(Please do realise that I say all of the following knowing how incredibly fortunate we are to be in the situation where we can afford to own a house AT ALL, let alone one as nice as the witchery (for all its damp and work-neededness), and that I am very aware that this might make me sound like an ungrateful arsehole. I don’t think I’m an arsehole, but then do people ever think they are? Oh, and also, this is quite long. Because my head is full of it all, and I want to get it out, so to speak.)

So here’s the thing.

When we bought the witchery, just over three years ago, Quercus (as he shall now be known) and I were pretty hard-up. We were in the incredibly fortunate situation of Quercus having had a large sum of money left to him by his much-loved Grandma, and that meant that our first house had been owned outright, an unusual situation for people of twenty-five, but in terms of income, we were trotting along roughly fifty pence above the breadline – I was doing my PhD full-time while working for the university as a note-taker for disabled students, which was well-paid but not consistent, and Quercus was working for the local electricity board and earning about eleven thousand pounds a year. We raised the money necessary to step up from a two-bedroom terrace house in the middle of a village (a very pretty house, and one we loved really quite a lot, except for the presence of Mr. and Ms. Horrendous, our ghastly, mid-week-parties-until-2.00-a.m. neighbours) to the witchery, a tiny detached cottage with no near neighbours, by including any savings we had, saving like mad once we knew we were going to have to sell our first house (because of the neighbours – once we’d realised that any neighbours could potentially piss us off that much, there was never much chance we’d stay beyond the time it took to do the place up and get it back on the market), taking out the biggest mortgage our ridiculous and inconsistent income could reasonably support, never going out, and, unfortunately, borrowing thirteen thousand pounds from my father.

At the time, I had ten thousand pounds in an ISA; most of this arrived as part of an insurance settlement which my parents were given after a really quite awful road accident when I was in my first year at university as an undergraduate; bizarrely, because I took a lot of time off, returning home for weeks at a time to look after them as they recovered from broken arms, legs, shoulders and whatnot, our solicitor was able to get me a large lump sum of attendant’s care-type fees. I always felt quite wrong about accepting this money, as if it somehow meant I had only looked after my parents because of the financial recompense, but, realising the sense of it, I took it, of course, putting it in a savings account and forgetting about it for several years, as if time could disinfect it, cleanse it of the unpleasant circumstances under which it arrived. Obviously, all that money went into the house-purchase, and Quercus and I were left with pretty much no savings, which was fine – we had the house, and we expected to work bloody hard to do it up, returning it to some shadow of its former, er, glory. (‘Glory’ seems a bit extreme, given that it’s a teensy little house which probably housed farm labourers in previous years, but you know what I mean.)

Anyway, the agreement with my father, which, I should add, he suggested in the first place, was that we would borrow thirteen thousand pounds from him, to be repaid either when we sold the witchery (which we estimated would be somewhere between five and ten years later), or when our financial circumstances had improved considerably. He said he wasn’t in a hurry to have it back, and was happy to lend on that footing. He also saw the house before we offered to buy it; I wanted him to realise that it needed a lot doing, and would take both time and money to finish.

Fast-forward three years. In the intervening time, Quercus and I have both changed jobs, he to a better-paid, but not vastly-so, admin thingy which pays the bills but bores him immensely, and me to working full-time for the university at which I’ve been doing my PhD. Our situation is thus: once we realised we were going to have a baby, we saved like mad to ensure that I could take the full year offered for maternity leave without needing to do things like taking a break on the mortgage payments, or getting silly with credit cards. I had built up some savings again as soon as I started working (each month I still feel they’ve got it all wrong somehow, and will some day want all that money back; being a PhD student for years and years has made me really appreciate having proper money, as has having a childhood filled with bailiffs, county-court judgments and constant awareness of paternal debt), trying really quite hard to dig myself out of the debt I had accrued while doing my MA (about two and a half thousand, or so) and build up a safety net which had disappeared with our house-move. So, having a baby wasn’t something we lurched into without any thought, nor, I don’t think, was it something we did recklessly, in terms of our finances. We knew that we would shortly be replacing the old and really quite buggered extension on our house, and that this would mean borrowing more money (this time from Quercus’s mother), but we had worked out a budget, and we felt, if not happy, comfortable with the financial times coming our way.

