Chapter 12 - The Alien Recounts His Many Divisions

I was not in the carpet shop for most of the last month that I was meant to be 'being trained to fit carpets', a training for which I showed no interest or aptitude. Alan sent me away on unofficial leave because after five months he had had enough of me being neither use nor ornament to him. The carpet fitters went back to the fluent self sufficiency they had before my arrival. The money Alan got for 'training' me was worth more to him for me not being around than if I was around. Given the awkwardness with which I did not fit in I felt better for being released too. If any of them thought that the Y.O.P's scheme was grossly mis-designed, as well they might, then what might resist realising was how they played their part in it's mis-design. The best part was that by the end of July when I reached my last day, and I had to go in and make my formal goodbyes, the break made them sound more sincere than they probably were. I had left enough good will with the shop for my goodbyes to be genuinely well received.

On the Monday after the Y.O.P's course ended the first thing I did was to fill in the forms to sign on. I expected to be unemployed for some time, as the catch 22 of 'lack of experience' went ahead of me and stopped me applying for jobs. The second thing I did was visit the Labour Exchange where I was given a job application form to fill in straight away where they said I stood a chance of getting the job because the employer was not asking for prior experience. The job was as shelf stacker in the cheapest supermarket in town, Kwik Save. If there was a better job for which I did not need experience to apply, that staff knew about, then I did not know what it was. Nobody spoke about the first-come-first-serve character of how the inexperienced and unemployed found the jobs they could apply for, which if they were not the best jobs they were what was available at the time of asking. 

I spent one week on the dole. Half way through the week I was interviewed by the manager of Kwik Save. I was offered the post of 'stock assistant' a short two hours later, starting the following Monday. I was unemployed for so short of time my claim hardly seemed worth pursuing. I had no sense of reward for filling in my new UB40, licking the edges to seal it, and delivering it to the DSS. All I had done with Kwik Save was fill in a form and sound credible as a would-be employee when interviewed in person.

Mother's response was interesting. She, like dad, was apt to say to me 'Get a job; any job.', as if job applications were like lottery tickets and winning job applications were like winning lottery tickets, though the size of the prize may be unpredictable. They were uninterested in the details I had to go through to get the job, presumably because the process bore no similarity to what it was like when they were eighteen and applying for jobs. Mother was still doing her cash in hand job for the local second hand shop, where second hand cookers and fridges were brought in, cleaned and sold to benefits claimants who got grants to replace white goods they had, that had stopped working. She must have seen a larger than usual turnover of goods in the last six months, as ever larger scales of unemployment took a hold of the town and more people went on benefits they said they did not want but found themselves claiming. I never knew what she thought about her role in this new reduced local economy that had made her job of minding the shop and cleaning the cookers seem so vital. Dad was signing on and he must surely have felt irritated every time he asked how much he had worked in the last fortnight, when clearly there was no work to be had for men of his experience and expectation. If he had done any work then it was like the money he kept for drinking. It was his secret to keep from the government and from his family. 

The job of stacking the shelves and cleaning the floors in a supermarket required the applicant to have one head, the right number of limbs, and those limbs and head were in all the proper places. I had that much, along with a civil tongue in my head for guiding customers to goods they could not find because we had moved them, which was a small but vital bonus. Only a person who was unfussy and in need would apply to be paid to do an activity so basic and repetitive and I was both. My application was never meant to be seen as a career move. But there was still muted talk in the family of me 'having a career', not that they could quote examples of other youths, or other parents who set their offspring on a clear career path. I don't know where they got such talk from, possibly the redtop newspapers. Careers had not been invented when my parents had started work. My parents had worked, both paid and unpaid work, rather than 'had careers'. Careers were for the staff of the careers office, but not for the youths who they summoned onto meetings for the youths to be divided by being selected for strange non-training schemes. How I might have a career when nobody in the family had ever had one before me, and whilst many of the hierarchies that might once have made a career seem viable were slowly collapsing in front of us, was a mystery to me.

If my supermarket job was a lesser lottery ticket, as Mother suggested, then surely I was still okay. The next job could only be better, and first jobs are comparable with first rungs on a ladder. Many first rungs seem the same, the higher rungs are where the differences in personal growth seem clearer. Looking at employers was no help at the time. Employers competed with each other and were defensive or unnaturally neutral in their language towards applicants and would-be employees, as if to say to them 'We have very little choice, so you are going to have even less choice'. In this atmosphere all talk of mental health was taboo. Any mention of the subject, however neutral and however much it was not about the person speaking, was seen as proof of personal weakness. 

