I thought it a wild goose chase, but my wife pressed me to give it a go. She was worried about our financial situation, "If only we had a little security...."
"Security is a menace to the development of character."
"What?"
"Henry Miller."
"If he's so clever, maybe he'd like to put bread on our table."
"He's dead."
A bookkeeper friend had made a fortune by buying properties and renting them out. Lots of people were doing it; so why not us? She didn't mean "us", of course - she was working hard enough as it was - she meant "me".
Advice on the web recommended property auctions, so I did a little research and picked out Manchester and Blackpool as having good prospects. Our savings didn't amount to much, and I knew it was no use looking in London or the Cotswolds. Also Manchester and Blackpool were close together so I could visit both on the same trip. My thinking was pretty simple, I suppose, and muddled. But what did I know? A Lancashire auctioneer sent me a catalogue and a calendar of viewing dates.
During the train journey north I marked up the properties I thought might be interesting. It was wintry, mid-February. Rain fell unremittingly during the journey, and the clouds, low and heavy, cast a gloom over the countryside. Inside the train, passengers sat wrapped in overcoats and scarves against an icy current of air streaming from the ventilation system. No apology came from the rail operator for the lack of heating, nor when the train stopped for an hour and fifty-four minutes north west of Wolverhampton, though we did get an explanation: a dead dog on the line.
I'd been hoping to visit the auctioneer's office, but the train delay meant that it was closed by the time we drew in at Manchester. I booked into a small downtown hotel for the night and the next day took a taxi to my first viewing.
Regenerated and with an air of prosperity, the city centre proved to be no more than a deceptive enclave. Beyond it, the urban landscape resembled an abandoned backstage lot, a wasteland of overflowing litter bins, polythene garbage bags, discarded pallets, empty shops and warehouses, shuttered pubs, houses boarded up with weather-stained plywood sheets. Vacant plots were strewn with rubble from demolished buildings. For the last mile of the journey, the driver had to dodge broken bricks, pieces of twisted iron and chunks of concrete left lying in the streets. "Wouldn't like to drive round 'ere in the dark," he said as I paid him. "If they 'ad any sense, they'd clear it all away and start again. Used to be lively round 'ere when I was a kid. Look at it now."
A handful of people had shown up for the viewing and were gathered in front of the house.
"Agent's late as usual," one of them muttered.
I glanced up and down the street of terraced redbricks. Half a dozen of the dwellings were vacant and creeping towards dereliction, but attempts had been made to brighten up the others. Front doors were painted in bright reds, yellows and greens. Several displayed vases of fresh flowers in their front windows. Crossing the road to take a perspective on the sale property, I spotted a tiny, middle-aged woman struggling along the pavement with shopping bags. I approached and offered to carry them.
"You're a big strapping lad," she said. "You're not going to run off with my groceries, are you?"
She spoke in a broad Lancashire brogue of gentle, unpasteurised vowels. "Just as far as number 12, then. It's very kind."
I asked her if she liked living in the district.
"B'in 'ere all me life, I 'ave. Wouldn't catch me no place else. Not no more. Too old to move now even if I could afford it. It's really quite nice. And the rent is ever so reasonable."
We passed two women in curlers and housecoats, chatting. They, too, were tiny with skin and bone faces and spindle arms. Their clothes drooped from them in shapeless folds.
"Thanks for 'elping 'er love," one of them said. "Not as young as she used to be, are you our Aida?"
"Never mind my age," Aida retorted. "You'll be there afore you know't."
We reached Aida's house and I set her bags on the doorstep.
"They shouldn't 'ave stopped the buses, mind you," she said. "Used to come every ten minutes, just up there in Pickling Street. All through the war we 'ad buses. Stopped 'em five year ago now. They don't care about the poor no more. You comin' to live 'ere?"
"Perhaps."
Aida rang the bell and the front door opened to reveal a spindly young man in jeans, hollow chested, face pale and pitted with acne scars.
"Me son. He's a good lad really."
