One of my favourite tropes in a book is house-hunting – particularly when it is done for comic effect. There is something so delightfully funny about the contrast between an estate agent’s exaggerated, mendacious positivity and some melancholy would-be homeowners looking at mouldy wallpaper and subsidence. Glorious.
So I didn’t know anything about Joanna Jones when I stumbled across The Artless Flat-Hunter (1963) in Hay-on-Wye a couple of years ago, but this title and this cover meant I couldn’t resist. Having recently enjoyed Nicholas Royle’s Finders, Keepers, it feels relevant to report that it had a penned dedication (‘November 1963. To Jill, all my love, Peter’) and, curiously, a clipped photo of John F. Kenndy from a newspaper article – possibly in the wake of his assassination, in the same month?
It’s one of those faux instructional guides that were all the rage in the 1930s, so it’s nice to see it continuing into the 1960s – and basically satirises the whole process of finding, renting, and living in a flat. Everything from nosey landladies to noisy neighbours, via finding the right flatmates and how to dodge unexpected expenses when estate agents try to foist unwanted fixtures and fittings on you. As a sample, one of the chapters is called ‘Low-flying aircraft and other amenities’. True, she largely doesn’t seem to realise that there are places to live outside of London, but we’ll forgive her that.
The maxim with which I opened this chapter should be followed by a second: the maximum rent you are prepared to pay will prove in the end to be your minimum.
You will start out by declaring that nowhere more than twenty minutes’ walk from such-and-such a centre of civilisation will be acceptable. You cannot afford more than such-and-such a rent, and you will not consider paying a penny more. Then the days go by,. You discover that nobody in the British Isles wants to let as much as a tool-shed. The advertisement boards are festooned with lies. It’s a wonder most of the postcards are not yellowed and curling with age. Why on earth do people pay good money to advertise in the evening papaers when they have no inteniton of even letting you set food inside the front door?
Nothing in here is unexpected, and Jones is certainly happy to hit every cliché, but that didn’t matter to me. It’s her lightness and consistency of tone that make this such an enjoyable read. She judges the right line of surreality in her satire, and while it certainly has no pretensions to great literature, it’s a very good example of a genre that has probably faded away.
According to the inside notes to the dustjacket of The Artless Flat-Hunter, there was a whole series in the Pelham Artless Library – The Artless Actor by Kenneth More, The Artless Gambler by Roger Longrigg, The Artless Musician by Sidney Harrison and The Artless Yachtsman by John Davies. What a fun idea, and what a curious selection of professions/hobbies to select. Well, these books won’t change your life, but if The Artless Flat-Hunter is anything to go by, you’ll pass an entertaining evening and be able to empathise all too well.