Do you think you could cope with someone begging you?
Not jokingly begging you to share your New York cheesecake or begging to watch the football highlights even though Pan Am is on.
Full on please-don’t-repossess-my-home-I’ll-do-anything begging you, because they are that desperate. It is an absolutely hideous situation.
I had a lady called Mrs Barton, who hadn’t been paying her mortgage for several years. There was no particular reason why she hadn’t been paying – her finances stacked up and she had money, but she just didn’t want to pay it into her mortgage.
She had previously had five evictions scheduled on her house. Each one had been stopped at an application hearing made to the court.
Each time, there had been a horrible conversation with Mrs Barton begging to remain in her property. Yet, after each eviction was stopped by the court, she continued to not pay anything to her account.
This time her application got dismissed by the court.
Mrs Barton then decided to tell us her husband had been murdered. He had apparently been stabbed to death in a drunken brawl and she wanted us to stop the eviction.
Obviously, we said that we would if she was able to give us the crime reference number. The police in Wakefield confirmed that there had been no such incident and the reference number was made up.
Mrs Barton then changed tack; she didn’t mention her husband again, but she began to plead.
However, like John Turturro in Miller’s Crossing, she had cried wolf too many times and we were not willing to cancel the eviction.
On the day, the eviction didn’t actually happen, because Mrs Barton attacked the Bailiff. We’re not sure exactly what happened, but hair was definitely pulled.
And she still hasn’t made any payments to her mortgage.
