'I've tried so hard and you just can't do anything about it'

'I've tried so hard and you just can't do anything about it'

Jeremy Sarjeant is the recession made manifest. A self-employed builder who specialises in erecting high-quality awnings, he enjoyed several good years in the middle part of the decade, was earning up to £50,000 a year, bought a detached three-bedroom house near Folkestone and a Mercedes, and then last year hit the rocks. The work dried up, his income fell to a third of its previous level, debts mounted. The week before we met, his van was repossessed; the Mercedes will go next; he and his wife Marie hope they can hang on to the house. He has £50,000 in unsecured debts and can't even afford the interest payments; declaring himself bankrupt may be the only an answer.

"The trouble started when all the food prices went up in 2007," recalls Sarjeant. "The season [most residential awnings are fitted in summer and early autumn] finished very early. Normally you could carry on fitting up until October, November, with a few in December, but in September of that year it died right down." The business never recovered; last year he barely broke even.

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Where are you now, I ask him? "Somewhere down there," he replies, pointing under the table of the pub in which we are talking. "You probably just trod on me. The van's now gone; the car will be following shortly, I imagine; I've had a word with a couple of companies I work for this morning and they're happy to club their work together and hire me a van for a week if necessary - if they sell anything. But I think they're just being optimistic. Hopefully we can keep the house. The value on that's dropped at least £70,000 since we had it valued a year ago. We had it on the market before Christmas and we had three viewings in three months." He has no equity in the house: if he sold it, he says, he would be lucky to cover what's owing on it.

He has come to meet me with his wife, Marie. She says she was the one who had to open all the mail with final demands for bill payments. She says she has been on anti-depressants for the past six months.

"You get to the point where it's so intense with phone calls [from leasing companies and other creditors] that you have to ignore it," Jeremy says. "Luckily, we've got two lines and caller ID. They all seem to ring at certain times - between eight and half past in the morning, and again at 12 and five o'clock and twenty to nine at night. You can't say anything anyway. They all want to know when you're going to pay something, and you can't pay any of them. Lloyds TSB are the worst." "And you owe them the least," chips in Marie.

Jeremy was pleased when the leasing company finally took him to court to repossess the van. "I was waiting for someone to do something," he says. "That's why the van [being repossessed] was a relief. It was the start of the end. I'm going to have to go bankrupt, I think. I've got no choice. I want everything to be wiped clean. I can't see any other option." And, "much as we love the house, if the house goes, it goes," says Marie, who is also self-employed, making curtains and blinds - another business that has stagnated. "Just to be able to sleep at night and have peace of mind."

The couple have a 14-year-old daughter, who, they say, realises that they are going through a tough time. "She's aware and understands," says Marie, "and she doesn't expect [things from us], whereas she did at one point - her pocket money every Friday and 'Can I have new shoes this week, mum?' It doesn't happen now."

What will the Sarjeants do to get out of this mess? "I need to draw a line first," says Jeremy. "What we've earned from October is just enough to live on. I've tried so hard and you just can't do anything about it. Everything I know, I've tried." He is doing some building work and servicing the odd awning. He hasn't tried to claim benefits, associating them with "kids who don't want to work". "I need to work," he says, "I cannot sit at home." He talks of retraining - as an electrician or a plumber. He even mentions becoming a hypnotist. I ask whether there is much call for hypnotists on the south coast. The question hangs in the air as we step out of the pub and into the rain and cold on the seafront. He gives me a lift into town in his beautiful black Mercedes - easily the most glamorous car in down-at-heel Dover. But all an illusion.

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