Over the two years of waiting to join the jobs market proper I felt that a lot had changed for me. I had endured the substitution of  my first attempted career path, radio and electronics repairs, twice for half-baked training courses in two skills that I never wanted where the government money to train me was the driver. I had discovered gay sex, and discovered new and unquantifiable levels of secrecy with sex that it would take me years to figure out how to unpick. In the social life that I could acknowledge I enjoyed being in The Theatre Club where I felt my acceptance most when the old joke about 'those with small parts' was used. I was now getting those small roles to act. I had taken a serious interest in not-quite-local radio where the quality of the music mattered and the different disc jockeys could be engaging enough for listeners to write to them, which I did and they played the music that I requested. The music they played took me into a world of my own when I played it, well away from my family with whom agreements were often supported by half-guesses and deliberately avoiding asking, I felt relief. I had voted in the May national and local elections and I had started to engage with local politics via my latest hobby horse/belief, CND. There finding fellow believers in the same radical politics was difficult, but that difficulty did not stop me trying, and hoping that I would find the right shared space for belief in change.

I was still caught in some sort of paradox about what to put on job application forms about my schooling, and what to say when I suspected that in any normal school qualifications passed were normal and I had none. As it was I took to the policy of 'tell the truth and shame the Devil', with job applications. If an employer was genuinely ashamed of schooling on my job application then I did not want to be employed by the Devil anyway. If the Devil made work for idle hands then he would probably cheat the workers of their wages.  I still wished that I could talk honestly about the school I came from with somebody other than other pupils from the school, and my honesty be taken at face value with some sort of affirmation.

Finally the job put me front and square in front of Mother's mix of snobbery, thrift, and indifference. I saw first hand the double mindedness that was part of her when I saw how she liked the cheap supermarket for getting her shopping from but she disliked how her thrift was indirectly related to how much I was paid. Me working that cheaply for her good was 'the wrong sort of thrift' for her.

My homosexuality was in line with the profile of homosexual activity in the town. It was visible for anyone who knew where to look for it but invisible to those who wanted to pretend that it did not exist. I had to pretend to be among the 'it does not exist' majority to acknowledge-and be part of-the secretive and marginalised minority. But there was a strange affirmation for me in the large pile of music papers, most of them back copies of the New Musical Express. Many of the cartoons bypassed the usual barriers between the 'it does not exist' majority and the expressed the hopes of the marginalized minority. There was one particular cartoon in one of the music magazines which commented on how opaque the silence around homosexual behaviour was. I cut it out and kept for years the same way I had cut out and kept the poetry column in 'The Daily Mirror', which started after Robert Maxwell took it over and selected from publications he owned to put a more literary spin on what was otherwise a very lowbrow paper.

In this cartoon there was a slim young man in a small run down high rise flat. He lay face down in quiet despair after submitting to a 'sexually dominant' carrot with a mean closed face on it, he was some sort of business man. The carrot was giving a dismissive parting greeting to the distressed and exhausted youth as he left the flat. I found myself drawn to that cartoon without ever once recognising that for all the differences between that scene and what I had gone through in the carpet shop, the dismissals I had endured were exactly like those of the wretched young man in the cartoon. Reading the cartoon was like me looking in a mirror at a parallel world and recognising my face in it, even though I was actually there.  For all that, what I valued most was the recognition of humour and absurdity of sexual secrecy in the cartoon.

My more acceptable and sociable energies were applied to my work, moving stock, stacking shelves and sweeping floors mechanically for forty hours a week on a rota that allowed me a mix of midweek days off, being there early, staying late, and working two Saturday's a month. The simplicity of the job mopped up most of my energies with remarkable efficiency. I still got depressed at different times, and with the taboo on talk about mental health I was disallowed from understanding why depression happened. Work warned me instead, I was put on the first warning twice. Both times I have no idea how I recovered. I was thankful that I only needed the first warning, of three, both times. The pressures that I could not give a name to came from how badly my family were getting along and they made me feel unequal to my fellow workers, who I apparently was co-equal with. Nowadays people admit to depression and because of that know that it has causes and means of being relieved. If the relief is applied then the symptoms lift like morning mists. Back then the morning mist became a red mist, an anger that it took defensive action to turn away from. I don't know what I would have done if I'd have been given the sack, I am thankful work relations never came to that.

