10 Life Lessons. Number 8.

A life-changing event happened for me in 1966, and it wasn’t England winning the World Cup!  Mum and Dad received a letter telling them they had to leave their tiny council house and move into one of the new high-rises that were being built on the estate. Hundreds of small terraced houses were being demolished and replaced with 20-storey concrete blocks of flats.

I can remember Dad saying very clearly, “No fucking way.”

Dad couldn’t understand why  people were so excited and eager to move into, what he called, “boxes in the sky.” When the first block was complete and some of our neighbours moved in, they raved about the flats. “They’ve got a bathroom with hot water! Three bedrooms and a big kitchen. No more outside toilets, no more bringing a tin bath into the kitchen and boiling endless kettles for hot water.”

But Dad was having none of it.

“We’re a family, we need a garden. We aint moving till we get a house.”

Mum wrote a letter to the council saying just that.

It wasn’t long before we were the only family left on the street.

That was great for an eight-year-old kid. So many derelict houses to explore and treasures to be found.

There were abandoned gardens full of flowers. Just left to grow wild. I had an idea.

My new best mate was Terry Dormer, he lived about a fifteen-minute walk away on another estate,  so his little house wasn’t in danger of being flattened.

We went from garden to garden cutting nice-looking flowers, wrapped them in newspaper, put them on my go-kart and walked to the other side of town, the posh side. We were no longer on a council estate, these houses were owned by the people who lived in them. We knocked door to door and sold them for a penny a bunch to nice ladies who must have thought we looked a bit bedraggled.

There was always enough for a big bag of chips each on the way home.

Winter came, and we weren’t short of coal or firewood. All of these derelict houses had left a few buckets full of coal in their shed, so Dad and I went and stocked up. Firewood was easy. Every house had a wooden fence, and these were quickly torn up and chopped into nice-sized pieces for the fire in the front room.

But, the thing that I remember most, were the Pianos.

People just left them. As I said before, most houses had a Piano, but now they just stood in an abandoned house covered in dust and dirt. What was once someone's pride and joy was now just a ton of wood and iron. I always wondered whether it was the families' choice to leave them or the removal companies refusing to take them. The logistics of getting these things up twenty flights of stairs would be a nightmare, and I’m certain they’d have been too big and heavy to fit in the lifts! There must have been hundreds of them. Dad just couldn’t believe that people could leave them behind. Whilst I was gathering up wood and coal, Dad would lift up the lid on these old pianos and knock out a tune. The acoustics were incredible in an empty house, you could probably hear the music miles away. Then I remember him shrugging his shoulders and saying, “ Oh well, people have to make their own choices.”

It would be another six months before Mum and Dad got some good news.

Life Lesson Number Eight.   Sometimes, if it's too heavy to carry, you just have to leave it behind and move on.