1978
Stilton Again
We arrived back to our house in Stilton, knowing that we would need to sell the house and move closer to Scampton. The house was pretty much a disaster so most of the contents were thrown away, including all the carpets. Goodness only knows why but we found that our shed contained a large number half full milk bottles that smelled horrible.
Some background to the people who lived in the house ought to be given at this stage. As may be remembered from an earlier chapter, Floyd and Jean GORE and their daughters moved in after we moved out. They stayed for about a year and were followed by another family who, although we never met them, apparently were very good as neighbours and kept the house very well and paid the rent promptly. When they moved out into Base accommodation, they were replaced by a young couple who apparently had little idea of how to look after a house. They started off by having a dog, which they tied to a tree in the garden while they both went out to work. After complaints by the neighbours, they got rid of the dog and got a cat, which was left locked in the house whilst they were at work. The result of the animals being in the house was the reason for the carpets needing to be replaced. When they moved out, they still owed us some rent and after complaining to the Base Housing Office, we got to meet these people who were actually a very pleasant couple. They said that the reason that they hadn’t paid the last month’s rent was because they had only been in the house for two weeks before being asked to leave. We accepted two weeks rent and that was that.
We recovered our furniture from storage and were quite horrified to see how bad it looked, however it was all we had in the short term. We bought a carpet for the lounge which gave us a start and we did have our three-piece suite, which meant that the lounge was made to look quite decent. We contacted Chris and Brian FOSTER again and found that they had a Dining Suite for sale. We transported that from Rushden to Stilton on the roof rack of our Cortina and thus had decent furniture for the Dining area. The old sideboard, table and chairs were broken up and disposed of. Eventually we made the place look semi decent.
I am not particularly proud of the fact but we did the quickest bodged decoration job on the house, both inside and outside, to prepare it for sale. Fortunately for us it sold within a very short time of going on the market. We bought the house for £8,100 in October 1974 and, whilst in Germany, I made enquiries of friends in Stilton and they told us that a house that was close to the specification of ours had been sold in October 1977 for £8,500. As I have said in the chapter on our time at Gutersloh, I had my tour extended by six months so that when we put the house on the market, we sold it for £11,250. The extension to my tour therefore turned into a real piece of luck.
One of the things that we had to do was to get Maria a UK Driving License and to that end I started correcting any mistakes or bad habits; this did not work as she took absolutely no notice of me. In the end, I had to arrange for her to have driving lessons. The driving instructor spent a lot of time with his foot on the brake to slow her down. He also had trouble with all sorts of bad habits but she did successfully pass her test at the first attempt and there was no more need for her International License.
At weekends, we searched the Lincoln area for somewhere to live. With RAF Scampton being to the north east of Lincoln, that was the obvious place to look however there were many more houses in our price range on the west side of the city and we looked at a lot, some new, some occupied. We had an interesting visit to a bungalow on one of the estates just off Brant Road. We hadn’t made an appointment as we were just driving round looking. Anyway we knocked on the door and a lady ushered us in to a house full of boxes packed up and ready to go. We had already decided that it wasn’t right for us when she showed us the master bedroom not explaining until we were inside it that her husband was on night shift and therefore asleep in the bed!!
Whilst we prepared the house, the two younger children went to the village school but Andrew had to catch a bus to the nearest secondary school, which was at Sawtry.
Eventually, we came across an Estate Agent who had been tasked with the sale of a lot of ex-RAF Married Quarters. Unusually these had been built as part of a private estate in Cherry Willingham and used by RAF Coningsby personnel. Now that they were no longer of use, the MOD wanted to get rid of them. The method used to sell them was a blind auction with a minimum bid of £12,500. These houses were ideal for us in terms of location and the fact that they had four bedrooms. We made bids on half a dozen of these houses at a variety of prices. Our favourite was a corner plot for which we bid £14,250. On this one we were successful so we made arrangements to move.
The date given for completion on our new house was fixed at 7th January 1979, but, when we sold the house in Stilton, the buyers wanted to move in before Christmas. We agreed that when we sold, Maria and the children would move to Oakroyd for the Christmas period. We also took a chance and organised the move of our furniture into the new house when we moved out of Stilton. In that respect, the house was now ready for occupation.
Whilst travelling back from a trip to Lincoln, we were driving down the road from Ancaster one evening when a Barn Owl rose up out of the hedgerow and flew alongside us for about 50 yards before turning at right angles. Unfortunately it turned right and thus flew straight into the front passenger’s window, which smashed. Maria and the children woke up in a hurry I can tell you. There was snow on the ground so it was an extremely cold journey from then on. The insurance claim was also interesting, especially when asked whether there were any casualties. I did stop and find the poor bird on my next trip; what a shame for such a beautiful creature.
Once we learned that we had won the bid and obtained a mortgage, I borrowed the keys from the Estate Agent on the pretext of measuring up for curtains and carpets. Well I did do those things but also got a spare set of keys cut so that I could go in at any time without having to trouble the Estate Agent. After the Christmas break, I had to be back at work before the 7th January so we arranged to travel back to Lincoln early in the January to stay with friends. The problem on the day that we travelled was that it started to snow and by the time we reached the northern outskirts of Lincoln it was quite heavy so we made an instant decision to divert to the new house and stay there. As it happens we were not the only ones to have made that decision. And so our family life together in Cherry Willingham started. On 7th January, the Estate Agent rang me at work to tell me that I could pick up the keys. I was suitably grateful when I collected them!!
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