The good lad glanced at me briefly then, without saying a word, took the bags inside. I turned to go.
"You'll like it 'ere," Aida called after me. "People are ever so nice."
A battered red Ford drew up in front of the house I had come to see. Two men got out. One wore a cloth cap and a threadbare overcoat, the other a padded nylon jacket and grey trousers shiny with age.
"I'm the agent's man," the latter said to the assembled group of viewers. "Name's Jack. Sorry I'm late. Bit of trouble with the car. That right Derek?"
Derek, his companion nodded.
Both men were in their fifties. Jack, the taller by a head, carried a bunch of keys. He tried several before he found one that fitted.
"I'm in charge, right Derek?" He pushed open the door and ushered us in.
A two-up and two-down worker's cottage, it smelled musty and damp. On both floors, the rear wall bulged with crumbling mortar.
"Better to knock these houses down," someone remarked.
“They were going to do that according to what I heard," Jack volunteered.
In ten minutes we were all outside again.
Jack led us to a second house in the next block. This too was damp, empty and dispiriting.
"Waste of time." One of our group said, in a voice redolent of the Indian sub-continent. "Came round just to see. But we're sticking to the better areas nowadays. All this lot should be condemned and the sooner it goes the better if you ask me."
He got into a silver BMW, and roared off. Gradually, the other viewers also left. Lacking transportation of my own I asked Jack if could give me a lift to the next house on his list.
"Dunno about that," said Jack. "I've already got Derek, and there's not much room."
He was right. The rear seat of his car was occupied by a miscellany of tools, a large cardboard box, several pairs old shoes, bundles of magazines and newspapers.
"Still," said Jack, "It's only Derek, He'll manage in the back, that right Derek?"
Derek managed, and I got into the front passenger seat, placing my feet on a pile of oily rags. The interior stank of petrol fumes. Jack started the car, but stopped it again.
"Fuel leak."
He jumped out and raised the bonnet.
Derek and I got out too.
"What do you think, Derek?" Jack asked.
Derek stuck his head into the bonnet for a moment and muttered unintelligibly.
"You may well think that, Derek," said Jack, "But I think otherwise. No offence meant Derek. But you're no mechanic, are you? Fetch my tool box Derek, there's a good man. It's in the boot."
Derek duly complied. Jack selected a trio of spanners of different gauges with which he adjusted nuts on the carburettor and fuel filter, alternatively tightening then loosening them.
"That'll 'ave to do," he said at length.
We clambered in and set off.
"Still smells of fuel," said Jack. "Right Derek?"
Derek mumbled what sounded like assent.
At the next house, in a neighbourhood called Moston, scarcely less dreary than the first though as yet unassailed by demolition crews, a women was waiting in a green two-seater MG. An ashtray full of butts rested on the passenger seat beside her.
"Thought you weren't coming," she said to Jack.
In her mid-fifties, she was dressed in a red woollen suit flecked with grey cigarette ash. "Bought a property last year in Brighouse and it's doing ever so well," she said, taking a last long draw of her cigarette before dropping the butt on the pavement. Her yellowed-stained fingers shook nervously.
The house we had come to see was occupied but the tenants were out. This one too smelled of damp and wood rot. Mould grew on the ceilings. Wallpaper hung limply from walls that glistened with moisture and salts. Beds stood in every room except the kitchen which was furnished with a hot plate, an upholstered armchair with a broken arm, four upright chairs, and a formica table on which lay a partially completed application form for entry to a local college of nursing. The applicant's name - Miss Mumtoza Butalezi - was written in blue ballpoint at the top of the page.
"They'll all be blacks in this house," said the woman in red. "You can smell them."
Last house of the tour was in yet another district, Gorton, whose streetscape of dreary terraces and decaying shops was by now familiar. I was struck by the absence of vegetation: no hedges, or shrubs in front gardens, no parks, no playgrounds for children, no evidence of civic pride. People in the street looked undernourished, like trees clinging to life on a blasted heath. Even the buildings looked gaunt and cold as if the sun never warmed them.
