1970s PRIVATE LIFE
0141 Molesey - The Move
Upon joining IBM I had, once more, to move; this time down to its Richmond branch -- which was in South West London. Accordingly, Pat and I had to start house-hunting in that area. We started, and finished, in Molesey; since this is where her aunt and uncle lived, and where we stayed when house-hunting.
Unfortunately, the Burton house was, once more, slow to sell. Indeed, we eventually had to advertise it ourselves. When we did eventually sell, privately, the estate agents boldly claimed their percentage for the sale. When I explained that we had found the buyers through a newspaper advertisement, the estate agents said that didn't matter because they had been on their books anyway. I then said “...well why didn't you send them to us”. Their reply was that our house was simply not shown to the couple – but that didn’t affect their claim -- and they still wanted to claim their percentage. It took a personal visit to the head of the estate agency, and threatened legal action by me, before they dropped the claim.
Even then, South West London – where we were moving to - was expensive, certainly for family size homes. Within it, Molesey was just about the best value for money at that time. In particular, it had a massive new housing estate which had just been completed, controversially built on the land where the Hurst Park Race Course had been. This sounds horrendous in terms of the damage to the environment, but in fact it had been built by Wates who put in a lot of effort to create communities and in particular into architect designed houses. As a result it was a middle-class community of families who soon developed very strong links with each other. It was where I was to spend the next 13 years of my life, and ultimately to figure in the local residents association as one of its borough councillors.
Even though we had decided the general area where we wanted to go -- Hurst Park -- we still hadn't found the house we wanted. We had, though, discovered one key factor; that the part of the estate to the north of the main road was 10 percent more expensive. This was quite simply because children from there were guaranteed entry to Hurst Park Primary School; the best primary school in the area by long way. Accordingly I concentrated my search there.
Our new house
To cut a long story
short, I eventually found an end of terrace house, where all the houses were in
terraces no matter how expensive. It was a three-bedroom house with two
separate living rooms. Thus, upstairs it had two large bedrooms and a small one
(which poor Miles had to live in) and a bathroom.
Downstairs it had a large
front room and a small size dining room which had a room divider built between
this and the galley kitchen. Out the back it had a garage and a small garden
which was nicely walled in.
The living room,with our Habitat seating units
It was about half the size of our Burton house, but it had a nice feel about it and it served us well for the next 13 years.
I had to buy it without Pat seeing it! But we had no choice. I was confident that Pat would like it, since one of the main advantages was that having been recently decorated we would not have to spend time decorating. I was wrong! Pat hated the wallpaper and I had to paint the house from top to bottom. In the process I got very trendy and covered the long wall in the main living room in Hessian. It was, as I said, very trendy -- but it was immensely difficult to stick on the wall!
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