The Landlord from Hell
He was a cross between a strict 1950's headmaster and Ebenezer Scrooge. Actually, he made the Dickens character look more like a benevolent philanthropist in comparison.
The year was 1993. There I was, a young man, barely out of my teens and trying to find somewhere to live. Somewhat inevitably {when you are in a weak negotiating position} I took a room in the town that was cheap. It was a culture shock to say the least.
The place was worn and old. It had a slight musty smell about it. The carpets still retained a hint of their original colours but were so worn and old it was questionable whether there was any benefit in having carpet at all.
I paid the deposit and moved in to a small room upstairs at the back of the house. There were issues but the landlord assured me that would all be sorted out. There was the lack of any lock on my room door which he said he was in the process of sorting out. The room itself was quite spartan but he assured me he was 'in the process' of getting another piece of furniture in there for storage.
This would be a good time to introduce you to the landlord. He was a strange old character with a moustache {and a personality} that looked like it reached right back to colonial England. He had a strict headmaster like quality about him with the obligatory tweed jacket {complete with elbow patch ensemble}. He rented out the two bedrooms upstairs while the room that would have been the lounge was used by him for his car insurance business where he would work during the day.
He was quite a foreboding character. Early on in the tenancy the larger front room became available and he was showing it to me {I decided it was beyond what I could afford anyway} and he told how he had a strict rule about putting up Christmas decorations. They were banned. An old tenant had stuck a few up one year with sellotape leaving tiny rips in the paper which to be honest I wouldn't even had seen had the landlord not taken great care in drawing it to my attention.
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it,
and decrease the surplus population.”
He waxed eloquent about how this was expensive wallpaper that cost him a lot of money and how he had successfully taken the tenant to court over this and won a payout of around £125 by today's standard. I couldn't help but notice how he hadn't used the money he'd won to repaper the room.
I was having trouble sleeping in my room. The mattress had springs poking out of it and was seriously sagging. A friend was getting a new bed and on hearing of my predicament said he would give me the old one. I was delighted. I didn't have the money to replace what I had. I was working on a day to day basis and this was before the minimum wage came in. I was barely finding money for food. The landlord used the large back room downstairs as an overflow room where lots of junk was stored and had apparently been there for years. I asked if the old bed could be put there and at first he went along with it but later he came to me explaining that having a double bed in my room meant it was now a double room and that because of this he was obliged to charge me more rent and that he should charge me storage costs for the old bed which struck me as ridiculous. Nevertheless I gave back the new bed because I simply could not afford to pay more rent. The landlord promised to sort out a new mattress which never came so I was stuck with it.
I lost count of the number of times when I would go down to the toilet at the back of the house and in the dark I would hear the scurry of tiny feet.
It gets worse. There was one toilet and it was downstairs at the back of the house. From the stairway you had to go down the corridor, through what probably was the dining room but was now a storage area for junk and into a small room through which you would enter the toilet. It was problematic because there were no lights from the stairs onwards to the toilet and it was very dark at night. The landlord wasn't at all interested in putting light bulbs into this communal area because this was an 'unnecessary expense.' When, one night, the toilet light went out I unscrewed another lightbulb where it was least needed and fitted it into the toilet so I could actually see where I was peeing when I got there. The landlord was really angry and said I should not do so without permission. It was ridiculous. How on earth am I supposed to go to the toilet in the pitch dark and he wasn't even there to ask. The added irony was I actually unscrewed a lightbulb I'd acquired to replace another that went out. So he was telling me off for moving my own lightbulb!
All these are relatively small issues compared to the one I am about to share. As you might recall he was running a car insurance office from the front room downstairs. The house was subject to several break ins from people looking for car insurance cover notes. The front door had several small panes of glass. Thieves would just pop one pane and then undo the latch to let themselves in. There was no other lock. The landlords answer to this was to tack a piece of card over the broken glass and leave it. He seemed quite proud that he would not fix it properly as he saw his lack of spending money as 'not giving in to them'. I, however, was stuck in an unlocked room upstairs ,scared that I wasn't safe and worried every time I went out whether I would come back to find my stuff missing. You could literally prise the card off with your hand and get in if you forgot your key.
