were no such things as cash machines, no nipping down to the local hole-in-the-wall for a few notes, and of course no cash back offered in shops, since you were paying in cash in the first place! Since you couldn’t really pay by cheque or credit card for most everyday items, like food or beer or public transport etc. you had to pay by cash, but where did you get your cash from, if not from cash machines?
The only place to get cash from was your bank – and not from the non-existent cash machine, but from the teller inside. You joined an endless queue, finally got to the one window of four that was actually open, wrote them a cheque (!) and finally got some cash. Even that was difficult, as banks weren’t open during normal hours, as they had their own opening hours of 10.00am – 4.00pm Monday to Friday, and they were shut all day Saturday and Sunday.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that it was often hard getting to the bank, and if you ran out of cash on a Friday or Saturday night (as happened frequently), then you really were stuffed, and borrowing (sponging) from a friend or acquaintance was your only option.
A year or so after I started at Portsmouth, Nat West Bank excitedly announced the arrival of the first ever cash machines to be available in the UK - but they were most definitely not cash machines as we know them today! Customers (myself included) were sent a separate cash card which was a thin, flimsy piece of plastic with holes punched out of it (rather like the holes in Pianola sheet music) which were read by the computer in the cash machine.
The cash card was for emergency use only and worked as follows: you went to the one and only cash machine in Portsmouth that had just been installed (outside the main branch on the High St) and inserted your card. The machine would then dispense one £10 note (no other options available) which was your emergency cash. That was it, a tenner - and be thankful! Not only that, but the machine would then keep your card! Your card was then returned to you a few days later in the post (!!) This system was touted as the best thing since sliced bread!
So, if anyone wants to start moaning about how far away the nearest cash machine is or whatever, just remember how bad it used to be. By ‘eck, we had it tough in them days!
My Accommodation Part 2: Mr Man’s
Anyway, I eventually left Pepe’s and moved into a large shared house in a rather unfashionable area that boasted rooms – with breakfast! The landlord, who I dubbed ‘Mr Man’ had hit on some tax loophole or other, as he discovered that by offering not just accommodation, but breakfast too, the house was officially classed as a Bed and Breakfast, and apparently the tax paid on a B&B was far less than that on a straight rental property. So every morning at 7.30am, Mr Man would arrive with his wife and daughter, remove the padlock from the kitchen door, go in and prepare breakfast, and then serve it to the residents in the dining room at 8.00am sharp.
The rooms all had at least two beds in them, including at least one with bunk beds, and the students there were all foreign students from India or Pakistan; I was to be the exception. Now, the thing to realise, and it’s hard to remember as you get older, but when you’re young you don’t consider things like impoverished accommodation with loads of foreign students, all sharing one bathroom and all being forced to be up at the same time as being a nightmare, you just look at it as being perfectly normal – your acceptance level is much higher.
And so it was, that despite some misgivings, I was happy to move in (especially as by that time I was desperate to free myself from the increasingly irksome burden that was David).
The day finally arrived and I moved in, but there seemed to be a little confusion amongst my fellow inmates (I use the term advisedly) and this led to Mr Man being summoned. When he saw me he looked slightly shocked and taken aback. He then proceeded to explain, in a slightly embarrassed manner, that as I hadn’t been back in touch in the two weeks since agreeing to take the bed (I can’t say room, as they were all shared) he assumed that I’d changed my mind and he had therefore let the bed to someone else, and they were already there.
In retrospect I guess it’s fair to say that I probably had a lucky escape, as the place was so weird, but in the short term it gave me a major problem – I was suddenly and unexpectedly homeless!
Luckily, though, Mr Man clearly felt rather responsible and said that I could live in the dining room of the house, sleeping on the (velour) sofa – at full rent! With no idea of what else to do, I accepted and moved into the dining room. The dining room contained a very large table with sufficient chairs for all the tenants, and the aforementioned sofa. Luxury! I was provided with a few blankets, a couple of sheets and a pillow and this was my new accommodation. I began longing for the old fashioned carpets and comforts of home.
The only real item of note that happened in the short time I was there, was that we held some kind of party and various people who nobody knew turned up. One of the unknown students to arrive was a bloke who was studying French, and he had with him a French exchange student who didn’t speak much English. I had reasonable spoken French having done a French Exchange at the end of year 10, with Frederique in Strasbourg, and I chatted away with the exchange student as best I could in my pigeon tongue, and I was quite proud of the fact that I managed to converse quite well.
It was only after they left that one of the other lodgers at the house, Rikki, a trainee chef from India, told me that it was obvious to everyone but me that the second guy wasn’t an exchange student at all, and they had just been pretending he was French for a laugh. All they needed was to find someone gullible enough to believe them ......
Rikki became my friend after that, but I have to say that he was rather a ‘toxic’ friend, as David had been, but in a very different way and he was always using me to get something or other that he needed or wanted. By the end of the year I had largely managed to shake him off, but it was another friendship that I wished I’d never had. In modern parlance, I guess you'd refer to his friendship as being 'toxic'.
Flasher!
As regards the house itself, I managed to last out for a few more days sleeping on the sofa, but the situation wasn’t great and things all came to a head one morning as breakfast was being prepared. I was of course sleeping in the dining room, where we all had breakfast, and for the system to work, I had to be up and about before everyone came down for breakfast at 8.00am. Or, to be more precise, I had to be up and about before 7.45am when Mr Man’s daughter came into the dining room to lay the table.
One morning, I was bit the worse for wear and when the alarm went off, instead of jumping off sofa as usual, I lay there, slowly coming round. After a few minutes I was awake enough to get up and get dressed. Just as I was in the middle of doing so, at the most inappropriate moment possible, in walked the daughter to lay the table. The level of embarrassment between the two of us was palpable, especially as, both being young, we didn’t really know how best to deal with the situation.
What I ended up doing was collapsing back on the sofa whilst trying to cover my privates with sheets and blankets, whilst she, instead of retreating, covered her embarrassment by continuing to lay the table! The time it took her to finish her labours and exit the dining room became the longest two minutes of my young life.
The good news was that this incident made it abundantly clear that it was completely impractical for me to stay there any longer, and that I urgently needed to look for yet another place to stay. And so the search for my third place to stay in as many months began. As before, places were at a premium, and I think I rather went from the frying pan into the fire. This time I moved into the lino house.
My Accommodation Part.3: The Lino House
