‘An estate agent,’ repeats the youngster. ‘I work for Slipsters in Haslemere, and I help arrange the sale of properties.’
‘An’ you say someone’s offrin’ two hundred thousand for this?’ He looks around his living room, at the flaked and mottled paint, the nicotine-stained ceiling, the missing floorboard and the cobwebbed, rotted window frames. ‘They’re mad then.’ A new suspicion strikes him. ‘Are you ’avin’ me on?’
‘No, Mr Oak.’ The young man tries to look suitably grave and trustworthy.
Jack Oak furrows his brow and says, ‘But I never said this place was for sale.’
‘As I explained, Mr Oak, my client saw this house and enquired about its status at the village shop. I mean no offence, but he thought it might have been abandoned. He asked me to approach you and offer you two hundred thousand for it, in case you should consider selling. I know this is a somewhat unusual way of doing things, but he does like it very much.’
‘He likes it two hundred thousand’s worth,’ observes Jack Oak.
It is the late 1980s and Mrs Thatcher has changed the entire consciousness of the country. She has profoundly inconvenienced and confounded the left by winning a popular war against a fascist government. An energised Great Britain has finally come to understand that it is not high talk but money that makes all things possible. Bright young people are making fortunes in the City, and are not ashamed to be thought vulgar or greedy. People who used to put their money in the post office are speculating boldly. The trade unions are rapidly declining. The government is beginning to rake in wonderful tax returns while lowering the rate. The word ‘yuppie’ has come into common currency, and people are playing with other acronyms. The present favourites are ‘dinky’, which means ‘double income, no kids’, and ‘lombard’, which means ‘lots of money but a real dick’. Socialism is about to be reborn as conservatism with a winsome smile.
The property-owning democracy is on its way, and the estate agent from Slipsters in Haslemere has pointed out to Jack Oak that just now all the money is going into houses. The prices have rocketed, most particularly in London, and in the south, in those places that are on the commuter routes. Commentators talk of the phenomenon in tones that clearly imply that there is a strong element of insanity in it all. Some Jeremiahs are seeing lemmings everywhere, and predicting a crash. Some people on low fixed incomes are realising that they will never be able to buy. In the countryside young people cannot buy houses in their native villages because weekenders are putting the prices out of reach, and they are leaving for rented accommodation in towns. Village shops and post offices are losing their weekday clientele and closing down. The social fabric of the countryside is distorting. Some people who cannot afford mortgages are buying houses anyway, on the gamble that they’ll recoup their outlay many times over when they sell, and now someone wants to buy Jack Oak’s cottage, because it is ideally situated on the cricket green of a marvellously pretty village on the Portsmouth line to London. It will be fabulous for weekends, it only needs stripping out completely, and a new roof, and an indoor lavatory and a bathroom, and one day it can be resold at a substantial profit, if only Jack Oak will sell. Ever since old Walter died, Jack has been the village’s last peasant, with his lips like kippers, his thick yellow nails, his rolling Surrey accent, his aroma of a thousand types of rustic decay and his eyes as round as dinner plates. He is the seventh generation of his family to occupy the little house on the green, and his daughter, Jessie, is the eighth.
She has been listening to the young man with careful attention, and, after he goes, leaving a business card that she secretes in her purse, she sets to work on her father. She is the only child of a wife long gone (run off with someone from the travelling fair on the green, so they say), and in the whole world there is no one but his daughter that Jack Oak loves. She comes over and kneels on the floor in front of him, placing her hands on his knees. ‘Da,’ she says, in a wheedling tone of voice that reminds him of his little girl when that was what she was, ‘Da, two hundred thousand!’
‘I like this place,’ says Jack. ‘This is where I was born, and this is where I’ll die.’
‘But Da, two hundred thousand! We can go west. Somerset, Cornwall. I’ve been there. It’s right nice. We can get a place twice the size and have money over. An’ you don’t work no more, anyway, and I can get a job, I know I can. Two hundred thousand, Da!’
‘I don’t know anyone but ’ere.’
‘But Da, who’s left here?’
‘None to ’ave a drink with,’ agrees her father.
‘It’s all goin’ posh. Just think, Da, we’d be set up for life, both of us. No more worries!’
He looks at her strangely. ‘I ain’t got no worries.’
‘Oh Da, you know what I mean!’
‘Turn the telly on,’ he says. ‘I wanta watch something.’
‘I’ll turn it on if you promise to think about it. Promise?’
‘Course I promise. I was goin’ to think about it anyways.’ He rolls himself a thin cigarette and sniffs it before he lights it. He reckons the sniffing is better than the puffing. He thinks about how some people are trying to stop the little boys from fishing in the village pond, in case someone falls in, and how they don’t let you throw sticks into it for your dog any more in case it frightens the ducks. He spits contemptuously into the fire. The place soon won’t be worth living in, that’s for sure.
So it is that not three months hence Jack and his daughter are completing the melancholy task of dismantling two centuries of settled family life. Into boxes go rabbit snares and mole traps, his father’s pipes, the horseshoe from above the door, glass jars of assorted nails and screws, tobacco tins full of brass washers, a seized-up revolver that his father brought back from the First World War and never handed in, a wooden quiver of African arrows that came back with his grandfather from Tanganyika, tattered Bibles and hymnals, faded photographs and samplers from the walls, and penknives with broken blades. Jessie tries to throw things away, to burn them, saying, ‘But Da, we won’t need this! What do yer want this for, Da?’ and he replies, ‘It’s mine, and I want it, that’s what.’ When she says, ‘But Da, we can get new things now,’ he replies, ‘Ain’t nothing wrong with the old one.’
Jessie has been having terrible misgivings recently. Her father has even tried to dig up every shrub in the garden so that they can be planted at their new place. He has emptied the contents of the compost heap into sacks, has filled more sacks with the best soil from the vegetable patch. Jessie had been hoping to move out with two days’ hire of a man and van, but all this junk and soil and shrubbery is spoiling her plans, and besides, it’s very embarrassing. The man with the van has taken to smirking. Her father has assumed the air of someone resolutely making businesslike preparations in the face of imminent death. He is saying things like ‘Well, it don’t really matter any more. Don’t reckon I’ll be long for the world any road. Reckon you might as well enjoy the money, that’s what I say, ’cause it won’t be much use to me when I’m dead an’ under.’
Out of consideration for her father, Jessie has resisted going for the kind of house she really craves, something clean and new on a smart housing estate, and has found a pleasant cottage for next to nothing in the village of Herodsfoot, near Bodmin. She is sure that he could be happy there. The house is very like the one they are leaving, with a decent-sized vegetable patch and a blue front door. It has one more room, and an inside lavatory, and it doesn’t really need much decorating. She has had to take charge of everything, because Jack’s mind goes into a spin when he has to concentrate on things like deeds and contracts. He signs the documents that she places before him, and says, ‘Might be signin’ my life away, for all I knows.’