A reader writes:
I taught English and Literature for thirty-six years, and I was quite sure that when I retired I would finally read all the books I had been telling other people to read. For about eight months I did. Then my husband Cecil died, and the house we built together on the hill became very large and very quiet.
Five bedrooms. We built it that way because we had four children and Cecil’s mother lived with us at the end. By the time he passed, the children were in Florida, Toronto, Birmingham and Kingston, and every one of them rang on a Sunday to ask whether I was eating. I was eating. I was also sitting in the dark some evenings because it seemed foolish to light a whole house for one woman.
The idea came from Sister Morrison at church, whose niece had been accepted at the university in town and could not find anywhere decent near enough to walk. “You have all that room,” she said, in the way people say things they have already decided. I said I would think about it. I thought about it for exactly one night, because my pension had not kept up with the light bill and I was tired of pretending it had.
That was nearly four years ago. I now have four young ladies in term time, sometimes a fifth in the small room off the kitchen. I will tell you honestly that I did not do it well at first.
The first year I had no written agreement. I had a list of rules pinned on the fridge in my best blackboard handwriting: no gentlemen upstairs, gate locked by ten, wash your own wares. What I did not have was anything about rent being paid on time, or what happens to a deposit, or who pays when the water bill triples because somebody likes a forty-minute shower. One girl, a lovely child, paid for September and then nothing until December, and every time I raised it there were tears. I could not put her out. I also could not afford to keep her. In the end her mother paid, but I lay awake more over those three months than I ever did over report cards.
My son in Birmingham, who is an accountant and cannot help himself, made me sit with an attorney the following summer. We drew up a simple agreement for each room. I also rang my insurance company, which I had not thought of at all, and found out that having paying lodgers was something I needed to tell them about. I will not pretend I enjoyed that conversation or the new premium. But I sleep better.
There have been other lessons. Four young women and one kitchen is a kind of diplomacy I was never trained for. We now have a rota written on the same fridge, and a shelf each in the refrigerator with masking tape and names. I had to put a second water tank in, and a lock on my own bedroom, which felt strange in my own house but was right. My neighbour Mr Grant complained about cars parking in front of his gate at night when the boyfriends came to collect, and he was not wrong, so the collecting now happens at the bottom of the road.
And I have had to learn that I am their landlady, not their mother and not their teacher, although I slip into both. When one of them came in at two in the morning last year I was waiting in the hall in my dressing gown like it was 1985. She was twenty-two. She had been at the library. I apologised the next day, and she laughed, and we are friends.
Here is what I did not expect. The house is alive again. There is always somebody’s music, somebody asking me what “juxtaposition” means before an essay is due, somebody burning plantain. On Sundays I cook, and whoever is home eats with me, and nobody is charged for it, and that is my one indulgence. Two of my old girls, as I call them, came back for my seventy-fourth birthday. One brought her fiancé for inspection.
I am not writing to say everyone should do this. It is work. My knees know it is work. There are weeks I resent the noise and miss the silence I used to complain about. I have asked myself whether I did it for the money or for the company, and I think the true answer is both, and I have made my peace with that.
Cecil used to say, when I fretted about something not happening fast enough, that God is never late but he is also never early to suit us. I thought my useful years had ended in a staff room with a cake and a card. It turns out there was another class waiting. I just had to open the door.
— Mrs E.B., Manchester
Editor’s note
Thank you, Mrs B. Your letter holds two lessons worth underlining. The first is practical: taking in lodgers is a business as well as a kindness, and it goes better for everyone with a written agreement, a clear arrangement for rent and deposits, and a call to your insurer before the first boarder arrives. An attorney-at-law can advise on the right kind of agreement where you live. The second is about seasons. Scripture reminds us that with the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day (2 Peter 3:8). A season that looks like an ending can turn out to be a beginning, and a house built for one family can serve many more.
This article is general information only and is not financial, legal, tax or other professional advice. Please speak to a qualified professional about your own circumstances.
Reader letters may be edited for length and clarity, and names and identifying details are changed.
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