by Sean Mallen
After nearly killing myself moving a massively heavy sofa bed in my student days, I had resolved to never ever buy another one. But my wife insisted. Needed to be ready for the mythical visitors, you see.
Now as our skinny, leisurely, paid-by-the-hour movers hoisted the back-breaker from Sweden, I watched in horror as they attempted to guide it through the door and failed. They turned it every possible angle and still it would not fit.
I instructed them to set it down and that I would remove the bed apparatus while they continued to saunter out with our boxes.
I was not present when the bed was assembled — we hired a guy to do it for us. So now as the clock ticked I worked frantically to figure out how the damn thing came apart. In a masterwork of Swedish engineering, the bolts were not only well-hidden but ingeniously situated so that you could only turn them a millimetre at a time, this while splayed out on my back underneath the heavy metal bed that threatened to either amputate a finger in the mechanism or collapse upon my sweating brow, ending my London misery in an epic furniture fail.
For fully thirty minutes I writhed beneath the never-used sofa bed, as the amiable movers sat and watched, having finally brought all our boxes out to their truck.
Finally, it was free! We lifted out the bed and they grabbed the shell of the sofa that I thought must certainly now be able to be manoeuvred out the door. Certainly fucking not.
They gently edged it around the corner until the space dwindled to nothing. It was wedged.
“Maybe we can bend it just a bit,” I suggested, perspiration now pouring down my face.
I pushed a bit harder.
Crack!
A bolt was starting to rip through the particleboard frame at one end. Fuck.
We brought it back inside and I unbolted one armrest. At last it was dismantled enough to be freed from Buckland.
The drive to the new flat took all of thirty seconds. The unloading somewhat longer thanks to our genial mates from The Sloth Moving Company of North London.
The final piece was the carcass of the sofa bed. Our new flat was on the main floor, the door a direct line from the entrance to the building. A piece of cake, surely.
No.
The sofa was once again wedged, necessitating the removal of the other armrest before it would deign to enter our new place. The moving guys helped me reassemble it. No extra charge. One side of our sofa bed was now slightly rickety, but it was more or less holding together.
At last it was done. Escape from Fuckland Buckland complete (pending the return of our deposit/ransom from the landlord).
We collapsed on our scattered furniture and took a breath. After a few moments of blissful silence there was a loud beep. Then another one. The source was on the wall just inside the door: a keypad for a security service. I pressed a few buttons in an attempt to disable it, but the periodic beeps kept coming.
We were now paying approximately $5,400 a month in rent for an apartment equipped with a beep that would wake us up every minute.
It was at least a huge, bright place, with a giant reception room, a spacious kitchen, three bedrooms and bathrooms, and even access to a backyard.
Isabella and Julia went to bed early, but I was motivated to start putting our things away and getting organized as quickly as possible. The covers for our sofa had been cleaned by Mr. Upstairs Landlord after having been doused in dust in the ceiling collapse. I removed them from the plastic bags in which they were transported and started pulling them onto the cushions. It was a struggle to jam them in. Once again my brow was moist with sweat as I wrestled with them. The covering for the main sofa frame was just not fitting anymore. I looked at the cleaning tag: “Dry clean only.” Sure enough, he had put our coverings in the wash and shrunk them.
I had managed to stuff the cushions into their diminished coverings, but now they were so compressed that they left large gaps between each other. I gave up on the cover for the sofa, leaving it partially installed, one side hanging open with the zipper partially done up. The effect was akin to putting a tutu on an elephant.
At breakfast the next morning, Isabella noted that the door to the freezer did not seem to be closing properly. There was a gap around the edge even when I leaned hard on it. Terrific.
Although the flat was a nice, airy space and located in a prime neighbourhood, the owner had opted for cheapo finishings. The fridge and freezer were both bar-sized, stacked inside a unit where the exterior doors were poorly installed. The kitchen cabinets appeared to have been bought at a second-hand shop, and the floor was a battered hardwood, sorely in need of refinishing.
In London you can pay a pile of money and still get crap.
Having just moved in after the Buckland fiasco, I was determined to make the best of it. At least it was big.
But a couple of hours later, Isabella texted me at work: “I just spotted mouse droppings around the fridge.”
Seconds after I walked in the door that night, she declared, “I’m out of here! I can’t stand this!”
By “here,” she meant London generally and our pricey new flat in particular.
I checked out the fridge/freezer unit and sure enough there were little globules of dried mouse shit in the containing cabinet. I recalled the lease form that demanded tenants pay hundreds of pounds for a “professional cleaning” upon departure. The landlord’s obligation for a “professional cleaning” before moving in seemed to neglect the detail of removing rodent scat from food areas. Not to mention removing the rodents.
I opened the poorly sealed door to the freezer. Already a thick layer of frost was forming and our food was covered in arctic snow.
Each new discovery was punctuated by the occasional beep from the home security system.
I emailed the New Landlord — a German expatriate who worked for an international bank. He promised to hire exterminators for the mice and suggested that I call the home security company to disable the alarm system’s beeps.
