Now It Can Be Told- Part 5

I've never been a witness in a trial before, so the whole business was somewhat stressful. I have been a supporting artiste in a television drama set in a courtroom, but have never had to be a witness. We were due to go to court last Wednesday and Thursday and got to the Magistrates court well before the 10.00 a.m. time we were given. We went into Milton Keynes centre by bus as we weren't sure where we'd be able to park and on top of everything else it was going to be stressful if we had to worry about parking charges and one thing and another.

As it turned out, the case in the court before us was over-running, so we had to go away and waste time in the shopping centre and then went back at 2 p.m. to then be told that the trial wasn't going to start until the following day at 10 a.m. This only added to the stress. I just wanted the thing to start so I could do what was required of me and then go home. I think Carol was getting more stressed than me, particularly when Brown appeared and made an issue (or so it seemed) of being there. We obviously couldn't communicate, but his body language seemed to say it all.
Then we learned that he had already been in Court and had been fined £1000 for his part in the flytipping (part of this being for Court costs.) for breaching 'Duty of Care' regulations and not providing the relevant documentation, but the actual trial I was to give evidence to wasn't against him, it was the gentleman who had done the actual flytipping.
There was a break in the proceedings and one of the court ushers allowed me to go inside the empty courtroom to get an idea of what the lay-out was like, where I was to sit (ie- in the dock) and this was a good thing as it calmed my nerves and I found that it wasn't as large as I was expecting. I think television can give a false perspective on things, make a courtroom seem a good deal bigger than it really is. The trial began and it was some time before I was called to give my evidence. Neil Brown sat in the public seated area and Carol had to sit a few seats along from him. The gentleman who was being tried sat in a glassed-in area.
As the prosecutor started to ask me questions, my nerves began to settle down. I was shown some of the photographs Wayne Turner had shown me the week before, when I had to identity our belongings in the pile of stuff that had been flytipped. There were one or two items which were really difficult to identify on the photographs, because they weren't particularly clear images, so I was shown better-quality photographs. Then I was shown photographs taken by Brown of the state of the interior of the house in Crownhill. I was supposed to identify items that were in the pile of the flytipped items, and it seemed somewhat unfair as I hadn't seen these images before.
After the prosecutor cross-examined me, it was the turn of the defence, a lady. I have to say that, as things progressed, my nerves began to subside, and I really quite enjoyed the experience. In all it was something of a learning curve, as I have never been involved in a real trial.
There was a break for 'comfort' as they say, an excuse to go to the loo, and have a breather and then it was back into the courtroom.
Eventually I was allowed to leave the courtroom, and I was told by the Judge that I wasn't to talk to anyone about anything and not discuss evidence.
We were free to go home. Wayne Turner, who had also sat in on the trial (and who had also given evidence. It was him who had discovered the dumped items in the first place.) told me that he would ring when there was a verdict.
It was a relief when we eventually left the courtroom and walked back towards the city centre and caught the bus home. It was about 2 p.m. when we got back to the house. Sometime later Wayne Turner rang to give us the verdict. The Judge could not find any evidence to suggest that John Fleminghad been responsible for the flytipping.  I reckon Brown slipped him a backhander to clear the house and wasn't bothered what happened to the stuff. It was made to look as if we'd dumped the stuff, when it was clear from the evidence that we couldn't have done this, as we wouldn't dump stuff which it was very clear we would need. At one point I was asked to identify the milk carton which contained petrol and had a rag stuffed in the neck. I said that it couldn't have been ours, as the  'best before/sell by date' which was clearly shown in the photograph was well past the date we had left the house.
So that is the end of that episode in our lives. Thankfully we can move on and leave it behind us.

Now It Can Be Told- Part 4

I am nearing the end of writing about this 'episode.' Please just bear with me as I complete it. I have written it in installments as it was going to take quite a while to write and it was easier to read it in these installments. I think maybe one more installment will complete it, so a little more patience is required of my readers. I just hope it might be of use to others who may come up against similar situations.

