Introduction And Chapter Guide

This is my sixth attempt at writing about my life from being a teenager until I left the town I grew up in. The life I led back then was always peculiarly slippery. The opportunities for self improvement were there, but by the time I accessed them, late, they became backward steps, rather than progress. I would be told that I  was 'Too old to be improved' by the managers of what I pursued. The help they offered were more meant to help younger, better resourced, people (from better resourced families). They told me about what I should have chased instead, without telling me that it was cheap, never worked, and was  discontinued long ago. What I remember most from those times was how the more friendly and sunny many people presented themselves as, the more opaque they actually were. The grumpy folk were the ones I should have listened to closer and trusted more.

My family disliked all change and slowed down every natural change that my growing up should have included by mis-describing my natural life and making a half life out of it. My intent as a teenager was to find out who I actually was, as opposed to accepting who other people said I was. Nearly every time I guessed rightly who I was then other people, particularly my family, would say that I was wrong because their self interest lay in preserving the younger, cheaper, and more passive versions of me that they had made up. My parents thought that they were parenting me well by stopping me from growing up. They wanted me, whilst under their roof, to think of myself in the most detached human terms possible.

With each previous attempt at writing before this one, who I actually was would appear on the page and then disappear as the opacity of my parents took over the narrative, just like my family did when I was young. When trying to find out who I actually was through the writing I would often get waylaid by the memory of the distractions my parents had once used. Bringing my mind and the page back to me was a test I often failed temporarily. Only the reader can decide whether I won against the distractions. It was not his fault that my teenage self has been so difficult to track down through writing. He was always being eclipsed by the narrative his parents preferred over the person he actually was.

As Billy Bragg neatly puts it 'They tuck you up/your mum and dad.'. Please accept this final attempt at waking up my teenage self to try to find the alive adult self that there was in him for who he is. He was so well tucked up that he made every call to wake up and grow to be a grown man as a means of further retreat. He had mentors who taught him to retreat, when courage and directness were what was called for. Happy discovering what of him survived.

Thank you for getting this far.

Chapter One - from invisible boy to alien in the attic with neither forethought nor preparation.

Chapter Two - Probing ideas of competition vs informed consensus via television, what to read and why, the earliest of the many battles against domestic cover ups and misinformation.

Chapter Three - Accepting living on less, looking back on the boarding school/care home, Mother's 'never again' stories, a wider choice of reading.

Chapter Four - Misadventures in work, unpaid labour on Mother's allotment, the annual family day trip to Skegness, rejoining S.J.A.B., how to live through science fiction.

Chapter Five - Education, starting at a disadvantage, witnessing mis-selling, neighbours try to help me directly, dad 'explains what work is about', retreating into music and humour, first discovery of Radio 4, shopping and television routines, that first flat Christmas.

Chapter Six - Discovering more than music via local/regional radio, a future openly cancelled, Mother's fantasy job for me, dad loses his job, out to the theatre for the first time.

Chapter Seven - Leaving education young, beginners syndrome, household improvements, life on the black economy, a lack of experience, expanding choice through dole money, hitching lifts for the first time, the vagaries of sex, dad's choice of shared viewing, bad official advice, bad training, bad sex.

Chapter Eight - Another flat Christmas, Mother's mental health, neighbours move, dad totally drunk, the NME as good reading, amateur theatre, misreading '1984', theatre masculinity and 'being gay', rebellion is difficult to make work.

Chapter Nine - Mother's choice of television vs dad's, speculations around alcohol, the lack of interview technique, more non-training.

Chapter Ten - Seduced in the back of the carpet shop, the sex addicted boss, hierarchies in work reflect hierarchies at home, unsuitable clothing, randomness as a choice, suicidal thoughts, weird watching habits and ideas reinforced. 

Chapter 11 - Exploring the roots of the loss of choice, meeting other boys who had left the boarding school/care home, discovering local politics, discovering CND via the BBC, selective amnesia, political activism/sexual invisibility, my first rally, the away-from-the-counter culture, .against majoritarianism.

Chapter 12 - A real job, actual trust in work, what parents say and what they mean, is this personal growth?, the well divided life, introduced to Christianity, strange local exceptionalism, a run down of life in the local toilets, a social meeting at the blood donors.

Chapter 13 - Life feels good, voting for the first time, leaving work, thinking of learning, old vices recur, illness in the family, the least expected encounter, taking sides in the family, plans to study take off.

Chapter 14 - The emotional seesaw, an education for the first time in ten years, relearning how to write, old computers, first forays into writing, Youth Fellowship, first live gig proves affirmative.

Chapter 15 - An attempted history of the local CND, the social passivity of local life, going to Glastonbury for the first time.

Chapter 16 - After Glastonbury an attempted restart with life in the parental house, Mother's plans for me, the onion factory, indifferent exam results, reflections on the times my parents grew up through, female friendship through CND, secret plans, retakes of exams, the 'hotel' phrase changes everything.

Chapter 17 - Reflections on sexual experience, directive counselling, more on the television wrestling/the Saturday afternoon family ritual, neutered gay men, my first diary, discovering True Freedom Trust, popular machismo and gossip, old prescriptions never work, Mother finally reveals 'why I was sent to the boarding school/care home' and I am appalled. Greenbelt to the rescue.  

Chapter 18 - One too many people in the parental house, The Glastonbury itch, the open life away from 'home' vs the shut down life in the parental house, more on the seesaw of my parents' marriage, scarily bad planning, fearless unemployment, Graham's music room, the expensive hi-fi, testing the boundaries, making my exit, The Grateful Dead live, loud, and unforgettable.

Chapter 19 - My first dodgy landlord, not-quite-cheap living, doing the double, a tatty looking freedom vs a better decorated oppression, Mr Aftershave, anger at the media, back to hitching lifts as viable travel.

Chapter 20 -  The big CND push, showing 'The War Game', wanting to resign, being at Glastonbury second time, The carpet shop man returns, a horrible twenty first birthday party, finally resigning from CND, last 'O' level retaken/passed, brittle encounters in the job centre. 

Chapter 21 - Reflections on mental health, on reading 'Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', friends who followed Guru Maharaj Ji, back to Social Services, Quaker Keith, teaching myself what to read, reduced isolation.

Chapter 22 - Drifting between churches, I joined the wrong church, my lack background in faith matters, church and history, Pastor Paul, middle class imitations of Christianity, escaping the Pentecostal Church hurt, TFT returns, honourable models of masculinity. parties, the end of the experiment in youthful communal living, learning about depression the hard way, the hardest way back to better living.

Chapter 23 - A survey of different addresses I lived at, my first year on a work programme, the fear of false nostalgia, my first exposure to the song 'Relax' by FGTH and my bad relationship with the song, Mother hatches new plans for me to live near the parental house I accept them.

Chapter 24 - A survey of the typical life of my parents found when they came into adulthood including their expectations, the job/wife/drink/owning your own house package, first experience of drugs, non-patriarchal ways of handling wealth, goodbye Mr Aftershave and Wilson Carpets, being older than my newer friends, my sister moves away from the parental house.

Chapter 25 - Moving out/in, I discover Radio 4 for life whilst decorating, a recent and not-quite-new best friend to share that flat with, my sisters life parallels mine, my membership of The Pentecostal Church hits the wrong note, my new popularity, the ongoing student life.

Chapter 26 -I enjoy going to the newly opened Arts Centre a lot, some very odd 'community politics', horrible histories-a local drama, more skirmishes around homosexuality via involvement with the theatre, seeing somebody with A.I.D.S. for the first time. 

Chapter 27 - Friendship change and popularity, different groups of people I intersect well with, the calmest people, Supersonic Steve, Mother's errant instincts, cannabis vs alcohol, the first party, leaving the Pentecostal Church, the second party, my sister's life changes and complicates my life, friendship evolves, my first serious therapy book, one last party, the row after the party.

Chapter 28 - The aftermath of the party and the argument, alone and subdued, how to explain to Mother?, victim/persecutor/rescuer, Dorothy Rowe helps me find victory in the face of defeat, Greenbelt again, my favourite few hours of the decade re-described, a new friend for life, the closet door definitively opened, 'the golden girls problem', another change of address, leaving the past behind me.  

