The Famous Driver

Anecdotes and Fantasy

I was about six years old, sitting on the wall in Clapham Road. Another child pushed me backwards. I landed on the back of my head and was concussed. A neighbour, who happened to be passing, picked me up and carried me home. I was laid on my bed. Eventually I regained consciousness. My mother was standing over me.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"Yes. I'm fine" I said, but deep down, oh, ever so deep down, I knew I was lying. Damaged brains can recover, but they never completely heal.

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It must have been 1973. I had gone back to live at home after the English and Spanish course at Southampton. The idea was that I would write an M.Phil, a complete exegesis of Lawrence's Women in Love. I made a fair start on that, living on 4 a week from Mother : I didn't qualify for a grant because I didn't get a First.


I typed out twenty three pages, which I still have, but Liszt's Sonata in B Minor got the better of everything. Clare had bought me a Karl Meister grand piano for my twenty first birthday, before she emigrated to the Bahamas.. After breakfast I would quietly walk past the accusing typewriter, looking the other way, with the intention of just trying over a page or two of the Liszt. The next thing I was aware of was my mother calling up the stairs "Peter, your dinner's ready."


My girlfriend moved in with me. She became pregnant. Mother had some kind of a breakdown, tears all over the place. Her henchman, Bill, the wheelman for a group of professional lorry hijackers, and now my ersatz stepfather, was given instructions behind closed doors. He duly appeared and, pointing to Hilaire, said "Git 'er out of 'ere!" We complied and so, homeless and leaving my property behind, we set off to look at a possible squat which Nigel had found in Swiss Cottage.


29 Winchester Road was in the middle of a four storey Victorian terrace consisting of a pub at the corner and six shops each with three floors of living accommodation above. It had all been owned by Camden Council since the fifties, and small businesses had flourished there under short licences, pending the redevelopment of the entire site as a sports centre. One day.


As the houses fell into disrepair squatters moved in and were tolerated, because they were a fire deterrent and generally kept what they squatted habitable, thus putting a better face on the sports centre's delay. The sports centre was never built but Winchester Terrace still stands, with a terracotta ball on a pedestal, atop the rear of the valley gutter between two of the houses. Vincent did that.


"Danger Keep Out" decorated the entrance door. All the other houses had been squatted. This one, classified a dangerous structure, was too far gone for anyone to inhabit. Whole sections of the ceilings were down due to water penetration, and some floor areas would have given way had you walked on them. Denis went ahead with an iron rod testing the floors. The basement was full, to the ceiling in places, with industrial waste left behind by a manufacturer of rucksack frames.


I got to the top floor feeling rotten because I had hit a time of profound change which was unwelcome. I looked out of the top floor window at the setting sun and felt that this was my home. This was true freedom. I gave that building my heart for six years. Me Alan Nigel Denis and Vincent.


At first I chose to settle into the top floor, so I began stripping the decayed wallpaper. The plaster came with it, in such quantities that it couldn't be replaced, so off came the lath and the studs were good for firewood and for repairing other rotten interior walls. The waste was simply thrown out of the rear top floor window, down into an enclosed space outside the basement doors four storeys below. There was a rotten old cast iron bath : heave ho lads! and out of the window it went smashing gloriously across a brick wall down below.


I had no money and no income, but the others chipped in and bought me a bottle of milk and three oranges a day while I rode my filthy mattress through the rubble at night. Hilaire had taken baby Jaime to stay with a friend while I got a room ready for them below the top floor.


As a squatter you have the same freedom as a freeholder when it comes to redesigning your home. Having removed all the ceilings on the top floor we were left under a great central wooden valley gutter which had rotted and let decades of rain into the house. The rafters sloped upwards from the centre, like an immense pair of wings, forming the roof.


Alan was a professional carpenter and took much trouble teaching me things like how to sharpen chisels, how to cut 45 degree mitres by eye and much else that he had learned as a tradesman in Australia, his native country. With no supporting walls left, the valley gutter had to be supported in the centre on a wooden post eight inches square, itself standing on a short brick pier. Alan had been one of Mother's lodgers, but he defected as soon as he knew about the squat. I had bought him an elementary set of carving tools as a Christmas present, and he soon began to carve figures into this central post in high relief : demons curling round the corners of the post with glass inserts for eyes and looking completely different from different angles. Six years later he shipped that totem pole back to Aussie.


