Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  Parents of children with mental and/or physical handicaps who will always require some degree of continuous care face a serious problem as these offspring approach the end of the education which the state provides according to their needs and abilities. By this time Chris was in his last year at the Victoria School in Northfield which had served him so well, and was going to attend the Bournville College of Further Education which provided courses suitable for him (though we had some difficulty in convincing the head of the relevant department that a Down’s teenager was capable of taking them). But that extension of education would also come to an end after two more years. What then? What kind of adult life could he have that was as secure and satisfying as the one he had enjoyed up to now, as we ourselves grew old? Mary and I had addressed this question several years earlier. Some parents of such children are prepared to look after them at home indefinitely, but we were not, nor did we think it would be in Christopher’s best interest to do so. What we wished for him was an adult life as independent as it could be while still keeping him safe, fulfilled and happy; and we wanted to ensure that this would continue if we predeceased him, without making him a burden on his siblings. After considering various options we decided in favour of placing him, when the time seemed right, in a residential community for mentally handicapped adults (as they were called then, a term later superseded by ‘adults with learning disabilities’).

  There were several charitable organisations that ran communities of this kind in various parts of England and we investigated two: Home Farm Trust and CARE (an acronym for Cottage and Rural Enterprises). Both combined a sheltered environment with useful and fulfilling work – mainly agricultural in the case of HFT and a mixture of horticulture, crafts and domestic tasks in the case of CARE. We went first, with Chris, to look at the nearest HFT community to us in Gloucestershire, centred on a large country house with a working farm. The ambience of the place was friendly and the manager who showed us round sympathetic, but we observed that most of the residents had shared bedrooms, four to a room. Chris had always had his own bedroom where he pursued his hobbies and listened to his favourite music. That, and the isolated location deep in the country, very different from the urban environment in which Chris had been brought up, made us think it was not the right place for him. The nearest CARE community to us, at Shangton in Leicestershire, was also in the country, but it was not far from the town of Market Harborough and had a more modern ambience than the HFT one.

  It owed its existence to a remarkable man who had once worked with HFT, Peter Forbes. He believed passionately that people with learning disabilities should be enabled and stimulated to lead fulfilling lives to the limits of their abilities, and he left HFT to put his own ideas for improving its model into practice. He started by creating a community in Blackerton, Devon, and although he died at a rather early age, the organisation he founded thrived and there were now several other communities in various regions of the country. One feature of Shangton that particularly impressed us was that every resident had their own bed-sitting room, and we liked the variety of work and leisure activities that was available to them. A crucially important factor was that CARE undertook to look after its residents for life. We put Chris’s name down on a waiting list for admission when he reached an appropriate age to leave home, and were encouraged to learn that CARE was planning to build a new community in the West Midlands, which would create more places in a location closer to Birmingham. In due course the Development Director of the organisation, Stephen Doggett, who himself had a son at Shangton, informed us that they had found a suitable site at Ironbridge, Shropshire, and asked me if I would be chairman of a fund-raising group for the new community, involving the families and friends of the residents. I agreed on the understanding that Chris would be offered a place when it opened. The first meeting was in our living room, but later we met in a Portakabin on the muddy site of the new village while it was being constructed.

  The CARE communities were called ‘villages’ and the houses they lived in ‘cottages’. This nomenclature went with the locations of most of them, based on an assumption, shared with HFT, that people with learning disabilities would be happier, and less subject to discrimination, in quiet rural settings. But as society became more enlightened this model fell out of favour, and some CARE communities relocated to places more typical of modern urban or suburban life, into which residents could be integrated. The Ironbridge site was ideal for this purpose, situated next to a large modern housing estate on the edge of a picturesque little town, known as the ‘Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution’ because Abraham Darby perfected the process of smelting iron with coke there. It attracts tourists all the year round to see the cast-iron bridge his grandson built over the Severn, and to visit a cluster of small museums dedicated to industrial history. It is also within easy reach of the new town of Telford, with many facilities and good rail and road connections, and is about an hour’s drive from Birmingham. We prepared Chris to move there at some future date, using the departure of his sister and brother to go to university as a demonstration that this was a normal stage of growing up. He was already accustomed to spending short periods away from home without us, sometimes with relatives, and more frequently in a respite home called Charles House operated by Birmingham Social Services, where parents of children with learning disabilities could leave them in complete safety for short periods. It was a marvellous facility which allowed Mary and me to make many trips away together, but sadly it no longer exists – a victim no doubt of cuts in local authority funding. Chris took an interest in the development of CARE Ironbridge and seemed to accept the idea of living there eventually. He had already experienced a trial residency for a week at Shangton and enjoyed it.