Chapter 29 -The last local change of address, the quieter better balanced life, a new and calmer church life, same old same old with work and education, changes of plans, a chance meeting proves useful, the occasional sexual partners, first forays into life in Nottingham, a memorable last night in the town.

Afterword - Conclusion and summary of a long and slow attempt at leaving my past behind me, a lucky escape, the next memoir?.

Chapter 1 - The Alien In The Attic

I cannot describe the depth of release I felt that Monday morning, in late July 1977. I was putting in the bin what remained of my three pairs of school trousers, two pairs of which I had literally worn the arse out of them. But Mother refused to throw them out earlier and buy me any more. The pairs with the arse out of the trousers had been crudely patched by the care home staff to last the last few weeks. Both the trousers and my worn-at-the-elbows school shirts went into the dustbin, for the bin men to take away later that same day. I had not had as much fun binning anything for two years, when Mother asked me to carve into small pieces the cardboard box that our new colour television had arrived in. She asked me to slash the box to bits because she feared that if anyone saw the words 'colour television' on the side and the box as it was left out whole then somebody might come and steal the then-new television set from us in the middle of the night without her hearing them enter the house. I was meant to leave school the summer the television arrived, but the school leaving age was raised by one year so I had to stay. What I did to that box was a substitute for what I wanted to do to my schooling and school clothing I was required to wear. But I could not do it, since I had another year to make my worn out schooling stretch further. Eventually I stayed at the school for a second year. Finally getting rid of my school uniforms at aged sixteen felt like clearing out signs of a long, very tired, non-education where I did not understand why I had to stay where I did and did not know what I was meant to be doing. That non-education would take years of late study to recover from. And it would warp my adult life in more ways than anyone at the time, particularly me, could foresee.  

I had only turned sixteen by a few days when the boarding school 'for the maladjusted' that I had attended for the last five years closed for the summer. I was one of ten boys who were taken on the five hour journey in an overfull school minibus where, one by one, we were all dropped off at our parents' houses. Most of them would return in September, I would not. Me and my suitcase, crammed with tired school uniforms, and the few items of casual clothing owned were the last to be dropped off before the minibus went back to the school. I went through the front door of the parental house, once inside I took my suitcase up to my attic room and left it there to be unpacked in the morning, and 'settled in'. I say 'my attic room', the decoration was distinctly female and made it as plain as it had ten years earlier that the room was much more the property of Mother than it was meant for use by anyone else. If I tried to point out to Mother or dad with even the mildest self evident reason the disconnect between how if it was meant to be 'my bedroom' then why was the decoration so female in character? Then what I said would be seen as provocative beyond all defence. I would be told 'Yes, it is your room, but there will be no changes to it, any more than the rest of the house will change.'. A similarly diverting explanation would follow if I asked about the school I'd just left. I'd be told 'You were maladjusted in the school, but you are not now since you left', as if the school was now the cause of the maladjustment, when originally I was led to believe that the school was the cure for my not adjusting to life in the parental house. Arguments in this house often looped in on themselves that way, where any original point to the argument got buried beyond retrieval and ended trying to understand anything much.

However the arguments looped in on themselves it remained clear that my life had been blown off course, but my life was not the only life so misdirected. Every schoolboy who had once hoped to leave school and start an apprenticeship at age fourteen had been made to wait for their apprenticeship until they were sixteen, when most of them were diverted away from the expected apprenticeship and directed by careers officers to do something they had never thought they wanted to do. They were not told that apprenticeships were being phased out. Had the apprenticeships been there when I would fourteen have left two years earlier, and by now I would be towards the end of my second year as an apprentice where for still living with my parents I would be esteemed as a worker. Instead I was accepting the going on the full time college course that my mother and the careers officer had agreed that I should do in which I had an interest enough to agree with them to do. But I could not imagine any knowledge I learned occupying any physical space in the parental house. The attic space was the only place I might try to do anything and the female atmosphere of that room would make any interest I took up a struggle to maintain there.

The routines of the parental house seemed okay at first, but for the past five years the longest I'd stayed there continuously had been the six week long summer holiday. I had no idea how I'd feel living there long term and going to college as a student, full time in lieu of the original apprenticeship might feel. I was quite used to substitutions, a cheaper idea replacing another, more expensive, original idea where the implications of the change for the future were never discussed. There were surely letters and discussions between Social Services and my parents prior to me returning for a permanent life in the parental house. But I knew as little about my parents as I knew about what Social services said and did, and kept records of. I knew nothing, I went where they sent me without knowing what my parents had agreed to with them. I would have liked to have signed off from my social worker, Mrs Hunt, in my own right, like the near-adult I thought I was. It never happened.

In the twenty-first century the issue of surveillance capitalism via digital media is well known if somewhat sketchily understood. In the analogue world of 1977 the Social Services were not seen as part of any 'surveillance society'. Yet the way that they collected and compiled information on children and parents, and the highly selective way with which they shared what they knew, and hid unknown amounts of information that they had compiled without being seen to, made them appear to be one part spy network, to one part 'soft policeman' and it made them to be wholly feared, because they divided families through mental health labels when mental health was a taboo subject within families. The view that anyone took of Social Services depended on their level of engagement with them-the less anyone had to do with them the more benign they seemed. The more anyone had to deal with them the less they trusted Social Services, even though they had to take the intent of Social Services at face value. As sort-of-policemen they often used very odd phrases, which made interrogating their motives by using plain speech difficult and dispiriting. But it was plain enough to all when anybody dared to retrospectively look at the records they kept on the children 'in their care' who were now adults that Social Services behaved as if they were a law unto themselves.

One point that was clear to all was an economic one. For my parents, the longer the school kept me in the last two years, when I felt that I should have been able to leave, the less the parental house had to pay for my upkeep. Now the household budget would have to expand to pay for me in full. if dad had 'a free ride' for thirty nine week a year for the last two years then it had to end sometime. Would dad give Mother more housekeeping money to pay the extra I took to feed and keep? I was reluctant to return to the parental house for a different reason, I was leaving the neutrality of the anaglypta wallpaper painted sea green of the bedrooms of the care home behind for a decor that was more inhibiting, where, naturally, it's inhibiting effect was denied.

If I hoped for change when I returned then I was in for a disappointment. When I returned to the parental house permanently, my parents took up exactly from where they had left off me living in the house full time five years previously, as if nothing had changed in the intervening period. The sense of dad being shut down was the same, the sense of Mother working hard because she had to and to keep dad onside with the household was present too. This lack of change came to the fore with short term career choices. When I turned eleven Mother had described me as 'having an interest in electronics' when really I wanted space away from family, and to get it I spent the summer in the backyard looking at the decades old radiogram they had thrown out because it no longer worked. It was the most interesting thing in the yard. Based on my desire for time apart from family that hot summer five years earlier in the yard, bored but quiet. I was now going to college full time for a year to study something I had never been given the space to gain a grasp of. On the upside, the exams in English and Maths would be a catch up after everything that teachers had not taught me in those subjects for five years because they thought, well I don't know what they thought, all I knew was that whatever they said, it was some sort of cover up.  

In my new place in the parental house my interest in electronics still did not get as far as a workshop space in which to take circuits apart and reassemble them, as my mate in school John Jackson had had since he was thirteen which had made the subject a vocation for him. The nearest Mother permitted herself to think about electronics was to save the glass that showed the radio stations when the radiogram was taken away from the yard, and letting me regularly change the battery on her small portable radio on which she listened to BBC Radio 2 in the mornings. I could wistfully gaze at that piece of painted glass in my room, with all the radio stations on it and do very little else. That piece of painted glass held all the force of sentiment that Mother put into it, making a piece of junk a symbol of an interest she claimed I had, and yet through the symbol she made sure that interest could not go anywhere, change my life, or change how life in the parental house worked. Having junk was better than having nothing.

