How I Turned into an Acorn.

  ....in the beginning.                                              

I came to England directly from China where I'd been Lecturing for 7 years.  A chap who contacted me while I was there & said he was doing so because he was a friend of a friend of mine at the British Council,, suggested we work together: he had the premises for a school in Eton and I would bring over a couple of teachers & contacts from China to help teach at the school. It was all lined up & I saw this as a kind of Wonder-Job: I couldn't wait to get started. (And the plate glass windowed flat high up at tree level was all blonde wood & brushed-steel kitchen appliances.)

The fourth day of being in England my putative "partner" declared bankruptcy. And I also discovered that the person whom he'd cited as a mutual friend at the British Council had never heard of him.Thus the whole reason for me being where I was, at that time, suddenly disappeared. And now I had no accommodation, no job, and no money. And no previous experience with lunatic private - and unregistered - landlords. I'd thought that perhaps sitting in a car in a parking lot to sign the lease might just be the way things were done in the UK? And perhaps there was some arcane law that dictated rent must be paid, always, in cash? It turned out the flat was a slum; one bloke had tried to cut his throat a couple of days before I moved in - and it was easy to see why.

This particular flat was in an Art Deco building - but it also appeared not to have ever been touched since the day it was bought. The wires & cords which snaked behind furniture, dangled from shelves or were tangled into an impenetrable ball and stuffed into a fuse box we were instructed never to show to anyone coming to do an inspection. I was in such a tenuous corner I accepted that. Until, one evening, I went down the hall to the loo, opened the bathroom door when I was leaving only to see a huge fireball  come roaring down the hall corridor from my bedroom. 

So now not only was I still unemployed and broke, but I was homeless, possession-less, a lifetimes work-less. And the nasty piece of work who'd most recently moved in, informed the police & the fire-brigade that I'd been burning candles & caused the fire!! So now I might find myself facing charges of arson.? If the lad could have crawled up the landlord's arse any further he would have been able to tickle his tonsils. Fortunately there was no forensic evidence backing up the candle explanation. I've often wondered how much the Landlord paid Nasty Boy to try to divert an investigation of dangerous wiring by claiming he knew the cause of the fire was down to me?

When  the Landlord turned up to examine the remnants I handed over an entire pillow-case full to bulging with weed. And a drawer full of false I.Ds. belonging to the 3rd tenant. Yet all I'd come out of it with was the wooly pink pjs I'd I'd been wearing at the time! Some guys have all the luck...a pillowcase full of weed? As I was wordlessly handing it over I wondered what would happen to it.  From the murmurings I picked up, it looked as though the Wicked Landlord was going to find the kiddy and give it to him. Because the kid's  brother was in prison and might sic some of his not-in-prison lads onto anyone who stole li'l brothers stash. It was like being in a soap opera!

The Landlord however, (to keep my mouth shut?)  offered me the princely sum of £100 as compensation. Dear gods, I didn't even own a pair of knickers at that stage - did he think his £100 would dazzle me? All I wanted was never to see a pillow-case  full of weed again. Because it was rather tempting to conjecture how even a few handfuls would help replace things like my laptop & phone! But hey, I'm a bit too old to become a thief - & to go around flogging an unnoticeable handfull or so from an illegal stash!

Thus ended my only experience of private renting in England.

...I spent the next couple of months living in a council hostel where a resident tranny prostitute came & snuggled into bed with me; all the mums put used baby nappies outside their doors which kept their own space free of the smells - but ensured that walking down the corridor from the 3rd floor had you gasping for fresh air before ever you got to the front door.

But Council - who had all been stars in dealing with me - called me up one day & told me they had a new-build (well it was an Edwardian house recently gutted & turned into flats.)  I had, at last, landed with my bum in the butter!

 

                   

                           Little did I know how life in this building would educate me.