Once we had the rental agreement sorted for the new house, and we knew for certain that we were moving, we organised friends of Carol's from the Academy to help in moving. We also had someone from church who helped with transporting our sofa, as our car wasn't big enough. We had to dismantle most of our furniture, which is from IKEA, such as our bed, bookshelves and wardrobes. We managed to ferry quite a lot of stuff over about the period of one  week or so (maybe more) as the new house was vacant. Then, over one weekend we managed to move the remainder or the most essential items, but there was still a lot of stuff in the garage which we were never going to be able to sort out and then transport. As Carol and I had only married in 2007, we had a lot of my things from my flat in Bedford in storage in the garage, such as a fridge-freezer, bits of furniture, a computer  and books, as well as Carol's boys mountain bikes. We never considered when we were going to sort this lot out. At the time of our initial moving we just wanted to get our basic items out of the old house and into the new, such as beds, the sofa and things to eat off, as well as our clothes. 

Once moved in, with the wardrobes reassembled, along with our bed, pots and pans, books and so on, we drew a sigh of relief. We then had to go to the bank and cancel the Direct Debit for the rent for Copper Homes. Throughout all this they had not the slightest idea that we were moving.

Then, one morning, around about the beginning of March (I think it was a Friday) I got a surprise phone call on my mobile from this woman from Copper Homes. She wanted to know why our rent hadn't been paid. I should have said something like 'oh dear, I don't know what's happened. Perhaps there's a problem with the bank or something. I'll go and deal with it!' Instead, I said that we'd moved.  I said I wasn't prepared to tell them where we'd moved to, and said this was due to their inability to help us with the repairs, the rats and so on. With that I put the phone down. Well, they would never have known that we hadn't moved unless we'd told them. If we had we'd be expected to pay another month's rent. They were only interested in the rent, not the state of the house and most certainly not bothered about our welfare.
Later that morning my stepson, Daniel, and I, made another trip to the house in Crownhill to collect some more things, particularly his black leather reclining armchair. We got to the house and had to dismantle this chair before we could put it in the back of the car. There were bags and boxes of clothes, books, kitchen equipment and other items left in the house ready to simply load into the car and take away. We managed to put a load of things in the car, including the chair, when I came out of the house to find the front path blocked by Neil Brown, a woman and two decidedly dodgy characters, who emerged from what looked like a Luton furniture van. I had 'words' with Mr Brown (I'm afraid I let him have a tirade which was really me being angry regarding what he had done (or not done) for us, the state of the house, the rats and the repairs which should have been done, but weren't. They looked decidedly menacing, so me and Daniel left. I'm not certain what they intended doing, but I wasn't hanging around to find out.
Carol and I decided that, since the things left in the house and the garage weren't of any great significance, we'd forget about them and leave them. We had, of course, intended on collecting all of these things, but as we now had a decent new home to live in, with working central heating, and a landlord who at least bothered about the condition of the home and our welfare, it didn't seem worth the effort to go back and collect this stuff, if it also meant threats and misery from Brown and his henchmen.
We didn't think any more of anything that was left in the house at Crownhill until several weeks later. Carol got a visit at the Academy from a Mr Wayne Turner (Environmental Officer at Milton Keynes Council) and a Policeman. I think she was somewhat upset by this at first, but when they told her that they had found some of our belongings, or what appeared to be our belongings, flytipped in a carpark in Simpson. They had found some documents with our name on, and could we tell them why these items might be there? They came to our house and we had to give statements. I said that I was quite prepared to stand up in court and give evidence, and that I believed that Copper Homes and in particular, Neil Brown, was responsible for the flytipping. They had made it seem as if we had been responsible as there was a milk carton full of petrol and with rags stuffed in the spout which made it look as if we were going to set fire to the tipped items so as to cover things up. There was also a lot of bundles of old papers there which were certainly not ours which were also there to make it look as if we'd dumped the things there.
Two weeks ago Carol got a message on her mobile asking her to ring Wayne Turner. He came to see us and we had to go through the statement again and also, with the use of digital photographs taken at the scene of the flytipping, identify where possible our belongings and he made an inventory. All this evidence was used against the man who was alledged to have dumped our belongings, one John Fleming. They had been to Court the weeks before Christmas for a court hearing, but the actual trial was last Wednesday and Thursday.

