Copyright Oggbashan October 2019
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. The events described here are imaginary; the settings and characters are fictitious and are not intended to represent specific places or living persons.
This is based on a real event.
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In the late 1920s the four of us were friends as two couples. Albert had been my friend since school and a choirboy at the same church near our parents' homes just North of the City of London. Sheila and Joan had also gone to the same schools and church. All four of us attended evening classes and took Civil Service entrance examinations and became clerks in the same department within walking distance of our homes. I, Charles, was with Joan. Albert's girlfriend was Sheila.
The four of us went everywhere together, often taking a bus or train journey for a weekend walk in the country. As we were returning from one walk we saw a new housing estate being built. A notice was being put up advertising a reduction in price and 'easy terms' for purchase. The homes had been reduced to £250 pounds and a mortgage of £245 was offered. The four of us walked into the sales office and looked at the show house. It was modern, with an internal bathroom that our parents' apartments didn't have. The houses had garages, not that we could ever dream of owning a car, and reasonable size gardens backing on to protected woodland that would never be developed.
The American stock market crash had just happened and people were worried. The houses had been reduced because people were not buying. But all four of us had Civil Service jobs on an increasing salary scale. What might not be feasible for many, might be for us. The mortgage repayments and the increased commuting costs would be just affordable and when we got our annual increases we would be able to live slightly better. We would be pushed to our financial limits for the first couple of years but after that? We would have a house on the edge of the country we loved. It would take us three-quarters of an hour commuting each way but our quality of life would be much better and we could marry and set up home away from our parents' overcrowded homes.
The salesperson was desperate. The four of us were the first potential customers for a couple of weeks and if some houses weren't sold soon, he and the building company would be in real trouble. He was the elder son of the company's owners. He spoke to his father. The builders would lend us the five pounds deposit for a year at no interest, arrange the mortgage for the balance of two hundred and forty five pounds and pay the legal costs.
That was an offer we couldn't refuse. Albert and Sheila, and me, Charles and Joan, agreed to buy two adjoining houses. We could marry and set up home in a newly built modern house in a great location.
I married Joan just before Christmas in the London church where I had been a choirboy. We were rather surprised that Albert and Sheila went off to Huntingdonshire, where Sheila's grandparents lived, for their marriage at the same time.
The Civil Service rules at the time meant that if a woman, who was an established Civil Servant, got married she had to resign form her established post and be re-employed as a temporary. Based on her years of service, she was given a lump sum as compensation for losing her pension rights. If I died first, she would get a pension based on one third of mine at that time. Joan's lump sum meant we could repay the builder's five pounds and by the end of our first year in the house we had reduced the mortgage to two hundred pounds. Even so, it was a struggle to make ends meet. None of the four of us could afford the bus fares to the railway station so we all went by bicycle.
The next year was a disaster. The recession had hit the UK and the Civil Service was not exempt. First our automatic annual salary increases were stopped. A few months later all Civil Servants' pay was reduced by ten per cent. We were really struggling until the final blow. All temporary Civil Servants were discharged. Joan lost her job and with it half of our reduced income. We could no longer afford the mortgage and our house was repossessed. Joan and I had to rent a cheap shoddy apartment within walking distance of my office. We had lost our first and idyllic home. It would take until 1957 for us to start buying a house again with the proceeds of foreign service allowance for three years' posting abroad. Only then could we hope to match what we had lost in the early 1930s.
Yet Albert and Sheila, although financially stretched, managed to keep their house and were paying their mortgage despite the cuts in Civil Service pay and numbers. I and Joan knew why but it was a deep secret shared by only the four of us.
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Forty-nine years later our children were planning our Golden Wedding for the next year and of course our oldest friends, Albert and Sheila, were invited too.
Out of the blue, shortly after the invitation had been sent to Albert and Sheila, I had a phone call from their eldest son, David. He had been trying to arrange a Golden Wedding celebration for his parents, without them knowing, but had met a real problem. He didn't know the exact date of their wedding nor at which church in Huntingdon. It must have been a church wedding since they had always been active members of their local church, and still were. I asked him to come to see me to discuss it. He agreed.
