What to do next?

What to do next; well the first problem that arose was, that as at this time I was under twenty one and you needed to be over twenty one to get a mortgage so buying a house seemed to be out of the picture. However you could get a loan to buy a business! Go figure that one...

Grandad and his brother Bill had had fish and chip shops and they had been good businesses. Mom and dad had worked in these shops and knew this was probably a solution of what to do about richard. So the hunt was on and we started hunting round the estate agents for a good business. I remember one in Wakefield, Good takings with potential and a decent flat above. We rejected it, which fifty odd years later I still regret; a different path. We had been living in the spacious modern flat above the garage and basically were spoiled. Instead we went for a rural shop and cafe outside York at Sherrif Hutton. Poor takings and little potential but...

Well it seemed a nice quiet village (surely thats what you want to expand a business!) and it had a LARGE workshop / barn at the rear ideal for storing / working on a dragster, it had a cafe, and would you believe it a flat above. Downside there were lodgers in the flat that the owners couldn't get rid of. But we still went ahead and bought it. Argh.

So much went wrong here. Because we didn't know what we were doing. We lost money on each fish we sold as the portions were to big, built up lots of trade though! Had to get Alwyn to go to court for us to get rid of the pesky lodgers, meanwhile it was like living in a haunted house as the partition walls were paper thin and you could hear people moving about at the other side of the wall. We were constantly loosing money so eventually I got a job in Leeds and commuted and we sold the property at a loss! Final ignominey, the purchasers soldit on at a big profit by selling it as one BIG house. I'd like to say at this point you live and learn, I'd like to say... 😄

Mom chose a bungalow in Garforth, its here dad died; mom never settled.