Sculthorpe Boulevard

Yesterday we went to a reclaimed timber yard to find floor boards for the holiday cottages. Heavy rain was muscling down all day.  The yard was on a desolate criss cross of tarmac and grass which used to be RAF Sculthorpe.  Lumbering bombers heaved into the sky from here in the Second World War.  Nan always called it 'The Last War'.  If only. Although she meant the war just finished of course, since the Cold War didn't count.  Too sneaky and no street parties.

Skeletons of half-demolished hangers and bunk houses haunted the empty paths.  We drove down one called 'Sculthorpe Blvd'.  It is big, it was the wars that got small.  Two men in acid green jackets were digging clumps of turf up by the side of the road.  By the black mountain of tyres we stopped to ask directions at a snack bar.  The snack bar was a small trailer where a wind-blasted woman was fighting with dirty blue tarpaulin, trying to weigh it down with rocks. She didn't know left from right but we followed her gestures and found the place.    

Enormous posts with sharpened ends, massive beams and piles of planks spiked with metal lay in the mud.  Welcome to the Somme.  We parked in a puddle and pulled Little Three out of her sleep into the gale. In an old hanger two men were cutting wood with giant circular saws.  One of them, in wet wool and a damp beard muttered "Picked a day for it". He might have been building an ark but in the meantime was using a portacabin.  I've run out of contact lenses so I was in my specs.  Useless in the rain, they steamed up when we went inside but I was holding Little Three so I couldn't wipe them.  Through my private fog I peered at floorboards, oak and pine, treated with wax, varnish or left splintery, ripped from derelict buildings.  Lucky Mr P can see and I hope he could tell the difference.  

Little Three examined some pages torn from a lads' mag and glued to the wall.  "A girl!" she shouted. "Girls!"  Someone dreaming of girls in red bikinis had built a Star Wars AT-AT Walker and put it on a filing cabinet.  

The guy in the beard and hat was a nice guy.  His firm had laid the floor of The Wiveton Bell using old boards from some other place. The first time we came to Norfolk The Wiveton Bell was our local for a week.  My feet were standing on those boards when I turned down a second gin and tonic, the first sign that Little Three was already with us, although we didn't know it then.    

We have found some boards at Homebase but think we'll go with these.  Less predictable - they will bring whatever they have at the time.  Inside some pine trees are streaks of sunset pink.  I like that they were cut and planed, laid and trodden and now they have been abandoned we will take them to use again.  We are buying our floors from the Battersea Trees' Home.  Without the bark.

   

Completion Day

Our solicitor just called. The first home we owned now belongs to someone else. We have completed.

The home that is not ours anymore is a Victorian flat in East London. When we bought it every room had at least three mattresses on the floor. Everyone in there were from somewhere in Eastern Europe and according to a neighbour none of them stayed for more than a month. During our first viewing a man was hunched on his mattress carefully squeezing a sachet of Heinz salad cream onto a heap of cold pasta. The floors were covered in black and red swirly patterned carpets slick with wee and grime. The room intended for our 7 month old daughter was painted black. Slipknot posters, condoms and nicked street signs were screwed to the walls and ceiling. Not a nursery theme I'd seen in Mothercare. Someone had stuck police crime scene tape along the stairs. Possibly it had been put there by the police themselves. There were too many walls and not enough light. No-one but us put in an offer.

For a month we stayed in our rented place two streets away. My husband came home from work every night to cuddle and splash the baby. For the rest of the night he worked on the new house. We forgot to take 'before' pictures to show lianas of electric cable draped over the rubble on the floor. My brother helped. A friend helped. I took the baby round to be lifted in her pushchair up the stairs and down through the dust into the garden so we could have cold beer and hot salt-fish patties in the sun. On moving day a bloke in a transit van came round for the furniture and I walked with the baby. We have more stuff now.

The new flat was beautiful. We'd taken down walls and the daylight seemed to be coming from Scandinavia. Maybe it was the Swedish White Dulux. Every morning I came downstairs and was delighted by our home. We had almost no furniture or toys - just space.

We have moved to find more space. We have moved away from London, going east as my parents did when they were looking for a greener plot to grow their family. But we've gone further. Two miles from our new house is the North Sea. If we set sail from the nearest beach the next land is the drifting sea ice of the Arctic Circle.

We have sold the flat today but I don't feel like opening champagne. The money from the sale of our first home will let us leap forward with all sorts of plans. Exciting plans. But today is the first day in nearly 40 years that I don't have a home in London. I am homesick. I am missing things.

When Mum and Dad made their big move they still had a London postcode.  When the M25 was built we were snug inside the O.  Now I live in a county which doesn't even have a motorway. Actually I don't miss sitting in stagnant traffic every day. Or not being able to park anywhere near our house on a rainy night with three cross children, a load of food shopping and a big bad mood. Maybe I will have some champagne after all.