The way we were

The first home that C and I had was a furnished ground-floor flat in a large Victorian semi in the Carrington area of Nottingham. We shared the front door with the couples on the first and second floors, and, for the first year or so, we also shared the bathroom on the first floor. (After that we had our own bathroom in a converted storage room off our dining room. Luxury!)  We found it through the postgrad student accommodation office at the University of Nottingham, where I began working for UKCIS in February 1973.

By chance an acquaintance from my year at school was also in Nottingham, practising law. He said that a lot of his (criminal) clients had addresses on Berridge Road, but I rationalised that they would be on Berridge Road West rather than East where we were. Once I answered the door to large plain clothes policemen who wanted to know who lived in the house ‘for their records’. (I was polite but uncooperative!)

Because of the shared entrance there were locks on our living room (the front room) and bedroom (behind front room), so you always had a big bunch of keys to carry about. The door to the dining room and kitchen at the back of the house didn’t have a lock. If you went through the kitchen to the back of the house there was a small yard with a little border, where we grew sunflowers, and an outside toilet, and access to the side street behind.

You could sometimes hear couples having rows out the back. Once I got a shock when I visited the outside toilet, first thing in the morning, to find a dead pigeon stuffed into the bowl. But the best thing was that at the end of the side street, literally 2 minutes away from the back gate, was a newsagents where I would go on Saturday mornings to buy the new Thor or Avengers comics.

The facilities in the flat were basic but adequate. The only appliances were a fridge, an ancient vacuum cleaner, a cooker and an old black & white TV which had a perpetual shadow, so, for example, there would be 44 players when you watched Match of the Day. We didn’t buy a TV licence until we got our own TV, because we thought ‘why should we pay for such a lousy experience?’!

We put posters on the walls, set up my very basic stereo on a makeshift shelf, and made it ours. I guess it looked exactly like a student flat. In winter, at the weekends, it was so cold we’d stay in bed and watch daytime films on TV – Elvis Presley etc, which was all you could see in those days of only 2 channels. I don’t remember the flat being damp (except when we bought a tumble drier and didn’t realise you had to vent it outside!) but one morning there was a large slug half-way up my Bob Dylan poster in the dining room.

I had no desire or aspiration to be a home owner. I think C wanted us to have our own house eventually, but that just wasn’t important at the time. It was great just to have our own space to be a couple. We didn’t have plans, beyond the next trip to visit relatives (parents, grandparents) or the next summer (camping) holiday. We didn’t have a car, or any friends really, for the first couple of years. It didn’t matter. We’d get the bus to Wollaton Park or go putting or bowling in the local park (Forest Fields) down the road.

The only pain was the commute to lectures: C travelled to Derby for 2 years (3 bus rides; that’s what love makes you do!) and then I travelled to Loughborough for a year.

We’d buy milk tokens from the Co-op and put them out at night with the empties (so the milkman would know how many we wanted in the morning) just like real grown-ups. We’d get on the bus into town on a Saturday morning and shop at the big supermarket, Scan, in the Victoria Centre. We cooked chips, sausages, burgers, chops and a whole lot of baked beans. We didn't have much money; we never ate out, and the only takeaways then were the fish-and-chip shops, but we did go to the pictures a lot, probably once a fortnight. There were three cinemas in Nottingham city centre (single-screen of course, and all long gone now). We’d take turns to choose what film to see. Sometimes there would be a band I’d want to see at the university. There weren’t really any other venues for rock music in Nottingham apart from the pubs.

We lived on Berridge Road East for nearly 4-and-a-half happy carefree years. Our landlord, the wonderful Mr Kukiewicz, lived next door and took good care of the building. He was a factory orker and our house was more or less his hobby. The rent stayed at £5 per week during this period of high inflation until we told him we wanted to pay £6 and he reluctantly put it up. His wife was proud of her countless fuchsia plants but made us smile with her pronunciation (fuck-sia).

Eventually, with both of us working and me starting a job in Loughborough, we got a mortgage (“two-and-a-half times the man’s salary plus half the woman’s”) and paid the huge sum of £9,000 for a 3-bed semi in Bunny, joining the bourgeoisie with all the stresses of mortgage repayments, council tax, home maintenance, decorating, DIY that that entails ...in a place that, if anything, was colder in winter than the flat had been.