We had not yet reached our destination when the car's engine began to scream. Jack shifted into neutral, cut the ignition and steered us into the roadside.
"Problem this time we have Derek."
The accelerator pedal had jettisoned its spring and now lay flat and loose beneath Jack's feet. For a moment he was nonplussed. I offered a few suggestions from the encyclopaedia of my ignorance and when these were rejected, proposed that we call a breakdown service.
"They'll charge more than the car's worth," Jack said. "I didn't buy it new, you know. Twenty-five years old is this car. Pretty good for its age. We can fix this. No trouble at all."
He turned to Derek.
"Now then, young man, look sharp. There's a ball of twine back there somewhere."
Derek mumbled, and it occurred to me that his slurred speech was probably the result of a stroke. He flapped around inconclusively until Jack directed him to the cardboard box.
"There you are," Jack said his confidence evidently intact. "You just have to use your eyes."
Derek handed him the ball of twine which he flourished as if it were a lottery win.
"Look and you shall find, Derek. Look and you shall find."
Derek's role, I understood, was not to contribute but to stand as evidence that there was someone in Jack's world who stood below him in life's pecking order.
Jack busied himself with the repair. He attached a line to the throttle which he then threaded first through the side of the bonnet and then the window on the driver's side. By pulling or slackening the line he was able control the tension on the throttle. We climbed in, Jack restarted the engine and we move off. Somehow he managed to change gears, maintain steering, and control the revs all with his hands. His timing was so excellent that it was hard to tell he wasn't using a conventional accelerator.
When at length we arrived at the next house, last of the day, we were already an hour behind schedule. No one was waiting. Pinned to the front door was a notice stating that the building was structurally dangerous and warning people not to enter.
"You can see it from the outside," Jack said.
I pretended to look but lacked stomach for the fight.
A few steps away, on the main road, was a little cafe with a menu board outside. I invited my companions to lunch as a way of thanking them for taking me as passenger. Jack responded with enthusiasm. It was hungry work showing all these houses, what with the car breaking down and all that.
The cafe consisted of half a dozen tables covered with plastic red and white cloths. A counter divided the dining area from the kitchen at the rear. Steam mingled with the odour of lard and tobacco smoke. Jack and Derek ordered egg and chips; I less wisely opted for the day's special - Irish stew - which came as a mélange of soggy cabbage, unseasoned dumplings and thin gravy. Afterwards we all had suet pudding and custard and a mug of tea.
Jack gave me his card, one side of which had a telephone number and a message: “If you have a problem. I can help. Just call Jack.” Printed on the reverse were a sketch of an angel and the words: “Complaints Department”.
“Anything that needs doing, I can do it," Jack said. "Derek here will vouch for that."
We parted outside the café: Jack - with Derek's moral support - to make a more permanent fix for the accelerator pedal, and I to the bus stop across the road from where the number 34 would take me to the railway station and thence to Blackpool.
"You won't mention the car problems to Pethers & Wilson?" Jack asked as we shook hands. "They won't pay me if they find out I was late for the some of the viewings."
My reassurances brought a smile to his lips.
"Don't forget," he said, "You can always come to the Complaints Department. Jack'll solve the problem."
I spent the night in one of Blackpool's featureless B&Bs, a charmless, draughty warren with red flower-pattern carpet, red flower-pattern wallpaper and cream curtains printed with red flowers. The landlords, a young couple who had just acquired the premises were worried about covering their mortgage payments and begged me to write them a recommendation. They seemed to think it would help them qualify for a seal of approval from the local chamber of commerce, or the tourist board. After an uncomfortable night in a tiny bed, a lukewarm shower in front of a window that wouldn't close, and a squalid breakfast of egg and sausage drenched in fat, I wrote them a glowing testimonial. On leaving, I wished them good luck, for in a town where every other building offered accommodation, and where theirs had so little to recommend it, luck was about all they had to fall back on.