  Since it became clear to us that we were not going to move from Birmingham, Mary and I had been looking for a house which would be more suited to our needs, be easier to run, and enhance the quality of our lives: a modern house of pleasing design, with three or four bedrooms, two bathrooms and a room that would serve as a study for me, as well as a spacious living room, dining room and kitchen. I wanted to live in the part of Edgbaston where the University is situated, a green inner-city suburb whose unusual combination of attractive features I described in the first volume of this memoir. Property prices there were the highest in Birmingham, but with the money I was making from writing and a modest legacy from my aunt Eileen, I thought I would be able to afford something we liked. We searched for some time without finding it: the houses we saw advertised and occasionally viewed were either unsuitable or way above our price range. Then in the spring of 1985 a house came on the market which was distinctly promising, situated about ten minutes’ walk from the University in an area that had been redeveloped in the late sixties and early seventies with a variety of detached houses, many of them uniquely architect-designed, as was the one that attracted our attention. We knew the location well because the house was near the Catholic Chaplaincy of the University where we usually attended mass on Sundays in preference to the Northfield parish church, and we knew the original owners, who were also Catholics. Its design was strikingly, even aggressively modern, with a steeply pitched roof on top of an assembly of brick-built cubes and wedges that were timber-clad in parts, and it had strong vertical features in the form of long narrow windows over the staircase. There was a two-car garage which was joined to the garage of the adjoining house, designed by the same architects in a different but compatible style. These two were flanked by huge modern houses with indoor swimming pools, and faced across the street a row of pleasant Victorian semi-detached brick houses of modest proportions, some of whose owners had lived there for a long time. I liked the idea of living in this interestingly mixed street in the house with the distinctive design, and made a prompt request to view it.

  The interior, however, was something of a disappointment. The ceilings were low, and the rooms rather small apart from the master bedroom and the drawing room, and the latter was domin
ated by a disproportionately large open fireplace and chimney breast that squeezed the floor area into an awkward oblong shape. Although there were large windows in parts of the house, there was a lot of pinewood cladding and exposed brick inside which did not reflect light and gave a gloomy aspect to some rooms, especially the kitchen. The original owners had split up since we had known them at the Chaplaincy and moved away, selling the house to a man I shall call Mr R, who had owned a small company and was retiring to a newly purchased home in the country. He had neglected the property and it had a dispiritingly shabby appearance inside. Mary was less put off than I was by these first impressions, and I had to admit that both house and garden had possibilities for improvement. The room that was designated a ‘study’ in the estate agent’s particulars was barely nine feet square, but there was a family room at the end of the house adjoining the garage which would make a decent study and could be extended into the back garden. The latter was a large but manageable square shape, mostly consisting of unkempt grass, partly bisected by a red brick wall, relic of the Victorian chapel of ease for Edgbaston Old Church which originally occupied the site, creating a paved patio overhung by chestnut trees. The wall badly needed repointing and the paving stones were relieved only by a patch of overgrown pampas grass and a sandpit in which no child had played for many years, but it was a space of which something could be made.

  Mary was keen on the house, but I hesitated, partly because I was also hesitating about whether to leave academia to become a full-time writer. To buy it at the high price Mr R was asking without taking on a big mortgage would use up most of my capital; it was not the house I had dreamed of and to make it approximate to that vision would require a lot of expensive modifications. I made an offer considerably lower than the asking price, which was refused. I went back again to have another look, without overcoming my reservations. Weeks passed. Mary was convinced that the house would soon be sold, but it stayed on the market, which made me think my doubts were well founded.

  I was not teaching in the summer term and we decided to go to the south of France for the spring holiday week at the end of May when Mary was also free. We flew to Nice, rented a car and toured along the Riviera and in the Languedoc Parc naturel régional, staying in comfortable hotels with pools. I was hoping that the change of scene would allow me to stop brooding on the house for sale in Birmingham, but in idle moments my thoughts would return to it. One afternoon towards the end of the holiday I was lying awake in our hotel room after a siesta and began to think of the rear garden of the house in Edgbaston, screened from neighbours by trees and high hedges, and its patio sheltered by the wall of weathered red brick, so superior to the side garden we had in Norman Road, which was exposed to the view of passing pedestrians and the noise of vehicles. I had a vision of myself – a kind of projection of the ambiance of the south of France on to Edgbaston – reclining comfortably there on a lounger with a book, enjoying perfect peace and privacy. At dinner that evening I told Mary that I was going to make another offer for the house when we returned home. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘But it will be gone.’

  It wasn’t, but I found reasons to procrastinate and deliberate further until one evening, a week or so after we were back in Norman Road, Mary answered a phone call, and came into the living room to tell me: ‘It’s Mr R.’ We stared at each other, wondering what this portended. I took the call in my study, watched intently by Mary. Mr R did not beat about the bush. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘can’t we come to some agreement about my house? I know you want it.’ ‘Well, that depends on the price,’ I said. I realised at once that he must be getting desperate to sell because he was anxious to complete the purchase of his new home, and I had told him that I would be able to exchange contracts as soon as a deal was done, without waiting to find a purchaser for our own house. We bargained for a while, Mary watching me tensely. He was asking £130,000, and I had offered £117,000, after getting a surveyor’s evaluation of £116,000. What would I offer him now, he asked. With adrenalin surging through my veins I said, ‘A hundred and ten thousand.’ He said, ‘I’ve already rejected two offers of that amount. What about a hundred and twenty?’ I thought the rejected offers were probably not for cash. ‘No,’ I said, ‘a hundred and ten thousand is my limit. But with immediate exchange of contracts.’ After a pause, he said: ‘You wouldn’t go up to a hundred and thirteen?’ I said no. He gave a long sigh. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘a hundred and ten it is.’ After a short exchange about dates and other details, he closed the conversation by saying, ‘I take my hat off to you as a hard-nosed bargainer.’ Mary shrieked with laughter when I repeated this compliment to her from the armchair into which I collapsed like a wrung-out dishcloth as soon as I replaced the telephone receiver.