You couldn't reason with him. If I dared suggest he was wrong or unfair in any way he would go into his stern headmaster role and put his foot down. It was as if I was somehow guilty of insubordination. I felt like a naughty schoolboy. You could see him getting quite angry. It was really a horrible situation to be in. I was working from day to day with no money spare and no way of getting any and no idea how to move out.
He once came into my room demanding that I hand over the one piece of furniture I had in which to store anything. He insisted it belonged to the front room which he was trying to rent out. When I moved in he promised more storage but now he was taking the one thing I had. He said he would replace it. He never did and that left my stuff on the floor.
He wanted to make the front room more attractive for prospective tenants to he took the item of furniture and I just had to accept it
Loyd Grossman's famous catchphrase on the T.V show 'Through the keyhole' was 'Now who would live in a house like this?' In this case, that question was taking decidedly longer than 3 minutes to answer. Over to you, David!
Then one day the landlord came in with his very elderly parents. They came to do some spring cleaning as a way of making the place a bit more attractive to people who were coming to look at the front room. They pottered around as best they could, trying to make the place a bit tidier while he strutted about in his 'supervisory capacity'. To be fair to them they seemed like nice enough people. Very different to the landlord. He then decided to hold my feet to the fire about the state of the place insisting it was my fault because I lived there despite the fact that it was a mess when I moved in and he was remonstrating about areas I didn't even use. No matter what I said it was my fault but this time I stuck to my guns. He could get as angry as he liked. I was not going to take blame for what was clearly not my responsibility. He was clearly annoyed yet I noticed he showed a bit more restraint when his parents were there. He had to maintain this appearance of being decent and respectable.
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By this time I had become a Christian and was going to church. You will see how this ties in with what is to follow. My pastor had come round to visit one day and his advice was "Steve, you need to find yourself somewhere else to live". I was having occasional nightmares where a figure would be waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. Every time I would hear a sound I would worry that it was another break in.
I saw an ad for a room rented out in the home of a semi retired couple. I went to see it. It was really nice. It was in a nice area and the couple were really good. There was only one problem. I needed a deposit of what would by today's prices be nearly £300 and I had nothing and no idea where to get that kind of money from. My pastor encouraged me to pray so I did.
I lived in a kind of desperate hope. I had only recently become a Christian and, coming from an atheist background, was only just getting used to the idea that God existed. To actually go from there to believing God would do something tangibly for me was a stretch. What if nothing happened? Does that prove that God doesn't really exist and if he does, does he really actually do stuff for people?
I told the couple whose home I visited I would let them know by the next weekend. Friday evening came and there was no sign of any miracle so I called them and left an answerphone message to let them know I couldn't take the room and that was that...or so I thought.
Broke, underpaid and no job security. To top it all, an official letter drops on my doormat. Yet this overwhelmingly positive feeling within me said "This is good."
Saturday morning came and I made my way down the musty smelling faded red stairs to go to the bathroom. There, on the floor, by the front door were letters including this ominous official looking brown envelope. There I was, broke, grossly underpaid {This was long before we had such a thing as a minimum wage} and working from day to day on a temporary contract and the first thing that flashed across my mind was 'oh no, what now?' Yet something deep inside of me just leapt up and said with such overwhelming conviction, 'This is good'. It was surprisingly convincing. It came with a sense of peace that really struck me. Why on earth would I be so confident? It's like it wasn't me but something else within me. I picked up the official envelope and opened it. It was from the inland revenue {The government tax collection service.} I began to read the letter as it explained how I had paid too much tax and was entitled to a rebate.
I looked at the amount. It was just three pounds short of what I needed for the deposit. I dug into my jeans pocket and pulled out all I had left until my next paycheck. It was around three pounds in coins. I just stared at this thing in amazement. I seriously had never seen anything like this before. In the last 25 years I think that was the only time I had ever got a rebate from the inland revenue and it was the exact amount I needed. I called up the couple I had visited and told them I would be coming round to pay the deposit.
Well, I had a new found faith but in all honesty I had been taking a lot of flak for it. Various people at work seemed to take delight in telling me I was brainwashed or just plain naive. It really stood out to me on that day that the world is full of skeptical people who are very quick to criticise but won't lift a finger to help you yet when I really needed it, God came through for me. I thought twice about sharing this 'good news' at work for fear of incurring yet more ridicule but it didn't really matter anyway. At last I was escaping the property from hell.
