Chapter 10: 1991: The Crucial Year

This part of the story - which is my own involvement with the house - in fact needs to go back a couple of years further, to the summer of 1989. That was the point at which the idea first arose of selling 59 Oakley Square, NW1, where David Sulkin and I had been living with Sarah Brown since 1986. My diary shows that in 1989 I paid various visits to Hastings to view properties -- namely Hill House on 15 January; various properties (including ones in High Wycombe, the Croft and 91 High Street) on 24 June; and 23 Hill Street on 7 October.

Why Hastings, is a question I am often asked? This takes a bit of explaining. First, my location in London had always been as central as I could afford in relation to Birkbeck College, where I taught from 1976 onwards. This led me initially to Dalston, which was an up and coming area and where David and I lived at Ashburnham Cottage, Colvestone Crescent, E8, from 1975 to 1986. In 1986 the idea arose of joining with Sarah Brown to buy a bigger, more central house, and we found what we wanted at 59 Oakley Square - just at the top of Eversholt Street and therefore within walking distance of Birkbeck. It was a very grand house - probably the grandest house I will ever live in - and I enjoyed the very central address and the elegant surroundings for a few years. But then I began to find that it was almost too central. The motorbike ride to and from Hackney had given a desirable amount of ‘space’, whereas Oakley Square was so close to the college that I could walk home if I forgot a book. This also meant that, at the end of each summer, I felt rather jaded as colleagues like Barry Coward came back refreshed from their country retreats. In fact, I found myself riding my motorbike down to the Devil’s Dyke or Brighton beach for the day just for a break, to read students’ essays there! Add to that the fact that an academic job meant that one only had to be in London for two or three days in most weeks during term and less in the vacation, and it made sense to head for the country with some kind of arrangement for accommodation for the nights when I had to be in London.

So where to go? I think I briefly considered Harting in West Sussex, where I grew up, but really the seaside beckoned. I thought about Brighton, but that was too like London, and the property rather expensive. Instead, I was attracted to Hastings, which is only a few miles further from London (Brighton is 53 miles; Hastings 63) yet much more provincial and at that time undeveloped. In any case, I was already familiar with Hastings due to the fact that Eric Tappe, my father’s childhood friend, had retired to Markwick Terrace, St Leonards. In the 1970s and 1980s I had often visited him, so I knew the town well.56 In any case, Hastings now became my primary option, though I do remember that in the summer of 1989, when I was slightly disappointed by what was available there, I went to Kent to look at places like Broadstairs and Ramsgate, to see what they had to offer: in fact those towns didn’t really come up to expectations, and there was the added disincentive of the extra distance of the Isle of Thanet from London.

In 1990 everything went quiet since Oakley Square didn’t sell, but suddenly, around Christmas that year, a buyer materialised, Mr Morgan, and the quest for a house in Hastings became urgent. At the start of 1991, I seem to have gone down to Hastings on 12 January and looked at Norton Villa and other properties, and then I went again on Thursday, 17 January - the day of the outbreak of the first Gulf War, ‘Operation Desert Storm’, as I remember, since I saw the television coverage of it at the Lord Nelson pub as I sat addressing letters to the owners of the houses I wanted to leaflet. I seem to have been in Hastings again on 19 and 27 January and then again on the 30th, when I have a note in my diary that I visited Exmouth House. I seem to recall that it took Mr & Mrs Willett a little while to get my letter about wanting to purchase the house as it was their second home, so in the meantime I’d looked at other properties whose owners had been quicker to respond, including West Hill Villa.

56 I should perhaps add that Eric, who had been a member of the Allied Control Commission in Romania from 1944 to 1946 and was subsequently Professor of Romanian at the University of London, was still alive when I moved to Hastings but was in a home because he had Parkinson’s disease. Sadly, therefore, he never saw the house that I chose; he died in 1992. There is a life of him by Dennis Deletant in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.