We opened up the fireplace and built a new surround for it. We laughed about it at the time but it was indeed an arched, corbelled, cantilevered brick fire surround with an original Victorian marble shelf. Vincent collected disused electric cable and burned the insulation off it in the fireplace before selling it for scrap.


Above the ceiling line was the brick party wall on either side up to the underside of the slates. That was unsightly so I repointed all the exposed brickwork, sealed it with P.V.A. sealer and ran a coving round the whole of the top floor, in bonding plaster, beneath it. It succinctly finished off the divide between the walls below and the ceiling space above.


I don't want to further distort the already dysfunctional situation at home in Streatham : my point of view could only be partisan. Mother was glad to see me looking fit, fine and filthy. She washed all my clothes : of course she did, it was part of the symbiosis. Likewise Bill donated to the squat the discarded canteen gas cooker from United Dairies which he had acquired. It had eight burners and at least two ovens, all built in cast iron, seven feet long, ideal for a community kitchen on the top floor, where Alan, using stolen timber, had built an elliptical table to seat fourteen.


There was no shortage of guests for dinner. On one occasion they met Nigel coming down the stairs wearing a chef's hat which he had set on fire. I first met him in 1969 in a terrifying drive to Yorkshire to Clare's twenty first birthday party, where her apprehensive father stood at the door of the Dowager House at Burton Constable, Clare's teenage home, polishing his shotgun.


Work to the house was going well. We tore the sticky layer of roofing felt and bitumen from the roof, an earlier last ditch attempt to prevent water penetration, and replaced all of that with our own waterproof expedient, so, no more leaks.


Knowing full well what would not happen, I wrote to the Chief Executive of Camden Council pointing out what we had done for his property and asking that he might, on the basis thereof, grant us all a tenancy.


Places at table were soon filled. We took it in turns to cook. My signature dish was toad in the hole with potatoes and green veg. That was just such a socially creative table, Alan. Whatever became of it? You bought an adjustable curved sole plane to round off the edges. A table for fourteen sitting in a perfect ellipse.


So, Mother, you very limited ignoramus craving true experience, there I was, a physically towering manifestation of human endeavour such as you had never imagined that the poetic, diffident and malleable Peter could ever have become.


I needed an income. Nigel had got a job driving the collection van for a well known charity. He gave me a teenage stamp collection, one of what he called his prizes. Soon he was sacked. Nigel just has to be sacked so that he can finally make his point : you think that I need you, but you are completely wrong. I need nobody.


Somehow the job became mine. You might well guess the name of the charity but I am reluctant to say which it was. Let's call it Famous.


This branch of Famous, a shop under licence form the Ministry of Transport pending road widening for many years, collected items donated by the public by sending a van driver round to pick up the donation to be sold in the shop.


I became that driver.


My first call was at a house where a young lady stood weeping in the hallway. Her mother had died, leaving her belongings to Famous, and I was there to take it all away. It was by now clear to me that the promise of Famous to use 85% of the proceeds for charitable work while retaining 15% for administrative costs was the very reverse of where the money went. The shop was managed by a retired military man. All of the money was kept as a roll of banknotes in his pocket. There was no record of receipts or sales. If a rare book were discovered then a man arrived at the back of the shop to buy it for bank notes. Nothing of significant value ever went into the shop, where the local, poor Irish women turned over piles of second hand goods to clothe their children.


"Can I ask you a favour? I really want some breakfast, so, can I come back in half an hour? We already have a great deal of stock so it is quite alright if you want to keep any of this." I opened the draw in the kitchen table. There were seventeen pounds in it. I smiled, left the drawer open and went out.


My next call was at a clothing factory where uniforms were made. I piled them into the van and put on a Green Line Bus driver's jacket which became my uniform.


Next, an old man showed me two derelict and filthy suitcases in his shed. As was often the case we were being used as a supplementary refuse collection agency. "I suppose this is your guilty conscience, is it?" I said. He reported me to my superior, who thanked me for not bringing in yet more rubbish.


Waste disposal was always an issue. I made regular trips to the vast facility in Edmonton where rubbish was burned to generate electricity, though how they burned all those steel bed frames and old cookers remained an unanswered question. And, about once a fortnight, I had to deliver a van full to the limit with unwanted fabrics, rags if you like. That was delivered to a dismal railway arch in Camberwell where girls sat at tables sorting it into bales for recycling. On the wall someone had scrawled "You can't get so low you can't get lower." No hope of repsychling there.


