Prince of Wales Lane, SC3: The SC3 Series, Volume 1

By Jacques de Hogdeville

When a young French student had parked his old, dented 2CV, in front of an estate agency in a small seaside town on the East coast of England, he had an absent-minded look at the properties on offer in the window. When he realised how ridiculously low the asking price of a grand palatial house was, he walked in, asked to view the house, and bought it on an impulse, to the shocked horror of his mother and friends. Little could he guess that he was hopping into a trap that would cause him to be followed by the police in several countries, and even offer him an opportunity to discover what it was like to be remanded in custody, all that without ever realising what he was wanted for. Meanwhile, he had made friends for life in the town, and would never be able to stay very long away from his family, his friends, his lovely house, his job a couple of miles down the road, or the local garden fête.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398447974

Jacques de Hogdeville

Jacques de Hogdeville was born in Paris in 1957 and brought up there. He studied English and Scandinavian languages at La Sorbonne and has been a modern language teacher for over 40 years in a variety of countries in Europe and Africa, and at present, teaches English phonetics at the Catholic University in Lille. He lives with his wife in Arras.

Book preview

About the Author

Jacques de Hogdeville was born in 1957, in Paris. After teaching a variety of modern languages in several countries, for over 40 years, he now lives in Arras, with his wife, and teaches English Phonetics at the Catholic University, in Lille.

He fell in love with England when a student, and spends as much time as he can spare in National Trust and English Heritage properties, and of course in London bookstores –including their tea rooms.

Dedication

To the real-life Penny, Kate and Thierry, lovely friends and beautiful souls, with whom I have shared so many cups of tea and home-made scones over the years, and who share my love for England and anything English.

Copyright Information ©

Jacques de Hogdeville 2022

The right of Jacques de Hogdeville to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398447967 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398447974 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgements

My children had for years asked me to write down for them all the family history anecdotes I often told them about around the dinner table or in front of the fireplace on a long winter evening, and I had always thought writing a book was not something I would ever be able to do. But during the Covid19 pandemics, in the winter of 2020, lockdown prevented me from walking to school and going on teaching, and I therefore spent a lot of time at home. It was a good opportunity to try and write a few souvenirs. After completing that book within about a month, I realised it had been such enormous fun researching and writing that I thought I could try and emulate my youngest daughter, who had had her first novel published before her sixteenth birthday (Sarah Walters, Les Enfants d’Ásgárd), but thought that at my age a more complex challenge would be welcome, and that is why I opted to try and write my first novel in English, a language I had been teaching for forty years: if I wanted to be able to express things in La Langue de Shakespeare, I had better not wait till twenty years after I had given up using it on a daily basis. I hope my readers will not find it too difficult to decipher my text!

As this is the page where one traditionally dispatches their expressions of gratitude, I would like to be allowed to thank all those who have made this possible:

First, that awful Coronavirus, which, as mentioned above, gave me, if not the motive, but at least the opportunity to start on this job, even though, like almost everyone around, I shall certainly not thank it for what it has done to my family and so many others;

More seriously, to my Norwegian Tante Marit, who very freely inspired the character of Tante Ragnhild, and who very kindly and patiently taught me her language when I was staying at her place in Bodø as a nineteen-year-old: unfortunately she passed away recently, and will therefore never be able to read these lines and realise how much I have always felt indebted to her;

The late Father Jean-Jacques Marceau, a French air force chaplain, who not only spoke enough languages to compete with popes, but was also a living advertisement for optimism, tea, scones and other cakes, and freely inspired the character of Father O’Sullivan;

Austin Macauley Publishers, for giving me a chance of reaching a wider audience than just my family circle;

Mrs Karen de la Gorce, a dear friend and the gifted artist who brilliantly created the cover picture, following the basic ideas my imagination was providing, and who made such a beautiful job of it;

Many of my friends, both French and British, who may recognise themselves as characters in this story, sometimes under their real first names, although I have always changed their surnames, and I hope none of them will be hurt by what I have written about their eponymous character. They will notice that I have tried to change their situations enough to enable them to deny being the people in the book if they feel so inclined. All I have wanted to do here is to pay a tribute to good people who more than deserve it. But apart from those dear friends, all the other characters and situations, as well as many places in the story, are fictitious, and meant to entertain;

Mr Alexander McCall Smith, who inspired me in as much as he writes lots of lovely stories, and so visibly has enormous fun writing them that it is very encouraging for those beginners like myself who are tempted to tell stories as well and hope to find that task as funny as he obviously does – and I have;

The Head and staff of the French Lycée in Oslo, since it is one of the very few places of interest in the Norwegian capital which I have never visited. I do not know anyone who has ever worked or studied there, and therefore all the characters mentioned in relation to that school are a mere figment of my imagination. I hereby thank them for appearing in this text, and apologise to them if they think they do not appear here in a very flattering way;

And last but certainly not least, my dear, lovely wife and children, for their encouragements and their patience when I invited my fictional characters to the dinner table conversations.

Arras, March, 2021.

Chapter 1

Real estate in England is not actually famous for being particularly cheap these days, and as compared to many European countries, England rather has a reputation for being a place where you had better be rich if you want to set foot on the ‘property ladder’. But it was not always so.

As far as I am concerned, it all started when real estate in England was cheap because the economy was ‘brain-dead’, everyone was trying to sell whatever property they had on their hands, no one was prepared to invest and no one could much afford to invest either. In those days, I am told that even South Kensington was very cheap and some foreign investors who needed to put money into whatever was available bought on the now most sought-after streets of the nicest parts of London, although they did not for one minute believe their investment would pay but at least it was so little money that it could hardly lose a lot of value over the years.

