The Young Lovers

To continue with the tenants.

I was surrogate Mum to the next lot - she was 16 and he was 19 and they were so desperately in love you’d have thought they’d invented it.

She was very cuddly, worked in the local greengrocer’s shop and gave me wonderful discounts. He was a stick thin gardener who needed feeding up.

Unfortunately she had absolutely no idea how to cook and would often pop downstairs to borrow a cake tin (the cake was a disaster), recipes etc and ask for advice on – well, just about anything.

I think he took over the cooking in the end, out of self defence, and when he came back from work they’d sit down to Fray Bentos pies, or Tesco value pies when things got worse. (I had to go and fix the cooker in the midst of several of their meals as it kept shorting.)

I’ll never forget their first Christmas – she asked me to come up and see their tree, that she’d bought in November, and was already lovingly decorated. For some reason it was in their bedroom, which was covered in teddy bears, all over the floor. That struck me as particularly poignant. The Child Lover.

Unfortunately, like the Christmas tree, this love peaked too early and she decided she’d had enough and went back to live with Mum. Her real one, that is. He stayed on for a few months, alone and resigned, before moving away because he’d been accepted into the army.

The place was a pigsty when he left. It took me three days just to clean the cooker. After that there were five trips to the dump and the entire flat needed not just cleaning but repainting. That was a long week.

I see her in town every now and then. She became pregnant by someone else at the matronly age of 18 and now has lost a lot of weight, looks stunning, and has a gorgeous little blonde daughter. She is manager of Burger King and the new bloke looks OK too. We haven’t seen the original boyfriend but apparently he’s around somewhere. So things didn’t work out badly for them.