Afterword

It took me eleven years to go from being 'the alien in the attic', hemmed in by the routines, evasions, and hierarchies of the parental house, to me ceasing to be 'the alien', in my own mind at least. In that time even the attic in which I had been the alien had been converted for another use. Eleven years was how long it took for me to make my permanent departure from the town I grew up in. Even when I left, the memory of my once having been the alien remained strong. For years after I left the location of old life behind, there was a strength and cohesiveness to the memories of the life I had in the parental house and the boarding school/care home that puzzled me with it's vigour.

What the years of patiently unravelling how I became 'the alien in the attic' achieved was to allow me to believe that I had made myself a fresh start. But even there, the start was not as fresh as it seemed, I was definitively seen as 'a late developer' because of my family and small town background, which I never knew how to deny or lie about when I had to explain who I was where I had come from.   

In the eleven years, by turns I was either attending the local college to catch up on my missing, presumed lost, education, or I was creatively unemployed, reading - moving house three times in seven years and engaging with the creativity of town, or I was in fake employment. That is that I was contracted to work a year at time on schemes that the government payed for because they knew they had to subsidise some employment to soak up the time of errant youths in order to stop them leaning towards crime for lack of an income. The government also had to delay the town going beyond all hope of economic recovery, at least temporarily. The withdrawal of the government subsidies with no like-for-like replacement scheme would ensure the permanent economic shrinkage of the town was a reality that was assured and yet to come, I did not want to be trapped in the small town when that change came.

By then I was on the same government scheme, but in Nottingham. I was attempting to start a long delayed career in care work. That the government work scheme I was on was in it's last year of operation, both in Nottingham, in the town I had come from, and across the country made my escape from my home town more lucky than I could know. 'Career' is too strong a word to describe what I was attempting, 'Continuity of work' would be the more accurate description, and even then my plans would frequently be downsized in front of me. 

But all that is to come with the next memoir, for which there are not even notes written so far. Thank you for reading this far.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.