Yep - it's all true.I’d seen the consequences on a number of previous occasions and then... it happened to us - in between having the offer accepted on our current house and exchanging contracts squatters moved in!At least it was the responsibility of the vendor (a building society as the property was in repossession) to get them out as it was prior to exchange. Unfortunately, this took 5 months to achieve, by which time winter was setting in. In fact, the building society and its court orders were totally ineffective, and it was really the onset of winter which got them to move on. Well, that and the nice man from the electricity board who used the equivalent of a giant pair of insulated bolt-croppers to remove the meter thus rendering the “free” heating that they had been enjoying up to that point inoperative. They didn’t go without a fight though – first they burnt everything that was easily removable in the house (the kitchen drawers and cupboard doors were a favourite) in an effort to keep warm. (One must be eternally grateful for the fact that their efforts to remove the original Victorian internal doors were largely ineffective and left us only with some substantial repairs instead of replacements to deal with.) To this day the remains of the hole burnt through the floorboards near the fireplace in the sitting room bear witness to how close they came to torching the entire building! When it all proved too inconvenient they then filled the fibreglass fish pond with rocks (rupturing the liner), threw a TV through an upstairs window, smashed 50% of the panes of glass in the windows, went out onto the roof through the skylight and, using a hammer, smashed up the tiles in a place that could not be seen – thus ensuring that serious and very costly damage was done to the upper floor as the full force of the winter hit during the further 3 months it took us to finally gain possession upon completion.To add insult to injury they had left rubbish hip deep (I do not exaggerate) on both floors, and had produced a substantial “art installation” on the walls of all rooms re the problems of being homeless.We moved in with a toddler in the February and our second child was born six months later. It took us three years until we found and disposed of the last needle and syringe from the garden where they had been casually but routinely discarded, all the while desperately hoping that one of the children wouldn’t beat us to it.This is standard behaviour I’m afraid, and I’ve only described the “highlights” here...In the first week we were there on of them had the audacity to ask me if he could “have his fridge back”, as he had “accidentally left it in the kitchen” when he had moved out. When I declined I was seriously threatened by a very large gentleman who turned up later that evening to a party in the garden of an unoccupied house on a nearby corner – and that one they did burn all the doors from! The Police were not interested – either in the threats made to me or the burning of the contents of the house on the corner.Personally I think a public flogging is way too good for them.And what REALLY annoys me is that they all think that the world owes them a living and that “rich b*st*rds” like me are somehow denying it to them by some devious means. Attempts to explain that I was born of a lowly typist and steel worker (staunch socialists the both of them) in a grimy flat in a not very nice part of a not very nice town in South Wales and spent the first six years of my life living in a council house with not two pennies to rub together so I know something of deprivation and how to dig oneself out of it always seems to result in selective deafness.RANT OVER! (what was the point? I dunno, but at least I feel better even if I have opened myself up to all sorts of criticism from the local branch of unreconstructed class warriors that occasionally lurk around these parts.) Oh, and the final insult from these people - they attempted to steal one of the fireplaces the day before completion. Fortunately, I intercepted the note that he had left pinned to the front door asking his mate to arrange a van; he'd pulled it off the wall, but it was too heavy for him to make off with on his own...
Tony Colliver ● 6256d