Chapter 10: 1991: The Crucial Year

If those were the ‘positive’ changes intended for the house, these were accompanied by a mass of demolition and refurbishment work that had to be tackled in conjunction with them and indeed to make them possible, and it was this that began immediately with the completion of the sale on 1 May. This must have been the subject of elaborate preparation in advance, because, on that day, two teams of workmen descended on the house: Stan and his men from P & H Services, and Kevin and Colin (aka Kolgrove Builders), both of them outfits that had previously done work for us in London. Kevin and Colin had in fact paid a visit to the house in February, and there is a letter to them from David in my file on the house itemising the principal works that would be needed, dated 28 February. Stan must also have visited, because there is a detailed estimate for installing central heating, itemising exactly what radiators would be needed, etc., dated 24 April.

Coming to 1 May, I recall that David was present in Hastings on that day to look after things, because I was still in London supervising the loading of all our possessions into removal vans provided by Top Trucks; these must then have been stored somewhere overnight and they arrived in Hastings the following day (David and I had meanwhile stayed the night with Freddie and Yvonne Hodgson at Ninfield, as we also did the following night). At that point, there was a minor mishap since, although I had sent the removal men a copy of the 25 inch Ordnance Survey map of the neighbourhood of Exmouth House to show how tight, narrow and steep the roads around it were, they were unable to get their removal lorries closer than outside the church in Croft Road. Luckily, Stan was able to come to the rescue, lending them a small truck which they were able to run up and down the street emptying the content of their large vans into the house. A lot must have been put in the cellar (where I recall that, later in the summer, it transpired that some books in boxes had got slightly damp), but other stuff must have been taken straight up into the house and distributed as appropriate.

Rot in the house, 1991

As for the state of the house at that point, it was in a complete mess, with a strong odour of damp and decay: it had been virtually unoccupied for years, except for occasional visits by the Willetts. By this time, Mr & Mrs Willett had removed all their possessions except the sideboard in the dining room, which I agreed to keep, but they left a residue of more structural junk that had to be removed. This included the kitchen fittings in the small front room upstairs which was now to become the bathroom; the ghastly ducting around the roof space, with its vents into the upstairs rooms, and the furnace at the back of the house that fuelled it; the decayed fire escape against the back wall of the house; the hideous and exceptionally damp and gloomy bathroom on the ground floor at the rear; and the partitions and doorway at the bottom of the stairs, dividing the upstairs flat from the downstairs ones. All this took skip after skip to remove, quite apart from all the debris that filled the back garden, as if it had been the resting place of old appliances and the like for years. In addition to using skips to remove rubbish, we also burned a lot in the rear garden. A sense of all this is given by the photographs of the back garden of the house sometime during the summer of 1991 that are shown here, one of them including Kevin. View image.

Kevin at work in the rear garden, 1991

Meanwhile, as the house was cleared of all this clutter, the work of installing new services began. Clearly the existing pipework and electrics needed to be abandoned, and Stan was able to take the opportunity to lay on a completely new water system and to provide central heating. At the same time, the house was rewired by Kevin and Colin. All this went well, assisted by the fact that the house was relatively empty, making it easy to raise floor boards, etc., to install the necessary pipework and wiring. Stan seems to have a done a pretty good job on the central heating system and I don’t have much to say about it, except that the so-called ‘bisque’ radiators on either side of the double doors in the study, which are traditional-style, free-standing radiators, had to be specially supplied. Stan took a particular relish in the controls for the central heating behind the door to the laundry room, an impressive layout of pipework, metres and red dials which looks almost like the engine room of a ship. He also constructed the metal frame to support the butler sink that was installed in the laundry room (the support to the kitchen one seems to be a purpose-built wooden construct, and I am not sure of its origin: perhaps it came with the house). These sinks, incidentally, came from Robert Browning School, Walworth: David had arranged with the headmistress, Mildred Utting, for us to have them as they would otherwise have been thrown away. Stan must also have been responsible for installing the abnormally large bath in the bathroom, which I recall was a second which David obtained from the firm, C.P. Hart, in Waterloo, and which originally had the monogram, ‘Düker’, on it, though that has since worn off. On the other hand, Kevin and Colin were responsible for blocking up the door to the adjacent bedroom and opening the original doorway from the bathroom to the stairs; for building the platform on which the bath stands and putting the tiling around it; and for inserting the ceiling cornice in the room, which is in fact made from floor boards with a bit of moulding added.

Bathroom