Being in full time education, and on a grant whilst getting family allowance, rather than working and getting a pay packet with which to bargain for space and personal choice meant that I was put in more of a financial and social bind than I would like to have been. But it was only the update of an old bind. In the boarding school I had been on half the amount of pocket money other boys the same age as me were on. By Summer 1977 I was on 50 pence a week pocket money, compared with other sixteen year old boys getting a pound. And my pocket money came out of the full family allowance, a fund that Mother got for me which in turn gave her oversight over what clothing I had, and might be bought for me that never ran to anything stylish and durable. If I had not learned my low self esteem from my schooling, then I would have gained it from how I was clothed. But being in full time education gave me one leverage point with dad when he got antsy that his money did not buy as much beer as it previously had; he paid less tax because I was still in full time education and if he was not claiming tax relief for me being a dependent than he should have been. 

Up to the time of my return full time to the parental house I thought dad had done well out of my absence, financially, partly because I had no interest in the price of beer in the pubs-dad's hobby. because I was listed officially as a child/dependent on full time education money for me came to the parental household through dad's tax allowance. But for the last five years I had cost him and the household nothing except the stamps Mother put on the letters she sent to me, for thirty nine weeks of the year. I saved the extension of this argument, that if he paid less tax because I was listed as a dependent on his tax code, then that money should go to Mother for later. 

If I had nowhere to do electronics in the parental house, then nor did I have hobbies and interests that engaged anyone my age or cost anyone anything much. All I had up to the age of sixteen were some scrapbooks with royal coverage in the red-top  newspapers going up to Summer 1973, and Mother's idea that 'Liked collecting stamps' as if I were some commoner juvenile version of George VI for whom quiet hobbies were 'good for the nerves'. In the latter Mother bought the commemorative stamps from the post office when they were issued. For decades after, when I applied for jobs where there was a space where I had to list hobbies and interests I used to put words to the effect of 'I don't have hobbies that I can't afford', as being able to pay for the hobbies was what counted. I did not realise that if I could name a sociable hobby then I might reveal a social skill in getting on with people that the employer might employ me for. There was always more space on those forms for proving sociability than there was in the parental house for hobbies and interests.

If I could say that I had developed at all, then I had developed to be on my own and into having no shared interests partly because everywhere I was sent, boarding school/care home, or the parental house, made me feel so temporary. Also where I had developed I was co-opted by Mother when dad would not be the helpmate she wanted him to be. It was another strange fold down/inversion of normality that Mother was my proxy for friendship, my minder and guide, for nearly everything that passed for 'my social life' up to the age of sixteen to the age of nineteen. This reached the stage where when some less perceptive people saw the two of us together, e.g. going shopping around the town, they assumed from our body language that Mother and I were man and wife. But I was never the helpmate Mother wanted. I simply stood in for what never arrived then, and would never arrive later. Dad was meant to be the helpmate to Mother, but his helpmate of choice was the drink, and the drink would not let him be seen with Mother attending sober minded non-alcohol based activities. I stood in where dad steadfastly refused, because between the two parents' lopsided way of parenting I was left with no choice.

I had never been taught how to choose to refuse something without seeming ill willed to myself about it. I had always been verbally coerced in such a way as what I was presented with appeared to be less coercion, more a matter of social necessity. So for three years I did not know how to refuse Mother anything. Apart from my own, frankly odd, behaviour at the age of ten and eleven, one of the reasons I had been seen as 'maladjusted' was about how much I was seen to be under the influence of my mother. In the 1970's the popular theory ran that a teenage boy needs the example and company of his father and men like his father, for the boy to become a man, and for the boy to become the rhetorically heterosexual male who makes homosexuality and 'being maladjusted' seem invisible, if not non-existent. I say this theory existed, in every discussion I ever heard back then that attempted to personalise the theory one real life example then either the argument got mangled beyond all credible explanation, or the theory could never apply close to home. It could only apply hypothetically and to examples far away.

But I had the evidence of how it applied to me and to my family. Whatever the school did to put some physical distance between me and my mother, she was the one to ring weekly, she was the one who wrote all but one letter to me, week in week out, for over two hundred weeks over the five years that I was at the school. I doubt that either the school or Social Services ever attempted to prompt dad into communicating more readily, and increasing his personal contribution to me becoming an adult, to balance up the combined presentation of gender they both made as parents. 

In later years I would repeatedly come across this 'too much of the mother, not enough of the father' explanation for male homosexuality. Every time the proponent of the theory put it forward they would have no answer for how the person who was 'historically gender unbalanced' might agreeably improve their gender balance through the life they still had as adults. If an individual had made workable choices out of 'being gay' as an adult then change was seen as 'too late' for any easy or comfortable reversal of their perceived sense of their sexuality. Blaming the errant father was either ineffective scapegoating, or 'trying to bolt the door after the horse had left', too little performed much too late for it to be useful.

So, there I was, the alien in the attic every night, in a room that if both of my parents had decorated it together a decade ago then ever since Mother had set the agenda for how the room was used. Dad never came into the room. The nearest he got to being in it was that if I were needed in the living room then he would shout through the door at the foot of the stairs -stairs which never had a light fitted above to make it easy for me to see where I was putting my feet-for me to come down because 'Mam wanted me'. 

Mother came up when there was food to be retrieved or when the bed had to be stripped or remade. The attic was the room that was most used as a store room in the house. It was as if the house had female and male poles to it, where the female pole was the attic. It was where Mother was most omniscient and omnipresent in the house, just as the living room on the ground floor of the house was where dad had most influence with his choice of wallpaper, furniture and the television that was always on if he was in. In the time that I was away Mother had used the attic as a rest space for herself, away from the marital bed when she felt uncomfortable there. The attic was interesting for a while, as a place to hide and be away from the reach of dad forever choosing what television programme we would watch next. But then anyone hiding in the attic too long would be confronted by how bunged it was, they would have wondered what the six boxes, all three foot high and two foot by two foot square were hiding. I made no real mark on the room all the time I was there, my character was under-developed and materially I had nothing to make a mark with.

If my parents' marriage was severely lopsided, with my father simply refusing to present himself as he was to any of us in our own right, then one of Mother's weaknesses was that of hoarding which was hard to detect as a weakness when  it was presented as thrift. The axis of the unbalance of it all was that the more money that he wanted to spend on beer the more she felt she had to be a hoarder, and scrimp and save to make every last penny she did get work harder, the more dad expected Mother to absolve him of household responsibility.

Mother stored household things in every room in the house except my sister's bedroom and the bedroom that she shared with dad. Where things were most used they were stored close to where they were going to be used. But in the midst of these most used things Mother remained a random and forgetful hoarder, where keeping the goods can't have been about making money go further, it must have been about something else. In the medical cupboard there was the unused twenty odd year old bottle of olive oil and dropper for softening the wax in our ears. In the pantry there were the decades-old jars of rice and pasta that she had never learned how to cook, and feared that we would reject if she tried cooking with them. On the top shelf of the pantry there was the tin of lemonade powder from the days of rationing which had ended circa 1952. On the pantry floor there were too many bottles to count of the blackberry vinegar that she made as a cold cure every year from steeping sugar and blackberries in white wine vinegar which she then boiled to stop it turning alcoholic. That she would never get colds enough to use even half of it was beside the point.

Thus one of the virtues of my bed was the two foot height of space underneath it, which was filled with bottles, boxes of jams, and other containers of foods that would be periodically brought down to refill more everyday use stores of food that got used up. The nearest I had to choice in how it was presented was changing the sheets of the single hospital bed every Sunday, and Mother led in that. 'Hospital corners' she would say and I did them every time.

The only thing that I could definitely say was mine alone was the small but growing collection of records I had. It consisted mostly of ex-chart and ex-juke box singles, and a few Beatles albums. Though I was openly proud of recently buying my first copy of 'Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' with some of my sixteenth birthday money from the local record shop 'The Music Centre'. My records were kept with the family's records, all the dud Elvis Presley mid 60's film soundtrack albums and the randomly acquired Music For Pleasure and Top of The Pops LP's that were kept in the cabinet below the record player that had replaced the radiogram. Dad had managed through his ignorance to damage the amplifier of the record player by disconnecting one of the speakers because he thought it was too loud. There was no use telling him he had done wrong; either he would deny it all or brazenly say that it was his to damage, if damaged it be.

