End of Terrace

As we near the end of the first decade of the new millennium the price of houses in Cumbria has never been higher. A family sized house on the edge of the Lake District is getting near to a quarter-million pounds, and even one-bedroomed flats seem to be making six figures.

The high price range isn’t a new phenomenon, by any means. When Graham and I were looking for a home in which to settle down and produce offspring in the late 1970s, house prices in the National Park were already impossible. We did sniff around one or two, but if they were within our price range they were usually so run-down that you’d have thought twice about keeping pigs in them let alone small children.

We abandoned the idea of nesting anywhere in the holiday areas and began to look at the industrial villages; Tebay and Shap, associated with the railway, Knock, Kirkby Thore and Shap with quarrying. Although Brough and Kirkby Stephen were also possibilities, they were too far from the north-south motorway corridor on which Graham’s wagon business relied heavily. “Somewhere to park the wagon” was a requirement that rather cut down our options, too.

Holiday homes have made money for owners in recent years, but the idea was around in the 1970s too, and when we spotted a pleasantly-sized house in Shap and made an offer for it, this element crept into the bidding almost immediately. We’d hoped to buy the two-up, two-down property for around £5,000 but a retired lady from the village had ambitions to buy-to-let and we didn’t shake her off until the price reached the £7,000 mark. This was high, in 1976, for an end-of-terrace quarryman’s house. By cashing in various small investments, though, Graham managed to buy it for us mortgage-free – a condition of first-time house ownership that’s almost unheard-of today.

It was a sweet little house at the north end of the street, snugly protected by the rest of the terrace from the worst of the southerly gales. A garage tacked on the end became home to Graham’s accumulating tools and equipment. We never kept a car inside it and towards the end of our ownership you’d have been hard pressed to get more than one human being in there either.

The kitchen was equipped with an ancient solid fuel stove, whose firebricks were so decayed that I could never coax it to do more than sullenly boil one kettle in a long afternoon, so a propane gas cooker was a priority if we were to eat anything other than salads. (I wasn’t keen on an electric cooker, and Shap’s conversion to mains gas didn’t happen until long after we moved away.) The installation turned out more of a job than we expected, since the three-foot thick kitchen wall sternly resisted the creation of a small channel to the bottles in the garage for the feed pipe. The hole was over 2 feet across by the time the full distance was excavated.

Kitting out the house was an unexpected entertainment. I had never come across house clearance sales-by-auction before, and it was deeply satisfying to our squirrelly souls to drive out on a Saturday morning to some rural location, and wander purposefully through the household goods and chattels, seeking the bits and bobs that we would need. We had curtains before we owned curtain rails, and two Parker Knoll chairs – a static and a rocking chair – fell to our modest bidding because everybody wanted the rocker but the owner wouldn’t sell them separately. At another sale we bid for a box of crockery and cutlery, in which our main interest was the knives and forks, and it wasn’t until we unpacked it at home that we realised the dealers bidding against us had wanted the three plain, white Wedgwood plates at the bottom of the box.

We got a three-piece suite for £3, and a double bed for 50 pence, and at Penrith Auction Mart some black iron frying pans and saucepans; whereupon a tipsy gentleman standing nearby informed me solemnly that “you’ll never burn the dinner in them”. He also warned Graham that if I threw one at him he’d better duck because “if her aim’s any good it’ll kill ye”. And I’ll always remember the endless trails of small tools, “use-wood”, and what one exasperated auctioneer described as, “real QUALITY tatt”.

Once we were married and installed, the terraced house was easy to keep. We replaced the old stove with a redundant Rayburn from friends who were moving from their ancient farmhouse into a newly built one, so the kitchen was warm twenty-four hours a day.

The discovery of a wild hop bine on the gate into the next-door empty plot made me try brewing with a spare jar of honey, which produced an interesting cross between beer and mead. A space at head level under the stairs, warmed by the Rayburn, then became our brewing cupboard; the power of fermentation in rhubarb wine often saw clots of pink foam projected through the airlock and onto the ceiling. Clearing this cupboard brought to light a 1908 newspaper – Harper’s Weekly; which reported a proposal from Norway that ladies should title themselves neither Miss nor Mrs but something non-status-linked, like the modern “Ms”. It takes a long time for ideas to trickle through stone …

The kids arrived – one in the black pre-dawn of snowy February, and one in the smiling sunshine of August – and the house was full. We laid a lawn, and rented hard standing for the wagon (a space we later bought). Graham cultivated a vegetable plot and I started to acquire alpine plants, partly because they took up little space in the borders and could survive year to year under the rigours of the climate, but also to satisfy some urge to have wild and hardy things at hand.

Before long, though, we and the kids were starting to burst out of the sweet little house.I was getting restless, so when my father died and we received some money from his will, we decided to look for somewhere larger; perhaps with room for a wild and hardy Fell pony … and that’s when we found Daw Bank.