After being in Bocking for quite a few months, Catherine informed me that she was buying a house in Braintree.

This was a little bit of shock and after a little bit of a chat, it dawned on me I would have to find someone to share the cottage with me. Admittedly; that though scared me a little as I’d never done anything like that before.

Catherine also commented that she would have to find someone to share the house with her she was buying.

To use my terminology, I took the bull by the horns so to speak, and asked her how she would feel if I was her tenant. To my relief she said she would be very happy with that.

This also meant the cottage would now be empty, and it would be the responsibility of the owner to find tenants.

This was how; I ended up moving to Braintree with Catherine.

If I remember rightly, I was about thirty when I moved into Catherine’s house in Braintree. While being in Bocking I’d had a reasonable size room in the cottage. It was certainly bigger than what Chelmsford had been.

Moving into Catherine’s house, I had the equivalent of the box room, and it really was a box room. However; the house itself was more spacious than the cottage and it also had a reasonable size back garden.

Because Catherine worked for a school, she got the customary six weeks holiday in the summer.

As I was now living with her in Braintree, once again the school summer holidays were approaching. She informed me, she would be going on holiday to America again for six weeks as she knew people out there. I remember taking her to the station and then returning to the house.

Although it shouldn’t have been, this was a very new experience for me, and as I’m not a party animal, I literally had the whole house to myself for this time period.

One of the drawbacks of driving is one doesn’t really have a social life (or at least I didn’t) therefore; when I wasn’t driving, I had no real interests to occupy my time with. It would take about another five years, to discover my interests and passion.

As I commented earlier, I was about thirty when I moved to Braintree, and the following… really should have been common sense to me. I can only presume, because I’d experienced a reasonably sheltered upbringing and life, my thoughts were not in the mode they should have been. I only wish… it had been me.

I can sit here and smile now, twenty five years later, but; at the time I found it very difficult to chat with girls. Therefore; living with Catherine was really pushing some of my inner boundaries to the limit. She was very attractive, but as far as I was concerned, she was totally out of my league. And; far more importantly I was her tenant, so I didn’t want to jeopardize anything. I also, didn’t possess the ‘initiative’ or even know how, to try and approach Catherine.