Things were financially tough during those days and although I had managed to move there was still the matter of a deposit the landlord owed me. I heard nothing from him so I left a polite note under the door asking for the deposit back.
At last, I was escaping the 'property from hell.'...and the landlord from hell. But not before he could have one parting shot.
That's when I got a nasty note back from the landlord. He told me that if I contacted him again or took this any further he would be making claims against me and that I should consider myself lucky that he was keeping the deposit and not taking matters any further. It was outrageous. There was no tenancy deposit protection scheme then and so I was stuck. I remembered what he had said about taking a previous tenant to court over his 'audacious cheek' in daring to celebrate Christmas by putting up a few decorations. I realised there was nothing I could do. The landlord from hell had just got a bit hotter.
It's a practice that's almost as old as the earth itself that those with power often use that power to exploit those that don't. That's why people joke that Guy Fawkes was the only man to enter parliament with sincere motives. But can it really be right to take the law into your own hands?
There was one option available to me though. I come from a rough background and {if you read some of my other testimonies on this site} you will know something of what I was capable of. I had 'kept a lid on it' while I was a tenant but now? In my pre Christian days I wasn't the kind of person who would let someone get away with robbing me and this landlord had given me numerous reasons to hold a grudge. I had been involved a lot of things in my pre Christian days especially in terms of payback and reprisals. Before I became a Christian I had a very clear way to deal with things like this. I could trash and vandalise the place or I could set fire to it. I was not the kind of person to just walk away. Forgiveness was just not in my vocabulary.
But now I had a problem. I was a Christian. That old life had gone. I couldn't behave like that any more. I am supposed to love my enemies and turn the other cheek. But while I accepted this it still left a big question. How can a landlord behave like this? How can he be allowed to get away with it? I had no power, no money and he had me over a barrel as the saying goes. Therefore I did the only thing left to me. I brought my complaint to God.
This was no religious sounding prayer. I didn't really know what a 'proper' prayer was so I was just up front with God. I'm a Christian. I am supposed to forgive, I'm supposed to love my enemies but does that mean people like this are just going to get away with it. So I told God how I felt about it. I told him...
"You know what I would have done before I became a Christian but I'm not going to do that because you don't want me to do that. I know you've forgiven me so I am not going to demand that you punish this man. So I'm going to walk away from this one and leave him in your hands. If you want to forgive him then I will accept it. I will not do anything to him. But if you want to judge what he did I will leave it to you. You saw what he did and what he is like but I'm going to do what you want me to. I'm going to leave this in your hands and you deal with this as you see fit. As for me, despite what he has done, I'm going to walk away and let it go."
I kept to my word. I never sought reprisals. I left it in God's hands. And that's where the story ends...except for one remarkable thing. Over the next several years that landlord didn't have a single tenant in the house. Not one! He couldn't get a single person into that place. Not only that but it became apparent that his car insurance business was no longer operating. The whole place was left empty. This was the case for about five or six years before someone else took over the property upon which it was completely renovated and made new. I remember numerous times when I was passing there and I would look at the place and there was no sign of life. It was really sobering. This God whom I didn't even believe in a few years prior was not only real but actually took my prayers seriously. It was encouraging and sobering at the same time. He really does judge evil.
I have no idea how many thousands of pounds that landlord would have lost but I know he has 'turned over' other tenants. People who were in the same position like me. With no power and no money and seemingly no way out. People who were vulnerable. All that came back to him in a spectacular way.
I do sometimes wonder if he ever made the connection. Was there a quiet voice whispering in his conscience when nothing was working out for him and the money dried up? Did he put two and two together and did he, like so many people whose god is their wallet, just brush it off?
I made a decision that day that I would not have made in previous years and that was to choose not to take matters into my own hands. Back when I became a Christian at the end of 1993 there was a change of heart. That day I chose to hold to the decision I made to live as a Christian even if it cost me. When I look back at what happened to that man I am on the one hand encouraged that I am not alone in this world but I am also sobered to think that there is one who can and ultimately will hold us to account.
"Do not seek vengeance yourselves but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written {in the scriptures}:
Vengeance is mine. I will repay, says the Lord." - The bible
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Steve Johnson
Real Relevant Life Changing
'darkness2light.me' was formed out of a passionate belief in the inspirational power of real life stories.
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