VT Coughtrey - Skelmersdale

NOTES There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me.	The interest rate had hit 15 per cent, so it was not a good time for me to be suddenly out of work. Things were not helped by the fact that Felix was no longer able to attend the convent school, as they took boys up to the age of eight only . He was now attending Sherrardswood school in Old Welwyn, for which the fees were considerably higher. We were still clinging to the notion that the state sector was out of the question for Felix.
	For a while I made a little money by acting as an agent for a loan shark, but by the Spring of 1982 it was obvious that we were going to have to sell the house. In one thing, at least, we were very lucky. In the three and a half years since we had bought the place, house prices had trebled in areas such as ours, which had rapidly changed from being council estates to being almost entirely owner-occupied. I might have cried into my beer the morning after listening to the election results coming in all night at Daval Gears in 1979, but now I had to hand it to Maggie for pushing the 'right to buy' to its limits and thereby transforming our area into a desirable place in which to live. In the event we didn't quite get three times the £12000 we'd borrowed for the house, because we hadn't done as much work on it as others had done on their ex-council houses, but we were nevertheless left with £22000 after paying off the mortgage.
	So, where did we go? Well, Angela was becoming steadily more involved with Transcendental Meditation and the movement had set up an 'Ideal Village' in Skelmersdale New Town in Lancashire. Coupled with this, we heard that houses were available there (outside the Ideal Village) for a couple of thousand! Before the house sale was complete I went up there on a recce. It soon became apparent why the houses - thousands of them - were being almost given away by the New Towns Commission. Despite being new (most of them had never been occupied) they had all been reduced to little more than shells. What on Earth could have been the cause of this? "Just children playing in them " was the ridiculous answer I got from the New Towns Commission office. It never became clear to me whether there had been a huge miscalculation of demand, or whether thousands of people who had put their names down for them had suddenly changed their minds. It was certainly true that some of the companies who had been attracted to open huge works in the new town, such as Dunlop, had closed them again almost straight away. Was this because the workforce had proved useless or was it that not enough workers could be persuaded to live in the place? The precise relationship between the sudden lack of jobs and this phenomenon of thousands of shells of new houses being sold for between £1000 and £3000 was never clear, but I'm sure there is still some huge scandal of mismanagement waiting to be uncovered. Countless millions of pounds must have been lost.
	Anyway, it made no difference to us - there was nothing for it but to buy one of these wrecks for a couple of grand. As it also proved possible to rent a council flat (already refurbished) immediately, just for the asking, Angela did that as well, to serve as her own base nearer the Ideal Village. For the first time ever, we had a subtantial amount of stuff to be moved, and engaged a removal firm to take it the 200 or so miles from Hatfield to Skelmersdale. Some of it went to the one-person council flat that Angela was now renting and the rest was kindly stored for us by someone in the Ideal Village (which was just outside of the town, far removed from the vast area of shells) until such time as I could make the shell habitable.
	When it came to it, the task began to seem impossible. There were no doors or windows, nothing at all in the kitchen, not even a sink, no electrical fittings of any sort and even the wiring had been stripped out of the walls. The central heating, which had consisted of a large gas-fired hot-air blower, with ducts leading to each room, had also disappeared. However, the place wasn't as bad as some of the other shells. At least the bath and lavatory were still there, though the hand-basin was missing. Also, the staircase was intact. This had been ripped out of many of the houses for Bonfire Night. In fact, in some cases the house itself had been used for the bonfire. In our shell, only the skirting boards had suffered this fate. Another useful thing was that the roof was intact.
	However, after a few days, during which I had been camping there with Felix and not really getting much done, someone knocked on the piece of plywood I had used to deputize for the missing front door. He offered to sell me everything he had ripped out of the house - for £100. This turned out to be the answer to the riddle of why the places were just shells (although it didn't explain why they had never been occupied before they could become shells). People had been renting garages from the New Towns Commission in order to store all the stuff they had ripped out of the NTC's own houses until such time as they could sell the stuff to the new owners. This was the local industry. Well, we were certainly not going to rock the boat. Like all the other purchasers of shells, we were going to end up with a refurbished 3-bedroom house for a total of £2100, plus a couple of hundred more to replace stuff that had indeed been destroyed by children rather than the entrepreneurs. There would also be some very minor extra expenditure when it came to such things as the plumbing, the re-wiring and the re-installation of the central heating. I didn't trust myself to these things, so paid other totally unqualified people very small amounts to do them for me. Whatever the quality of their work, there were no subsequent problems with any of those things. The windows were all pre-fabricated and only required screwing back into place. We had the water, gas and electricity turned back on, and carpeted and decorated the place throughout.
	So where were the police when all that blatant stripping of houses was going on, on such a massive scale and over a number of years? The answer is that they were hiding away in their police station. Most of the southern half of the new town was a no-go area for the police, as we were about to find out.