It was common for men to make mistakes and own them as if they were virtues. It was also common for women to think they had made mistakes when they hadn't, and for them to fear men's mistakes by recounting them as stories in which men always did things right. But later the women would recount the story differently where not only were the deeds of men now wrong, those deeds had always been wrong, a mistake all along and none of it should ever be allowed to happen again.

One of Mother's 'never again' stories of male failure came from the four years when she was single and her sister Alice was newly married to Terry, 1956-60. When, as a newly married man, Terry settled into not going out to the pub to please his wife he started making fruit wine with fruit grown on his allotment. He set it all up in bottles in which he put corks to seal them. Some of the corks had water based valves in them that let out the air pressure that built up in the bottles, but not all. He ran out of valves.Naturally the batch that were plain corked that he did not have the water valves for were a risk. One night when Mother was around to see them and chat, she was most alarmed at the sound of the popping of corks out of bottles. The pantry floor overflowed with spilt wine and there was much cleaning up to be done. It became Mother one of her more enduring false warnings about making mistakes, she never mentioned the water based valves that the wine should have had in the corks. Terry learned from his mistakes though, he kept on making the wine so it exploded less. When I went to see Alice and Terry, as part of my having to follow Mother round I was given a glass of his latest batch of home made fruit wine to taste, along with all the adults in the room, twenty years after the story of the batch that had exploded was retold for the umpteenth time.

In that one act of Terry over-ruling Mother's reluctance, and giving me the same as he had given everyone else in the room Terry showed me what equality and inclusion were. But then he was a socialist, although he talked little about it because he knew his belief was best shown by his actions. It would have been awkward for me to wish that he were my father in that moment, rather than the person who very distantly actually occupied that role being my father. But if I had wished that, then it would only be the first of many times that I met men who shared a generosity of spirit with me that made my previous family experience seem mean and meagre.

Terry was the earliest example of wiser drinking that I knew of, 'Never drink farther than a short walk to your bed' was a phrase that I adopted much later in life, when I was learning how to live more honestly with myself than how my dad had ever lived with himself.

Please find Chapter 2 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.  

Chapter 2 - The Alien Discovers Life Through Television

The way dad used the television was manipulative, to the point where he tried to make it a virtue that he was transparently manipulative. We could watch what we wanted or turn the set off when dad was not around, but when he was around he chose which of the three channels we should all watch from an angle when his chair faced most directly towards the set. When choosing what we would watch he might have said that the broadcasters were being manipulative, because they provided so little of the entertainment that he was partial to. What felt most manipulative was how dad appeared to use the television set as if it was an obedient but noisy child, where the noisier it was the more obedient it was to him. He used it to make us, Mother included, quiet and obedient and child-like by comparison. With hindsight it was clear that a restful quiet in the parental house was the one thing dad could not cope with, and his control of everyone in the parental house through the television meant that he never had to cope with quiet.

His choice of viewing was always to find the most sporty or crass looking reporting of the news, the sitcom with the cheapest characters who shared the mouldiest jokes, the television programmes with the least information value. It was as if the lack of information in a programme meant that the programme could withstand being repeated more easily; we would remember real information that was worth paying attention to so it had to be updated. With cheap jokes and stereotypical characters that never needed updating they could be repeated to infinity.

Most evenings of the week and Saturday lunch time dad went out to the pub with his mates. He spent enough hours there mid-week every week for it to be the equivalent of a part time job. Add the weekend hours and they added up to a full time job. Around the time I was sixteen Mother went out on her own more too. I was left at home to mind my twelve year old sister many midweek nights. On our own we watched television or turned the set off to play board games. It felt liberating to not have the adults, well the parents, around insisting they were right and our choices were always the wrong ones. Our ideas differed from theirs. If we wanted to giggle at the names of elderly actresses like Googie Withers, who starred as the governor in the prison drama 'Within These Walls', then we could. It was as if their very names were jokes.

On my own, with my sister in bed, the programmes I liked were guided by Uncle Terry's choices when Mother and I visited him and Alice. I liked BBC 2 programmes like 'Call my Bluff' and the science documentary series 'Horizon'. I liked the way that there was rarely any continuous onscreen presenter with the programme. The programme would usually be a film about a particular branch of science, with explanation for what was happening coming from an off-screen narrator who spoke sparsely and let the visuals lead, with the occasional interview where it fitted in to the narrative. The presentation put the subject first and the makers of the programme far behind, well behind the scenery so to speak. I had often experienced teaching from teachers where they made who they were seem more important than what I was meant to be learning from them. As a television programme 'Horizon' was a good teacher, they let the subject lead. 

Another sign of a good television programme was that there was a book that I could read that would be a more detailed source that explained better what was being shown on the screen. Thus it would be that I read both 'I Claudius' and 'Claudius the God' by Robert Graves after the BBC television adaptation of both books, along with other books by Graves where with his pagan views he interpreted events that Christianity claimed to have the sole viable narrative of. It was brave stuff for a teenager to read. I would not like now to speculate the percentage of material in those book that went straight over my head back then, where simply stepping outside life in my own times, the late 1970's, through reading, seemed like a necessity to me as much as my reading seemed like a folly to the rest of my family.

For as long as I was on tiny amounts of pocket money per week I would either follow Mother because she requested me to be with her for an evening, or stay in and watch the television programmes on my own that I knew dad would never approve of, they were too intellectual. When I had to have money to make new friends and I had very little I was unintentionally following dad's example. The television was my friend, it was the better informed cousin or older brother I wanted when there was no human equivalent, when there never had been.  

I could not explain to either dad or myself why I loathed what he found to be compulsive television and he loathed what I loved. He was practically addicted to sport on television, whereas televised sport reminded me of the miserable time I had in school, with sport. I had done incredibly badly with school sports because it was competition without mentoring, or the stick without the carrot. I was half okay with the idea that my badness in sport made others seem better. But when the sports teachers wanted me to improve I could not see the point. Other reasons for disliking televised sport were that it was all recorded, rarely live. Because of that it was more television than sport. I was watching a recording of a competition which I disliked and within that I was viewing what was already deeply pre-digested that I had no part in it except to watch it glassy eyed with incomprehension. The exception to this rule, the shared meeting point for dad and me, was snooker, because it was presented live, as it happened and It was slow, quiet and calm.

Dad never explained anything, he left explaining to Mother, who he knew would leave out of her explanations anything he disliked. Among the subjects he avoided explanations for was why he disliked news and political analysis programmes, and so liked televised sport. Maybe he saw rhetorical aspects in televised sport; with it's immersive focus on the action of the sportsmen, televised sport was a way of avoiding logical arguments that knew of but had never thought through. The more televised sport he watched the more relieved he was that he felt less need to think. As a family we never allowed each other to discuss politics, religion, sex, or money. This rule was reinforced to the level where nobody in the family was even allowed to think far enough as to ask 'Who made the rules that banned these subjects so absolutely from discussion? And when did they make them? And how much further in the world did they apply?' What those rules meant to me was that we were not allowed to think, because thoughts and logical arguments required framing via the use of words-ban the words and you ban thinking altogether.  

If dad's choice of television programming was severely anti-thought, then under his orders the television reinforced the house rules when it was disallowed from presenting anything to do with politics, sex, religion or money. If dad did believe that could present stories that kept to self censorship rules of the house then both directly and indirectly, so much of what television presented did comment on those subjects-albeit with a fair amount of showbiz flummery to dilute any sense of direct instruction.

The level of showbiz insincerity was at it's peak with television wrestling, which I found both compulsive viewing and agonising in it's effect on me in the parental home. Television wrestling was the Gordian knot of all television presentations for me. Years before when I was ten, triggered by my being bullied and unable to fight back in school, I had endured a nervous breakdown and for seven months after I was put on heavy antidepressants which often left me feeling rather absent from myself. My family saw me as simply as being in some strange sort of limbo, rather than having had a nervous breakdown. They thought that only adults they did not know could have nervous breakdowns. I was put on pills to keep me calm and bring me round again. I did not know what I had gone through but I felt as if the pills froze me more.

