Page 189 - It's a Rum Life Book 3 "Ivy House Tales 1970 to 1984"

CHANGE OF DIRECTION
In the meantime, I set up a small commercial tyre sales business and began to supply
commercial haulage clients with decent second hand tyres, for cash.
That business was trading sufficiently long enough to help me buy the “Northcote” property
and then I had a better offer.
Ken Rundle, My next door neighbour and part owner of the John H Rundle business in our
village offered me a job. His regular driver John was diagnosed with cancer and needed
some time away.
I took on John’s lorry until he was to return and began another amazing episode.

‘That Attack’ happened in late October 1993, we bought Northcote in about February of
1994.
I began working for Rundles and moved all at the same time, Easter 1994. Christmas of
1983 will never be forgotten.

CHRISTMAS 1983
We still had the awful problems and Court hearings with our vindictive farmer “friend”
making demands on our property to get his own back for my actions as local Parish
Councillor in re instating local footpaths. (see ‘Litigation’).

Matters were far worse because I had finally lost my business and in unpleasant
circumstances, my solicitor being so inept and then, eventually loosing the lovely Georgian
family home we had enjoyed for over 14 years.

Even without the constant pressure from Midland Bank, without a decent income I could
not possibly afford to live at Ivy House. The costs of upkeep of a Georgian Country house
even in the 1980’s were extensive to say the least.

The mortgage was not huge but it did not stop there.
We held an auction sale on the premises in November and sold all our “moveable assets”!
Including most of our horse drawn carriage collection and my last Jaguar saloon a 1968
white 3.8 “S” type with wire wheels.
Then we lived on the proceeds “frugally” for two months.

“NO PRESENTS FOR YOU, BROTHER”
Christmas was coming with empty pockets, very little income and no job.

One reason I will never forget that pathetic Christmas was because my sister phoned to
say that as we could obviously not afford presents for the family, her husband and herself
had decided they would not embarrass us by sending anything at all to us!!

She was married at that time to husband number two. A dreadful clone of Arthur Scargill.
Everything you said or did he had done ten years previously and better of course.

An example was a few years previously, we had traded well for a couple of years and we
bought a second hand but almost new Mk 1 Jaguar XJ6.

All my previous cars had been very second hand, like £250 maximum, but this XJ6 was
very different. Not for her husband John though, he ran a “wedge” British Leyland’s latest

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