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One day I received the phone call I'd been dreading.
"We've had an offer from Mr and Mrs House Purchaser, which we have accepted. Congratulations, you have a buyer!" It was The Awful Mrs K.
"I'm the executor," I moaned pathetically. "I was rather expecting to have some say about whether an offer is acceptable ..."
"You signed that right away so we could undertake the work on your father's behalf," she said, somewhat tersely. "We've settled on £140,000, which your siblings have accepted."
I was completely knocked back. This was £80,000 under the original valuation just a few months earlier and a further £40,000 below the unacceptable reduction we had already discussed. All done with no consultation and, worse still, behind my back. I was in one of those stories where brothers and sisters plot against each other over money. I felt keenly the knife between my shoulder blades. They had nice houses to live in, so they didn't need every penny just to put a roof over their heads. I certainly did not resent being available to help my father, but the others were very distant, both in terms of their relationship with Dad and in terms of geography. One of them had phoned me from his home several thousand miles away, when Dad had been sent home from hospital to live out his final weeks, to say they could only afford one trip.
"Would it be better to come now for a couple of weeks while Dad is still alive and risk missing the funeral or do you think it would be more important to make the trip for the funeral?"
Why was that even a question?
I did not resent being able to be of service to my Father as his life closed down. Somehow it felt like a privilege to be able to help him when for most of our lives I had treated him with such undeserved disrespect. During our years of living together I learned what an exemplary human being he actually was and I learned to love him at last. It shocked me to realise that my siblings still held a lot of anger against the man they had perceived him to be earlier in his life. I was, however, simply exhausted from the strain of this whole experience. Where were the siblings when I had been the one to run Dad around? Sometimes backwards and forwards to the GP several miles away three times in a day. I had been the one to care for him at home, visit him twice every day (all fifty miles of the full journey) all those weeks he was in hospital. I wouldn't get home till ten at night and then had to think about getting something to eat, only to go through the whole routine the following day. None of my siblings were in sight every time Dad panicked, overdid the laxatives, and didn't make it to the toilet in time - another anxious hangover from his childhood. None of them had to worry about getting the medication exactly right, worry about leaving him with the morphine or prepare meals and special protein shakes he couldn't or wouldn't eat, or had to deal with each bit of medical news that was so depressing. I was the one who sat up with him all night and held his hand and watched him wasting away and, on the final night, had to mop away the blood and dark bile that dribbled from his mouth in a steady flow.
"What!" I was furious.
"We've agreed it now. You need to make arrangements to see the estate agent from this point on and sort out the details."
I didn't bother making arrangements. I drove straight there and asked to see Mr Agent. To his credit he did seem a little embarrassed that the offer had been accepted. He felt it had been a "little on the low side and could have been negotiated up". The buyer was a taxman who was moving south to work in the local tax office. He knew exactly what he was doing when he made the derisory and speculative offer. I bet he thought all his bonuses had come in at once when everybody rolled over and accepted it. I had never felt so betrayed.
So now it had to be full steam ahead. I had to get on with clearing the house. I contacted everyone I could think of who might be able to take some of dad's tools, some of the crockery, the furniture, books and all the other evidence of his well-lived life. Just a year before he died he had finally come to the realisation that the Mormon Church had been fleecing him for more than fifty years. The "one true church" was a con. He had donated tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of pounds during his time of membership, not to mention the countless hours of service. It gave me some small pleasure to dump the church books and manuals. At least these books wouldn't be used again to ruin anyone else's life. An aunt took most of his sewing equipment of which there was a lot, uncles, aunts, siblings and children helped themselves to the photographs. There were thousands of photographs in albums and in frames. Generations of the lives of family members and friends. Everything had to go. Sadly, with days to go before I moved out of the house most of the stuff from the sheds ended up in a skip hired locally. One of my brothers and I filled that skip three times. That was heartbreaking too.