Frozen in thought and deed as I was, Mother made sure I took the tablets, whilst why I had to take them was a subject on a par with money, sex, religion and politics in terms of being subjects fit for discussion. Also banned from all talk was what had led up to me taking these pills. But in this period of my mental fragility every Saturday afternoon around teatime dad would insist that the wrestling be on in the background whilst we ate. All through this period, and long after, I would sort of  'trip out'  on the television soundtrack coming from behind his head, every grunt groan and noise of a wrestler making a noisy and painful landing came to me from somewhere past dad's head. The characters of the winner, the 'plucky' loser, the cheat who did his cheating moves to the camera but away from the referee, all echoed the different school children who were part of why I had the breakdown. The roar of the crowd watching the wrestling echoed the noise of the classroom when the teacher was absent which was when the breakdown happened. At age sixteen, and having avoided it all the time I was in boarding school, those sounds and that drama came back to me from behind dad's head as if his head was a wrestling ring with wrestlers and a referee in it. His head was certainly a place of open conflict, particularly when he denied that it was drunk. This denial added to how I was personally divided by the television wrestling, where if dad had said in a way that invited confirmation, and actions to follow, that the wrestling was fixed and the way it was filmed made it even more artificial then I would have been saved a lot of conflict. But no, the conflict and denial had to continue. Add to that conflict how my now sixteen year old self was full of raging hormones, and the proto-homoerotic images of large men in tight trunks being tactile and aggressive with each other and what you have is me seeing well past the label 'light entertainment'. As I peered into the fake sincerity for signs of rules being well observed I saw only my frustrations dramatised, and yet again whatever argument I started out with ended up by looping in on itself. 

One of the better reasons that attracted me to what was shown on television was how unlike the parental house it was. Whatever we saw on it, every space was a single use space for showing us one thing at a time. Every activity was done in one space and that one space had one function that one time. With the house being so small and with Mother's hoarding making every room except my sister's and my parents' bedrooms multi-use almost simultaneously Mother made the parental house something like an inside out TARDIS; where the TARDIS was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, our house was smaller on the inside than the dimensions in space it took up suggested it should be. What Mother could never get rid of made it smaller, and through those things we still travelled back in time in the parental house. What Mother kept carried the stories we lived by, which by their nature stopped us having new stories to tell.

Nearly nothing of what surrounded me was mine, after all I had not lived there for three quarters of the past five years and I had even less before that. What I owned in my own right included some records, mostly singles, and quite a few cheap paperback books, most of which were juvenile in nature, particularly the 'Russ Tobin' series of books by Stanley Morgan. Tobin was a sexually immature adult male who lived in a world of infinite choice including sexual encounters that, literally, fell into his lap, from which there never any consequences. I perversely enjoyed the reductive exercise where the more juvenile and evasive the sexual detail in the books became when they described seemingly chance sexual relations, the better I thought I understood them. But I was young and secretly horny enough to believe anything, particularly when I was never likely to have an open conversation with anyone about what to do or like, sexually, and what might have been good or bad about it.

My dad read cowboy books, american magazines, and cheap detective thrillers with lots of near-but-not-quite sexual encounters in them which he got part exchange money back for when he returned them for new titles in what we would now call 'a pop up book shop'. I drew from his example there: just as dad's cowboys and detectives were presented as lone agents going through hostile rural or urban landscapes, so it was for me with Russ Tobin; opportunism never had consequences, it could only lead to increased and unaccounted for opportunism. 

However silent and secretive I was about being a would-be erotic fantasist, to Mother I tried to be what she wanted me to be when I was with her. How could I do anything else? Mother was clear about money; everything about it was based on duty, not opportunity, much less opportunism. Thus it was that when we had to break the household rule about not talking about money I had to lead her in us doing so, because she would not take any lead in any discussion about choice with money.

Unexpectedly, I had been given money for going to college, a 'maintenance grant' of £1 a week for the year, a cheque for £40. It was the first cheque I had ever been given in my life and my inclination was to follow the agenda I previously lived by; I had never had much money in my own right so it was  best I give it away so as not to let it cause jealousy. I did not know what I had been given it for. I talked to Mother and I said that since she paid out so much money for me weekly then I wanted her to have the money, since I was kept I should learn to do without. I had seen how little she got by on and I saw easing her financial discomfort as a reasonable thing to do. She was vehement about not wanting it, she made it seem that I was tempting her to steal. It would have been helpful if she had picked up on the word 'maintenance' and said 'That money has been given to you so you can buy all the A4 pads, a calculator, pencils and pens etc that you will need throughout the year', but she did not. She suggested that I put it in my account in the Yorkshire Penny Savings Bank, though I had no idea what sort of bad weather I might need to cover me against, or when it might happen. 

She then explained that from when I had returned 'for good' dad had increased the money he gave her by £1 per week and the budget and the food she served were not stretching very well. Half the £1 went to me in the form of pocket money anyway. I understood more then; dad was the one with the money and he was the one who should be increasing the household budget by £5 a week more, but he had not volunteered so far. What was more, he made it near-impossible to ask him about housekeeping money, even if part of what was being spoken of was about maths as much as it was about money. Since we were barred talk abut money, sex, politics or religion, little could be said. I thought that since we were not barred from talking about was maths then that was the way to ask dad directly for more money. He was numerate, unlike some men of his generation, though he strove to hide most signs of it. He knew that the more he hid what he knew the less we could expect of him in the way of understanding.

So it was one dinner time, in between eating mouthfuls of food, I explained to dad what he was doing in figures he could not ignore and I said to him directly that he needed to give Mother £5 more each week if the household budget was to remain in balance. In the harsh artificial light of the overhead circular fluorescent tube I could not tell what colour dad's face turned, but if ever a face looked like a storm cloud then that was what his face looked like at that moment. What I did not realise at the time was I had the advantage of surprise, he simply expected everyone to obey the rules of conversation without him ever giving any explanation of anything. He did give Mother more for the housekeeping, probably half of what he should have given her, but still more than the £1 a week he had given whilst he silently knew, and denied to himself and others, that it was not enough.

That said, I soon understood that the power of surprise can only be used once. With dad I was in the situation of being unable to pick my battles, he always had the advantage of setting my battles with him on his terms because he owned the parental house. In the longer term it was thinking like this that personally turned me off property ownership. I did not want to be that secretive and distant. When force and secrecy are the nearest there is to morality, and they hide behind a distant politeness, then that politeness creates a deferrence in others that becomes equally distancing. This was something I had dimly perceived from the life and routines I observed in the care home/boarding school, where even now I would find the handful of boys around the town who had attended that school where when we met we would puzzle over life now and life in the past that put us in that place. None of us had the forethought and courage to ask Social services directly why we were sent there, and to see what files they had kept on us.

The easiest cover for the necessity of secrecy was shared television watching. Much of what was considered 'family viewing' was the audio/visual equivalent of a reading age of around ten at best, which matched the newspapers we read every day. The more limited in intelligence the programmes were, the more their virtue and purpose became that we could form a consensus of opinion around them as a family. Secrecy meant that forming a consensus around how we saw each other was far less likely or possible; too much would have to be revealed. The more intelligent and argumentative the programme became the narrower the consensus that we could form around the points it raised. The best programmes for forming cheap agreement around were the beauty pageants like 'Miss World', where the programme makers made the sexism they exemplified seem inoffensive beyond belief, and it made the beauty industry, the selling of make up etc an instrument of world peace even with the beauty treatments pandering to white majoritism and being tested on animals. But we valued agreement much more often than we rejected a programme for dumb us down. Television unified us in a passive consensus which seemed to be a good thing in a world where we were afraid of disagreeing with each other. None of us had learned at that time how to cope with us all being complex and individuals. When differences separated us from each other we had to hide our differences, however awkward such open opacity became.

As the household alien I felt that I was at my best when I watched Dr Who. For the first time I watched a whole season of episodes. I followed the arc of the story however, absurd it seemed, avidly. I felt dad's distant approval from across the room when I sensed that he knew that my watching the programme made me obviously happy. He let me watch it even though we all knew that his choice would have been some glossy high-budget low-on-continuity american drama where the point of the drama was the size of the cars and men were real men because they all carried guns about with them. The gun made the man. Dr Who was a different universe to all that, literally.