The cleanup of mouse shit, evidently, was to be left to us. I vacuumed up the droppings, washed the infected area, and made a note to remember it all when the time came to move out and we faced the demand for an expensive professional cleaning.
I phoned the company that installed the alarm.
“Do you have the security code, sir?” asked the woman on the line.
“If I had the security code I could disarm the beep myself. It was installed by the previous tenants.”
“Well then, we shall send out an engineer,” was her cheerful response. An engineer’s visit, of course, would cost us — unless we were actually signing up for the service.
“Can I get a quote, then, on how much the service costs?”
I was transferred to the sales department.
“To quote you a price we would need to send a salesperson to talk to you about it,” said the sales guy.
“I don’t want a visit. I just want a rough quote over the phone.”
“I’m afraid we can’t do that, sir.”
My voice started to rise: “You can’t tell me over the phone how much this costs?”
“Uh, well. Perhaps I will have another of our sales staff ring you,” said the suddenly flustered sales guy.
The call never came. The beeps continued.
I left behind the mouse shit, glacial icebox, and mountainous rent the next morning to hop on a train with Dan to Southampton. The one-hundredth anniversary of the Titanic was approaching and I had been assigned a story on the great ship’s port of departure.
Southampton has a maritime history that goes back two thousand years, to the days of the Romans. But the city itself was blandly modern, with a particularly ugly housing estate near the port. We have to have some sympathy for the lack of heritage buildings because it was bombed heavily during the war. Southampton was strategically important, not only because of the marine trade but also because it was the home of a Spitfire factory. Only a few remnants of the ancient city remain, fragments of old buildings.
The shell of Holyrood Church was just a short walk down the street from our hotel. Within the walls is a small memorial to the Titanic crew. And here is an essential element of the disaster’s story that is usually overlooked: 685 of the 1,517 people who died were crew members. Four out of five crew members came from Southampton.
No single place felt the disaster more keenly than this ancient port city. The dramatizations focus on the captain, the Astors, the well-heeled passengers, and the unfortunates in third class who died in much greater numbers than the rich folk in first. But many of the victims were working-class folk from Southampton.
Those who had gotten jobs on the Titanic felt lucky. There had been a bitter coal strike that had kept most ships in port, with thousands of mariners left without work.
I visited the Grapes pub, where the three Slade brothers gathered to hoist a few in celebration of their new jobs on April 10, 1912, the day of the Titanic’s departure. In one of history’s many ironies, the boys had a few too many, showed up too late and too lubricated, and found that they had lost their prized positions to other guys who had been lingering at dockside. A rare example of how getting hammered can save a life instead of ruining it.
Two years after the sinking, a memorial was opened to the Titanic engineers — a bronze of the winged Nike, goddess of victory, above carvings depicting the men who kept the great ship moving. Incredibly, one hundred thousand people showed up for the dedication.
We interviewed David Haisman in front of the memorial as he told the story of his mother. Edith was fifteen years old when she sailed on the Titanic with her parents, Thomas and Elizabeth Brown, en route to the New World to set up a hotel business.
He told us that when they heard the bump as the Titanic hit the iceberg, Thomas went up to the deck to investigate. He returned to tell his wife and daughter to dress in warm clothes, put on their life jackets, and come up top. He left his life jacket behind.
“My mother always told me she never saw her father look so sad as they saw him on the deck, puffing a cigar as their lifeboat was lowered,” said Mr. Haisman. “He cupped his hands and called out, ‘I’ll see you in New York.’ That was the last they ever saw of him.”
“I’ll See You in New York” is the title of the book he wrote about his mother, a story he loved to retell. Their American dreams sank with the great ship, Edith and Elizabeth returned to their native South Africa. Edith ended up marrying a Brit and, amazingly, moving back to Southampton where she raised ten children (David was the youngest) and lived to the age of 101 — one of the oldest Titanic survivors.
When Peter Boyd-Smith was a boy growing up in Southampton, few people spoke about the disaster, the memories too raw even decades after the sinking. Entire working-class neighbourhoods were decimated, hundreds of widows and fatherless children left behind.
We spoke to him in his memorabilia shop, Cobwebs, where Titanic items were among the biggest sellers. The interest is endless, verging on bizarre. Easy to understand why an actual ticket for the fateful voyage would be a prized collector’s item. Boyd-Smith showed me one that he was about to send to Sweden for an exhibition. But odd and slightly creepy were the pieces of coal that had been hauled up from the wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic.
Boyd-Smith was also a contributor to the library of books on the Titanic — his paints a picture of the disaster through contemporary accounts: newspaper articles and official reports. I bought a copy and got him to sign it.
Southampton would be sharing the limelight for the Titanic anniversary. Belfast, where the ship was built, had opened a glittering new museum — a sore point for some in Southampton. They were also getting a museum, called SeaCity, that would tell the story of their long maritime history.
But Belfast got a substantial EU grant for their institution. Southampton taxpayers had to foot the bill for theirs.