Meanwhile, I still had nowhere to move into and no idea of how I was ever going to be able to afford it. One day I looked in the window of an estate agent in Wisbech and saw a flat in the town centre for sale that would only (!) need me to borrow about £20,000 if the revised estimate of what I could expect in inheritance was anywhere near correct. This was better than anything I had seen so far. There was also an industrial unit with parking for a relatively modest lease. Although I wouldn't be able to live there officially, it was far enough away from prying eyes that I could probably get away with it for a while. Failing that there was a parking space for my van and I could sleep in that. There would be plenty of storage for my instruments. In the end, the most sensible option seemed to come when I realised I was old enough to move into a park estate of mobile homes. I had a look at one that was for sale. It certainly offered more space than the flat and would be more comfortable than sleeping in the van. Unfortunately, there were the inevitable terms and conditions. Although I would own the property I would only be able to lease the land it stood on. When time came to sell the property ten per cent of the money would have to go back to landowner. The more I looked into it the more depressing it appeared. It was like the Hotel California, but without even the promise of the "pretty pretty boys". I could check out any time I wanted, but I'd never be able to afford to leave. There was no guarantee that I would be allowed to park my van on the estate and there was another rule forbidding the growing of vegetables or fruit in the gardens on this ex-brownfield site. Nobody could, or would, tell me how badly the ground had been poisoned in its previous incarnation. I discovered that the rules for erecting a cabin on a park home site bypassed the safety aspect of a more permanent type of structure. The final depressing nail in the coffin came when I was walking round the estate one afternoon. I got talking to a resident and a propos of absolutely nothing he asked,
"Do you play bowls? We're looking for new members for the club ..."
It sounded like a death sentence and I spiralled further downward.
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It was a Saturday night and I was calling for a ceilidh with my band. During the break the Wise Bass Player told me he could tell I was upset and he didn't think I should go into the "old people's home". I told him I could not think of an alternative and time was not on my side. He thought for a moment and said, there must be something I hadn't thought of and to leave it with him. He would mull it over and check out some possible ideas.
The very next day he phoned me and said he'd been in touch with a video artist and his wife who lived in the same village as him. They lived in a large farmhouse that had an empty annexe and that the artist and his wife did not have two ha'pennies to rub together. They would be happy to meet me and discuss the possibility of me moving into the annexe and providing some rent money which would amount to considerably less than the commercial rents that had made other options so unavailable. This was the best news I'd had during this whole miserable year.
I think I went over to the farmhouse to visit on the same day and the annexe looked ideal. There was also a very large room, mostly used for storage, that separated the main dwelling from the annexe. I could store my instruments and books there. We parted on a verbal understanding that I would move in when the sale of the bungalow went through. I wasn't sorry that the buyer's solicitor had a number of questions relating to the shared drains, the front boundary and some extra land my father had bought to extend the rear garden when he and my mother moved in a few years before she'd died. He was being very cautious - a small mercy at the time.
One morning I was in the kitchen at home and my phone rang. It was the Video Artist. I told him I was pleased he had rung because I'd like to start moving things over the following week.
"Yes, about that," he said. "You do know we've been trying to sell the house for three years? How much stuff did you say you were bringing? Will it stack tidily, because we don't want to put off potential buyers by having the house look like a tip."
I explained that most of my percussion was boxed or cased, but the cases were not in uniform sizes that would not necessarily stack evenly. Silence. If my goods and chattels were going to be a cause of contention before he'd even seen them, this arrangement was clearly not going to work. Oh well, that was another plan exhausted. What now!
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This was a crunch point and my belongings had to find a home. I am very grateful to G, a friend and retired farmer who let me store a lot of stuff in his barn. I also found a storage unit in a complex a few miles away and started moving my work equipment over there. A dear musician friend helped me break the back of that move. I was able to remove and rebuild the Dexion racking I first had in my garden studio and instrument store when I was married and had remodelled in Dad's garage. That went to the lockup. Filling the shelves was easy. As a percussionist and workshop leader "stuff" goes with the territory.
"I didn't know anyone could have so many xylophones and glockenspiels," marvelled N as we emptied another van load of drums, pitched percussion, guitars, amplification for live gigs and recording equipment. Of course, there were also the music education books, the sheet music, the cds, the vinyl, the cassettes ...
Feeling that a van conversion was looking increasingly necessary I continued clearing and moving stuff.
I think it was the day after my conversation with the Video Artist, my phone rang again. I didn't recognise the number nor the male voice that began
"Hello, you don't know me, but I hear you are looking for a boat."
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