My Mum and brothers moved house out of Stanley Court to a bigger council house in Hesketh road in Burscough. Heathers family had applied and got one of the new council houses in Fletchers Drive. As much as we loved our own flat in the centre of the village we wanted a house of our own with its own front door on ground level with a garden. The only way we could get one was to apply for a council house. As a childless couple we were so far down the list for Burscough it would probably be something that would never happen. Our friends Chris and Helen had got a house in the new town of Skelmersdale and the development corporation was offering them to anyone that could move in. We filled in the forms that Helen got for us and we posted them off. Within a couple of weeks we had a letter back offering us a house in Little Digmoor.
I took a day off work to go over with Heather to pick up the keys and have a look at the house we had been offered. It was right in the middle of the estate just around the corner from Chris and Helens home. It was a three bedroomed terraced house with an enclosed back garden. When we opened the door I was disgusted with the state. It had been vandalised with paint graffiti and the downstairs windows had been broken. The down stairs toilet had been used and as the water was turned off nothing was flushed away. We even found used needles and burnt tinfoil inside one of the bed rooms. It had been used as squat for drug addicts. We just locked up the front door and took the keys straight back to the Development Corporation offices. They apologised and said it had been checked a couple of days before. I said they ought to check them on the morning they were due to be offered to tenants.
We went home really disappointed until the next week when we got another letter saying there was another property with a garage not far away that we could have a look at. This one was far better with an integral garage, it was built into the ground floor. It seemed a strange layout with the kitchen at the front of the house and the dining room and one of the bed rooms on the rear ground floor with two of the bedrooms and the lounge upstairs at the back of the house. The garden was quite large at thirty feet square and it had a tree at the bottom of the garden. We had a quick discussion and decided that we could make it what we wanted. We went back and told them, yes, we would have it. The next day I went into work and asked could I borrow a lorry to move our furniture. That would be OK so long as I paid for the diesel, my boss told me. So in December 1976 we moved over to Skelmersdale to the house that we were going to start our family in.
We took everything we could out of the flat even the carpets that we had bought when we moved in as we did not have much spare cash. Getting the furniture out of the flat was an adventure. Everything had to be carried around the narrow corridor, down the fire escape staircase at the back and then through the narrow gate into the next doors yard where I had managed to park the lorry off the road. It took two full loads to get all the stuff we had accumulated across to the new house.
I didn’t realise how much we had collected in the nineteen months we had been married. The corporation helped by giving us a grant to redecorate, we bought paper and paint with it as the walls were either orange or blue, even the ceiling in the lounge was purple. It took quite a few coats of emulsion to cover it all up. The whole family chipped in to give us a hand getting the house into shape. Chris checked out the electrics, he was an electrician that worked for Vernons pools in Liverpool. He wired up our electric cooker for us so we had somewhere to cook. My mum came over and helped us with the wall papering and the twins even gave us a hand.
On my travels around North Wales I picked up a load of slate from the construction site of the hydro electric station near LLanberis and used it to create a pot around the tree in the garden. We found out later it was a flowering almond tree, every house on our road had one, and the local pub is called The Almond Tree.
The neighbours were mainly people that had moved out of Liverpool in the late sixties and early seventies for the jobs at the new factories that had been built like Cortaulds and Dunlops. There was even a big television making factory on the next estate called Thornes. Shopping was easy as there was a big new shopping centre with an indoor market and loads of big stores. Heather soon found a new job in the Co-op store and I was still at Hedges. We were further away from our families but we still went over to Burscough to see them every week.
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