These three years have also seen my father become something like the man he was before my mother died (not in the road accident, but, for new readers, from breast cancer when I was in my final year of university, which was, and continues to be, incredibly shit – I miss her every day, and I think I always will – my grief reached a plateau about three years ago, but it never goes, really). Well, he was always that same man, but he began to want more out of life than ringing me up every night, worrying about what I was doing, and generally disapproving of my choices. (Did I mention that when Quercus and I decided, after we’d been together for six years, that perhaps getting married would be a nice idea, he said we should be sure to do it when he was on holiday, as he couldn’t in good conscience come when he disapproved of our relationship? Despite the fact we were clearly happy, settled, and, er, going to stay together?) Anyway, after he’d pissed about with one or two other candidates and generally behaved in a slightly bewildering, and, to me, immoral fashion for a few years*, he met his now-wife, who was just separating from her husband at the time, and was clearly in need of a confidante. They began seeing each other, and despite reservations, decided to marry. The upshot, which is quite a shortened version, is that they have now relocated, leaving two houses still to sell, and are renting in a new area while they house-hunt. They both think they are hard-up. To clarify: he has, as a pension, more than I earn working full-time in a reasonably-paid job, and he owns outright a house on the market for £350,000. She, meanwhile, owns another house outright, this one on for £450,000; she also gets about £2000 a month in child support from her ex-husband. The house they are renting costs them £500 a month, and my father has let his house for £700 a month.

And here comes the punch-line.

My father now wants back the £13,000 he lent us. Because they are ‘pushed’. Because they ‘need’ to buy a house. Because ‘it was only ever a loan; how did we think we were going to pay it back?’ We ‘must have known he would want it back some time’. Despite his having said, when I was visiting him some two months ago, that he ‘wouldn’t be looking for the money back, and considered it gone’. Because I ‘chose to give up a good job to have a baby; that was my choice, of course, but I should have thought about where it would leave me financially, really, shouldn’t I?’. Never mind the fact that Quercus and I worked all this out in advance; never mind the fact that we believed him when he said he didn’t want the money back any time soon; never mind the fact that they have two houses which are worth far more than they need to spend to buy another house for them in their new area; never mind the fact that it is sheer IMPATIENCE, sheer ‘the world according to us’ness, that makes them move areas, abandoning two perfectly acceptable houses in favour of a rented one they don’t like.

As you can possibly tell, I am quite frustrated.

I have explained several times that we haven’t got the money, can’t get the money, don’t really see why we should have to, like this, bearing in mind his recent comments on its being ‘gone’. I have also pointed out that, when he said he was getting married again, he was aware that moving into one house with his new wife would probably mean that the inheritance he had always said would be coming my way would probably be absorbed into this new house, and that he didn’t want that to happen, and would take steps to ensure it wasn’t. I don’t care about the inheritance. I never have done. I always just wanted him to be happy, to have someone for himself, to have a proper life again rather than the half-shadow life he led after my mother died. But I didn’t mean that at the expense of having to go back to work when my daughter is a few months old in order to support a larger mortgage raised solely to finance his whims. I didn’t mean that at the expense of selling the one thing my mother left to me, a Steinway piano which he effectively forced me to rent to someone when he arbitrarily announced he could no longer ‘store it’ for me. (This last announcement, of course, came after months of trying to get me to sell the piano, completely ignoring the fact that it was my mother’s piano, and that for that very reason, I would sooner chew my arm off than part with it.)

I have reached a peak of frustration with him. He doesn’t seem able to understand AT ALL why I am upset. He implies I am being unreasonable, that we have behaved irresponsibly financially in the choices we have made regarding the timing of our daughter’s birth. He says it was a bad idea that we have children, or, rather, he doesn’t argue when I suggest this is what he thinks. (I should add, as I am clearly on a roll, that he also implies that the witchling is a bad baby – she doesn’t ‘behave’ as she should, i.e. doesn’t yet sleep through an entire night at four months, and, heavens forbid, she cries – saints preserve us. I am not taking a firm enough hand, clearly; she should be left in her cot to cry herself to sleep, and if she gets frightened, angry, or just upset, so be it. Clearly. Because of course that will ‘fix’ her. She is a problem child, after all. [/sarcasm]) And meanwhile, we are trying to finish an extension which Quercus has done, with the help of Lovely David, on his own; we are adjusting to life with a new baby; I was finishing my PhD; we are economising right, left, and centre to make sure we have enough money despite food costing half an arm more than it did a year ago (Quercus will shortly be listing his beloved Citröen CX on eBay, for example), and we are doing all this on half-pay for me, and Quercus’s not-extravagant pay. We planned this; that bit is fine. We expected money to be tight, but not too tight. And now we are supposed to just throw all that to one side, and prioritise my father’s whims by extending our mortgage or handing over any savings we have to him, to finance his house-move.

Two words: fuck off.

* I don’t mean ‘immoral’ as in ‘ooh, you’re not sleeping together out of wedlock, are you?’ way, but in an ‘I can’t believe you treat people like that’ sort of way.