Please find Chapter 3 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here. 

Chapter 3 - What The Alien Did Next

That summer of 1977 I was just days, weeks, away from never hearing again the dozen or more role calls and bells that rang each day that I used to respond to without question in care home/boarding school. I would never experience them again except as rather isolating memories of times that nobody else around me knew about. The old rules, bells, and triggers of the school were rapidly replaced by spoken calls to watch the television with the family, or to prepare the table for us all eating before Mother plated the food in the kitchen. Other calls were to help Mother strip beds of sheets and remake the beds, prepare for going shopping or going to the allotment. That I followed promptly is witness to how well the previous set of cues had worked. Where in the boarding school television was incidental to the eleven bells and roll calls a day, what television showed at any given moment was much more integrated into the schedules of the parental house.  

I might well have known that if my parents had made sure I had money and time of my own then they would have been granting me greater choice about how to live. But, whether the routine was connected to employment, alcohol consumption, or running the house they were bound hand and foot to their own repetitive routines. If both my parents and I were bound by routines then there was one big difference between me and them. They had friends with whom they experienced something like temporary equality and shared respect as they met other adults through their routines. I had no friends yet, and I would not find any through following the new routines led by my parents. The people I met as I followed Mother around acknowledged me, but they always acknowledged her much more. Mother both wanted to use me for the strength I could give her and wanted to instill in me the line from 'the protestant work ethic', 'work hard and you will get what you want, you will be rewarded'. At the age of sixteen I did not know work would reward me from work that would leave me disappointed. What I dimly saw was that over the last five years I had been presented with many chances for choice and reward which rewarded others more than me, where I felt inclined to ignore those choices rather than embrace them. Sport as 'rewarding teamwork' was one such set of choices.

That was how I accepted the little that I was given. I did not know that I was 'doing without' to no particular purpose. I did not miss the better choices and having more. I saw choice as the choice to be indifferent. With such a small amount of money of my own and my time mostly taken up around college work, or around family, it was a novelty when every so often I was found I had time to myself to explore how I might organise myself if I had even more time. 

It was liberty enough for me to have a key to the house and be given a second hand watch that worked and would not wear out in months like the last one had, so I now knew what the time was.With the new set up I could let myself in and out without my parents being gatekeepers for the house all the time, like the staff were in the care home/boarding school had been. I had been given my first watch out of necessity two years earlier when during the summer holiday Mother had gone into hospital for an operation at short notice for a fortnight and I had to take my sister and myself to the hospital where Mother was recovering. I needed the working watch because whilst I might have been able to read the clock on the platform of the railway station when we got off the train I still had to get back to the platform at the right time for the right train back to the parental house. As if it was meant only to cover the emergency, the watch proved so old that it wore out and was thrown away six months after I was given it. My parents could have got me a good watch the first time, but Mother's stay in hospital was arranged at such short notice and her ill health was such a surprise for all of us that they had done the right thing that fast to get Mother to the hospital. All preparations for me and my sister outside the operation was, quite literally, an afterthought.

In the care home/boarding school I had poor physical coordination and rarely received any help with it, nor was it discussed in any coherent way with me. It was only towards the end of my time there that I learned how to fail in sport with good grace. Then I could fail more comfortably because I was leaving. All the time before that I was in a catch 22 situation of every time I tried harder to compete and be more adept in sort I always failed by an uncomfortable margin. And the level of discomfort made my trying harder even more uncomfortable. All the time I was a sports failure and uneasy about it. The failure put me ill at ease with other boys who either failed more gracefully or were natural winners. But I was not the only one to fail at sports, generally team sports create very few winners and the winners tend to be the same few all the time. After creating the winners the biggest category were the happy losers who occasionally won. I was in the last category, the unhappy losers. Some sporting types could use their unhappiness to make them better players whilst they rarely won. I had the wrong sort of unhappiness, the sort where being forced to compete became cumulatively irritating and depressing.

Part of why I was to study electronics was because it was desk work under instruction but on my own. My coordination and level of comfort around others fitted the quiet and relative isolation of what I was learning which was a comfort to me after losing so often in sport, and feeling bad about losing, had left me unwilling to engage more. With the support I expected to get from the course I hoped to prove that I could do something sufficient that I might be accepted as competent at it by an employer. The more sporty boys from the school surely got far more sociable and rewarding training opportunities than I did. But that mattered less when their lives were continuing well away from mine. 

Another example of the limits of my coordination, closer to home, was that dad trusted me to ride his bike safely but I was never allowed to learn how to repair the puncture when one of the tyres went flat. He would never share in/show me the process of taking off the back wheel, with the three gears on it, and putting it back on securely the same way. He was not going to teach/show me and there was nobody else to show me. I accepted being allowed to watch, but not do, after all much of my life already seemed like that. But it did little to give me confidence and improve my sense of coordination. 

In one way it was enough that I could ride the bike. I was not like Mother who in another of her infamous 'never again ' stories talked about being a teenager and somehow falling off the bike and into a bed of nettles which she said that she was allergic to the stings of. She never got on a bike again. As with many such stories, nine tenths got missed out in her telling of the story, most of which we could not even guess at, like Where did it happen? How did she come to fall off the bike? Whose bike was it? And was that how she discovered she had an allergy to nettle stings? If that was not where she discovered this allergy then where and how did that happen? I always pictured the event happening on the road out her home village and a passing car frightened her in the worst possible place, against a bank of nettles in the heat of summer, with the nettles at maximum height whilst riding a bike her dad owned. But not being told the whys, hows and firm details was always the way with trauma, the result was safer to report with the details AWOL. Describing the process of what led up to the trauma was much more fraught, and risked diminishing the character of the person traumatised in the eyes of other people.

Any hobby that I wanted to have where my family did not prepare it for me had to be within my capability and be cheap. It had to require little to no help from anyone else, and given the hoarder Mother was it had to take up very little space for me to be allowed to keep it without it impinging on space she controlled. The hobby had to work without me having friends too. Friendships required money and I had little. Any new hobby/friendship was also required to respect the secrecy that surrounded my past in the care home/boarding school because when I went there it was impossible to explain why I was there. And now I was out of the place then explaining why I used to go there made me sound like Mother where she talked about the immediate effect of the trauma but not the process that the trauma started from. The last reason for hobbies being cheap and antisocial was more practical and self-evident. In some households it is fine for children to bring other children into the house. It was wrong to do that in the parental house. Mother's hoarding would be as self evident to any guest/visitor as it was blind to us because we lived it.

This left me little choice of how to use the time in which my parents left me to my own devices. One constructive choice was to join the local public library, which I did. I had been a member of the public library in the town where the care home/boarding school was for the last three years I was there. I regret now that I kept no record for my future self of what books I read back then. What I can say about my library borrowings whilst in the care home/boarding school was that I had no guide to follow as to what to borrow, and there were no school reading lists for me to draw inspiration from. Nor did I have friends in the school who read as much as I did who could act as a human reminder of what books I liked and why.One prompt to choose what to read was the films we watched on television, whether it was 'The Cruel sea' or 'To Sir With Love', or 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'. There must have been many other books adapted into films that were considered light adult reading that I was a bit too young for where I followed the prompt, regardless of the result. 

I liked reading grown up books that I guess grown ups read less because I saw my reading of them as badges I gave to myself as proof I was nearer being an adult when I was going to get a few other credits of my maturity. When I joined the library from the parental house I still had no guide as to what to read and I still kept no lists for future reference. One reason I kept no lists for future reference was my handwriting, which was done with my left hand and it looked like my Mother's hand writing. She despised her handwriting, even for simple shopping lists,  and would do nothing to improve it to make it something she, and others, might despise less. My writing was more legible than hers, but I held a pen awkwardly and I needed somebody to tell me how to work on how I held a pen with less pressure. But it was not just that I did not have a mentor, I had never heard of the word 'mentoring'. Before I started the electronics course I wrote quite a lot but not lists for self reference in future, what I wrote were mostly letters to Mother from the care home/boarding school along with letters of thanks to distant relatives every New Year for the small Christmas gifts I had received from them. Dad pooh poohed those letters as I wrote them. I did not realise at the time he was disapproving of the relatives for them being Mother's relatives, as much as the gratitude with which I wrote.