A taxi driver ranted about it to me: “I don’t know why we have to keep kissing Irish ass after they bombed us all those years!”
I decided best not to tell him my name is Sean.
David Haisman was more sanguine about the anniversary’s impact on his hometown. “I think it’ll do a bit of good for Southampton,” he said. “It’ll remind us of all those people who died. Poor people, most of them. They deserve to be remembered.”
Back at home. Early Saturday morning we were awakened by the sound of our door buzzer. The exterminator had arrived. His task was urgent because the droppings around the fridge were not historical artifacts. While I was in Southampton, Isabella had a rodent encounter: one night in the kitchen she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned to see a mouse staring up at her before it darted away. She warned that if the mice were not gotten rid of she would leave.
Exterminator guy listened to our story with professional interest, nodded, and advised that the solution was to spread baits and to close up holes under sinks and elsewhere to eliminate their entry points.
As he started to work, New Landlord arrived on the scene — our first meeting. He was a slender, bookish young German. He and his French wife had previously lived in the flat before moving out to a nearby house with their two small children. He likely made a salary that was a multiple of mine, although he was twenty years younger. Investment banking is far more lucrative than journalism.
New Landlord handed me a fob to disable the security system. Sure enough the beeping stopped, only to resume anytime we opened the door.
“Hmm,” said New Landlord. He promised to see if he had written down the code somewhere at home.
I showed him the freezer, now in its own mini ice age. Somewhere beneath the frost a chicken breast was now completely encased in ice. There was a narrow ice cave in the centre, enough perhaps for a single Popsicle, but it was quickly closing in.
“Hmm,” said New Landlord. “The door really does seal.” He pushed on it, then leaned into it with all his slight weight. As he stepped back, the door slowly swung open again.
He pulled out one of the freezer drawers to demonstrate its many benefits. Several large chunks of ice fell out onto the floor and shattered. “Hmm. I’ll try to get my handyman to drop by to have a look.”
If it was the same handyman who installed the cabinetry where every door hung at a different angle, I despaired of a prompt solution. The freezer needed to be replaced and clearly we were in for a long battle to get it done.
Our experience of collapsing ceilings and calamitous rents for crappy places was only a variant on the broader theme of the challenges of finding housing in the world’s greatest city.
One of the enduring mysteries of London is how so many people can afford to live there. Even with my housing allowance, even with our Fuckland Buckland dump, we were stretched into deficit. And now with our move to MouseShit Manor we were tipping perilously into the red. The struggle for affordable shelter is among the ongoing narratives of the city, with conflict inevitable.
There is a subculture of squatters, who choose to occupy vacant buildings both to give a roof over their heads and to make a point about class divides. Their message appeared to be: use it or lose it. Fascinated, I decided to do a story.
Dan and I met a group of them in a gutted row house on the south side of the river. They were happy to talk to us, on the proviso that we did not reveal the actual address.
A young woman named Rueben Taylor met us at the door and gave us a tour.
She told us the place had been empty for two years before she and a couple of friends moved in a month before. “For all these properties to lie vacant and rotting while people are being forced out of their homes seems completely unfair,” she said.
The walls were all bare to the studs, a single hose brought water up from the basement, and the electrical supply was a fire hazard of cords running off an extension plugged into the single working outlet. Their food was salvaged from grocery store dumpsters. Living off the land in London.
This brand of squatting, the kind where it happens in vacant properties, was
not a crime in London. Owners must resort to civil remedies to evict their unwanted visitors.
“He hasn’t taken us through the civil procedures,” said Rueben.
“Has he said, ‘please leave’?” I asked.
“That would be the automatic reaction.”
“And your answer is?”
“Do you have an immediate use for this property?”
The other side of the story was embodied by two retired nurses from the Philippines, Lilia and Amelita. Dan and I took a taxi far to the north side of the city, where I knocked on the door of their modest house. There was no answer and I was about to walk away when Lilia opened it a crack to ask what I wanted.
“I’m a Canadian journalist,” I responded, with all the kindness I could muster. Being Canadian tends to reassure.
“I want to talk to you about the squatters.”
Warily, she invited me inside. The tiny living room was sparsely, modestly furnished, with a small Christian shrine the dominant feature. These women were the opposite of flamboyant.
Their nightmare played out when the sisters were away for a month, visiting family back home. They got a call from a London neighbour, advising that unwanted visitors had moved into their home. Seven “Romanians” were how they were described. Whenever anyone came to the door, they would use the sisters’ family name, having read it off their mail.
Because this was not a vacant house, merely one where the owners were away on vacation, police could intervene. They were called and the squatters evicted, not without complaint about the injustice of it all.
When Lilia and Amelita returned to their home, they found thousands of pounds worth of damage. Jewellery was missing.
For fifteen minutes, I gently negotiated with Lilia to tell her story on-camera. She was unwilling until I agreed to not show her face. I called in Dan from the taxi and shot the sisters from behind.
In a soft, tremulous voice Lilia said the experience made them ill.
“We can’t sleep, knowing strangers had slept in our beds,” she said.