One aspect of the job that pleased me was that I had to use a Stanley knife every day to cut holes in the cardboard boxes so that the customers could get the food into their trolleys. In the previous training I had experienced a trauma and awkwardness with knives where to nearly the last day I refused to use the Stanley knife that belonged to the lads to cut carpets as part of the team because I saw the knife as their property, and I felt frozen out, not part of any team, when I was with them. I now seemed to have quite good physical co-ordination and confidence with Stanley knives on cardboard boxes in spite of my being left handed. The staff also got first dibs on food that was edible but the packaging was damaged so it could not be put out for sale. Mother liked that side of the job and happily accepted food items I brought home which saved her having to buy them at full price. I was also happier than dad ever was for her to know how much I was paid, even though she said that we were not to talk about money. I did not need the secrecy that he obviously felt he needed to maintain his higher social status. I was happier than he ever could be with my lower social status work too.

Like dad did with his birth family, the family he had created, and his drinking mates, I mostly kept dividers between the different interests. It rarely happened that the several different worlds that I kept apart from each other collided. And the sex in public toilets was that highly cordoned off that I denied to myself that I did it. When I was in work and Mother came into the shop and I was stacking shelves I was sociable as we passed the time of day not just because of who we were to each other, but because the shop liked positive customer/staff relations. She was the same when I went into the shop she served in, though in some ways in our places of work we felt more at ease than the parental home left us. The life in the toilets was creepy, but creepy in a way that resisted all labels, including 'creepy'. It was not the first time I'd been in a place that resisted apt and unfavourable labels. Part of the creepiness was an inability to comment on the place because the place suggested a nameless and immersive submissiveness to it. If it could have been pointed out to me that I was 'playing hide and seek from a fuller idea of  relationships' I would have agreed but nobody dared suggest that. If they had I would also point out that I was living as a dependent in the parental house, which practically forbade choice. There were at least two 'regulars', people who when we met in the toilets we recognised each other by each other's face and the sound of our walk and that recognition became a non-verbal contract, almost a relationship, between us. The use of names would have destroyed the sense of immersion and sense of a contract, just as much as my describing to myself the social mechanics of that world at the time would have hollowed out the character out of the activity.

Imagine my reaction when one of these regulars saw me at work taking big boxes of washing powder off a pallet and stacking them on a shelf. I stopped and pretended that he was a customer as he made comments about looking forward to when he would see me next. I could not stop him from talking to me. What horrified me was how rapidly his body language changed on seeing me. It went from 'supermarket neutral' to 'creepy' instantly. I will pass on the irony of him trying to talk dirty whilst I was putting out washing powder, in favour of mentioning the querying looks I got from some of the other staff, people who I counted as friends who knew nothing of the other side of my life, as this man nearly 'outed' me in front of them. Another time there was just me and the manager doing overtime and as the work was due to stop and he had to shut down/lock up etc. he said 'I am going into the office to change my trousers before we leave' which put me in a real tailspin because of the memory of Alan. I felt ill and froze as I asked myself Is this a 'come on' line? Am I returning to Y.O.P's territory again?'. I was wrong, he was just changing his trousers. Whether it was Mother, Mr Creepy, or the boss, each event proved to me how separate these worlds were, imaginatively, from each other, but also how close these worlds were to each other physically, via me. Each world claimed a part of me, and each part claimed a restricted recognition, and  refused to recognise the parts that the other worlds claimed on me.

Since I was one person on my own in my room, another to Mother and family, another in work, another when the body language and expectations disallowed elsewhere were allowed free reign in the silence of the toilets, another politically against the wishes of my family, and yet another who plays small roles in amateur theatre, then there was no obvious reason to add one more identity to the list, the singular identity of being 'a Christian'. The team of staff who worked on the shop floor of Kwik Save consisted of two or three full time workers and up to half a dozen part time workers. The part timers worked every Thursday and Friday evening, and some Saturdays. Never before had I been part of a team where we were all so close in age. Previously when I was with boys near my age, we did not like the scheme which rather affected how we saw each other. In Kwik Save we seemed much more to be there by choice. and like them I was living with my parents but they had all had relatively normal childhoods, and they were still at school on the exams conveyor belt, studying for 'A' levels. For the first time I could compare my families and parents with a normal family relatively safely.

The two part timers I liked most were Keith and Phil. Both were younger than me but saw no difference in the age gap. Both lived in single parent families, though Phil's father was only recently separated prior to a full divorce coming through. Phil and Keith were both members of the newly formed mixed denomination Christian Youth Group who met in the rooms of the local Unitarian Church. If I was one of the older ones there then we all lived with our parents and were all looking for a safe and proper life outside of our families, who saw our safety as being dependent on them. I was one of the few in the group with non-Christian parents and a non-Christian background. For all the difference that it made I was made just as welcome as if I had the Christian background that they might well have preferred me to have to fit in more exactly. 