As interests and hobbies went I had the library books to read and return, and the seven inch singles that I had liked in the care home/boarding school too. I liked them because I could afford them and because they linked in with the weekly treat of watching 'Top Of the Pops'. I had not yet discovered the world of cassettes, cassette players and how time consuming it was to make recordings off the radio, though before the end of the year I would get that far. What found me more before the world of cassettes were the rituals around popular music, which moulded themselves around how my week went. It started with being Woolworth's every Tuesday lunch time when the new pop charts were announced, and when the staff noted down the new positions from BBC Radio 1 as they were broadcast I would overhear what she was copying down. Two days later at 7.30 pm there was 'Top Of The Pops' half an hour of chart based music to enjoy, culminating in the playing of the number one record, unless it was banned as some were that summer, so it got played over the credits that closed the show. By the weekend I would be browsing the small shopping tray at the side of the records dept for what singles were being sold cheap because they were going down the chart, or had left it. I could easily spend plenty of time there, apparently running an errand for Mother who always wanted something small for the parental house but extending my stay whilst lingering around the ex-chart singles box. Whatever the formal reason for being there I always lingered at the record department the longest.

If I was there on a Tuesday lunchtime  I could watch the staff as they rearranged the white letters in the grooves of the black board which they put high up on the wall to tell the public the top twenty singles and albums. There was a key difference between me following the music that went in and out of the charts that closely and the way that men, including dad, followed sport. Music and sport were both competitive popularity contests, but when music became less popular it did not disappear like yesterday's sportsman and his achievements did. Music would still be written about and the writings about it could still be found if anyone was determined enough to find them. Albums would reappear at random in second hand shops and other places well after leaving the place they were first sold as new. As I was soon to find out. 

Whereas if a sportsman or a team became the bad news of the day once too often in short period of time, then they would all too easily cease to be the apt subject of conversation between drinkers who needed heroes. This bad news effect could happen because of their sporting performance, shameful acts in their private life being made public, or because their team's finances were going awry. Whatever the reason, the team becoming bad news reduced the testosterone levels that fuelled the chatter about the game, and changed the conversational habits of drinkers.

The biggest record shop in town was called The Music Centre, it also sold record decks, needles, hi-fi, pre-recorded and blank cassettes and white goods. The white goods took up most of the space in the shop. They sold a lot of singles and also had a vast array of rock albums for sale, by artists that at that time were just names to me. Apart from their ex-chart singles which I made a beeline for, nearly all their stock was above my pocket money grade. But I had started to develop tastes and ideas that were more my own than the previous ideas I'd had. There were four music papers that were sold in W. H. Smiths. Before the end of 1977 I bought one every week, I started buying 'The Record Mirror' the most pop oriented paper of the titles available. I became much more informed via my second hand copy of the definitively useful reference book called 'The NME book of Rock'-edited by Nick Logan. It is still read and referred to today, decades after it was first published.

Through 'The NME book of Rock' I was gradually drawn towards the weekly magazine that was most oriented towards the albums that were released weekly, The New Musical Express. It was a newspaper about music where the point of the writing was that it was meant to to go over the reader's head, the literary equivalent of progressive rock. Often the writing and cartoons made a humour out of contempt and nihilism that seemed funny for no obvious reason. I already had a love of long words being used for their own sake, but still used with more precision than seemed apparent, the New Musical Express tapped into that grand style. Reading the New Musical Express every week made me feel like a more comfortable alien within the family. But to those who thought they knew me it probably made me even more alien.

The stock of books in the library seemed mostly to have been originally published in the 1950's, with later reprints of the same material. Some of my earliest borrowings were the 'The Coarse Art of....  ' series by Micheal Green, of which there were eight books as of when I started reading them. They covered the subjects of rugby, sailing, acting, moving, sport, golf, drinking and cruising and they were to reading what the Carry On films were to film comedy. There was always plenty of broad humour in the books, and the humour was somewhat more sophisticated and better organised than what you might find in a red top newspaper, but it was not so far beyond the popular press as to seem too removed from popular culture. After that series, and also from the 1950's onward I discovered  British and American Science Fiction. Within that genre there were plenty of authors to choose from in the library. From one author to the next, worlds seemed very flexible. Early on, and more by accident than my specific design, the publishers of the books became my guide. As I found different works and different authors published by the same publisher I became more aware of the breadth of the genre. If I was slow to see how some of the worlds I found in the books openly borrowed from the world that I lived in with all it's wars, sex, religion, and violence then the authors treated these ideas with much more imagination than ever my family allowed themselves and each other. And the cohesion of the family as a unit/ a dramatic theme was quite rare in these books, which was an escape for me. Tribalism and singular male adventurers were more the norm, with an exoticism that the cowboy books my dad liked could not even begin to match. When I was absorbed in books I felt much more secure than when I was in the world.

Please find Chapter 4 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here. 

Chapter 4 - The Lesser Social Life Of The Alien

The following is the measure of how much I was inattentive, and 'a slow developer'. The newsagent's shop where every Saturday Mother payed for the daily papers for the week was pokey, but amid gloom one week I found the pluck to ask if they wanted a paper delivery boy. The pay was pathetic, but for having initiated the conversation I was in no position to argue. financially, I was in the same position that I thought that many other sixteen year old boys were. We were treated as if we were younger than they were, but money had been available to us somehow. I was surprised when the owner of the shop said 'Yes' so promptly and offered me a trial straight away. I lasted three days on the job. On the first two of them I was given help and guidance. On the third day I was on my own. I was awake and presented myself at the crack of dawn, on dad's bike. The lad who was teaching me the round did the best he could in the inadequate time he was allowed to show me everything he could. The owner of the newsagent was not going to give me a second chance. I was bound to make a mistake on my first day on my own. So on the fourth day when I turned up he gave what I had earned in three days and told me to go home. I did not feel 'cheated' by being sent away so promptly. Nor did I feel as if I had let myself down, though I was disappointed to be rejected quite that soon. It was clear to me soon after that the trial had been set up to fail me. It was nearly as clear to me even later that if I had been accepted in the job and been able to do it, then it would not have been an achievement. What was least obvious to me was the newsagents embarrassment at anyone asking to deliver the papers, particularly somebody who was sixteen when it was typical that newspaper boys gave up the work for something more lucrative and purposeful at the age of fifteen, or younger. If I had known in full how highly the odds were stacked against me being able to train and do the job properly then I would have tempered my hopes and never asked to do it.

I had been going to Mother's allotment with her for as long as she had an allotment. Originally when she took me it was to do some work whilst childminding me. For nearly as long I had been going she had let me do only certain limited tasks. The task she trusted me with most was mowing the paths either side and in the middle of her now two allotments with her old push mower. It was a job I enjoyed, but she liked me doing it because it combined maximum use of me with keeping me off the allotment itself. Mother and I both had poor coordination. Mother's way of adapting her poor coordination was to disguise it in how she planned and ran her allotment. Rows of different salad goods and vegetables looked straight on the plans that she made on paper every year, but always the rows were crooked in reality because her eyesight was like her writing, something she refused to get help with even when such help was free for the asking. 

Both of my parents were born before both the National Health Service, and it's wartime predecessor, The Emergency Medical Service were created. They were born in times when self sufficiency was a matter of mistrustful pride. This pride worked best for it's owners when it made other people make mistakes that they could not recover from sooner than when the pride felled it's owner. This sequencing made the proud seem self-reliant, and their dependents somewhere between haphazard and helpless. For Mother her allotment was active, self evident, self-reliance in which she hid her refusal to get free the help that she mistrusted because it would have been free. With the pride of self reliance, help can never be free-it costs the proud their pride.

The more benign way of seeing how Mother saw her allotment work would be that in the 1960's when singer-songwriters like Roy Orbison appeared, they not only wrote the songs they performed, they also arranged their own material. In the arrangement they made sure their voice was central to how the musicians were arranged to play around them. They made it so that they could always reproduce the arrangement of the song on stage if their voice was strong enough. If Mother was the singer, then the way she arranged her allotments, crooked rows or straight, was her song and I was one of very few very lowly backing musicians who were kept at a distance from her whilst she gave herself the central role.