Blackpool was rumoured to be the next - the first - British Las Vegas. Casinos occupied a central plank of the government's latest economic strategy - a means of counteracting the city's and the nation's terminal industrial decline. Where better to re-create Las Vegas than Blackpool, playground of the people, host of annual Party conferences, bingo-hall capital of little England? Soon the town would be humming with gamblers, and with carpetbaggers vying for ways to relieve them of their money. Property prices would sky-rocket. In no time, the demand for accommodation would exceed even the immense supply already available.
You couldn't lose in Blackpool.
This confident assessment came courtesy of a middle-aged businessman wearing designer jeans and an expensive leather coat whom I met on the doorstep of the house we had both come to see.
One block from the southerly - less fashionable - end of Blackpool's immense beachfront, it stood in a line of Victorian semis whose flaking paint, cracked cornices and sagging roof-gutters could not disguise that they had once been the castle keep of respectable middle-class families. After Manchester's dank terraces, I could hardly contain my excitement that here, at last, was a house worth the inspection, a house for all that it might have come down in the world since the Empress of India had presided over an empire on which the sun never set, still stood as evidence of a more gracious era and would surely require little more than a lick of paint and a new carpet to put it in condition to earn a handsome rent.
The businessman had arrived at the wheel of a shiny black Mercedes with tinted windows. He was smoking a large cigar.
"Bloody estate agent's not here again," he said.
"Again?"
"They often don't bother with crummy properties. Too embarrassed."
He knocked loudly on the door and then pushed it open. I followed him in. A young man greeted us and offered to show us round. Painfully thin, he wore loose sweat pants that hung from him like sails in a calm, and a fleece with a large hole in the right sleeve. He led us along a dark corridor to an empty room at the back of the house.
"Supposed to be the kitchen," our guide informed us, "but we can't afford a cooker and the landlord won't put one in. The downstairs toilet's in there." He indicated a door to the left of the corridor. "Don't work though. We have to use the public toilets on the sea front."
My companion had seen enough. He turned on his heels and left, leaving behind a parting comment that the place was falling down and he had better things to do."
According to the catalogue, the house was divided into two apartments. I asked the young man how they were arranged.
"No flats here," he said, "Just one house. Look here."
He led me part of the way back along the corridor to another room partitioned with a plastic curtain.
"I put this shower in. Runs on a hose from the garden tap. We had nowhere to wash. I mean you can't live like that, can you?"
The young man's father was sitting on an upright armchair in the front room before a single-bar electric fire.
"My dad's got cancer. He's still working mind you. Can't afford to retire."
My guide raised his voice to address his father as if the latter were hard of hearing.
"All right dad? This man's come to look at the house."
The old man looked at me with defeated eyes, but he held out his hand and I grasped it.
"Going to buy the place, are you?”
His son answered for me. "He's just looking ,dad."
"Hope it works for you," the father said.
Upstairs was a warren of mainly empty rooms divided by plywood partitions. The floors sloped uniformly to one side like the deck of sailboat in a breeze.
"My sister had this room," said my guide, showing me a bare space with a torn curtain over the window. "Left last week. Gone to Manchester."
"No bed?"
"Slept on the floor."
We moved to the only furnished room on the second floor - a double bed with a sheet over the window.
"This is where I sleep. It's dry in here. All the other rooms leak."
I asked him about the rent.
"My dad pays £95 a week and I pay £45. My sister paid £50 because they said she had a better room. Don't ask me how they work these things out. When it rained she had water running down her wall."
"Been here long?"
"More than four years now. We lost our council house. It's terrible here but we can't afford nothing else. I've got a pregnant wife, but how can she live like this?"
"Is she here?"
"Went home to her mum. I mean she couldn't stay here, could she? Not with the baby coming."
"Couldn't you get the owner to fix a few things at least?"
"Dunno who owns the place. Some company in Liverpool they say. I only know the rent collector. Says it's nothing to do with him. Just does what he's told"
"If I buy the house I'll fix it up for you," I said. But we both knew I wasn't going to buy it.
Nor did I attend the auction. There seemed no point.
