Authors: Bill Williams
‘Why should you?’ Debbie asked, puzzled by his remark.
‘Didn’t you see all those cows in that field back there?’ he queried. ‘I haven’t seen so many cattle since my last cowboy film.’
Jamie saw the road sign and groaned. ‘Dad, you didn’t tell us we’re going to live in Hog’s End Lane!’
Debbie’s groan followed Jamie’s. ‘No wonder you said it was a secret.’
Leanne was on the point of crying when she said that she wouldn’t be able to give their new address to her friends.
None of them replied when he said, ‘What’s in a name?’ and then advised them to look out for number thirty-three.
The car was on the point of stalling after Kevin reduced its speed to a crawl, so that they could read the house numbers. Their new life was about to begin!
‘They’re not very big, but I like them,’ Debbie enthused as she surveyed the terraced cottages. Her excitement grew when she saw that number twenty-seven was the last of the terraced houses and twenty-nine was a lovely detached house with roses around the front door.
‘Oh No,’ Kevin cried out when he saw the house with most of the roof tiles missing and boarded up windows.
‘Crikey, Dad, is that our house?’ Jamie shouted out and he was thinking that he would need an umbrella if he was in his special room in the attic when it was raining.
Debbie was shaking her head in despair as they drew closer and the house reminded her of the photographs that she had seen of bombed out houses in Liverpool. ‘Kevin, we can’t stay there. What are we going to do?’
Kevin started laughing and Debbie was worried that he’d cracked up with stress of moving here.
‘This is our house,’ Kevin announced with relief as he pulled up outside number thirty three which was the house before the one that was in danger of falling down.
‘Did you know that our house wasn’t the wreck next door?’ Debbie asked, thinking Kevin had been joking as usual because if he had then she hadn’t found it funny.
‘Debs, I swear that I thought it was ours and that perhaps Uncle Stanley might have thought I worked in the building trade like my old dad did.’
The house was the same style as the other detached houses, but that was all that it had in common, although number thirty-one next door wasn’t exactly a palace. The small front garden had obviously been neglected for a long time and the grass on the lawn was close to a foot high. The letters on the wooden sign near the front door read, ‘Cox Pippin’, which they discovered later was the choice of a previous owner and not Uncle Stanley.
‘It’s detached, Mum!’ Jamie called out. ‘You can tell Auntie Helen that we live in a detached house and it’s bigger than her semi on the Wirral. I bet she’ll tell you that she doesn’t like detached houses.’
Debbie smiled at the prospect of telling her sister about their new house and watched Jamie who had leapt out of the car and raced ahead of his dad towards the front door. Jamie didn’t bother to look back when his push against the front gate had caused it to fall apart, scattering pieces of rotten wood onto the path and he halted when he spotted the black cat on the doorstep. The cat meowed, came forward and rubbed itself up against Jamie’s leg.
‘I hope the neighbours are as friendly as that puss,’ Kevin said as he joined Jamie at the front door.
‘Can we keep him, Dad?’ Jamie asked. ‘Perhaps it was Uncle Stanley’s.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ Kevin laughed at his son’s suggestion. ‘He must belong to one of the neighbours.’
‘No, he’s yours,’ said the man who had appeared from the side of the house. Debbie and Leanne had arrived at the door and all four of them were startled by the man’s voice and the cat retreated behind Jamie’s legs as though it had been spooked by the arrival of the strange looking man.
‘That’s if you’re the new owners,’ said the man and gave them a disapproving look. ‘I was hoping you might be older. We don’t like noise around here. We’re not used to children and we don’t like cars either, especially old ones.’
The man peered over Kevin’s shoulder towards their car before he turned his attention to Leanne and Jamie. He reserved his sternest look for Jamie and only dropped his gaze when Jamie was on the point of saying, ‘What!’
Kevin introduced himself and the rest of the family, explaining that he was Stanley’s nephew.
Rufus Cranleigh told Kevin that he lived next door at number 31 and had just been feeding the fish in the back garden pond, a task he would be glad to get rid of.
‘It’s not as though I like fish, or cats for that matter, but someone had to do it. I might as well tell you now that if that cat strays into my garden then he won’t need to wash himself for a week, if you know what I mean.’