I witnessed much corruption while I worked for Famous. The manager of one of the charity shops let the flat above it and kept the money. The driver who had had the job before Nigel had filled the basement of his squat next door with antique furniture, and sold it all.


I did keep a few items of essential furniture for my home, but not before reading that the aims of Famous were to help anyone in need. I was in need and could not buy furniture on my driver's allowance of 7.50 a day.


Nonetheless, I felt soiled by association with all this dishonesty. to which each day made me more of a silent accomplice. I needed the job but hated the context. Those doing the stealing had no need to; it was just greed. I wanted to do something to separate myself from all of this, so one Saturday morning I struck.


The van was always unloaded at the rear of the shop, so its contents were not available to public scrutiny. On this Saturday I pulled up on the pavement outside the front of the shop. Somebody held the door open for me as I struggled in with a very ornate china cabinet, glazed in bevelled glass. The shoppers soon gathered round. "Oh look" I began "two rings. This one looks like a ruby, and this one a diamond. Some of these trinkets must be quite valuable. And...I can hardly believe it, a first edition of Virginia Woolf!"


The military man soon intervened and took possession of his prizes, but I did feel as if I had had a bath.


Back at the squat we lived for a year with no gas, no electricity and no phone. We raided skips at night for firewood and brought huge quantities of demolition timber home with the van, loading it down into the cellar through the coal hole in the pavement. Once I had found suitable pans and fire irons it was no trouble to cook on an open fire. Clothes came back from the laundrette and were dried by the heat of the cooking. Camping lights for camping in the city.


By now I had moved down into the rear of the shop. I rebuilt the rear windows incorporating salvaged stained glass. Because the ceiling was more than thirteen feet high there was enough room to build a gallery round three sides of the back of the shop, open on the fireplace side. This platform provided a bedroom and my office, from which I again wrote to Camden's Chief Executive telling him how we were now completing a new concrete floor in the cleared basement, the roof was now not leaking at all, and would he please consider granting us a tenancy. I knew there would be no reply. I was rather counting on that, because had he written back and rejected my request my long term plan might have been jeopardised. I was building up a file of unanswered letters that I might one day produce when eviction time came. In part I was testing the society I lived in : was it really as callous as so many people said it was? Denis was training to be a solicitor : he told me what to say when the time came.


All through my higher education I was haunted by the idea of how I was going to earn a living when I was no longer a student. I studied literature and languages because that was always my interest. At Winchester Road I found my vocation. I was able to use my hands as if they responded to some higher, multi-dextrous, manipulative dimension. If I set my hand to anything within my field it just happened, perfectly, every time. That did make me a bit self conscious at times. I was evidently a prodigy. That makes life easier but there are those who don't like it, especially if they have paid their subscription to the Guild of Master Craftsmen and have the sticker on the van to prove it.


So, with my love of three oranges and my pint of milk I had discovered my social function. The next thing to do was to market this skill, and I needed to do that. Time as the Famous driver in the green jacket with chrome buttons was running out. There was one occasion when I stood back and let the "poor" raid the van : wasn't that the ultimate objective anyway?


Also, the manager who had let the flat over the shop and copped the money had been busted and sacked by head office. A new Regional Organiser needed to be appointed. Would I be interested?


That's where Bill, my step father and role model when I was twelve, comes in. He was born in 1919 and so grew up in the era of the cult of masculinity : you just had to be photographed in your boxing kit, showing your determination. (Do read Iron John by Robert Blye.) John Wayne was the archetype of the real man for a whole generation. Bill died with the same John Wayne film repeating itself for weeks on a screen in front of him. Ronald Reagan was a real man; you could see it in his cigarette advertisements. Real men love to address their eager prot as Son. So Bill's fatherly advice to me, in my mid twenties, was "Son. Be a Man. Get out and nick a bit."


So, here it was, my opportunity to be the Man with the bank roll in my pocket, the man who knew, or could easily find out the value of, for instance. an eighteenth century harpsichord. I'd be a Made Man by the time I was thirty!


