Belfiore Lodge was a Victorian house that looked like it had come out of a Dracula film set: the outer walls of the main house and the wing covered with Virginia creeper, ivy, honeysuckle and sweet pea; turrets on the roof of the main house, complete with a wind vane. People who happened to come down our cul de sac would stop, stare and point at these features in amazement, admiring this most eccentric house.
There were eight self-contained one-bedroomed flats: four in the main house, four in the wing that was added on later (in the 60s?). The landlord and landlady, Fred and Nora, lived in one of the ground floor flats.
In the space between the house and the one next door was a single-storey long room, with the front and back walls made of brick and a tiled roof, used as a kind of storage area / workshop. (The other two walls were the side wall of Belfiore Lodge, and the garden wall.)
Further down the garden was a spare shed, completely made out of doors and windows salvaged from skips. The inside was stuffed full of other things, also picked up from skips. I heard that the built-in wardrobe in Fred and Nora’s bedroom was made out of discarded doors, rescued from skips.
One blustery winter’s day, one of my two living room skylights, which had a dodgy rotting catch, was blown right off its hinges, flew over the sloping roof and landed on one of the skylights, which was in good condition, in the bedroom on the other side, smashing it to bits. In an instant, there were two gaping holes in the roof, one at each end of my attic flat, providing a clear passage for the gale outside to whip through my flat, slamming doors hither and thither.
I ran downstairs to inform Fred, who came up to inspect the damage, then went downstairs to his spare shed to pick out a couple of spare windows stored in there.
Where would one find someone to come at 5pm on a windy Sunday afternoon, never mind get two windows replaced within 20 minutes?
(London, 1986)
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