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him a room.
    Brian Coulson moved in the following weekend. Jenny gave him a bedroom that had a splendid view out over the Mersey and did everything she could to make him feel welcome. He said that he didn’t want an evening meal but he would like her to provide him with breakfast.
    After just one week Jenny knew she had made a ghastly mistake and that taking in lodgers wasn’t working out, but she couldn’t afford to tell him to go.
    Brian Coulson was the most untidy person she had ever known. He left his room a shambles with his dirty clothes left lying on the floor and possessions strewn everywhere. Worst of all he left the bathroom in such a dreadful state with wet towels on the floor and shaving cream and toothpaste splattered all over the mirror that she dreaded going in there afterwards.
    Something else that bothered her were the odd hours Brian kept. He was never home until after midnight and he always seemed to be in high spirits, banging the doors and making a lot of noise when he came in. Long after he went to his room she could hear his radio playing. This she decided was probably why he didn’t get up in the morning until after nine o’clock and usually rushed out to catch a bus with his half-eaten piece of toast still in his hand.
    The following week Jenny received a telephone call from a man called Austin Ford. He told her that he was a lecturer at the university in Liverpool and that he only wanted a Monday to Friday arrangement as he went home to his family in York every weekend. Jenny invited him to come and see the room she could offer him and discuss terms.
    He was a lot older than Brian Coulson and was dressed in dark grey flannels, a dark red wool shirt and a tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows. Jenny didn’t like him very much but she agreed to rent him a room in the hope that once there was another man living in the house Brian Coulson might mend his ways.
    Austin Ford was not only middle-aged and rather set in his ways but at times he could be extremely fussy and pompous. He brought with him a bookcase, which had a shelf that opened out to form a writing desk and he made a great to-do about exactly where it should be positioned in his room. He also gave Jenny strict instructions that she was never to touch it or rearrange any of the books and papers he left spread out on it.
    It didn’t take Jenny very long to realize that she simply didn’t like having lodgers, but since she so desperately needed the money she forced herself to grit her teeth, smile politely and put up with their foibles.
    She had told both men to ‘make themselves at home’ when they first moved in but she had no idea that they would take her quite so literally. Brian removing his tie and leaving it lying on the table or in the chair he’d been using, or draping his coat over the banister instead of hanging it up on the hallstand when he came in late at night was bad enough. When Austin Ford removed his shoes and placed his stocking feet up on the coffee table Jenny felt incensed. She sat tight-lipped wondering what she could do about it as he babbled on endlessly about the political tension that had arisen between Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher.
    A further problem was that the two men had to share the same bathroom and Jenny listened to the heated arguments between them each morning with growing concern. The tension between them whenever they met was palpable and Jenny knew she ought to do something about it.
    The matter resolved itself at the end of the third week when Austin Ford announced that there had been a change in his plans and that he would not be there the following week.
    At the time Jenny thought he was taking a week’s holiday, but when she went upstairs to put clean sheets on his bed she found he had packed and taken all his belongings, even his books and bookcase, with him and realized he had gone for good.
    That same evening Brian Coulson said that it was too difficult for him to get back