By PETER VANSITTART
HOUSES have always absorbed me. Swedish manors with generals going mad in the library; 338 Rue St Honore where Robespierre lived during Terror '94; the home with a certain locked door, the children convinced that a gal- lows was behind it; the Tudor mansion-turned- prep-school where, as acting HM in 1940, I received from a distraught parent a loaded pistol with which to shoot Robert and Charles if the Germans landed. Eventually, for £600 cash, a jazz-man on the run sold me a large house for my own, stuffed with stolen furniture. Dazed with sheer possession I travelled about it recklessly naming the rooms. Breakfast Room, Studio, Still Room, Bar . . . but, of course, they had to be let, myself, the despised rentier, camping in the Library.
The aftermath became like a dated novel of small misadventures among people at once dim and vivid; like Trojans, rich at a distance. To avoid paying rent they would wriggle into attitudes barely conceivable. The salesman gratuitously painting the hall bottle-green and demanding recompense, the artist offering her appalling abstracts, the woman with lunacy or sardonic subtlety arriving daily with cold tea and dead flowers. And Mrs Hodson, who always spoke in blank verse. 'I can bear rain and thunder/I can bear the darkness/ But the wind, the wind/ I cannot bear.' Indians abounded. One gave me a grubby handwritten MS over which he had paid f75 reader's fee to 'Graham Greene's brother.' Would I add my opinion for £30? 'Not
obscene at all!' A few pages shorter than War and Peace, it was worthless but I conscientiously finished it. Could it, he demanded, be published?
Tactfully I replied that it was technically pos- sible. 'Good man, good man, you must kindly wait then and be paid out of the royalties.' Later he relented and presented me instead with a secondhand copy of The Splendid Days of Bruce. Another used special language. 'Old man, a word in your car, I don't want to upset the apples but I think my wife's gone phut,' recalling the famous epitaph on Gandhi, The hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket.'
There was Girlie and Mate, a middle-aged couple, 'Ours is a do-it-yourself marriage,' end- lessly playing Mozart to give their baby good taste. But they had offended their West Indian neighbour, C (or Sea) Breezes, by lending him a tin-opener on which he had cut himself, so in riposte he rocked the house with pop. During the freeze-up he manufactured ice-shillings for his gas-meter, a success countered by his need to boast of it.
There was the Colin-Jordanite, who trained on Hampstead Heath with a wooden rifle and had himself photographed in the People wearing SS uniform and displaying my address. He covered my walls with anti-Semitic slogans and insulted coloured people from a safe window. Why keep him? Summary ejection was of course his own creed. 1 believe in forgiving and persuad- ing a monster ninety and nine times, after that, either hit back hard or dedicate yourself to him for life. He was boastful, cowardly, lonely, a com- pulsive liar, on National Assistance ('Jews and Blacks are given the best jobs') and five feet high. 'Tell me,' I said, 'why you so admired the Nazis.' 'They were such fine figures of men,' he said wistfully. 'Himmler? Hitler?"Yes, when you got to know them.' He finally gave me notice, owing me £60 ('Jew-lovers should pay me for living here), saying he had been appointed to Government House, Hong Kong. Behind his back I packed up his luggage and sent it there. Then M. O'Lynn, who put up a plywood wall and sub- let half his room for a rent double what he paid me. He admired my Chinese student, whose name in translation was 'My Father Wanted a Boy.' My best tenant was the resonant Douglas Van Levers Fancy who hired a large room, in which to stack a pair of riding boots. My most unusual, Dr Orlick, who paid a year's advance for an attic room and never reappeared. Subsequently it was invaded, found empty of all furniture and bolted on the inside. My own role was confessor, scape- goat, pasha, moneylender, dean, surrounded by half-strangers, half-intimates, wholeheartedly re- senting yet needing me. Ageing girls whose boy- friends jibbed at nothing but marriage, seated before mirrors that whispered 'Others are Better.' Foreigners awaiting calls that never came and wretchedly chirping 'See you later.' The elderly awaiting dreadful verdicts.
Landlords have few friends and are probably doomed. 'The new Rent Act,' hissed Mr Ng, 'is aimed at you personally. But it's not enough. Silly Queen and daft Parliament!' But let our successors be as wide open. My bell was inces- santly rung by people applying for rooms they did not want and seldom bothered to see. 'You're not exactly a gentleman,' a well-dressed vagabond told me, 'but at least you pretend you're in- terested.' That perhaps was it. Ludicrous projects for tenants' charters and community activities dwindling to cynicism, then an eye for copy. But something else lingers. At my rival's, a council block, an old lady died. 'Nobody came today' was written for every day in her diary during her last two years of life.
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