Phil and Keith fell away from the youth group early on, as the pressure they felt for them taking several 'A' levels in school increased. I stayed in the Christian Youth fellowship for most of ten years, about four years longer than I 'should have'. It seemed a calm place to stay for somebody who lacked drive and a sense of direction. Given my age advantage I should have led the group more in studies and exercises than I did, or what I drew from the studies. I regret how I idled there.

In the September of 1979 I signed up to a non-vocational night class in college, on local history. It was run by an enthusiast and it was mildly educational. Before I started the course I imagined that my town was like many towns across the country, that there was a template for all these small towns where the local history was similar but different to other market towns. I expected the interest in the course to come from the variations where my town differed from others. What I was taught was how localism as expressed through local history resisted comparison to other places, resisted all standardised time lines and shrank into exceptionalism via often poorly sourced and related anecdote. The fact that stuck with me was how during the English Civil War (1642-51) the town changed sides seven times. The context for each change was the strategic opportunities the town offered the victor, control of the inland waterways for moving freight useful to the victor such as uniforms, rations and arms. That towns changing sides in the civil war was a standard narrative was not explained to us, nor was it explained that the point of civil war was about one side or another taking a town. The viewpoint of the lecturer was more concerned with the exceptionalism of the town than with the constantly changing lines of attack and defence between the two sides of the civil war.

But local history was not the only place a strange exceptionalism had taken hold of the way life was explained. In the 1970's the law about gay sex what that it was legal between two men over the age of 21 but the terms on which it had been made technically legal also made legally negotiating for the sex, or even friendship or companionship where sex was allowed to exist in theory, impossible. What law reform there had left many other prohibitive secondary laws in place. If they were observed they would have added to the sense of homosexuality being a completely theoretical non-activity and non-identity. In detective thrillers the phrases that describe the most mysterious plots were described as 'locked room mysteries'. The 1967 law that permitted homosexual behaviour, whilst prohibiting all discussion of it, made homosexuality very much 'a locked room mystery'. But the 1967 law was an improvement on the 1885 law, which it replaced. 

In the 1885 law that made homosexuality illegal the original purpose of the law had been to raise the age of heterosexual consent to sixteen, from thirteen and to safely outlaw prostitution. Late in the debate in the last reading of the bill clauses were added to it that in theory made the punishment for underage heterosexual sex worse for the adult male perpetrator. In theory the new law in theory sought to limit female prostitution, in practice new clauses sought to make sure that men who bought underage prostitutes could neither be blackmailed nor prosecuted for not knowing and not checking the age of the girls they bought for sex. In the final amendment that was added, in a nearly empty chamber at 2 am effectively all homosexual behaviour became banned because a punishment of two years hard labour was to be passed down to anyone convicted of 'gross indecency', as anal sex was euphemised, and that was whether it happened 'in public or in private'. 

The privacy part of the phrasing was what caught Oscar Wilde out and broke him as a man aged forty six, in his prime as a writer. Over the decades that followed many further laws were passed which tightened the law against permitting men to discover each other with a view to the gay sex and the full same sex relationship that they might have in private. The 1967 act ended the punishment of gay men for having consensual sex in private and ended the blackmail that was well known to happen to gay men in the 1950's.

There was something of the 'Schrodinger's Cat' logic at work with homosexuality. Like sex generally, at the level of conversation homosexuality did not exist, whilst as a physical activity it very much did exist, and for me it had many euphemistic cues, like the television wrestling dad insisted on viewing. How gay sex was negotiated when there could be no conversations around it made it strange stuff indeed. The difficulty was coming up with how to make it clear when you meant 'No, not with you' to somebody when there was no other person about, and they knew your face. They would not blackmail you for money, but they might try to blackmail you for the sex you did not want to have with them. This happened.

The vast majority of the visitors to the toilets were much older than me and married. Many were not-quite-sober as they visited because they were on their way home from the pub. What had given them the false courage for the activity also required them to need a pee which gave them reason to be in the toilet in the first place. That the cottaging scene was a subsection of the drinking scene gave those who waved with their willies strong cover, the amnesia created by the drink which it was difficult for their wives to want to interrogate.

Against the odds I met two men who were unmarried, sober at the time, and under thirty whilst I was still a teenager at the toilets. I attempted to meet them in places where we could talk and negotiate well beyond the reduced agenda of compulsory secrecy, and waving willies as if they semaphore flag poles.

