The Egg & The Family by Steve Green

Author:Steve Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Book Guild
Published: 2018-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Linda and I planned to marry in 1984. Also, to move. Some of our best friends in Hampstead had moved on, and the journey from north London, with the change of tube lines at Embankment, simply took too long. We found a bright modern ground floor flat in Wimbledon, south-west London, a manageable nine stops away on the District Line. Wimbledon was another aspirational village on a hill. Our one-bedroom flat was the ground-floor half of a house that had been divided into two. You could hear our neighbours’ footsteps going up and down stairs but that didn’t bother us; we had a little garden, we liked Wimbledon, and we were happy there. Summer afternoons were punctuated by the thud of ball on racket from the Lawn Tennis Club nearby. For a couple of weeks in June, we could hear the roar of the crowd as well, but we never did manage to get tickets to the championships.

We would have the wedding here, we decided, at a big Anglican church down the road. Most of our friends were in London, and it wasn’t hard for the Tamlyns to come from Devon and the Greens from Lincolnshire. So we booked our wedding at St Barnabas for 15th September and made our preparations.

Then Linda’s mother died. The cancer was uncontrollable, and she just couldn’t carry on. Linda and her father Roy were devastated, but after the funeral he encouraged us to let our wedding go ahead. He would be with us, and would give her away.

So it was. There were tears, as well as smiles, but after the ceremony we all went back to our flat for the reception and the cutting of the cake. We had a big party that went on long after midnight. Next day, by prior agreement, we left the mess behind for our sleeping-over guests to clear up, and jetted away to our honeymoon in Paris.

11

We stayed in Wimbledon until 1987, but when we discovered that Linda was pregnant with our son, Robert, we decided that we’d need a house and a garden. Both of us earned respectable salaries but in those days the most credit you could squeeze out of a bank, for a mortgage, was 3.5 times your income. I would have been highly overstressed had I mortgaged us for more, especially since I’d be the sole earner for a while, but still ­– it meant that we were priced out of Wimbledon.

Neither of us knew London very well. We were both working and Linda’s maternity leave wouldn’t start until the autumn. We didn’t have much time to look for a new home but when we did, we looked in places close to the tube lines to and from work.

I was still at the Cromwell, which was as busy as ever. I also now worked part-time at the MCI Hospital in Ealing, further west. I’d become great friends with a Jordanian gynaecologist, Dr Zak (Zouhair) Amarin, and we’d set up a tiny clinical laboratory so that he could offer GIFT to his private patients.

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