Fiddler on the Roof

After the feature in The Guardian came out where I talked about everything going really very badly wrong indeed, someone got in touch to ask ‘did I mean that I had a leak rather than a roof collapse?’ After I’d stifled the murderous inner scream that this amateur Salt Path detective had induced in me, I decided to write about it instead. Better for the vocal cords. So let us begin this sorry tale with a photo.

In 2022 we needed a new roof. It couldn’t have been worse timing as we were so broken and exhausted from everything that had happened. But we couldn’t keep ignoring the worsening leaks that were blowing our newly smoothed plasterwork with increasing regularity. We’d only just finished renovating; walls freshly painted and that heady chemical-delicious smell of fresh carpet floating through the house. We’d had the roof checked when we moved in and were told that it had a good few years in it yet. We knew that it was the sensible thing to do to get the work done before the renovations commenced but the quotes we got in were eye-wateringly expensive, so we convinced ourselves that we could do it later. ‘Later’ has a pesky habit of nudging into the present tense and so the time came to act. The roofer had done some work for us before, so we had no reason to think that it wouldn’t be a smooth process. He was booked up for six months but said that if we gave him the £25,000 for the roof tiles he would buy and store them for us, saying that building costs were rising on a weekly basis so it would save us thousands of pounds in materials. We handed over the money and didn’t think to ask for a receipt. I think you know where this is going.

A few weeks before the roofing work was due to begin the scaffolding went up. We have a mansard roof so the process was slow and torturous. Ever since I was a small child I have found loud or sudden noises incredibly hard to bear- they dig into my body and cause great physical and emotional distress. Anyone who has had scaffolding erected will know that the noise is excruciating. The loading and unloading of planks, the engines and exhaust fumes, the beep of reversing trucks, the dust, the constant shouting, the sawing of planks, throwing of poles, the impact drivers which sound like a dentist’s drill on acid, the blaring radio- it’s a roaring cacophony. So I spent days in the house hiding with the curtains closed, hands over my ears, holding the dog close for comfort.

The scaffolders were aggressive and unpleasant, which added to my sense of being breached, but the work finally got done. On the agreed start date the roofer simply didn’t turn up and when we rang him there wasn’t even an answerphone to leave a message on. I remember feeling a fluttering of panic in my throat- he has so much of our money, I whispered to myself. We kept trying to get in touch with him but to no avail. Two months later, after which he still hadn’t been in contact, I was in the bath when I felt a movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked out of the window and the roofer was standing outside the bathroom window staring in at me. I felt mortified and violated. I crossed my arms over my breasts and crawled out of the bath, edging across the floor to grab a towel. Dan was at work and I was alone in the house. I quickly got dressed and went outside. He acted as though nothing had happened; that he hadn’t turned up two months late and hadn’t just been standing outside a bathroom window staring at my naked body. I decided to swallow the transgression and just try and get the job started.

The work begins. The noise that is generated by the taking off a roof is immense and the house is detached so I am surrounded. The roofers are everywhere, on top of the house, around every window and door. Dan is at work so it’s just me trying to deal with it all. Now the roof is off and the house is exposed. It’s how I feel too. Exposed, vulnerable, cold. The work was supposed to start in August but it’s now November. I am still recovering from major abdominal surgery and I find I can never get warm. The cold has resolutely wrapped itself inside me. The roofers are sexist, racist and homophobic and their toxic energy feels like it’s choking me. The roofer has refused to get the required rubbish chute, so they simply hurl tons of slate and wood onto the ground, which smashes and fragments into thousands of tiny, death-sharp pieces. This act of wilful destruction destroys our lovingly tended garden.

I feel like I am fracturing too. The precarity of my sanity becomes clear- it was teetering and now it too has smashed into minute pieces. Debris rains down throughout the day and the dust is choking. A water bottle lands painfully on my head after being tossed carelessly off the scaffolding and then, despite me hollering that I am coming out, a ton of slate lands right next to me, smashing violently onto the driveway just a few centimetres away from me. It would certainly have killed me. Laughter and jeering follows and I shrink further into myself. These are the men that I have been scared of and secretly despised my entire life and I feel mad with fury that they are surrounding my home. I am imprisoned inside and it feels like a yellow wallpaper level of madness and disintegration. The banging, the blaring techno, the profanity, the aggression- I just can’t cope. The words that I have been skirting around for three years now. I cannot cope. I can’t cope with the rejection, the endings, the pain, the exhaustion, the despair, the loss of hope and any sense of future. I can’t cope. Where do I go from here? All I see are locked doors. Deep inside me I feel like an end is approaching, I just don’t know what it is yet. Death by fucking roof slate seems most likely at the moment.