‘Don’t worry about the cat,’ Kevin replied. ‘We’ve got an old budgie cage arriving with our furniture tomorrow. I’ll make sure he’s locked up in that and it’ll save you wasting good water on him.’
‘But that’s cruel, Daddy,’ Leanne said, obviously upset by the suggestion.
‘You can’t do that,’ Jamie said, supporting his sister.
‘I’m only joking. Of course I’m not going to lock the cat up,’ Kevin said and smiled at Rufus before adding, ‘but I will try and make sure that any butterflies in our garden don’t make too much noise.’
Leanne was thinking that the man with the long pointy nose and very bushy eyebrows was even scarier than the one at Disney World whose face had kept her awake at night for the next week.
‘It would have been a shame if the fish had died,’ said Rufus, ‘just for the sake of a bit of attention, but I guess they have got a new keeper now.’
He handed Jamie the large container of fish food. ‘Just give them about a quarter of a handful in the morning and the same before you go to bed. I hope you don’t go to bed too late.’
Kevin was amused by the odd ball and thanked Rufus for his help when he’d handed the spare key to Kevin who asked him if he was a friend of his late Uncle.
‘No, I wouldn’t describe him as a friend. I don’t know where he came from because he didn’t have much to say, but he did have a funny way of talking though, which was a bit like you people speak I suppose.’
‘We’re from Liverpool,’ Kevin said proudly. ‘My Uncle Stanley moved away from there when he was a young man, so I thought he might have lost his accent. To be honest I don’t know a lot about him.’
‘He moved here after us, but I can’t remember how long ago it was exactly. Like I said, he wasn’t a great conversationalist, but we would sometimes chat over the back garden hedge. I suppose you would describe him as a loner, but he did have the odd visitor and we did occasionally talk about his goldfish or my cucumbers. I never knew that he had any family or anything else about him. I tell a lie, I do know that he was some sort of boffin working with radar and he fixed my television once.’
Jamie thought old Rufus had a bit of cheek passing remarks about their accent when he talked so slow and sounded like a mudder. A mudder was how Jamie and his mats described someone who was a bit, well a bit thick, as in, thick as mud. Jamie hoped his accent wouldn’t change because he could just imagine the sort of looks that he would get when he went home to Liverpool and was cheering on his team in a voice that sounded like the son of Farmer Giles. Although it might have been worse if they had moved somewhere near London and he had ended up with an accent like an Arsenal or Chelsea supporter and saying things like, ‘Forty fahsund fevers on a frush.’
Debbie was curious to know if he had any family and asked if there was a Mrs Crankeigh.
‘Yes, there is a Mrs
Cranleigh
,’ he replied, emphasising the name ‘Cranleigh.’
‘Nice one, Mum,’ Jamie said and smiled.
‘Sorry, I meant Mrs Cranleigh,’ Debbie apologised and asked if they had any children and grandchildren.
Rufus frowned and answered, ‘No, I’m an only child. There’s just me and mother and I’d prefer it if you didn’t pry into our family business. Mother and I are very private people and we don’t encourage gossip.’
It was Kevin’s turn to smile. ‘Mr Cranleigh thinks you’re being nosey, Debs. Bang goes your chances of a chinwag over the garden fence with Mrs Cranleigh.’
‘I wasn’t being nosey,’ Debbie said indignantly and thought, ‘So much for country folk being friendly!’
‘You won’t see much of Mother, unless you’re about on a Wednesday when she rides her bicycle to the market.’
‘Awesome,’ Jamie said thinking the bike must be a sit up and beg like he’d seen in one of his history books.
‘It’s one of those fancy mountain bikes. She traded her old bike in last year and treated herself to a new one. Anyway, I expect you’ll want to get inside. If there’s anything that you need,’ Rufus paused and Debbie was thinking that he was about to make a neighbourly offer of help and perhaps he wasn’t so bad after all. She changed her mind when he continued, ‘the local shop opens at nine o’clock in the morning. They’ll probably charge you visitor’s prices until they get to know you.’
Kevin was tempted to say, ‘You mean in twenty-year’s time.’ but didn’t think Rufus would get the joke because he didn’t seem to have a sense of humour. When Kevin asked what had happened to the house next door Rufus told him that it was the victim of a freak storm about two years ago and the owners were in an ongoing dispute with the insurance company regarding a clause in the policy.
