By

Craig Ennew

—

Thirty-One: Another One Fights the Dust

This week: the Ennews finally move into The Shack!

“Would sir care to have the turndown service this evening?”

It is a scene that evokes pity in the hardest of hearts. The room is stripped bare save two stained mattresses on a rubble-strewn floor: upon one, a scrunched-up, orange duvet; on the other, a dishevelled sleeping bag with a broken zip. Modest paraphernalia lie at the edges: tea-stained mugs now half-filled with water, loose items of clothing, random car-keys and scratched mobiles. From another room, the raw coughing of a consumptive child breaks through the darkness: the sound of a tired, spent engine turning over and over and over.

And dust.  Everywhere, there is dust.

***

West Lulworth, 6:30am.   Forced to shower at my mother’s when I arrive in Salisbury, I’m wearing my trackies and am climbing into our battered Qashqai to embark on my seventy-minute north-eastern commute.  As I do so, an energetic walker strolls past and hails me with a travel mug. 

“Are you from the new place?” she breezes. She indicates beyond, where two heavily-loaded skips, hide our stripped recent acquisition that squats ashamedly on the hillside.

I rest my hand on the steering wheel. “Yep,” I confess. I reflect that ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind.

She passes her free hand through the window. “I’m Molly – I live just up the road,” she says. Then, “Wait a minute… you’re not actually living there now, are you?”

 “Yep,” I repeat. In the hope of not being perceived as a total imbecile upon first acquaintance, I add: “All we have in there at the moment is a toilet and a sink.  No kitchen.  No hot water.”  

I’m not sure why I’m sharing this, but I do know that the result is a sudden withdrawal of the hand. She rubs it slowly down her top adding, “You’re very brave,” before quickly retreating towards the far end of The Launches.

The new ‘lucky’

I’ve come to understand that ‘Brave’ is the new ‘lucky’. Less than a week ago, ensconced in the temporary haven of the Worth Matravers cottage, we’d regale anyone who would listen with tales of the little picturesque cove and dainty thatched roofs of the coastal village that would be our final resting place. You’re so lucky, people would say. Living by the sea! I’m sooo jealous! At the time, my wife and I would shrug dismissively. Luck, schmuck. This was planned! We had lined our ducks up and were turning them into crispy pancakes. We’d made this happen! Back then, in our naïve little minds, everything was simple. We would move out of Kings Road and stay in the cottage at Worth until early May, by which time Will the Builder and his team would have all but finished their part in the transformation of The Shack. Granted, nowhere on Will’s meticulous, colour-coded spreadsheet of works promised a May sign-off, but that was by-the-by. To each other, my wife and I had acknowledged that, removal of the wretched asbestos factored in, things might creep into mid-June, early July; we’d convinced ourselves that by Summer, the builders would be tinkering around with skirting boards and polishing kitchen drawer handles. Cue the careful placement of an attractive bowl of limes on the kitchen island and swooshy ‘grand reveal’ music.

Coming on nicely: the kitchen

So, to say we’ve been in denial is an understatement. I exaggerate not when I say that we are currently living on a building site. To his credit, Will the Builder has tried to accommodate our premature encroachment with the limited means he has: our bedroom has been plastered; the ensuite is tiled and functions as our bathroom (a working shower and running hot water have also supplemented our utilities since my early-morning conversation with the neighbour). The Boy has his own room at the back: an unwholesome, cobwebby cave, but a space he seems to prefer over the hideous alternative of sharing a room with an old man and a slightly less-old lady. In terms of food prep, we share a kitchen with the builders – and for ‘kitchen’, read ‘filthy microwave and kettle on an old worktop surrounded by random batteries, screws and empty Ginsters wrappers’. We have allowed ourselves the extravagance of an air fryer and the necessity of a corkscrew to enter the fray. And if you’re wondering how Percy the Cat fits into this mayhem- well let’s just say we’ve found a use for the chicken coop. If this madness drags out for much longer, I might be joining the poor bastard in there.

Managing

Now a week in, my wife says, somewhat unconvincingly, “Well, given everything, we do seem to be managing.”

I want to tell her: we are on the very edges of ‘managing’. Us and ‘managing’ have briefly exchanged glances across a crowded street and are now heading off to opposite corners of the galaxy. But I’m not sure that she sees my healthy dose of cynicism as being the panacea to crisis in the same way that I do, so I keep quiet. But we will make do. And we always have wine.

Getting home each evening, our lives have been reduced to a solemn ritual of ‘making do’. Because contractors are all over the property, plastering, drilling, installing under-floor heating and the such-like, we have promised Will that we will leave the place as a blank canvas at the start of each working day. Hence, when we arrive home of an evening, we are getting out our portable fridge, food supplies, camp chairs, TV, mattresses, pillows, and camping lanterns, to settle for a cosy evening in a la Beirut in the early Eighties.

The “spare room”

Come 6am the next morning, it all happens again, but in reverse. Bleary-eyed and cursing, we pack our lives back into the sheds and head off to work and school. The weather has largely been kind to us; but there was one morning when my wife coped with the re-packing alone in the driving rain, which by all accounts was an unfathomably bleak low for her.

Effing and jeffing

All of this is made even more testing by the fact that, currently, there is just one place to access the building. Naturally, this happens to be on the opposite side of the property to where the storage sheds are located. In addition, this makeshift, plywood door can only be locked from the outside. Therefore, if we want speedy access to the sheds, or need to lock said temporary door at the end of the evening, one of us having to clamber, effing and jeffing, in or out of the bedroom window.

The window itself opens just wide enough to allow a body to do pass through and is at just the right height to make anyone attempting to do so look like the most inept cat burglar in the universe. Clad in just a t-shirt, pants and Birkenstocks, my preferred technique is to grab my right ankle with my left hand in an attempt to twist my legs at impossible angles so that I can access the other side. Almost without fail, The Boy will be waiting there, grinning as I flop in an ungainly heap. He, of course, is able to pass through with lithe grace; although there was some comeuppance recently when, in my absence, he managed to break the window’s mechanism entirely by shoving it back too far.

When you do pass from outside in, it’s like connecting with the surface of the moon. You are consumed in dust. There is a cloud of dust as your lay your mattresses down each night, a cloud of dust as you rest your mug on the window ledge. Even the act of blinking seems to raise a mushroom cloud that would make Kim Jong Un blush. Dust for breakfast, dinner and tea; dust covers our shoes, streaks our clothes, and coats the insides of our lungs.

I know what you are thinking: that we have made our own dusty bed and that we must now lie in it. That there are millions of people in many war-torn areas of the world who endure much worse living conditions day in, day out without complaint or the remotest sign of an end to it all. To which, quoting CeeLo Green, I utter this humble reply: forget you.

©Craig Ennew 2025

Please feel free to leave a comment on this post!

Please feel free to leave a comment on this post!