We lived in a semi-detached bungalow, that is it was one of a pair, in a street of pairs of semi-detached bungalows. They were built in 1963, we moved into ours the following year, someone had lived there for a year and then decided it was not for them, sold it and moved on, but not before doing the simple things that folks do to a new house, plant some simple hedges, lay a lawn etc.
So we had a lawn, front and back, and so did all of the other bungalows in the street and for the next thirty five years it continued that way until we sold the place after the demise of our parents, every bungalow in the street had a garden with a lawn, just as you’d expect.
Except for Stan Laurel next door.
Ned and I quickly named our new next door neighbour “Stan Laurel” for the simple and yet very effective reason that he actually looked like Stan Laurel, and so Stan Laurel became his name and he still lives there and Ned and I still call him Stan Laurel and 47 years after he bought the bungalow fresh from the developer Stan Laurel still hasn’t sorted his back garden out.
His front garden was simple, he just concreted it over and parked his car on it.
His back garden was simple too, he just pretended that he didn’t have a back garden, still doesn’t have a back garden.
And so every year our dad would mow the lawn in our back garden whilst over the fence the grass and the weeds and the brambles and the nettles just grew higher an higher and we stopped taking bets as to whether or not they’d reach six feet high after a few summers.
At the bottom of our back gardens were the back gardens of the houses in the street beyond and one year the owner of the house that backed onto Stan Laurels wilderness garden chopped down a mature silver birch tree, huge thing it was, and he sawed it down in pieces and threw all of the pieces into Stan Laurels wilderness garden, Stan Laurel never knew for he never ventures down to the bottom of his wilderness garden, and the tree still lies there, everyone else knows its been there for thirty years but Stan Laurel hasn’t a clue.
Both Stan and his wife Georgina (think the wife off The Woodentops) were/are both profoundly deaf and we were never sure if the fact that Stan was stone deaf affected his gardening ambitions, I have my doubts but our dad convinced himself that all deaf people must hate gardens, so why did Stan buy a bloody bungalow with such a big garden if he never intended to even attempt to walk down it even once in 47 years ?
Their deafness had it advantages, for we could play our music as loud as we liked in our bungalow and the neighbours would never complain, would never know that we had the amplifier turned right up to number ten, but it had its disadvantages too for Stan and Georgina did not understand what the knob on their TV set marked “Volume” was for – as far as they were concerned it was a knob that did nothing for they turned the knob marked “Volume” on their TV set and nothing at all seemed to change.
We’d sit in our bungalow some nights and because our mother was a bit forgetful we (the three males in the house) would omit to remind her that Wednesday night was Coronation Street night and we’d leave BBC1 on, sniggering behind our hands as 7.30 passed by and she’d appear to have forgotten again, until from next doors TV set you’d hear the unmistakable refrain of “dah-dah-dah dah-dah-daaaaaah” and our mother would jump up from her armchair, rush to our TV set and turn the tuning knob around to ITV, “eeeh I nearly missed it again” she’d exclaim as she sat back down while we cursed Stan flipping Laurel and his television set with the maxed-up volume.
NOTE - Yes kiddies, in the days before remote control you had to get off your arse and turn a knob to watch something different on the TV.
On the nights that our family and the Laurels next door were watching the same channel it didn’t matter, in fact on those nights we would experiment by turning the volume right down on our TV set and listening to Stans TV instead, our dad thought you saved electricity by watching TV with no volume so he was quite pleased on those nights – but on the nights when the Laurels were watching a different channel to us you had two choices, you either turned your TV set up full volume to drown theirs out or you’d wait until our dad couldn’t stand it any longer, throw down his newspaper, and storm out of the house yelling all the way up the Laurels garden path “Turn your bloody TV down you deaf old gits…” or similar.
And they’d apologise and Mrs Laurel would blame Stan and in that way that deaf people talk with stunted syllables she’d say “ids him, he cadn’t ‘ear ipt see” and Stan would stand at the door and shrug his shoulders for of course not only could he not hear his own TV set but he couldn’t hear what his wife was blaming him for again either, nor did he ever work out why our dad kept coming around and hammering on his door.
Stan was a joiner and one summer he was made redundant so with his redundancy money he employed a builder to build a huge garage in part of the wilderness back garden, it was more of a barn than a garage with two huge wooden doors, “ahm goin to worbk from hombe” he mouthed to our dad, “as a selb-embloyed carbenter” and our dad laughed loud and long for he could not imagine who on earth would employ a carpenter who was too bone idle to even scythe the weeds down in his back garden once a year.
True enough as it turned out, for the builder who built the barn left the huge wooden doors unpainted, and so did Stan Laurel. we never saw him use the barn as a workshop, indeed we never saw the doors ever opened, we doubt that Stan Laurel recalled anything about having a barn in his garden after a couple of years for it grew over with brambles and weeds and the last time I saw it the huge wooden doors had rotted away to sawdust and had fallen off their hinges – a great advert for Stan Laurel, expert local carpenter.
