The Handmade House Read online

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether I have planning permission or not,’ Tom Tasou said smoothly. ‘This is my land, and if I say you can’t cross it, you can’t.’

  ‘But how can it be your land?’ I said. ‘The lane’s unadopted. No one knows who owns it.’

  ‘If you don’t believe me, look it up in the Land Registry.’

  ‘I see,’ I lied. ‘Well, we have a problem, because we’ve just got planning permission for this house’ – I unfurled the plans – ‘and the front door is here.’ I gestured beyond the gates.

  ‘Hmm.’ He looked at the plans, feigning interest; it was only later that I realized that of course he had looked at them in quite some detail already.

  ‘So,’ he said at length, ‘I have something you want. We have to come to some arrangement. You understand my meaning?’

  This was a favourite phrase of his. He said ‘You understand my meaning?’ about ten times more in the course of this conversation, like a nervous tic, presumably imagining that he moved too fast, mentally, for anyone else to keep up. It didn’t particularly bother me, perhaps because at some level I really didn’t want to understand what he was saying, and he was right to wonder whether I was following – but it drove Charlie crazy.

  ‘This is my land,’ he repeated. ‘You understand my meaning? You want to talk to me.’

  We didn’t, actually. We wanted to kill him. ‘You mean you would be prepared to sell us the land?’ I asked wearily.

  ‘I’m open to listening to what you’ve got to say to me.’ He was like a cat with a couple of dead mice. ‘And that’s a possibility.’

  ‘So, er, what other possibilities are there?’

  ‘You could acquire the right to cross it. It amounts to the same thing. And it doesn’t bother me.’

  We agreed to go home to think about it.

  ‘Nice house,’ Tom Tasou said, as I rolled up the plans.

  I drove home, seething, and punched our lawyer’s number into the phone violently. ‘How can this be,’ I wailed when I finally got through, ‘when we all thought that no one knew who owned the lane?’

  He said something about having pointed out that an area of the lane around the factory was in fact owned by the factory.

  ‘But not up to and past our front door!’

  ‘You didn’t know where your front door would be then.’

  As he was speaking, I did vaguely recall his having asked us whether we’d need to take the car down to the bottom of the site. But in the flurry of activity I hadn’t registered the significance of the question. And, definitely, it had only ever concerned the car. Had he queried whether I might want to walk down the lane the full length of my own property, I might have asked what on earth he was going on about.

  Clearly, it was his fault. He should have pointed out that if we put our house at the farther end of the site, we wouldn’t be able to reach it. He should have insisted that, never mind the rush, this was an important point. He should have issued some kind of written warning. The trouble was, I knew it was also my fault, for insisting everything should be done in a hurry, for not using a qualified solicitor, for not listening very, very carefully. I was probably thinking, when he mentioned it, of newspaper deadlines and whether Harry had clean PE kit and how many people would be in for supper and to what extent I had fulfilled my lifetime’s ambitions and whether I still fitted into my black trousers. In my defence, though, the very faint, patchy recollection of his saying anything at all definitely included his not being very bothered about it.

  ‘So what about the indemnity insurance?’ I asked wearily. ‘This is what it’s for, presumably?’

  ‘I’ll have a look,’ he said cautiously, ‘but I don’t think so. I think it’s in case something should turn up after the event. We knew about this.’

  Except, of course, we didn’t.

  A couple of days later, Charlie called Tom Tasou and offered him £15,000.

  ‘You’re in the right region,’ he replied. ‘But we need to talk about the price.’

  We got his meaning. A couple of days later, we called back and offered £17,500. He said he’d think about it.

  Then he rang us and said it wasn’t really worth his while for this amount of money. But not to panic: we were definitely in the right region.

  ‘We can’t afford twenty thousand,’ Charlie said helplessly.

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said Tom Tasou.

  Charlie had to bear the brunt of these negotiations, because I selfishly declared that I didn’t want to deal with him. I don’t think I lack energy, generally speaking, but Tom Tasou made me feel tired. He had too much relish for the contest. Negotiating with him, unless you had a similar verve for the thing, could never be other than a dispiriting experience. It seemed to me that to get involved, to cultivate the emotional engagement, threatened to bring on self-hatred.

  We caved in and offered him the £20,000. It could have been worse, I kept saying to Charlie: he had us over a barrel; he could have thought of a number then doubled it. He could have demanded £30,000, or £50,000. In fact, of course, he’d demanded precisely what he’d gauged we could stand without being provoked into a redesign which would reorientate the house, or into selling the land. He’d asked us to think of a number and he’d added some.

  He agreed to the £20,000. But then he announced he only wanted to grant us a right to cross the land, whereas we’d thought we were negotiating a right to buy.

  By this point, I’d decided we needed a new solicitor, one with qualifications this time. I asked a lawyer friend of mine to recommend someone. Bridget, our new solicitor, explained that what Tom Tasou probably had in mind was an easement, which would be appended to the deeds of our land, and would give anyone who owned our property rights to cross the lane in perpetuity. He was right that it wasn’t really any different from owning the land in its effect, so it was a bit of a mystery why he didn’t want to sell.