Now It Can Be Told- Part 2

After a year of our tenancy agreement we had to have our boiler checked. It is a legal requirement that landlords of rented property have the gas boiler checked to make sure it is safe. We got the visit from a plumber to do this job, and we got the certificate saying that the gas boiler was in good working order. We told him at this time that the central heating was not working properly, and we assumed that he would inform Copper Homes and they would get it repaired. Copper Homes were fully aware of the problems with such things as the hole in the kitchen ceiling, at the time we sold the house to them, it was understood that they would fix this problem, as well as doing general maintenance on the house, the guttering needed some repair as there was  constant running water when it rained and the downstairs toilet needed replacing. But we heard nothing from Copper, either in writing or by telephone, that they would deal with these problems.

Things proceeded for the next few months without any further problems, until we got a letter from an agency which stated that we must not pay our rent to Copper Homes any longer, and that we must pay it to them. We didn't think at the time that there was anything odd about this, and duly changed our Direct Debit to pay to this new rental agency. After a few weeks we got a letter from Copper Homes stating that we were not to pay our rent to this other rental agency. So, we accordingly changed the Direct Debit back to Copper. We discovered that one of the directors of the company had left Britain and gone to Australia. There was some sort of dispute with the rest of the board members, but we could never discover what this dispute was about. It was at this point that we became somewhat concerned as we got a letter telling us that the dispute was about who owned our house. Then the 'other' rental agency wrote (we presumed that it was him who used this agency to collect our rent.) to inform us that we must pay THEM and so we had to transfer the Direct Debit back to THEM. As you can imagine, we were getting somewhat annoyed having to keep going back to our bank and changing the Direct Debit details to and fro. 
Meanwhile, the condition of the house was deteriorating rapidly. We were getting more and more rats coming into the house and we could hear them scuttling around in the loft and within the cavity walls. They began to come into the kitchen and steal food, so we had to keep food in boxes and even inside the microwave to prevent it being eaten. Then the rats even ate through a plastic box in which we kept the dogs' food, on on one occasion the rats ate through a plastic chopping board. Also, the state of the kitchen sink was so bad, because any water that was drained away down the plughole, came out on the kitchen floor and eventually lead to the units rotting away. We were helped on this issue, though, as someone from our church kindly came to our aid and repaired the sink so that water would actually drain away outside and not on the floor. As I have also mentioned, the washing machine became inoperable as the rats gnawed through the plastic pipes on the back, so we had to take our laundry to a local company to have it washed. 
These rats got the attention of our two dogs, Poppy and Alfie. They could obviously hear sounds that we couldn't, and Alfie, in particular, would go into the kitchen and stare endlessly at the cupboard near the sink, as he must have been able to hear the high-pitched sound of the rats as they squeaked. Poppy wasn't so effected by the rats, but one presumes that she had some idea that there were intruders in the house.
Carol, meanwhile, decided that enough was enough and decided to ring Copper Homes to try and get them to sort out the various things that needed repairing, informing them, amongst other things, that the boiler wasn't working. By now we were approaching winter and the thought of having no heating was not something we wanted to have to do without. She got a lot of verbal abuse down the telephone from the Managing Director, Neil Brown. He said that the condition of the house was terrible (given to him by the plumber who came to do the checks on the central heating boiler.) and they weren't going to do any repairs until we cleaned the place. I think this may have been due to the state of the kitchen, as we were contending with rats running about and the hole in the ceiling was making the kitchen really dirty as bits of plaster and tile kept falling out of the hole and the ceiling in general was deteriorating very rapidly. If Neil Brown wanted to inspect the property, he was welcome to come to the house and see for himself, but he never came to the house once, even at the time the house was sold to Copper Homes, so I have no idea how he could make such comments when he hadn't seen the house. If they had repaired these things earlier, the condition of the house might not have got so bad.