With thanks to Linda for today’s prompt
It is a chapter of my life that I prefer to forget. It happened many years ago now. My husband had had to take work in London, and that was the last place on earth that I had wanted to live. We had often passed through London in the car on our way back home from seeing my husband’s relatives who lived down south. I was always and still am, a countryperson and I love to be next to nature. As we drove through London it was just streets and streets and streets of houses. Mostly terraced houses, and there was no greenery anywhere to be seen. I used to shudder as we drove through this.
Hoever, my husband lost his job as the plant where he worked closed down. This necessitated a move to London as he found work working as a Safety Officer for Haringey council. We had no idea where we would live, as houses in London were way beyond ur means. Yet we had to move. We put our house up for sale in Lincolnshire and had then to find a place to live. In the end we found a house that we could afford in a place called Waltham Abbey which is actually in Essex and my husband drove in to work from there every day. Because we didn’t have much money with which to buy a house, the one we ended up with, though large, was rat infested. The first thing that we had to do was get Rentokil in to get rid of the rats that had jumped on all our boxes on the first night that we spent in the house. The rats had actually been in the living room. Arrrrrgggghhhhhh. Fortunately they did go. I hated the place from the very beginning. The whole house needed decorating. It was shabby and dark. The rooms were large with very high ceilings. It was a terraced house and looking at it from the outside was deceptive. It looked small but inside it was huge. I set to and decorated it all myself. By the time I had finished, it looked lovely. However, I still hated the place. Everything was so different here from what I had been used to. Even the fish and chips didn’t taste the same.
At that time I had a motor bike. One day I decided that I would take a trip to Walthamstow market. I came to a huge roundabout and was on the inside lane. I went round the roundabout, wanting to take a left turn to get to Walthamstow, but there was no way in which I could get off the roundabout for all the traffice on the outside lane. I must have gone round that roundabout six times. Eventually there was a space to get off it, but the signpost said “Chingford.” I had no desire to go to Chingford, but I just said,
“Oh blow it, I’ll go to Chingfored.” At least it got me off the rounadabout. There wasn’t much at Chingford to see and so I went home. It was an experience but I realised that driving a motor bike round this place was going to be hard. In the end, I had nowhere to park the motor bike except in the front garden which was very small. One night some thieves took it and it was found by the police but it was a write off. Gone was my precious motor bike that I had loved when living back north. It had taken me many places and now it was gone.
One funny thing that happened though, was that the dog, Sherry, a rough collie, was used to going with me into the town and at the bottom of our road there was a people crossing and we would stand waiting for the light to change indicating that people could cross the raod and all the traffic would be stopped. One day, Sherry managed to get out of the back garden and she wasn’t stupid because she went down the the bottom of the road, and stood with all the people wiating their turn to get across the raod, and when they moved, she too walked across the road. She ended up in the country park where I often took her and she had known exactly what she was doing. She had been prone to jumping over a fence which was quite high at the previous houe in a small Lincolnshire village, and on one famous occasion she went to the post office and then the bank. Fortunately someone picked her up and we found her again. We had thought that the fence was high enough for her not to be able to get over it, but she had been determined and had managed it.
In time, my husband did get another job back north and we were able to move again. But not before he had had to take some council officers down the drains in London and he came face to face with rats. Also there had been a murderer who murdered people and then disposed of their body parts and they were down the drains. He never told me about the day he came face to face with that until after we had moved back north. He said he hadn’t wanted to upset me.
We never had to move back to London again for which I was thankful.
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