The time comes for the roof tiles to be put on- finally some shelter from the cold- but the roofer and his men don’t turn up. And don’t turn up, and don’t turn up. After a few days he comes round and explains that his dad has died. We feel so ashamed of ourselves- why didn’t we trust him, why didn’t we think that something bad might have happened? A few days later a scaffolder turns up for his payment- we are paying weekly. ‘I was so sorry to hear about S’s dad’ I say. ‘What a shock for him.’ The scaffolder laughs and says ‘I saw his dad last night, at the pub- he’s bloody fine!’ He has lied about his father dying. He knows that I’ve lost my dad, so it feels like a particularly gruesome falsehood. The fluttering, sickening fear also returns- he has our money. Where is this slate? S turns up with his guys a few days later. Their homophobia is constant and hideous. We don’t ask about the miraculous Lazarus recovery of his dad but Dan does talk to them about their language. As they stand there, eyes down, resentful, they look like unrepentant schoolboys. I go outside to ask where the slate is. S is a huge guy- hench from years of gym time and when he looks at me, his eyes are flinty and for the first time I am properly afraid of him. He says he doesn’t want the job anymore and that they’re leaving. I ask him again about the slate but they are already packing up. I am shaking with fear and rage and I head inside to tell Dan. I look through the kitchen window as they drive off and notice that each man has gobbed onto the window pane as they’ve left. Another piece of me breaks off in me that day. Somehow the spit that is trailing down the window is worse than them leaving the job- it is such a noxious act. The house has been my only place of safety and now it is desecrated. There is nowhere left for me to go.

In practical terms we have been stranded, in winter, living in a house without a roof. All we have is some tarp covering the whole structure. I am still hopeful that S has our slate and that we can recover it, so I ring round every roofing supplier in the region. Hope leaches out of me with every phone call, as it turns out that he is well-known to many of them, having run up huge debts. Most will no longer supply to him. We had trusted him and we feel so stupid. We feel desperate so decide to go to away for a few days. I am so unwell with the cold and the stress and we need a break. Three days into the holiday a huge storm hits. Storm Claudio brings winds of 70 mph and torrential rain for three days. My mum phones at two in the morning to say that she is at ours. She says the tarp has ripped off in massive sections and water is pouring in through the whole roof.

The fire brigade are on their way as it has set off every smoke alarm in the house. She sends a video and the top floor looks like a giant rainfall shower. Water is pouring through entire ceilings- the water is brown and rusty, instantly ruining carpets, paintings, walls, curtains, beds, clothes, light fittings. All that time and money and love and hard work that we spent on the renovation- it’s destroyed in minutes. It’s hard to explain how it felt. I’ve never been someone who thinks ‘why me?’ or says that ‘it isn’t fair’- but now I am convinced that it is a continuation of my father’s deathbed curse. It is a punishment for my sins and God has sent the teeming rain and the squalling tempest to destroy the one safe place that I had left.

When we get home I open the door and the smell hits me. The stench of mouldering, pneumonic damp. Mum has done her best to make the upstairs look presentable but it is what it looks like- a disaster zone. We decamp downstairs and during the day we rip out the newly fitted carpets, wash clothes that are infused with the fust of rusty moistness, try to rescue beloved artwork. It’s exhausting and the house is now not only freezing but wet now as well. I feel so ill. Ill in every way. We are already £40,000 down and all we have to show for it is a ruined shell of a home.

The search for another roofer begins. Everyone is busy, especially after a named storm has whipped its way through the city. Eventually we get lucky. It is just him and his nephew, so not ideal as the we need at least four roofers to get this job done, but at least we have found someone. He says that the weather is now so bad that we will need a tin hat- a gigantic structure that requires more scaffolding in order to wrap sheeting right round the house and corrugated iron sheeting over the top of the roof section. The original scaffolder quotes us £12,000 and work commences. I have never heard noise like it- it is like I have died and gone to hell. The neighbours are livid and I can barely leave the house without someone demanding to know when it will all be over. No one shows even a jot of empathy- not one of them came to ask if we were okay when two fire engines turned up outside the house on the night of the storm. Their wrath cripples me and I struggle to leave the house at all, breathlessly fearful of their reprehensions. Because of the mansard roof, the whole process is massively more complex than first thought. If I thought the scaffolding was oppressive, this is a whole new level. It takes weeks to erect and the noise is deafening. The whole house is wrapped in plastic- it covers every single window so I can’t see outside the house at all. It is a madness-inducing fog of utter isolation.

The structure screams and groans all day and night- the corrugated iron sheets are lifted by the intense winds and they crash relentlessly over our heads like angry gods. The dog barks non-stop- she is bewildered by the constant noise, thinking that there is an intruder on the perimeter. And of course, in some ways she is right. Our precious refuge, the only place of safety for a clinically vulnerable person who has just been sliced open and who is still bleeding, has been breached.

The roofer is lovely but not long into the job hurts his shoulder badly. This hampers progress terribly and weeks pass where he is not on site at all. Weeks turn into months and the house is still wrapped in its tin straitjacket and we are still without a roof. I can’t explain how cold and bleak those months were. We had lost so much already and it was too much to bear. I think if just one of the neighbours had been kind or sympathetic then maybe I could have borne it, but as it was their texts of complaint and resentful stares robbed me of my last scrap of sanity. One neighbour tells us that the tin hat is blocking their Sky signal. I start crying, wondering what she wants me to do about it. I simply text back ‘we are doing our best.’ She doesn’t reply. The new roofer tells us that he’s heard on the grapevine that S spent our £25,000 in one single night, on a massive coke-fuelled binge in London. I feel bone tired. All in all it takes eight months to finish the roof and by the end of it I feel finished too.

So no, my dear, not a leak.