VT Coughtrey - Weardale Court again

NOTES There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me.	I'm finding it difficult to remember much at all about the eighteen months with my mother in Weardale Court, Quinta Drive. That may be because it was so terrible that I succeeded, for the most part, in blanking it out of my mind - or it may be because I was drunk a good deal of the time. It's certainly a good example of why those poor souls who think that time moves forward at a constant speed (just because of the way clocks work, presumably) should be sectioned without delay. Periods of your life that seemed to be dragging on for ever and ever amen at the time, are a barely recollectible flash a decade or two later. Time is manufactured in the head of the individual, or as the hero of some Russian novel I read during that same period had it (while talking to himself): "There's something the matter with time as far as you and I are concerned". And me.
	Speaking of Russian, that's one good thing that came out of the eternity - or the brief flash - of that period, insofar as I learned the language. That's to say, I somehow managed to teach myself, with the aid of a BBC course on LP, borrowed from the library, and a Teach Yourself book, to read it fluently. In fact, it was the Russian original of the novel referred to above that I read, not a translation. Of course, lack of opportunity for conversational practice meant that it would be a long time before I was able to speak it with much fluency.
	Russian had to be studied in the evenings, when Angela was at 'home'. During the daytimes my mother soon began to claim that she was unable to go anywhere or do anything because she had to stay on guard all the time to ensure that her home wasn't wrecked. This was because of one or two incidents of very minor damage by Felix. She predictably worked herself into the well-known state that made it impossible to be in her presence at all during the hours that Angela was at work at the hospital. I was therefore obliged to leave, with Felix, every morning from Monday to Friday, and to stay out with him all day until early evening. You've read all this before, in Chapter 82. It was just a re-run of the the situation in 1973. The difference, though, was that Felix was now four, not eighteen months, and he became so disturbed by this state of affairs, that he began to resist every morning and had to be dragged down the stairs screaming.
	So where did I take him? Well, again, it was pretty much a re-run of 1973: many pub gardens are visible through the memory murk that is peculiar to that period. Under GLC leader Ken Livingstone, with his ill-fated 'Fares Fair' policy, travel for children was free throughout London, and almost free for adults, compared with today's fares. Those pub gardens were therefore likely to be anywhere in London, so the time was divided, in the main, between drinking and travelling on buses and tubes. It was from this period that Felix developed his abiding interest in public transport - a field in which he is an expert (though not in any professional capacity). At the time, though, it seemed unlikely that any good could come of all this, as I staggered, in charge of a four-year-old, from one pub to another, just as I had lurched with a pram from one to the other in the earlier Dreadful Interlude. I soon reached the point where I was usually able to appear almost completely sober when I arrived back in the evenings - a very useful skill to acquire, of course, and I doubt if anyone under 30 could master it. And, of course, I actually managed to study Russian successfully in the evenings.
	In approaching the council for accommodation, we suffered an almost exact repeat of the experiences of 1973 (Chapter 82 again), with apparently recent immigrants behind large desks asking us indignantly what we were doing in Barnet and assuring us that we had no claim on the council. The only difference was that this time we didn't have to make these visits to the council housing office without my mother's knowledge. In fact, she insisted on coming with us. Friends had persuaded her that she wouldn't be evicted or put in prison if the council discovered she was breaking the rules by allowing us to live there, provided she came clean about it. Once she had done that, they said, the council would evict us, not her, especially as she had refused rent from us. In fact the unlovely council officials said exactly what they had said before - that they would not take any action if we stayed there. Of course, last time round my mother had not been aware of that response. It was not what she wanted to hear. In vain, she remonstrated that we were destroying her life and wrecking her home, but the council was adamant - none of it was anything to do with them, and neither we nor she would be in trouble at all if we stayed there. As before, she went to the police, but of course nothing came of that
	The situation eased for a while from September 1977, when Felix started school. We regarded Felix as a gifted child, because of his reading and artistic abilities. This led us to spend a lot of money on private tuition in ballet and elocution and also on consultations with a gifted child specialist. I must have taken time off from the pub gardens to take him to these activities. The gifted child expert reckoned he had the reading ability of the average 14-year-old. For some reason (and this seems extroadinary now) we imagined that paying for him to attend St Martha's Convent School in Wood Street, Barnet, would be a much wiser choice that allowing him to go to the local council school. Of course, it wasn't. There was the same blind prejudice against children being ahead of the average for their age as you would encounter in any state school. His extraordinarily detailed drawings, with their adult command of perspective was dismissed as totally undesirable - the art teacher actually told him "That's not what children do", as she handed out the poster paint and thick brushes and demanded circles for heads and squares for houses. He turned his back on art from that moment, and has never had any interest in trying his hand since. As for reading, the lessons must have been excruciatingly boring for him. Of course, the good thing with reading is that once you can do it, you can do it - despite teachers.