  It was indeed most uncharacteristic behaviour on my part, and in retrospect it was foolish of me to jeopardise the deal by refusing to raise my offer by a mere three thousand pounds. But I knew that if I got the house for a hundred and ten thousand it was a bargain, and a decision I would never regret. I went forward confidently with the purchase and the move, and every stage of our occupation of the house confirmed the wisdom of our choice. We were able to have it redecorated and carpeted before we moved in towards the end of August, and its shabby rooms immediately became lighter, brighter and more spacious than they had seemed before. Over the years since we have improved the house in various ways, extending the family room into the patio to make the spacious study I had always dreamed of; increasing the size of the drawing room by building out into the garden; and enlarging the tiny bathroom adjoining the main bedroom into a luxurious en-suite. For all our extensions we employed an architect, John Price, who worked for the local firm that had originally designed the house. He had access to the plans and took a personal interest in making modifications which harmonised with the existing building, inside and out. Mary developed a gift for gardening that she was never able to exercise in Norman Road, partly because she was then too busy bringing up the family, but also because our patch of grass and stony earth there did not inspire her. At the new house she created over the years a thing of beauty, which has given her great satisfaction and both of us pleasure. We were extremely lucky to have had such a long time for me to overcome my initial doubts about the house. A couple of years later a boom in the property market began, people were scrambling to buy, and gazumping was rife.

  It was some time, however, before my idyllic vision of lounging on the patio of our new house was realised. Whenever I lingered in the back garden I was bitten by tiny, almost invisible black flies that seemed especially attracted to my flesh and raised inflamed and itching bumps on it, while mostly ignoring Mary and Christopher. Eventually we traced their domicile to two festering compost heaps in the garden, and when these were removed the plague gradually disappeared. Considering it was less than two miles from the city centre, our garden was remarkably well populated by every kind of natural life. Most welcome were the birds who swooped in to perch on the wall and trees or probe the lawn for grubs and worms: pigeons, blackbirds, thrushes, robins, wrens, tits of several kinds, magpies (so elegant in gliding flight, so ugly strutting about on the lawn intimidating the smaller birds) and the occasional woodpecker and jay. Squirrels scampered among the branches of the trees; and although the house and its neighbours were built on a triangle between three roads, with a perimeter of not more than 400 yards, our garden was visited by foxes, sometimes in broad daylight. There was a foxhole in the middle of our lawn, beside which, we learned, the wife of the previous owner foolishly used to leave food. Mary blocked up the opening with bricks and stones, but we still had the occasional vulpine visitor for years afterwards. I remember being interviewed one afternoon in my study by a sophisticated New York journalist who nearly fell out of her chair in astonishment when a fox loped past the full-length windows.

  12

  At the end of August 1985, just a few weeks after we moved into the house, Dad phoned to tell me that he was in hospital. He had seen blood i
n the toilet bowl and went to see his GP, who referred him to Greenwich Hospital. They did some tests and told him he had to have an operation on his bowel without delay. I went down to London to see him shortly afterwards, and he seemed to be recuperating very well. With the Sony Walkman radio/cassette player and headphones I had given him as a Christmas present he was able to retreat into a private cocoon of music and information, blotting out the life of the ward. I felt that he was drawing on his wartime experience in the RAF to make himself as comfortable as circumstances permitted. He was in good spirits because he had been told that the operation had been successful: they had cut out a section of his intestine and sewn it together again, so to his great relief he would not require ‘a bag’. His GP told me later that he had been diagnosed with cancer, and that it would probably recur, but wisely neither he nor the hospital medics told Dad since it would only have worried him, and in fact he lived for another fourteen years, enjoying good health considering his age, with no recurrence of the disease.

  When he was discharged from the hospital he was transferred to a convalescent home on the south coast near Worthing for a few weeks, and Mary and I visited him there one weekend. It was familiar territory to him and he always enjoyed the smell and sight of the sea, but he was glad to return to the house in Millmark Grove. He managed to run it and look after himself with the assistance of a Polish home help supplied by the local social services, with whom he got on very well. I had persuaded him to let me pay for central heating in the house to make it more comfortable. He was dogmatically opposed to gas as a source of energy for a reason I never discovered, though the house was connected to it, and oil was impractical for several reasons, so it had to be an electric system and one that would not seem to him alarmingly expensive. He agreed to the installation of night storage heaters throughout the house, which accumulated heat in the night when electricity was cheaper, and gradually leaked it into the air during the day. He seemed content with this system despite its limitations, and at least it was completely safe.