But, here in the world of bric-a-brac and bank notes was no creativity. Real Man cannot be creative, because he has to follow a script which precludes learning, providing dogma instead. I knew I would be in for trouble, but I wanted freedom. That's a curious longing, romantic, quixotic, self indulgent, time wasting, expense, with everywhere the raised eyebrows. I was throwing my life away for the sake of becoming a non-conformist, subversive freak. I handed in the van keys.


I cut the door of Jaime's room in half so that the top could be left open while he crawled about in safety. His was the first room to be finished. The walls were light in colour, the ceiling black. I poured red blue, green and yellow emulsion in parallel strips onto a paint tray, dipped a very wide brush into all four colours at the same time, and applied it diagonally across the ceiling, adding a white streak of lightning through its middle. Original Victorian coving in immaculate order.


I had begun taking on jobs for people who needed painting, and soon found that they needed a lot of other things doing.


One of them, a professional publisher living in Hampstead, said she had been quoted four hundred pounds for the replacement of her defunct w.c. extractor fan. Did I think that was reasonable?


"Leave it with me".


I opened the unit, took out the printed circuit board, found a replacement for 3.50, fitted it and presented her with an invoice for 12. That was calculated, long term thinking on my part : pure theatre. What these people want is a builder to whom they can entrust the keys of the house, reveal the alarm code, leave a blank cheque, and know that when they come home the builder and all traces of him will have vanished, and a transformation will have taken place. Hence the invitations to the theatre, the ballet and the opera.


For the next twenty five years I carried out property maintenance almost exclusively at this house, at her husband's offices in the city, at the house next door to that, including their business properties in Highgate and a home in Amsterdam, and then at the house adjoining this one, though I turned down the work to the castle in Switzerland. That would have been outside my remit, which is essentially English domestic interiors 1794 - 1924.


At the squat I was being called the fanatic, behind my back. I suppose I would have seemed fanatical. I joined a team restoring the Buckland Showman's Caravan at Kenwood House. This elaborately decorated, Edwardian horse drawn 'gipsy caravan' had been donated to Kenwood House by the owners many years before. It had been sitting on Hampstead Heath for so long that It had begun to decay. The greater London Council took on the task of restoring it so it was towed into a workshop in Hampstead and four of us took on the task.


There are applied carved mouldings all over this fantasy vehicle, in the shape of horses, mermaids, lions and acanthus leaves. All of these mouldings were removed, stripped and repainted with coach paint before being pinned back on. Much gold leaf was applied, even to the wheels. I had to sign the poisons book before the lead primer for the canvas roof could be sold to me. It was a long, slow job. I could only put in an hour or two each day before going on to drive the charity van.


The contractor for the Buckland Caravan project said at the outset "i'll pay you 2 per hour, but there are no guarantees with that." When the Buckland was completed and towed back to Kenwood House my six hundred hour involvement had been paid at 63p per hour. Heritage is, so often, a mug's game.


After my shift at the charity shop each day I came home to dinner, with which I always ate about three pounds of potatoes, before getting on with laying the concrete floor in the basement.


With the caravan completed and the basement floor laid there was then time to get on with what I wanted to do for myself. Ursula.


Ursula is a 1934 Austin 18 straight six, side valve hearse, or 'earse, hence her name. My friend Mike had a tiny 1932 Austin two seater with a boot which opened to form what was called the dicky seat. Another friend, Alan, winner of a clarinet scholarship to the Royal Schools of Music, would stand in the dicky seat addressing the crowds as we drove along, wearing a pith helmet and gesturing wildly. "How are you enjoying your stay in this country?" he would shout at a black man, whose reply, in fits of laughter was "very much, thank you."


In August 1965 Mike went on holiday to Devon in his tiny Austin. At a town called Seaton he discovered an Austin hearse which was no longer in use. I phoned the owner whose number was Seaton 3, in those days. We drove down to take a look. As the garage door opened I saw this huge Austin with velvet drapes inside the windows, a hearse which had been built on an ambulance chassis, using some left over bodywork components from the twenties, so it looked even more old fashioned than it actually was.


Love at first sight is an understatement. The Austin bought me for 20, a whole week's wages at that time, and we drove off back to London.


For about four years I managed to keep Ursula on the road. It was the ideal vehicle for an 'A' level student. Sometimes up to fourteen of us got into it and, scraping up a pound together for the four gallons, we would drive off into the Kent countryside for a hearse ride in the night.


