Mint Street

It all seems a bit crazy looking back on it now. I'd been seeing Katherine for a few months in a courtship that seemed to consist of an awful lot of evenings in a downstairs bar called Break For The Border just off Oxford Street. We had a lot of fun on what was a fairly limited budget; we'd both left university the previous year and were surviving in London on salaries somewhere in the region of ten thousand pounds apiece. And then, out of the blue, she was offered a job in the Lake District on far more money, with a company car, in a role that she couldn't have anticipated landing for years.

So we talked about it a bit and there didn't seem to be any decision other than for her to head north. The day before she could move into the place she'd rented, we drove up the M6, got a bit lost driving along the A591 and came into Kendal from the west, along a road that had loads of B&Bs but none offering a vacancy. It was dark and raining, and I was beginning to wonder if we'd end up sleeping in the car.

Then, and by now almost unbelievably, we saw a 'Vacancies' sign and pulled over. I don't know that I'd ever booked into a B&B before but I made a crouching dash through the rain and rang the doorbell. The landlady answered and when I enquired after the room, she told be she'd only just heard her son wasn't coming home for the night and put the sign up. "Mind you" she said, "It's only a four foot bed." I looked at her dumbly. I was clearly six foot tall. Slightly over, in fact, as I would have told her or anyone else who asked. I was just about to say something stupid when I realised she meant four feet wide. "That's really no problem!"

The next day we moved Katherine's possessions into "The Byre" - a converted goat shed - on a farm called Hyning, just north of Grayrigg. It was a cute little place, divided into thirds. A front room with a wood stove, a middle third divided in two with a kitchen on one side and a bathroom on the other, both leading into a second bedroom at the back. The main bedroom was on top of the kitchen, bathroom and back bedroom, and overlooked the living room, a feature which I loved. There was a wooden beam at roughly hip height that ran across the bedroom but even that seemed a novelty rather than an inconvenience. 

For the next few months, I'd drive up to see Katherine at weekends. In those halcyon days, I could leave Weybridge at a quarter to four in the afternoon and be at Katherine's for eight o'clock. ON A FRIDAY EVENING! And during that time, things unravelled in London. Things weren't going well with the band - partly due to frustration and partly because I'd recently fallen in love with Talk Talk's 'Spirit of Eden' - and my job was moving out to Farnborough. On top of that, I found life far more acceptable in the Lakes, especially as I'd always wanted to live there (a love affair started by Arthur Ransome). And so, in the end, I moved up.

It was lovely at the Byre but we wanted a place of our own and ended up buying an upstairs flat on Mint Street, which was a rung between the diverging Shap and Appleby roads north of the town. We moved in in April 1990 and were married in the July. Katherine had her job in Kendal and by then I was working in Lytham. What we hadn't allowed for was the arrival of Charlie the following March. The flat that had been perfectly sized for us was suddenly awfully cramped as we squeezed around buggies in the hallway and navigated the toys and mobiles and nappy mats on the living room floor. By October, we'd moved out.

We'd bought at the wrong time, really, which wouldn't have been so much of a problem if we'd stayed put, but we couldn't do anything but rent the flat out while we rented ourselves. 

Twenty-five years later, I still own the flat and I still rent it out. Most of the equity has been taken out for various reasons over the years but I like to hang on to it, even though it costs me a few hundred pounds now and then. After all, it's Charlie's first home.

I remember when we moved in, we'd get leaflets through the door, warning us about flooding but in all that time, even when the Kent has been high and overflowed its banks, the water didn't ever get anywhere near Mint Street. It's never seemed even a remote risk. But then, a few weeks ago, when Kendal flooded, the water wasn't only coming up from the river, it was coming down from the hills. The rain fell onto the saturated ground and flowed over the top, seeking its way to the Kent.

I came to Mint Street today because the stairs at the back of the property, from the upstairs flat to the garden, needed looking at. It was the first proper sight I've had of the devastation, with empty houses, front gardens full of carpets and furniture, skips in the road. While I was there waiting, two more vans arrived to remove water-ruined possessions. Away from the novelty and, yes, excitement of seeing the flooding, people canoeing down the streets of our unwanted Venice, then the devastation to people's lives is more apparent. I understand it will be months before people can move back into their homes.

I often feel nostalgic when I return to Mint Street but today it was only sadness.