Page 149 - James Caan - The Real Deal

14 · Having Fun

nanny. By then, I knew enough people who had employed domestic
staff and seen how having the wrong people in your home could
easily become a nightmare. Even people I know in recruitment
spend less time and effort finding someone to work in their home
than they do in their business. I went to great lengths not just to get
the best nanny for Jemma, but to find one who was right for us.
At weekends we used to take Jemma for a walk in Winchmore
Hill, where there’s a road called Broad Walk. It’s a very wide,
tree-lined road which has to be one of north London’s most
desirable streets to live in. There’s hardly any traffic, a fabulous
park, and palatial houses with huge gardens and swimming pools.
Someone told me that Rod Stewart lived there, and you could
easily see why. It was the kind of road that you would drive down
really slowly just so that you could get a good look at the houses!
On this particular trip we saw a For Sale sign and started
wondering if we could afford to move there. The last house, in
Mill Hill, had cost £75,000, and this one was going for £550,000
– several million in today’s market – which was a very big leap,
and I didn’t know if I was ready for that kind of debt.
Alexander Mann was doing well enough for me to realise that,
actually, I was really pretty good at recruitment, and I was also
good at running a business. So I asked myself: Do I believe
Alexander Mann will continue to be successful? When I realised
the answer was yes, I also realised I could afford the repayments
on the mortgage for what would be anyone’s dream house.
It was fabulous. You could have parked ten cars in the drive if
you’d needed to; it had more bedrooms than I remember, so many
reception rooms that I could put a full-size snooker table in one
without it getting in the way, and really extensive gardens. In fact,
it was such a gorgeous house that it was almost too much, and
when friends and family visited I occasionally felt slightly uncom-
fortable. We were undoubtedly the youngest couple in the street,
and in many ways it was the kind of house you aspired to live in

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