  We consoled ourselves with the thought that, having spent this money, we would effectively have a spare place to put a car, across the lane. Even if it would be the most expensive parking space in London.

  Tom Tasou required us to fund the moving of the gates and their electronic reinstallation. We also undertook to pay for the construction of a bin store (at this point his tenants were leaving their bin bags outside what would one day be our house) and to relocate all their letterboxes and entryphones. And all inside six months.

  When finally we were ready to draw up documents, Tom Tasou said, oh, no, he’d just realized, he actually wanted £25,000. There was some nonsense story attached (which made it, if anything, even more humiliating): some relative of his – brother, brother-in-law – now owned one of the houses and he needed compensating for his ‘loss’ too. At this point I would have spent a substantial amount of money never to have to utter the words ‘Tom Tasou’ again.

  And, he added, he’d take £10,000 in the contract, and the rest in cash.

  I never did find out how Tom Tasou owned that chunk of the lane (although once he’d told me to check the Land Registry, I never doubted he did own it). One of the neighbours, someone who’d lived around the lane for a long time, whispered darkly that a line had somehow been drawn in the wrong place. Obviously the thing to do was find out who’d sold to him, so I wrote to the Land Registry and encountered the same old problems. The Land Registry is bound only to disclose current ownership. To persuade them to tell you anything about previous owners, you have to prove you’re involved in a dispute. Our spat with Tom Tasou, apparently, didn’t count. (God knows what a real dispute would feel like.)

  Presumably the Land Registry people are worried that if they were to give out too much information, it might foment revolution, inflammatory politics, etc. (although not being allowed to know who formerly owned your own land seems pretty politically inflammatory to me). I pottered nerdishly in the London Metropolitan Archives instead, and managed to discover that in 1829, our land and all the land around had been fields. By 1862 there wer
e big houses behind, and our road appears to have been called Ivy Grove Mews. There were no buildings on our side of the lane then, although, ten years later, on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey Map, there was something on our plot, plus other structures beyond us down the lane. It’s difficult to tell, but it looks as though there might have been some sort of little gatehouse on our site, which would give weight to the notion that it was always part of the same package of land as the buildings that became The Glassworks.

  The factory across the lane was built on former market gardens in 1928, for a company called A. C. Cosser, which made broadcasting equipment. As the Second World War approached, they carried out much of the crucial research into radar in Rose Cottage (which, according to the company’s official history, then had ‘an almost country aspect, with the adjacent garden of old-world flowers, beehives and tennis court’). Cosser constructed all the receivers for the chain home radar system that eventually covered the country and by the end of the war, almost every combat aircraft operated by the Royal Air Force carried at least one item of Cosser-made equipment.

  Not surprisingly, the Nazis repeatedly tried to bomb the factory. But they failed, and instead hit many of the buildings around it. On the (wonderfully comprehensive, war effort-style) maps of bomb damage issued by the London County Council after the war, the house behind ours is graded dark red, i.e. ‘seriously damaged, doubtful if repairable’, while the building on our site is bright red, i.e. ‘seriously damaged, but repairable at cost’.

  The Victorian house in the avenue behind us was pulled down to make way for the present villa in the early 1950s, but clearly the cost of repairing ‘our’ mews was too great for such a scrotty little building and it was gone, the land absorbed into the villa’s garden, now owned by the Robertos, ice-cream merchants and one of the numerous Italian families in the area. (Even today, there are three Italian delis in the little parade of shops up the road.)

  The mews next door to ours was designated a ‘ruin’ in 1954. But by 1968, an Ordnance Survey map shows it rebuilt, while Tom Tasou’s mews houses and the land outside them (but interestingly, not beyond) are marked as a separate property called ‘The Works’.

  The villa and our plot was sold in 1997 to a Mr Eliades (possibly not unrelated to Mr Christalides), who planned to knock down the house, replace it with flats, and build the two houses on our site. His architect, Stanley Haynes, told me that neither he nor his client had been aware of any problem with access to the houses. On the other hand, Mr Eliades did decide not to proceed; I’d assumed this was because the fierce residents who ran the private road behind had raised so many planning objections and held him up for so long that by the time he finally got permission his finances were weakened. But maybe there were other reasons.

  Clear as mud, then. Tom Tasou could have solved the mystery, but I wasn’t going to ask him. I do know that the deed of easement names the owner of the land as Dome Developments Ltd; a few months later the land was sold to Firstpaint Ltd for an undisclosed sum. Firstpaint Ltd shares an address with Tom Tasou’s other businesses.

  I also know that when I was visiting the land one day I met a couple more of Tom Tasou’s workmen who were putting finishing touches to the rental properties. ‘Oh yeah, these gates,’ one of them said to me. ‘He told us not to take too much trouble putting them up, because they’d only have to come down again.’

  And down they came, although not until one morning, about a month after we’d got planning permission, when Charlie went to Barclays Bank in Holborn and collected £15,000 in £50 notes. He loaded bundle after bundle into a Nike shoe bag, put the bag on his front, strapped over his shoulders, and buttoned up his coat over the top. Then he took a taxi up to the office of Dome Developments, where Tom Tasou and his brother made him sit and wait and watch while they counted every last note.

