THE END OF AN ERA

By George, we’ve done it, in the immortal words of Henry Higgins. My wife and I have reached a sales agreement on our little house here in Eastbourne, East Sussex, England. I say “reached an agreement” because in U.K. a sale is never final until the final documents are signed before any monies are paid: no “earnest money” here, the sale really favors the buyer, not the seller. In any case, we will have a cash sale from a charming and, I suspect, affluent mother/daughter combination who live in a nearby East Sussex town. I think our house is intended for the daughter.

I am relieved to have this sale agreed before we leave for home in Florida September 11, but I hope we can expedite the legal paperwork, but, knowing lawyers, that won’t be easy. I’ve lost a few days to talk to our lawyer and the buyers because it has been Bank Holiday this past weekend through Monday, the equivalent of Labor Day in the U.S., just a week earlier. Time is running short. We have some household goods and furniture to dispose of, and I hope to get with the buyers to see what they would like to select from the house and then dispose of the rest, probably to Ali Baba and the forty Thieves, as I refer to liquidators who come in and pay 10 cents on the dollar, if you’re lucky.

We are taking some goods back to America and have made arrangements with an International shipper to come in, after we leave, pack up the items we want and ship by sea. When you ship by sea, it is not weight that counts but volume, and we will have a 25 cubic foot container for our stuff. We have a beautiful nest of four carved nest tables with silver inlays, inherited from my wife’s parents (who owned this house for sixteen years), plus another small table, some china items and personal effects.

On top of this, we have a daughter arriving for a short visit September1, who will return with us on the same flight to Atlanta where she lives, while we then fly on to Fort Myers, Florida. Naturally, we want to entertain her, but it is going to be a juggling act, doing things with her while we clear the house details. She is a great organizer and can be of help, but we also want her to have a good time.

It is the end of an era. My wife’s parents bought this town house, the middle one of three connected homes in 1977 and lived here until 1993 when my mother-in-law went into a nursing home and my father-in-law to live with my wife’s sister and husband briefly before he went into a nursing home. They died within seven months of each other in December 1993 and July 1994. So, it has been in the family almost thirty-five years.

We rented the house for the nine months we weren’t here and, in a couple of cases, for a year when we did not come to England. For the last ten years, we have rented, through an excellent letting agent to mature students who took good care of the house and would go home for the summer while we occupied the house. Their rent for nine months usually covered our expenses for the summer, which was a nice deal.

My wife and I,to a lesser extent, feel sad that we won’t be coming back to this house. It is in a wonderful section of town called Meads; in fact, Meads was once an independent village and, even now, has the characteristics of an independent village with its own center of town and shopping area. We are located next to the downs, beautiful rolling hills leading to the chalk cliffs overlooking the English Channel. We could even see the channel from our bedroom windows. We are about a mile from a famous lighthouse called Beachy Head, a light house standing next to sheer white chalk cliffs in the channel. This is the part of England over which The Battle of Britain was fought in 1940.

We’ll probably come back for shorter visits and rent a larger house or apartment for children and grandchildren when they visit, but not for three months.

Yes, it is definitely the end of a wonderful era in our lives.