By 1970 I was at Southampton University. Seven of us, my first experience in a commune, had rented a Queen Anne rectory in twenty acres near Romsey in Hampshire, for twenty pounds a week. University staff felt lucky to get invited to one of our prestigious garden parties. We lowered and recovered each other in and out of the 150 feet deep well, until the dog fell in and drowned. One of us knew the formula for gunpowder, so, having made our own fireworks that November, we made a bomb, and detonated a fearsome explosion on the lawn sending a local chicken farm into panic.


But Ursula was not happy. For no apparent reason she would grind to a halt, and then start again after about a quarter of an hour. I had no money and little experience in running an old car. What did I know about a cracked inlet manifold? So I sold Ursula to the woman who eventually became my sister in law, for 169. I was given a copy of Mervyn Peak's Ghormengast, inscribed "to commemorate a great spiritual transaction."


As Ursula was driven away a deep foreboding gathered in my entrails. This was the wrong thing to do. And so it was. One drunken night the new owner swerved to avoid an oncoming vehicle and Ursula, not originally intended to have heavy plate glass windows built into her sides, turned over and was smashed to pieces. Two years later I was offered the wreckage and accepted. Nigel towed me and my wreckage away, into a restoration event which caused me actual nightmares for the coming fifty three years. The whole of the offside was smashed, the front axle bent, the wing and mudguard crushed out of recognition, the braking system distorted, the driver's door in pieces and the roof torn open.


The hearse was towed to 29 Winchester Road and left outside under a flimsy cover. A workshop was needed to carry out the unthinkable task of restoration, so, with Vincent's help, we shored up the shop floor from the basement beneath, unbricked the side of one of the two doors, pushed the hearse in and reinstated the brickwork and door. So, you came into the shop through an ordinary door and found a historic vehicle standing inside.


After fourteen months of work the hearse was ready for its M.O.T. and had to be driven out the same way as it came in. Despite much progress the vehicle was yet a tatty shell.


Thus the fanatic was able to keep fully occupied until eviction time came.


All of Winchester Terrace was given 28 days notice to quit under order 113 of the HIgh Court. A coach arrived containing thirty police officers. The only door which was not already open was number 31, so the Police smashed it in. Old Jim, a homeless tramp, sauntered out smiling and saying good morning. The contractors erected a hoarding across all the houses except ours and one of them got chatting to us. He wheedled his way in and accepted a cup of tea. He asked so many questions as he sat there all day that I began to wonder what his game was. At five he felt it was time to go : I looked at his hair style and thought over his many questions. This was a police officer, still trying to get evidence of a major crime being masterminded at number 29.


Almost all the squatters had fled in fear. Fear of what? I wanted to find out. One or two attended the High Court hearings but nobody had sufficient grounds to avoid being evicted. Then it was my turn : _"I respectfully request that the Plaintiff be equitably estopped on the basis of these unanswered letters." That request could not be ignored : it was part of the legal procedure, so my case was passed on for a further hearing. At the second hearing my case was upheld and passed for a third hearing. It was then submitted for scrutiny by Mr. Justice Milmo in the Master's Library.


I watched intently as this senior member of the legal profession patiently read through my third affidavit, now thirty two pages in length, and later substantially pirated and used in a publication called "Squatting : the real story."


At length the verdict was given. "Mr. Manzoni, I can see that you went about things in the right way from the outset. I now refer this case to the County Court for full trial."


That left number 29 sub judice for the following eighteen months. The Council, at huge expense and inconvenience, had to work around this central house. It was already obvious that they might have granted the tenancy of a council flat at least to those of us who had a baby with them, as they had done with everyone else. But no. We were just too suspect. We had to be terrorists or major drug dealers : our story had not added up, despite police raids. There would be a violent knock at the door and we were told "You must let us in. There is a man on the roof with a gun." Yawning, I let the Police in saying "if you find anything, can we go half each?"


Were we too good to be true, or too true to be good?


At the County Court trial I sacked the worse than useless legal aid barrister and took over as a litigant in person representing myself and fellow squatters. The Council's barrister took me aside in a corridor and told me how, in no uncertain terms, he would have me out of that property, as he scrutinised my trousers and shoes with a contemptuous expression. Little did he know how I yearned to be released from a domestic situation now made so ugly by the presence of those who had lately wheedled their way in and were anathema to me.


