Part 2. The Search.
After my mother told me that my father had died, we had coffee in a nearby café and I took the underground back to Balham.
The lunchtime edition of the papers had front page stories about ‘75 Britons killed in air crash’, there were even some photos. I didn’t buy one. The next couple of weeks were a bit of a blur. The flat was crowded with people, not much space for reflection or grief. My sister had dealt with all the gory stuff, identifying fathers’ belongings and voice on the black box recorder, dental records for I.D.
I came from a dysfunctional family, most of my life my parents had lived in the same house in separate parts, my mother, with what I can only describe as a bed sit downstairs, and my father shared a bedroom with me and had use of the front room downstairs, when he was home. We all shared the kitchen, my three sisters and the separate parents, until my eldest sister moved out and mother moved the rest of us out to Flat in East Croydon when I was about 12 or 13.
I moved back in with my father about two years later to finish school, I moved out into squats, bedsits and flats as soon as I left and didn’t see either of my parents for some two or three years, although the year prior to his death my father had started dropping in to the Balham flat and we had a passable relationship.
He had planned to remarry, the trip to Yugoslavia was a sort of honeymoon to celebrate his divorce being finalised, and he then planned to came back and start a new life with his new partner. He died the day before the divorce was final, so my mother inherited everything and us kids got a little cash. I suddenly had £1,500 and the dream of getting a little place in Wales became a real possibility.
We started going to Wales to look at places, staying in a friends Mum's holiday cottage, an idyllic writer's retreat next to a stream in a little valley, or with people we knew who had already moved there. We didn’t want to live in a predominantly hippy area, our new plan was to have a place of peace and tranquillity where troubled souls could visit to recuperate from the rigours of “Babylon” and the 'rat race'. A small place where we could manage to set up a cottage industry and explore our artistic and musical interests. A place where all you needed was love.
I have to admit to an almost total amnesia of the search, I didn’t have a car, though I did have a driving licence. I suspect we took advantage of Janet’s mum and used her car or maybe I hired one on occasions, bummed lifts with helpful hippies, it’s a blur. Suffice it to say that eventually we settled on a place on the top of the Llanybyther mountain, on a small road between two small hamlets, no neighbours nearby, no running water, just a rainwater tank, no electricity (though the line ran along the road) and just a one up and one down with a small extension on the side that had a tin roof. No one had lived there for about 30 years. I went and had a look at it and went into the solicitor in Carmarthen the same day and signed the papers, it cost £900.00. My girlfriend had only seen the picture on the advert but was happy enough. It was a 400 year old cottage, it was on top of a mountain, it had a cooking range that ran on wood or coal so we could heat the place and eat. There was a long barn beside it that would become our studio and workshop, it left enough money for us to live frugally for a year or so, what more did we need to know ?.
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