And that is the name of a cottage

1725 and the rest
18th January 2005

1725 is the name of the cottage in which my mother and father lived. The cottage, which by the way was really three knocked together, had been built in 1725 and as no one appeared to think of a better name for it, that was how it was known in the village of Upper Beeding, in West
Sussex.

My mother had started to become interested in selling bits and pieces when we lived in Wembley, she had developed the knack of selling things
in order to pay the bills that my father was not able to pay. She started buying second hand furniture and then selling it from our home. One time I remember clearly, my brother and I were sitting in the dining room of our house, I would have been about 16 and a half, married and pregnant, my brother would therefore have been around about 14. We were eating, the doorbell rang, my mother answered it, the table had been sold, so we quietly and without fuss lifted our plates knives and forks up off the table, the chairs had been sold as well, so we stood with all the paraphernalia in our hands and just moved out of the way. I am shocked when I think back; we thought this was normal behaviour. No money, bills to pay, sell something.

When my parents moved to Shoreham in Sussex and lived on the Pelican a 75ft motor launch, my mother opened a bric a brac shop near to the town end of the Norfolk bridge and she started to seriously become a "collector" and "dealer", pretty soon she was running an antique market in one of the pubs on the riverside. It was therefore not really much of a shock when she declared that she was buying 1725 cottage. There was an already very well established antiques business running from this property and she intended to take this on as well.
I guess that is when the habit of collecting started to change, she was buying, but not now having to sell everything to make ends meet. She began to collect and hoard, her logic being that with time these items would increase in value.

1725 was a dark, long low ceilinged building, tiny leaded windows leaked in little light. The building did not have central heating, and never did whilst my parents were there. My mother lived at one end of
the cottage and my father at the other. Again this was nothing new, as this had been the state of play for years. They met in the kitchen, a small, odd shaped room with fairly limited sitting space. Here my mother prepared food for my father; he ate and then returned to his end of the house. His space was a bedroom, which doubled as his lounge. Here he had a television and his music system. He sat and watched TV, or listened to his music, he sometimes read as well. Whatever else he always had the most enormous bowl of sweets and chocolates in front of him, which when he was not using dope or alcohol, he systematically went through. These sweets were not for anyone else to touch, just for him. If my father was in the cottage, this is where he was. To one side
of him was a room, which linked to a bathroom, which was next to the room in which my mother slept. Her room, unlike my fathers, which was dark and dingy and faced the street, was the largest upstairs room in the house, faced the back, and had a spiral metal staircase leading down to a pretty patio. She lived in the kitchen and the main part of the shop, which was set out as a sitting room. There she sat in the evenings, sometimes lighting the coal fire and entertaining potential
furniture buyers.

The cottage had two downstairs showrooms, one as I said was the lounge for my mother and the other was under the room my father used. There was a spiral staircase off this showroom, which led to my father's area. They were able to come and go and not disturb the other. They lived under the same roof but had little to do with each other.

My sister lived there for a short while, until she got married and she occupied the furthest away bedroom upstairs. She had little to do with either my mother or father and in less than a year had married and moved into a flat in the village.

Detached from the cottage was a barn as well as a summerhouse and in these my mother built up stores and spares. So from being a little part time collector she moved to become a serious full time one. The style in which she lived, buying from people and then buying more began to suggest to the community that she was a woman of some substance.

My father wandered around in this antique world completely at sea. He was a musician who had fallen from the dizzy heights of fame, had a drug habit that my mother lied about and denied. He spent lots of time in and out of psychiatric hospital being diagnosed as manic-depressive, depressed, messed up and so one, each time he left hospital they gave him tablets, which he took when he wanted and how he needed. This added to discovering alcohol, and using cannabis caused him to be unstable and volatile most of the time. A good sign for the family were that the chocolates were out on the table and being eaten, as this meant that he was not using other substances, so although we might not get to eat the chocolates we got to see my father. A bad sign was when he refused to get out of bed, took the tablets, not as prescribed and took whatever else he could get, and the chocolates grew dusty and remained uneaten.
More often than not I would receive a call from my mother declaring that my dad was "not well", a code for he is using drugs again, I would come and sit by his bed, for some unknown reason he seemed to be, in the main, alright with me. He would tell me all sorts of inappropriate things about my mother, swear he was going to leave her that she had trapped him and he had made a mistake by marrying her. All he wanted to be was a musician. We would have long nonsensical, intellectual conversations and he might then get up and eat some food, or he, on the other hand might go back to sleep.

When he was "well" he pretended to be interested in antiques, but in reality, he was not. He liked the furniture and the history but had little time for the dealers, for the folks that wanted to ooh! and aah! for hours in the shop and leave after having purchased nothing. He did not like small talk and was entirely unable to engage in conversations that did not interest him. He was immensely self-centred.

