Transient fruits

I helped Lee and Pete move the rest of their things to the Grey House on a sculpture park trolley, borrowed from the Art College. We had an amusing time steering it down hill as it weighed a ton and was difficult to control.

The Grey House was opened as a squat on May 29th. Alex and Gav slept the first few nights here; the police were told, the owner of the building informed and legal warning notices put up. It was decided not to go through the Watermouth Housing Association as everyone is by now sick of Morris’s unrealistic promises and his mania for publicity and his Squatting Cause.

The owner of the Grey House is a Mrs. Coldman-Hicks, who’s slowly dying in a mental hospital; her son said that we can live here until she finally pegs out and he wants to sell. Lee showed me some of her insane letters, some to “The Col. of the Guards Regiment,” scrawled in a childish, almost illegible hand, that rant on about the people next door and their “machine” that when they switch it on hurts her right eye and right leg, the postman who keeps people prisoner and all the visitors who steal from her. She even had her solicitor send the next door neighbour a letter saying that “our client kindly asks that you refrain from putting your hands through the wall and stealing her money.”

Her son obviously wants shut of the whole business. Gav said he was very decent about everything and put just one condition on their living there, that his fiancée’s daughter be allowed to move in to the basement. But when the daughter turned up she brought along three friends, all of whom seemed to want to move in too.

Mo has moved out of Castle Mount Court as the landlord wouldn’t renew her tenancy so she is now living in Pete’s back room. Apparently I could have had Alex’s room because Alex said he was going to Amsterdam, but now he’s delayed his departure until the summer so that Gav can go with him, but at least he offered me his front room while I clean up the basement. I can hardly complain when it’s free, and Pete’s offered me his room when he goes to America in late August.

Until then I’ve got several possibilities. I could stay here another two-and a-half weeks until the end of term and move into Gareth’s room at Westdorgan Road as he’s going home for the summer, or I could try find a place on my own straight away. There are advantages and disadvantages to both schemes.

Guy moved out of his flat into a bedsit of his own in Ledwell Street. It’s £25 a week and he said it was very difficult finding a decent place; he hung around newsagents waiting for the first edition of the Herald every morning, trailed round the agencies and made numerous and fruitless ‘phone calls and trips to see dingy pigsties let by sharks and con men before he found his current place.

I know this would get me down, but a single room on my own would be ideal. Moving into Gareth’s room is easier but I can’t help worrying I’d get caught up in the enjoyable but fatal round of going out and staying up into the early hours, or sitting about talking or taking drugs . . . transient fruits, soon rotten. Plus Westdorgan Road is miles from central Watermouth . . ..

I just can’t decide. The rent at Gareth’s is £17.50 a week; the rent for a bedsit is bound to be much higher.