  That February, Charlie left Atlas. Unlike a lot of people caught up in the dotcom bubble, he hadn’t been paid in slips of paper that promised miraculous wealth a few months down the line; he’d had money. But now, as for some time it had been apparent it would, the money was drying up.

  It wasn’t a particularly good time for this to happen. We’d increased the mortgage on our Hackney house and were paying a whole other mortgage for the land. We still had the bridging loan. The construction would be paid for entirely out of borrowings, but the architects’ fees had to be found from current income. And we’d just given every last penny we had to Tom Tasou.

  Our very first meeting with Steve Symonds had involved one of his many useful mates, this one from Barclays’ mortgage department, and the whole deal had been set up to be seamless. We’d get the bridging loan to buy the land, and then, once we moved on site, we would be able to get a self-build mortgage. This is the commonest way that people raise money to build a house, and allows for money to be released in a number of pre-arranged stages, usually between five and seven, so that you can pay for materials and the builders as the project progresses. Once the build-out is complete, the outstanding debt becomes an ordinary mortgage (in our case a large one, consolidating the mortgage on the land and the construction costs).

  Unfortunately, in the time it had taken us to get planning permission, Barclays had bought the Woolwich and integrated its mortgage services with theirs. Not least because we’d been so dilatory about getting medicals, it was no longer possible to do the original deal. We had to go through the whole application process again. I got rather fretful over this, not really believing anyone would be mad enough to lend us all this money, and kept wondering aloud and irritatingly whether Steve would have the same pull with these new people. Would the former Woolwich staff use our deal as an opportunity to assert their political independence of people like Steve who made decisions by himself rather than according to the rules? (The rules, obviously, would never let us anywhere near such a large sum.)

  Charlie spoke to Steve more often than I did and was consequently less neurotic, but when he had to prepare another set of accounts, he certainly – as he put it, Steve-like – ‘wasn’t in the business of minimizing’ his income. Until then, he’d been paying rather low levels of tax based on his early freelance earnings, which were minimal in comparison with those of recent months, although in reality respectable enough, being around the size of mine. Our accountant warned him that there would be a very large tax bill coming.

  The Atlas monies had meanwhile pleasantly removed the need for Charlie to hustle for work, and he was out of the habit. The previous summer, when he might have picked up projects that would have been paying now, he’d wasted ages working with a politician on a book that didn’t, in the end, come off. Meanwhile, the dotcom collapse was feeding through into the rest of the economy, or certainly the bits of it in which Charlie was engaged. He had a contract to advise an organization that was helping local authorities to acquire appropriate technology; in April, they simply stopped paying. And he was doing some sort of strategic thinking for Channel 4, where advertising revenues had slumped: the payments came later and later and later, and required more and more chasing. Eventually, they cut his fees in half.

  In the middle of May, having finally got planning permission and access to our land, we could get back to meetings with Joyce and Ferhan. The next phase would involve detailing all the rooms, deciding on materials, organization, cupboards, lighting, where the fridge would go… but first they wanted a business meeting, the purpose of which was to establish exactly how much we had to spend. The house was planned at 1,900 square feet, excluding the garage, for which they were setting aside £25,000, and the hard landscaping of the garden (the terrace, the high wall along the lane), for which they estimated we’d need between £15,000 and £27,000. (Up to this point, I thought we were designing a house of about 2,500 square feet. But they seemed to be fitting everything in. And since I had no idea how big 1,900 square feet was, it was difficult to find any reason to object. Besides which, it was too late.)

  When we’d originally talked about w
hether we could afford to build a house, they’d said something about needing to think in terms of £150 per square foot. Now they explained that there were three possible levels of finish, which we could think of as costing £170, £200 or £220 per square foot. They showed us magazine pictures of a house that had been finished at the £220 level. Typically, I had no idea what I was looking for, and admired the way the fireplace was sunk into a piece of stone.

  ‘It wouldn’t actually look like this,’ Ferhan said. (They must have thought sometimes that they were dealing with imbeciles.) ‘This is just to show you the quality of the finish.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said, staring at the picture to try to work out what this meant.

  ‘If you spent that sort of money it would mean you could have everything custom-made,’ Joyce explained.

  Charlie, slightly to my surprise, quickly did the sum and announced that he thought that we ought to go for the highest figure. This would mean a total construction budget of £470,000. He’d have to talk to Steve and, through him, to the Woolwich, but that was what he’d ask for.

  So that meant that our income had plummeted at the same time that our expenditure was about to go out of control. Already we could smell in the air the money worries that would soon be settling like a fog around us. To go for the highest offered budget was incautious. But it also felt like absolutely the right thing to do, and, I thought happily (since I was not the one who somehow had to find the money), was absolutely typical of Charlie’s unerring sense of what was important, and his commitment to doing the important things properly.

  Joyce and Ferhan made sure we knew what we’d be letting ourselves in for. They reminded us that, aside from the construction money, we’d have to find fees for all the consultants we’d need to employ: a structural engineer, quantity surveyor, mechanical engineer, party-wall surveyors (ours and the neighbours’), services engineers, possibly computer and telephone consultants …