Coming from the continent, I was managing groups of French pupils spending two or three weeks of their holidays in England; they were accommodated at the home of English families with whom they were supposed to speak a lot and improve their English. In my experience, there had been groups who were very motivated and progressed a lot over those two weeks, and others, well, let’s face it, who were less motivated. They had lessons in the mornings with local teachers and we took them out in the afternoons to discover beautiful or culturally interesting places around. I was there with two colleagues, who meant to take advantage of my old blue 2CV and claimed to explore the cultural attractions of England, that is to say, drive with me in the late afternoons to ‘test’ the pubs on offer within a radius of about twenty miles. As I did not want to sound snobbish, I agreed to go with them but as the driver I would limit my input to a glass of Coke or fruit juice while they imposed pint upon pint of all sorts of beers to their poor stomachs. After the second day, I had understood the way it could work, and quickly got into the routine of dropping them in front of the pub they had selected, and, under the pretext of looking for a space to park the car, I went my own way to visit bookshops, and joined them thirty or forty minutes later, only for their umpteenth round of drinks.

That day, we reached that lovely seaside town, and after dropping my two colleagues at the George and Dragon, I happened to park the car in Marlborough Street, just in front of an estate agent’s, and on leaving the car, I saw that grand house for sale at a ridiculous price. So I walked in and asked if there was a misprint or the price was really that low. I was immediately offered a viewing and the estate agent, Mr Gillam, took me there. The house was not in very good condition, in spite of what the estate agent was implying, but it was very spacious and incredibly cheap. Of course it was not at all in South Kensington but that was not enough to worry me, as I never thought I would ever need a place to live in or near London, so this location was perfect for me.

I had not paid much attention to the police patrol car parked just opposite the estate agency when I walked into it. I had only noticed it because I could see its reflection in the agency window, and it somehow interfered with the information about the house, so I had had to shift position to be able to read it in full.

The house had a significant number of bedrooms, which allowed me to dream of starting a family… one day. I thought it had the grand look of some of those National Trust houses I had visited, with its bow and bay windows, and its monumental chimneys, on a more modest scale though, of course. You would not find eighty bedrooms here but to be quite honest I did not need eighty bedrooms and I never would. Or so I could be forgiven for assuming.

And a suitably large or maybe a suitably small garden, large enough to set up barbecue parties with friends and colleagues and take advantage of the shade under those big trees, large enough for children to play in and have a good time while enjoying fresh air but small enough for a non-gardener like me to be able to find a pleasant hobby and spend a little time outdoors, growing things without becoming the slave of an ambitious vegetable or flower garden. In other words, not a National Trust Garden. And with luck this pleasant place could possibly be let and bring me a little money as well. Well, in terms of figures, the garden extended over about two and a half acres, which is more than enough when you get into mowing but there were enough trees around to reduce the mowing, which was something I was going to highly appreciate.

At the bottom of the ground there was a spacious garage which was in decent condition. It had a communicating door with the garden but that door could easily be locked and blocked if necessary. I thought about that because the garage had an access from Alderney Street and I thought that if necessary, I could live there, in the two rooms upstairs, without interfering with or being seen from the house in case there were tenants there. That is, tenants without a car. The garage also had running water, so a bathroom and kitchen could easily be set up there with little work and expense. That would be done soon and I could easily imagine slightly enlarging the downstairs toilet to add a shower and washbasin and putting a sink in the room above it upstairs and deciding that room would be optimistically renamed and used as a kitchen.

And of course the SC3 postcode was flattering (any postcode ending in 1 sounds serious, doesn’t it? But then 2 or even 3 are not too bad either!)

It was the year of the Silver Jubilee. England basically looked like a time warp to me, with its roads creeping with Morris Minors all over the place, when most continental countries were being driven around in up-to-date modern vehicles of all shapes and sizes. In England in those days even my old, dented, blue 2CV miserably failed to look out of place or out of date. And even a respectable estate agent did not object to a Frog leaping out of a battered Paris-registered 2CV snooping around their office and looking to buy some property from them. Even when he asked for my address in the UK, and that turned out to be that of a hostess, Philip Gillam did not seem to object. Maybe I should have found that suspicious, but who cared? Any money was good enough in those days. Any student willing to part with a few pounds was rich enough.

The house was in Prince of Wales Lane. I quite liked Prince Charles, and that address was also another extra criterion in favour of the house, even if that lane branched off Victoria Street, which led me to suspect that the Prince of Wales after which the road had been named was not the current one. But it did not matter. In such a place I felt nicely close to Buckingham Palace, somehow.

And so I eventually did buy the house. The decision was made very quickly, before I even walked into the George and Dragon, where I dutifully celebrated with my astonished colleagues, who found it difficult to understand that I had more or less fallen in love at first sight with the town, where I was certain I would like to come back to now and again, and thought it would be convenient to have a place of my own there without having to book a bed at the youth hostel or decide months in advance when I wanted to come over from home. I had the money transferred from my bank in Paris and I soon found myself the happy owner of a slightly dilapidated house in Prince of Wales Lane, SC3. When I came again at the very end of June, I went to see Philip Gillam again to check all the paperwork that he had done for me, add my last signatures on those forms, recover the keys of the house and take my sleeping bag there.

Well, I suppose it was altogether adequate. The heating was clearly not overdoing its job but the plumbing did perform the tasks it was supposed to (well, most of the time – sort of), and when you pressed a switch, you got some sort of light (most of the time). None of