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.

The Landlady

I am a landlady by default. It happened like this. When I met Himself, he lived on a fishing boat and I lived in a cottage in Devon. When we realised that we were going to make this a permanent arrangement we rented a bungalow in Falmouth and I let the cottage. Just in case things didn’t work out. (My late grandmother once said to me, “darling, always have a bolthole”.

Two years on I sold the cottage (at a profit) and bought the flat we live in now which was a wreck. Nothing had been done since the 1950s when the former occupant had moved in, so you can imagine what it was like.

We gutted it and did it up ourselves (hard work but meant we saved money and could do things as we wanted) and then the upstairs flat came on the market. Himself suggested to my mother that it would be a good investment for her, so she bought it and as it was let to holidaymakers, I ran that side of it for her.

When the top flat came up for sale Himself persuaded me to buy that, so I did.

When I took over the flats, they were both let as holiday lets – the business came with the sale. So I took all the bookings and did all the administration. I was then working full time and doing changeovers at the weekends. This meant that every Saturday was spent cleaning and washing, hoping to god that it wouldn’t rain so I could dry the bedding outside – we don’t have a tumble dryer and the nearest launderette is some way away. By Sunday I was knackered, but we could never go away at weekends because of the business.

After that first summer I decided to let to long term tenants so I advertised in the local paper and got no one. I panicked. A week later our first tenant turned up, courtesy of an ad in our local Tesco.

He was in his twenties, very bright and charming and worked for one of the big hotels in Falmouth. He was dyslexic (I’ve kept all his notes which still bring a lump to my throat) and painted the flat very strange colours with what seemed to be indelible paint. (After he left it took weeks to restore the flat to some semblance of normality, or at least something that I could let again.) Lesson Number One – don’t let tenants paint the place unless they agree to restore it to the original colour before they leave. And if they’re not good at painting, make sure they pay for someone to do it properly.

I’ll never forget one of his referees was the receptionist at the hotel he worked at. Where it says Occupation, she wrote, “Receptionist. Good one.” (That still brings a smile to my face.)

I often wondered what happened to him. He was ambitious and evidently good at his job and he went off to work for one of the big London hotels. Last heard, he was desperately trying to find any accommodation he could afford: one week’s rent there was the same as a month’s rent here.

But I’m sure he will have done well. And who knows, if we won the lottery one day, we might be in a London hotel and there he would be. I’d like that.