hospital where staff were not trained to care for the dying. I was very upset about the row and I am sure Barbra was too.
Granddad had always been so interested in property and doing up old houses that I knew he would want to know about our new house. And he was interested and looked at the leaflet and asked a lot of questions about it. His mind never lost its sharpness and even when his voice started to fail and it was an effort for him to speak he still took an interest in things, especially regarding finance and property matters.
Ted and I had a short break and went by ferry to Dieppe for the weekend. I was a bit worried about being away with Granddad so ill but it was only for two nights. We went to the Dieppe market on the Saturday and on a stall that had a lot of scruffy looking clothes piled on it, I saw a banana coloured thing sticking out. I had already decided I would like to wear yellow to Cathy's wedding so I extracted it from the pile and found it was a dress, brand new with its ticket still attached, an English made dress, but with a small ink spot on the front of it. I worked out the francs and realised it was £8. I bought it straight away as it was a lovely dress and exactly the sort of thing I wanted. It was good fabric and lined and looked as if it would not need ironing. I could hardly wait to get home and try to remove the spot. When I did, it worked beautifully. I dabbed at it with a cotton bud dipped in bleach and then wiped the bleach away quickly with clean water. After three dabs, the mark had gone and I could no longer see where it had been, so now all the clothes I had to worry about for the wedding were bought and safely put away.
Granddad went blind at the end, although strangely he never mentioned it. He was taken to hospital but Sep wanted him to die in his own home, so on a Saturday, the day after I last saw him, Sep took him home and moved in with him. A night nurse was also arranged. As it turned out, I can see it was the right thing to do. His last few days were peaceful. I was due to visit the following Wednesday and on Tuesday night Cathy and John went to visit him from Bath, Jennifer was in London for an audition and went to Woodford Bridge straight afterwards and Michael also went there after work. It was very fortunate that all three of them were there on what was to be his last night. Sep and Barbra had moved his record player into the bedroom and Granddad actually sang along with some of the music that night. He died on Wednesday morning and Sep rang to cancel my intended visit.
I was so sad that his last year had been so unhappy and I felt sure that his unhappiness over losing Nanny contributed to his illness. After the funeral, there was still estrangement between Barbra and me and I thought this mustn't go on and even if I had to grovel, I would have to make peace with her. Barbra perhaps was not the sort of person I would ever have become a close friend of, had we not been related by marriage. Perhaps there was no natural affinity and yet I was so grateful to her for many things over the years and she had been such a good aunt to my children and she had such sterling qualities of conscientiousness, reliability and strength, I knew it was important to me for my own sake as well as the family's, to patch up our differences. It took quite a long time, I even prayed about it. I wrote to her more than once and in December, after we had moved into the Lancing house, she came down to Brighton to see Jennifer and agreed to visit us to see our new house.
But this is jumping ahead - first we went to stay at the Parkhouses' as planned. Though Jenny did her best to make things comfortable for us, it was very difficult living without most of our possessions and keeping important files on the floor under the bed plus having to make all the necessary phone calls connected with buying a property from someone else's house. We decided it might be a good time to have a holiday for one week only. Neither of us had ever seen Spain and Paul who by this time was teaching English in Portugal, had always told us how interesting Barcelona was, and of course Pixie and Irene were there too. So that's where we went. Pixie booked us in to a hotel near her in Premiá de Mar. Irene and her sister Anjelica met us at the airport. Apart from toing and froing to South Africa and my few hours between planes in Rome, I had hardly travelled at all in my life. There had been the two ferry trips earlier that year, one to Calais and one to Dieppe, and that was all I had ever seen of France, so it was very exciting for me to have a real holiday in Spain.
We both found Barcelona fascinating, so sophisticated and cultured, the people so well dressed and the trains so streamlined and wonderful with classical music playing in the background and a very clear system of moving lights on the trains, showing passengers where they were and which way they were going. I liked the extraordinary Gaudi architecture and Ted loved the music. It seemed quite a safe place and we often sat out in the squares listening to music until midnight. We only stayed in Premiá de Mar two nights then we moved in to the centre of the city. We both loved the food and paella was something I could eat, whereas in France everything had seemed to be wheat-based. Pixie was very busy and now worked at teaching English as well. I don't know whether meeting Paul had given her the idea but for the first time the family were more solvent because of it. Pixie said she had always felt England was her spiritual home and felt no affinity at all for South Africa. She longed to see London again and had decided to come the following September as she now had a proper income. She had other friends in England but would stay with us and meet others in London for the day occasionally. The weather was very warm considering it was late October. Then we had to return to the worry of the removal, and all its attendant complications.
Luckily, as we were staying with Jenny P, we could move gradually and get the house ready before the furniture came out of store. We had to have complete rewiring done as the survey had said it was old and dangerous. The fitted carpets that were left were all right to go on with and the house had obviously been loved, although little had been done by the previous owners to solve any underlying problems. It really had mainly been a case of papering over cracks with flowery wallpaper and tying bows and lace everywhere. It took a long time to unpack the 36 crates that came out of storage but by Christmas when Ted had made bookshelves in the lounge, we were more or less straight.
Cathy and John came for Christmas that year. I typed their Order of Service leaflet for the wedding. The computer went wrong on Christmas day between dinner and the evening meal which caused me a lot of stress, but I managed to fix it and they returned home on Boxing Day with the leaflet ready to photocopy.