The Office

The front room at 4 Lodge Road had several uses - as the dining room, the music room, and my office  - but it was rarely used as a dining room mostly because the office steadily took over. My 'work station' started with the big pedestal desk which I bought while we were at Hockley. At the time we had a Mini 850 with a roof rack and I brought the whole desk home in one go, with the drawers in the back of the car and the desk upside down on the roof, through a thunderstorm.

Once at Lodge Road, the shelves around the desk steadily grew and grew. To my right I had the computer, an Amstrad 6128, hooked up to an electric typewriter which belonged to the NAS/UWT but which also printed Gill's 'Sunflower' catalogue. To my left I had my music: the cassettes were in rows right in front of me, the cassette player and amplifier were to the left above them, and the two speakers were on the shelf above. Finally, the most-used reference books - among them a dictionary and a thesaurus - were straight in front of me.

In the left foreground is a piano stool. Our piano was a good one, a Bechstein, which came from my uncle Frank, my father's eldest brother, who was a FRCO. The three older children all had piano lessons.

At my desk I did much of my union work, I did all my lesson preparation and marking of exercise books, and I began to write short stories and completed my first novel.

I produced huge amounts of teaching materials, particularly worksheets, booklets and overhead projector slides. I kept 'masters' of all this material and took them up to Scotland with me as an insurance policy: if the shop didn't work out, I could always go back to teaching.

One of the features of the room was the original tiled fireplace which had a red marble surround and mantelpiece - I think the marble came from somewhere in the west country. When we bought the house this had been covered with several layers of white gloss paint which I steadily removed.