	Although the start of Felix's schooldays improved the situation with my mother at first, she soon began to transfer her worries about what Felix might get up to during the day if she wasn't there, to me. What these dreadful activities might be was never spelled out. So I had to resume my daytime wandering. Not having a child with me now, except in the school holidays, there tended to be less travelling about and more boozing, especially I had to be in Barnet to pick Felix up at 3.45 each day. This was too early for him to return to Weardale Court as far as my mother was concerned, so I had to take him to the X-ray department of the hospital, where he played in the waiting-room until Angela finished for the day. He tended to play rather too enthusiastically, and the boss of the department eventually barred him.
	I've just remembered that at one stage, I actually got a job in a die-casting factory in East Barnet. I've no recollection at all of what arrangements were made to pick Felix up from school while I was there. The job involved ladling molten zinc out of crucibles and into dies, and was hot, dangerous and tedious. I soon chucked it in. By the Spring of 1978, my mother could no longer tolerate our presence at any time and a number of dreadful arguments ensued, with a lot of very bad things being said by both sides. In desperation, we approached a company who advertised that they could arrange mortgages for anyone, regardless of status. All we had to do was find £500 deposit. We found it - in the form of a very generous gift from Angela's mother. Having heard nothing more from the firm - Colbona - I went round to their office in Potters Bar and found a notice on the door: "Creditors of this company should contact the CID at the local police station". I went round there, but was told that there was no chance at all of getting any of our money back, as we were very small fry. Only the big creditors could expect to get anything.
	Next, I went to Enfield in the hope of renting a mobile home, but the required deposit was too much. On the way back from there, I was crossing the entrance to a builder's yard just as a lorry was about to pull into it. The foreman of the builder's yard screamed insults at me, but I pushed him to one side. The next thing I knew was that I was in Chase Farm Hospital. I had a nasty star-shaped gash on my forehead requiring a lot of stitches (I still have the scar). The police knew perfectly well who had done it - the foreman's son. He had a criminal record for similar offences, in fact. In court, the case was dismissed because of lack of evidence, even before I had had a chance to speak. That was because the attacker had been standing behind me, so I couldn't identify him. The bandage on my head made my mother very angry indeed - with me, perversely.
	Naturally, my mother told all her friends (and she had a lot, having lived in the town for thirty-six years by this time) about her desperate plight, and one of them came up with a solution that filled us all with hope. Her son worked for an insurance company and he had been known to wangle endowment mortgages for hopeless cases. It involved the assistance of a professional bogus employer who, for a price, was prepared to say that you had been working for him for many years, earning whatever amount it was you needed to be earning to get the mortgage you wanted, and that your prospects were brilliant. He lived in Southall and actually rented a small workshop with a machine or two in it, in case anyone checked. Of course, nothing was produced there, because none of the 'employees' ever actually turned up for work. What an excellent idea! I wonder if it was (or is) a fairly widespread practice? We were strongly advised to choose a cheap house, as we would somehow have to find the payments every month - no scam could protect us from that. We therefore chose an ex-council house in Hatfield, nine miles north of Barnet. The price was £12,000. We moved in on Angela's 35th birthday, in May 1978.