The Man In the Rubber Mask by Robert Llewellyn

Author:Robert Llewellyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Memoir
ISBN: 9781908717771
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2015-01-14T18:31:56+00:00

Part II

Chapter 8

In February 1993 I walked around a small rented flat in Shepperton High Street.

‘Yes, it’s okay,’ I said to the nice lady who was showing me around. ‘I’d like to move in next week.’

Once again, I’d been lucky enough to spend most of the British winter in Australia so I was tanned, trim and terrific, though I say so myself. The reason I was renting a small apartment in an outer London suburb? It was within walking distance of Shepperton Studios where we were about to start recording the sixth series of Red Dwarf. In previous series I’d made the daily slog from north-east London where I’d lived to far west London to get to Shepperton. By the time we did series 6, my living arrangements had changed dramatically and I wanted to avoid having to drive many miles every day.

The main reason my living arrangements had changed so much was because when Judy and I got back from our trips to the USA and Ethiopia the year before, we finally bought a house.

I say house, I’m making it sound glamorous, it was pretty much an oversized shed in a field outside a small village in Gloucestershire. It would be easy to assume that because my parents and grandparents came from this area it was my idea to live there. However, Judy had found the place when she was touring around the Cotswolds with an Australian friend. A few weeks later she got the details of a tiny terraced cottage in a village called Oddington, which we thought, ah so amusingly, was appropriate for us as we were both a bit odd.

One cold winter’s day, we drove out of London to see it. We never actually found that house, but instead stumbled on another one we both loved. Judy had stated that she wanted to live in a wooden house on a hill that wasn’t joined to any other houses. I said she was thinking of Australia and we didn’t have any wooden houses on hills in England, and more or less all houses were joined together in rows.

We went to a dusty old estate agents office in Stow on the Wold where a lovely old lady leafed through a book of house brochures. One of the houses caught my eye, but the lady told us we wouldn’t want that one. I had to insist she let me see it again. We took the details and went to see it for real.

What we found that day was a wooden house, on a hill, that wasn’t joined to any other houses. It was almost spooky.

We could just about afford to put a deposit down and, after a massive load of hassle, managed to get a mortgage. I was immediately dumped into paroxysms of anxiety, I’d never bought anything more expensive than a third-hand car before. I’d never borrowed any money from anyone, it really didn’t feel good to me. Suddenly I was in massive debt, just when I’d started to earn some money for the first time.

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