The family watched Rufus take the shortcut across their overgrown lawn to his own house and Debbie gave Leanne a nudge when she saw her sticking her tongue out at him, but then did the same herself.
Kevin stepped forward and stood in front of the solid mahogany door with its antique looking door knocker.
It was the moment of truth for Kevin as he inserted the key in the front door lock.
The removal van would be here with their things tomorrow, but they’d brought sleeping bags, not knowing what they would find in the house. The tension increased when he pushed open the door that was hindered by the pile of junk mail that Rufus hadn’t bothered to clear.
‘What’s that pong, Dad?’ Jamie asked.
‘It does smell a bit musty.’ Kevin agreed. ‘Now let’s hope the electricity has been left on. Fingers crossed.’ He reached for the switch and pressed it. ‘Bingo!’ he said when the light came on.
‘Now we can see where the dead rats are,’ Jamie said, still thinking about the smell.
‘What rats?’ asked Debbie just before Leanne started crying and said that she wanted to go home. Kevin managed to calm her down and admonished Jamie for frightening his mum and sister.
‘I don’t know about rats, but something has died in here,’ Kevin said in a low voice and then he spotted the source of the smell. It looked as though the cat had brought in a collection of trophies, mostly field mice, but there were also the remains of a few of what must have been quite large birds that the cat would have had trouble dragging through the cat flap. Kevin used his foot to push their remains into the space under the stairs and told Jamie to throw them out into the back garden.
‘I’m not very good with animals, Dad, even dead ones,’ Jamie said.
‘Don’t be a wimp. You’re a country boy now. There’s probably a garden shed and you’ll find a spade in there and you had better bury them.’
‘I’ll do it,’ groaned Jamie, ‘but I’m not going to bury them until in the morning. I don’t want to dig up one of Uncle Stanley’s old pets by mistake.’
‘You’ve got too much imagination, son. That’s your trouble,’ Kevin said with a shake of his head and a smile.
It was all hands to the pump as the family unloaded the car before they did a tour of the house. Jamie bagged the second biggest room, prompting Leanne to moan that it wasn’t fair. Kevin restored the peace by telling them that they would decide tomorrow who had what room, but Jamie could sleep there tonight. Jamie was itching to see his special room and it was his turn to moan when his dad told him that he would have to wait until they’d had some supper. He had sneaked upstairs and been surprised to find that door was like a very old outside door with a makeshift sign pinned to it showing that it was ‘JAMIE’S ROOM’, but the door was locked and his dad had the key.
The decoration and fittings in the house were very dated and Debbie was thinking back to their little palace and she wasn’t encouraged by Kevin’s assessment that the place just needed a lick of paint. At least the extra space would be useful, including the fourth bedroom, counting the mystery room. It also had a separate sitting room which they planned to use as a television-cum-games room.
* * *
The family were quiet as they tucked into their first taste of a Steaderton fish and chip supper that Kevin had brought back from the only chip shop in the town. He’d got a blank response when he’d asked someone where the chippy was, but he suspected that was more to do with his accent than the fact that they’d never heard of the term in this part of the world.
Kevin stared at his empty plate, patted his stomach, yawned and then
suggested that the family had an early night after their tiring journey.
‘You must be joking, Dad,’ said an indignant Jamie and then added. ‘What about my room? I wouldn’t be able to sleep without at least having a peep inside.’
When Kevin jokingly suggested that perhaps Jamie should wait until the morning, Jamie threatened his dad with the Human Rights Act and said that he would consult a solicitor if he wasn’t allowed to see his room tonight.
Kevin winked at Debbie and fished into his pocket for the mystery key which he handed to Jamie. ‘We’ll all have a look, unless you intend to bar us from your room.’
Jamie agreed that they could have a look just this once and dashed towards the stairs, but when the family joined him outside the attic room door he was still struggling to open the door which didn’t have a handle on it.
‘Are you sure this is the right key, Dad?’ Jamie asked.
‘Of course it is. Here, let me have a go.’
Kevin pulled on the key while turning it and an anxious Jamie looked on. Kevin pushed open the door after his second attempt and stepped aside to let an excited Jamie have the first peep inside the mystery room.