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Living Over The Shop

We were young and madly in love but was this alone enough to make the lack of decent housing bearable? Was I being fair to my little boy?
We’d tried for a council house without success, looked at the rental cost of decent houses and even flats and found it beyond our means. If there had only been the two of us we’d have lived on my boyfriend’s boat, moving from one free riverbank mooring to another till something more permanent came along but my little boy, Bobby, had just started school and that would have been no kind of life for him. We knew that whole families had lived on narrowboats up and down the canals, with the children receiving little or no schooling, even up to the nineteen fifties but this didn’t seem right in the nineteen nineties and besides it was a ten foot cruiser not a seventy foot narrowboat.
My mother had given Bobby and I a home, in spite of the shame she felt at having a pregnant teenage daughter, since my lovely little boy was born and his ‘father’ decided that emigration was preferable to fatherhood. However, she had become very possessive about both myself and Bobby and when I met Tom (lovely kind Tom, darkly attractive Tom, who made me laugh and feel alive again) she gave me an ultimatum. If I wanted to ‘waste my life on yet another no-hoper’ then we could find our own place to live.

The flat above the corner shop was a bit damp and much in need of the attentions of a scrubbing brush and a lot of buckets of hot water, but it had a roof (the landlord’s responsibility) and four walls, even though they were almost brown from a previous occupants chain-smoking. The back of the shop extended beyond the footprint of the flat which gave a flat terrace where I could put some buckets of plants ( the discards from the rack of neglected, unwatered pots outside the shop) and Bobby could play a somewhat restricted game of football or ride his little bike round and round in safety.
Tom offered to paint the rooms and Sanjeev in the shop agreed, with suspicious alactrity. We had to hope that he wouldn’t turn us out once the place was habitable (or put up the rent ).
I learned to check regularly for Bobby’s discarded apple cores after one lodged in the rain water drain at the edge of the terrace and I found the place crawling with maggots. Tom who liked fishing, just laughed, but I hate maggots, always have, still do.
Also the walls between us and the next door properties on either side were paper thin and we didn’t share their taste in music or wish to join in with their domestic disputes.
There were however, compensations. Sell-by dates were now stamped on a lot of the stock that Sanjeev bought from the Cash and Carry and, rather than have a visit from the Public Health man he would throw out perfectly edible food . The only problem was that his assistant, Betty, who came from the dig-for-victory; make-do-and-mend generation couldn’t bear to see things wasted. We soon discovered that she laid them carefully on the top of a clean bit of cardboard in the top of the bins behind the shop. Then, when everyone had gone home, her son Malcolm would appear on his motor bike and load up his panniers.
It wasn’t long before we had the idea that as soon as we heard the bell that signalled that the shop alarm was set, Sanjeev’s old van would cough and splutter it’s way out of the car park.
Tom would be down there with a plastic bag , as if he was putting rubbish in the bin, load up anything that was usable and be back upstairs long before Malcolm appeared and stood there scratching his head, trying to figure where his ‘booty’ had gone.
Sometimes we would leave it, in case Betty stopped being so careful and dumped rotten cabbage leaves on top – no recycling in those days- so he kept on trying. He must have thought there were some very clever cats or urban foxes to have carried off anything from packets of bacon to tins of beans, but then he didn’t look as if he was a candidate for MENSA! One problem was that Tom had also lived at home with his parents till now and, though very handy had absolutely no tools. When we wanted to mend the larder door, damaged by Tom and Bobby in an overexcited game of chase round the kitchen, he went across the road to the local hardware shop.
“Have you got a screwdriver?” he asked the girl behind the counter with is most winning smile. She pointed to the rack with them on display and Tom took one that seemed the right size.
“Forty pence” said the girl. “Just want to try it” Tom replied and before she could argue he was out of the shop. Ten minutes later , door fixed, he took it back.
“Thanks anyway sweetheart but it’s not big enough” he grinned, handing it back to her.

The other disadvantage was that the flat was within even Bobby’s walking distance of the local park. Sorry, I hear you say, wasn’t that an advantage? Well we thought so till one teatime in late Autumn when Bobby decided not to take no for an answer when told that it was too late to go on the swings.
We thought he was sulking in the little box room that served him as bedroom and playroom, till called for tea. A search of flat, terrace and car park and we were beginning to panic.
Suddenly Tom had a brainwave.
“The park.” He was out of the door like a streak of lightning with me close on his heels.
Bobby was indeed in the park. That was OK then? No it wasn’t. The park keeper locked the gates at dusk and Bobby thinking he was in trouble, hid till he’d gone and now he was crying on the wrong side of the five foot fancy wrought iron gates. Tom, of course, came to the rescue. My hero climbed over the gate, lifted the sobbing little boy over to me and climbed back out, only to be confronted with the irate Park Keeper who chose that moment to set out for his evening pint.
Bobby has children of his own now, as does Gilly, and Martin is a sergeant in the army and Tom and I live in his parents’ old home but that scruffy flat will be forever part of our lives.