I could do more than she let me do. She kept me doing so little because she always thought I did not know a weed from a plant and would not look where I put my feet. I knew what was a plant was not by the crooked rows. But like the inadequate trail to be a newspaper boy any explanation she gave me turned into a self fulfilling prophecy where when she explained a task badly and I followed the instruction she disliked the result and chose to decline all further instruction. The pay off for her was keeping control, which made her feel secure. But then again one of her most repeated and more openly distrustful  malapropisms was used every time she was given any sort of guide to how to use something. She would say 'Let me read the destructions here... ' as if they were going to be the reason the result came out different to what was expected. With a parent like that who needs enemies? Even now I maintain a garden, but it has no straight lines of plantings in it. Instead it has many fruitful near-wild patches which are all the more pleasant for  how the wilderness balances off against the minimal maintenance that makes sense.

As a pretend family we went on the town's annual pretend holiday every summer, including that summer. The Liberal Club one day family coach trip to Skegness was when men who overtly avoided their families for most of the year pretended to be with their family for the day and families tried to ignore how they were ignored by the male heads of family. When I was young enough to not understand these events I liked them because we went by steam train and I liked steam trains. I liked the sulphurous smoke they put out which was good for clearing my bad sinuses. The steam train stopped taking us when the local railway line was closed in 1968 and my bad sinuses remained unrecognised as a limit to my concentration until I was in my mid twenties. For now I was officially an awkward teenager with a past too obscure for it to be worth explaining in accurate detail.

The coach journey was chaotic at the start as everybody assembled and heads were counted before departure. The journey was noisy but nearly fun and it took over an hour. The coach park was always about half a mile from the shops and the beachfront. Being part of the family on days out like these was something to endure. The organisation required seemed to take any sense of reward or rest out of the day. The men stopped pretending to be with their families when they got bored with the idea, which by a consensus that bordered on instinct/drive was when the men knew that there was a pub within walking distance of wherever they were. The women and children went in self sufficient family units, sandwiches and flask check, towel check, trunks/bathing suits check, beach toys check etc all bagged up and carried by the female head of household to the beach with children in tow. By age sixteen I was neither a creature of the pub nor a disciplined biddable sub-unit of the family. The best I could do was take a book with me and try to help and organise where I was allowed. I was not allowed to not be part of the day and the family, I might go into the arcades where the slot machines and pinball machines were and I was not allowed in such places either away or when I was nearer the parental house. My sister was allowed near them as long as everyone turned a blind eye that she went. That year I walked on my own to a beach nearby which had previously been a military firing range. I looked for military shells rather than sea shells, and found a nice one to take home. A few short years later army surplus shops would be places I would delight in going to for their cheapness, and for the durability of the goods they sold. Going back to the home town from Skegness on the coach, we were torn between knowing how tired we were after pretending to be happy all day, and wishing that we were somewhere, anywhere, else but where we were on the bus.

When men went to pubs it was not that they barred women and children from going, more that women and children had to go to their own pub with their own money if they went at all. My cousins on Mother's side were older than me, of an age to legally drink. So it seemed friendly when Mother went to join Colin and Heather at a family friendly pub one summer evening. She took me, the alien/pretend human with her. Mother was the cousins' chaperone for the evening. Colin and I could talk about music a bit but his tastes were complex and those of an older teenager compared with mine and he had much more money for buying records than I had. But I liked the ballad of a single 'Wonderous Stories' that had been a hit that summer by progressive rock band Yes. When I found I had nothing to say to the company on my own I looked at the 'B' sides of the singles that were listed in the jukebox and paid my money. As Mother's air of false sophistication wore off through the evening the thread of the conversation lapsed into a silent dead end and still had not heard the track I had paid to hear. We left before the song played. But even that small loss was recognised and brought me recompense a year later, when Colin was clearing out his pile of back copies of the New Musical Express. Mother was on hand to receive them from her sister Alice on my behalf. The creative recycling which overfilled the house had finally rewarded me directly.

To child-mind me further, and more consistently Mother made me rejoin the local St John Ambulance, where our shared membership  became the means to other days out together, as we both went on duties for S.J.A.B. It should be obvious to the reader by now that whatever she did Mother was lonely, and when she joined groups she made me join too. My joining hid how her joining the group failed to make her an effective helper or a good team player and failed to reduce her loneliness. Only me being close by whilst Mother struggled to fit in reduced her loneliness. I may have been of marginally more practical use when I walked with her there and back. Where it all got complicated, almost icky, was that we fell into some odd trap where the body language we adopted around each other was more that of helpmate to each other than mother and son. 

Members of S.J.A.B. did notice this, and tried to help me out of the boredom I felt for being around her so much. The organisers of S.J.A.B gave Mother a position of authority in which she was meant to act alone and be responsible for us all indirectly, but she did not have to benignly order other people about. That was something she was clearly bad at doing. After over ten years of duties in S.J.A.B. They made her 'Head of Stores'. That she joined S.J.A.B. to get away from anything that looked like a title and housework was beside the point, for staying around long enough she was bound to get some title/position of responsibility handed down to her. If she couldn't give orders and did not want to leave then 'Head of Stores' was the only choice left. It took some years before it became clear to me, and it saddened Mother, when I found that between my low boredom threshold, the flat hierarchy of the place and the half useful work we did, my only choice was to leave. 

As a substitute for St John Ambulance, for Mother's sake I subscribed to her public service values by giving blood twice a year. In the Town Hall Mother would escort me from the bed where I had given my pint to a chair near the tea and biscuits. But even there future trouble lurked, unseen. I met a man I would years later willingly, but often ineptly, have sex with. That first meeting with Manchester Al after giving blood and sharing the biscuits and tea with him proved to be an interesting counterpoint to how family had sliced and diced all that could be said about sex into how adultery was horrible, the shame of bastardy was well deserved by on whoever it fell upon, and both were private and invisible in society, like my homosexuality.

Meanwhile the times seemed more innocent. I enjoyed being around Mother. But my favourite inactivity was reading on my own. Since British Science Fiction was part of my favoured reading that summer I got a particular dystopian title out of the library. it was sufficiently dystopian that I felt uncomfortable reading it in the parental house. I had to read it somewhere where I felt less watched and I did not have to worry about the time. I told Mother that I was going to see Gran and Grandad and she gave me sandwiches to take with me. My book was 'The Mind of Mr Soames', published in 1961 and written by Charles Main. I went off on dad's bike for seven miles to do what I told Mother I was going to do. When I saw Gran and Grandad I arrived between meals and drank tea with them, and did not admit to having the sandwiches. My grandparents were both in their mid to late seventies so their quietness together and low energy levels were quite restful. I stayed under an hour and left them. I took myself and the bike further along the river bank and simply read and read a lot more.

It was an odd book. In its sideways take on the world it dealt with adolescence and showed the limits of good scientific intentions. It was also a variant on the Dr Frankenstein story. A thirty year old man who has never been awake is kept alive but in a coma. Without thinking like parents, scientists seek to wake him up. As they do this they have to predict his behaviour and the environment that would suit him most. Will he be like an infant because his brain development is starting from scratch? Or will he behave like the thirty year old that his physical body presents him as being? You can guess what happens. What surprised me was that without distractions I managed to read the whole book in one sitting without skipping a phrase or a sentence. Whilst I puzzled over some of the ideas in it I found the plot easy to follow, and I recognised the ideas the author had borrowed from other authors remarkably well. The scientists laboratory was a new and untested experimental space, and the boarding school/care home I'd been to was meant to be 'an experiment in schooling', it was easy to draw a line from the book, limited as it was, to my life. 

I was never going to do what Mr Soames did, run amok among people who only belatedly realised how poorly they understood his developmental needs. But I knew a thing or two about the feelings and behaviour that are natural to an adolescent that are long held back and then misunderstood. I also thought I knew enough about people who act like they are in charge and think they are right who disallow others from thinking and doing differently. I was going to meet many people who were wrong and thought they were right in future.

Please find Chapter 5 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.