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 the arse out of them but Mother refused to buy 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 that summer 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. But I could not do it, since I had another year to make all of it stretch further. Eventually I stayed at the school for a second year. Finally getting rid of my school uniforms aged sixteen felt like casting off years of a long, very tired, non-education where I did not understand why I had to stay there or what I was meant to be doing. That non-education would take years of late study to recover from, and it would still 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.