After two days of scrutinising the evidence it was recommended that we be given Council tenancies. I was the only one to take up the offer. Vincent would only consider a property which had no roof.


When Hilaire had moved out of the squat, Sharon had moved in. We had a daughter but parted after being rehoused twice by Camden. I was granted the tenancy of a one bedroom flat with a view of the British Library under construction, in a ghetto in Kings Cross, starting at nine pounds a week. I moved in and closed my own private front door on the world for the first time in my life.


Twenty years later, thanks to Margaret Thatcher, I sold the flat for a quarter of a million pounds.


At the time I left Winchester Road, with my grand piano and the hearse, I was still finding clients whose houses I could work on. By then I had become Captain Caustic, stripping furniture and doors. for a restoration firm where I was in charge of a thousand gallon tank of a heated solution of caustic soda. This was the era of stripped pine and there was much work available removing paint from interior woodwork and finishing it with shellac sealer and wax, hence my nickname Pete the Stripper.


One of the customers, Phyllis, having her doors stripped, was looking for someone to help her refurbish a Victorian house. I took on several tasks and eventually worked for two years on the same house. It was here that I taught myself to restore enriched plaster cornices. They were built from interlocking sections moulded in plaster of Paris. If you took a section down you could soak off all the accumulated paint, which consisted of many layers of water based paint which they used to call distemper, before modern day emulsion was invented. Once cleaned all the original detail became visible, usually the ubiquitous acanthus leaf, or a grape vine. That section was then laid on a bench with a wooden frame around it, and then an ingenious substance called Vinamold was heated till it melted and was poured over the piece in question. Once cooled the workpiece was removed, leaving a flexible matrix which would produce any number of identical sections. Plaster of Paris was poured into the mould and twenty minutes later you had a reproduction of the original. In this way I could replace whole lengths of missing Victorian cornices. I would then spray the whole installation with household bleach to homogenise it.


Good. A neglected, fine old family house was lovingly restored, having been an ugly and neglected maze of bed sitters for decades.


All was not well. Phyllis was having marital problems because she had relationships with her girl friends of which her husband, John Stein, did not approve. His public school accent sounded quite normal as he said, echoing stepfather Bill, "and get that dyke out of here."


So, John bought Phyllis out and she moved round the corner to Islington, where I set her up again, all stripped pine and mahogany kitchen.


A few years later I wrote to my son about the property Phyllis had vacated.


"Where a marble fireplace was missing one was found and installed. I stripped and repaired all the cornices, copying original parts to replace any of the missing original decorative plasterwork. From the remains of the ceiling centre piece in the rear reception room I reproduced and reinstated two twenty five piece sets of acanthus leaves, about two feet in diameter, with another crown of leaves moulded in plaster inside that. I stripped, repaired and refinished every detail of the original staircase. All the pine floors, except in the carpeted bathroom, were stripped and repaired in period timber. Doors, door cases, shutters, shutter cases, windows and the front entrance door were all refurbished, polished and painted. Door and window furniture likewise. Even the walls of the coal cellar were deeply repointed. In the end the very neglected old house had passed from being a collection of seedy bedsitters into something that felt so near to being its original inspiration. Somehow, just for once, an act of atonement for all the rape and violence done to our Victorian heritage in the sixties. "I shan't be leaving here unless it's in my coffin" said Phyllis.


The day before yesterday I drove down that road and stopped to see if I could catch a glimpse of the cornice in the front room. Had they decided to paint the flamboyant collection of leaves in the middle of the ceiling instead of leaving the plaster of Paris unfinished as had been chosen when it was restored?


I looked upwards, between the joists of the first, and then second and third floors, through the roof timbers, and saw the sky.


Presumably John Stein had sold the house to a developer to turn into - you got it, bedsitters. The top of the skip was littered with shards of plaster acanthus leaves."


This event marked the end of my involvement with the aspirations of those with middling means. Only the very rich can give any meaning to heritage, and even there it pays to be very choosy if the work is to be felt as self expression as well as a contribution to the continuum of all that's fine.


Had I brought a period house to that level of restoration I would, as its joint owner, have put restrictive covenants in the deeds. But then I'm out of touch with reality, by vocation I have to be. What I see as a huge loss for those who value heritage and tradition is a mere counter on the board in the game of fashion and financial incontinence. I began taking on maintenance work for business premises where there is much less potential for heartbreak.