By some manipulation my mother convinced him that he would do well to set up his own business, making and selling long case clocks. As my father was of an obsessive bent he took this idea up with more enthusiasm than knowledge and set about running himself into debt. He purchased a lorry, one that could be driven on a car licence, he had it kitted out with a cooker, bed, fridge and so on, he was going to make clocks and deliver them himself. He rented a large property in Brighton and employed a few men to work for him. He had never employed a soul before and of course pretty soon was in a mess. He ordered clock parts, the dials and weights from Germany, they still remain in the outbuilding of the property my mother has now, gathering dust and have no time to tell. He drew plans, ordered wood and had the men make clocks, he phoned shops and sold them clocks; he rented more space in Lincolnshire and employed my then partner to make clocks. My dad then collected, delivered and maintained them. He talked clocks; he slept and thought clocks, if you did not like them he talked for hours, hoping to convert you to loving them as he did. He poured into and onto these clocks the love that he had never felt able to show either my mother or us. He more or less stopped using any drugs for a couple of years, totally committing himself to the clock business. He lived as much as he could in the van, rarely stopping in 1725 other than to touch base, collect mail get some fresh clothes. He loved Scotland and would try to sell as many clocks up there as he could. He loved driving and was happy to be on the road. Unfortunately he was not good with budgets and money. He had always left that to my mother, or someone else and with his blinkered mind refused to look at his finances, he sailed into owing more money than he was getting in. By the time he died he was in debt, using drugs and booze too often and was often out of his mind.
My mother however was flourishing, she was seen as knowledgeable and knowing, she appeared to be able to deal with any queries, had all sorts of contacts and could get any piece of furniture, glass, or silver that was requested. She moved all her attention to the business and gave it all the love that she had not been able to give my father. She worried, she fretted, she enjoyed, she planned and schemed, she was like a young bride in the days of the honeymoon. This by the way has lasted until now. Whilst my father was away she began to collect small bits, glass and china, frippery, bits and pieces, he hated them, she displayed them around the place, she said that this drew people through the doors as they could buy something for almost nothing. She started to sell things for a fraction more than she paid and always told people that she would buy back furniture or items from them, almost as though she could not bear to be parted from her things.

Both of my parents were becoming more and more eccentric. My father was reading some weird and unusual books, drinking brandy, talking of being a playing musician again. My mother was renting houses she did not need and wanting to rent more. They rarely spoke to each other in any depth and barely tolerated the others company. My father had been diagnosed as a diabetic; he did not want to take the insulin as prescribed, my mother nagged at him about the need to do so. The tension between them was explosive. My mother decided to buy the cottage next door, and sell 1725. They moved into a tiny one bed roomed cottage which would be great if you liked to be in close proximity to your partner but was hopeless for two people who had stopped being together years before. My mother had the big bedroom and my father occupied a small space,jokingly referred to as a box room. To get to his area one had to go through my mother's large airy room.

My father went a decline in this period and stole a car and a clock from himself and went off to Morocco to search for his soul. He did not find it; instead he sold the clock bought copious amounts of marijuana and got stoned. When he ran out of cash he ran back to my mother, who in the meantime had bought back 1725 and sold the little cottage.

They reverted back to the way they used to live, my mother denying anything odd had happened, that nothing but nothing out of the ordinary, doesn't everyone buy back their property for more than they sold it? She then decided to sell 1725 again, did so and this time moved into a large flat that she had rented years before in Steyning High Street. My father went as well. The flat has five bedrooms on the first floor as well as three on the second. Put this with two reception rooms, lobby, bathroom and kitchen and you get more of the picture. My mother took the largest bedroom, my father the smallest and they drifted into their lifestyle once again. But now my father and his business were lending my mother money. The tenancy of the flat did not allow her to run a business from there, so she rented a shop in the High Street, to set this up my father borrowed money from his business to help her out. He believed that as she had bailed him out of debt from Morocco he had to do the same.

They had gone from owning property to renting, from being able to run a
business from their own home to having to rent a shop.
The shop opened, my fathers business went into decline, the workshop in Brighton was gone, the clocks were dispersed to other clock businesses and my father tried to set up a Big Band and re-create the music he so loved. He bought a bass, a car that would accommodate it and set about
becoming a musician again. He drank too much and missed gigs, he cried too much into the beer of the past and missed the present. He tried to go back and fight time and only succeeded in missing it.

He had one last admission to hospital where he was able to admit to me, (this was September/October 1997), that he was an addict and alcoholic and that whenever he used booze or drugs he was in trouble, that he did not know how to function well without something to numb his feelings, for a brief while he found some respite. He went home.

This went on until 1998 when my father killed himself. He had been in and out of hospitals, he was rattling from the medication he was supposed to be taking in a managed way. He was disillusioned, disappointed and desperate and on the 21st April 1998 he took a bottle of brandy, all the tablets he had hoarded and an overdose of insulin
and departed from this mortal coil.

Wherever he is I guess he is playing the music he so wanted to play and that he does not any longer have to be living a lie or selling
clocks.

My mother increased her hoarding by 100%, she lives in the same flat, still has the biggest bedroom, but has no room, every square inch of floor and wall space is full and covered by bits and pieces, books, and covers, curtains and bedspreads, lampshades and litter. Furniture is all around, she has so many clothes that they lay in piles all over her room. She is a little woman roaming the furniture of the past with nowhere to go. She does not go out much, she does not want too. She waits for people to visit her, she tells them tales of what she believes her world was and like me can only tell what she remembers and like me probably does not see how things really were, can only see the colours in her own mind.

She says she misses my dad, that he was the best husband ever, that he was gentle and caring, that he was practical and sensible and I have to smile as she has the picture she has painted and I have mine and
actually it doesn't matter anymore.

Stories are for telling, what the listener does with this is up to
him.

I am no longer sad or ashamed to have come from such a wacky set of parents. They were two people who did the best with what they had and what they had has gone. Like us all time, (those clocks again) goes on regardless. Time waits for no man or woman, I am grateful today for the parents I have, I am grateful today to be here and not there. I am
grateful.