MOC Day 11: tell me a story
- Description
- 650 words
I used "Frames in Fours", "Apple of my Eye" Elements (paint) and "Victory Kit" kit
I told the story of my 'OE' (what New Zealanders call the 'overseas experience' all young kiwis aspire to go on)
I had desperately wanted to return to the UK for as long as I could remember. Every year ‘trapped in New Zealand’ was a year too long. But first I needed money and the ability to get a job in London. So after getting my degree and a year in limbo on the sickness benefit, I realised I could either be in pain and do nothing - or be in pain and still do the things I wanted, ie travel. So I worked for a year at the Broadcasting Corporation and saved every cent I could. By the end I literally only had one pair of shoes. I met XXX, who decided to come too, and fortunately knew some people already there - former workmates at the uni library - so we had a floor to crash on. And then, unexpectedly, a room came up in the same house. We slept in the kitchen of a tiny two-room (one bedroom) flat and two kiwi blokes we didn’t know slept in the bedroom. Before that three Japanese girls had shared the one room. The bathroom and loo was in the shared hallway - which was the source of frustration as other people in the three storey house would come home late at night and leave the front door open, so you would get up to go to the bathroom and be staring out into the night time street. On the top floor lived a oil rig worker who would only be home every few weeks - but would get stoned and play bad music so loud everything in the house shook. Until the night I went up, banged on his door and literally screamed at him to shut it up. :-0 The house was in Brook Green in Hammersmith - already quite a desirable address thanks to the posh St Paul’s School at the end of the street, the proximity to Kensington and the lovely parklike common in the middle of the street. Now you would need to be a multi-millionaire to be able to afford a home there, with houses going for over £3 million. Ours was one of dozens owned by an Irishwoman who lived in a scruffy house down one of the side streets. Every weekend we would have to take a bundle of cash to her house and join the queue of Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans waiting to pay their rent. She liked having us as tenants as in those days you weren’t allowed to raise the rent on a sitting tenant, and we never stayed that long. She was clearly a shrewd businesswoman although she still looked like the dowdy middle-aged cleaning woman she was. Her husband would always be slumped in a chair dozing and breathing out beery fumes. In retrospect I admire her - she certainly would have set her many children up with millions and millions of pounds and I can only hope they made good use of it. I fear perhaps not, though.
Little work was done on the houses and everyone just used them as a place to crash at night. But you needed to be careful what you dropped on the floor before you crashed: rats would eat holes in any socks we left lying around...
But it was close to everything and my first job was even within walking distance - at a finance company five minutes away. I would come home at lunchtime to check the first post - because in those days there were TWO Royal Mail deliveries a day! XX got a job at a polytech library in the East End and made friends with lots of the girls studying there. I went to visit one day and found myself walking past old bombsites with tramps gathered around smoking bonfires, but work was already beginning on the Docklands redevelopment project which would change everything.