The first one was Mr Patch which was not his real name but I will call him that because he walked around the town wearing jeans with a badge on the crotch of his jeans where the writing in black cotton against a yellow background he declared 'Gay Pride'. Naturally the patch was on the side he 'dressed', to the left, and, yes, the jeans were a tight fit on him. With that sort of advertising he took some of the waiting out of wanting. But I was made to wait more than you might guess. We spoke because we were nearer in age than the usual callers in the toilet and  we were both young compared with the usual men in their forties and above in there,  who were looking for men much younger than themselves. With the nearness in age we guessed that neither of us was married and one of us might have 'somewhere to go to', a bedroom door behind which to lock out the world from around us. We did not know which of us might have had the space until we asked each other. Mr Patch had his own council flat. But it was on the very edge of the estate that was farthest from the town, forty five mins walk away. So the waiting was put back into wanting for another day.

I went up to see him in his flat maybe once a week or a bit less over the summer of 1979, until he ended the relationship. I did not want to stop seeing him, even after discovering by accident that from well before he met me he was in an established relationship with an older man and that older man wanted the relationship to be monogamous. Mr Patch was aided in both his relationship and his infidelities by his living on his own. He worked as a farmers labourer and had straight friends who seemed to not bat an eyelid at evidence of his homosexuality because they took him as a 'jack-the-lad' figure instead. In private Mr Patch allowed himself to be controlled by the older and more wealthy single man, whatever his image with his mates. Before Mr Patch ended the relationship/attempted friendship I told my parents that he existed and had to tell them a fair number of unconvincing lies about how and where we first met, and what the friendship consisted of.

What Mr Patch wanted from me was nearer sex than shared meals and chat. What I wanted was  something much warmer and more friendly than being taken into the back room of the carpet shop to wank the boss off, which up to that point was as near to a relationship as I had got at that point in my life. I wanted my friend to have a place that felt worn but loved, that reflected affection in how it was furnished rather than the store room I slept in. What I wanted was that when there was sex to be shared, it should not be cold technique or like some sort of fixed programme. It should be like the furniture, where the room and sex both reflected a shared acceptance and warmth. Mr Patch's council flat was a slightly run down/under-decorated bachelor pad. His physical affections were similar, brusque but friendly. I never learned about his past. I think he had been adopted or fostered when much younger. The council flat was the social services signing off all support for him. I visited him for a whole summer. Towards the end he politely told me that I could not visit him any longer. But as a final friendly gesture he invited me out to pick potatoes with him and his friends as part of his group on a local farm. As I stood on the picking machine which vibrated the mud off the potatoes I was there to check  that the potatoes were not rotten etc. It seemed like a fair way to end an affair. I was not heartbroken when my visits ended. I'd done my crying by the time he gave me notice, but I did feel the loss when the visits ended.

 

The second gentleman was called Manchester Al, though he had a Liverpool accent. He was again perhaps only ten years older than me, but like Mr Patch his being single which made him seem younger. He was single because he was an ex-soldier who had served in Northern Ireland who he had recently signed out of the army, where in secret he had been introduced to homosexuality. He was handsome, fit and strong, which was rare amongst the men I half-knew, this made him attractive.

We first met in public after my first or second blood donation. He was a fellow blood donor who caught my eye after I had given blood and Mother had escorted me towards my tea and biscuit. I think he caught Mother's eye too, Mother put Al and me close together for our tea 'So we had each other to chat to'. There was a persistent charm about him, but equally there was a persistent evasiveness. He could say anything and make me want to believe that some part of it might be true. But if what he said was pure charm, and was utterly false, then by the time I realised that it was too late. But he maintained the charm with me for all the time I lived in the small town. Over most of a decade there were occasional trysts, well away from the public toilets, where to varying degrees we tried to get past the silence around sex and genuinely please each other. But in them we both realised that any attempt at an honest homosexuality made us both seem like fantasists to those around us. We wanted a world that we could make but the world we had stopped us making that world. In the shut down small town, what we wanted could not exist and never would.

Sometimes he disappeared for ages, and returned with some excuse that if it was suspicious could not be faulted, other times he presented himself around the town as if he had never been away. He never stopped being handsome, nor did he stop having some sort of escape clause or reason to disappear again after the latest random meeting with him. If I wanted some more mature and tender side to him then what I got in private was often a relentless sexual tease in which he was obvious about what he wanted, but he would never say it out loud, and in the he presented himself he would try to make me responsible for his sexual needs. Al was the first man who for all his evasions made sex out to be something better than the grubby deal others had made it out to be, where grubbiness was almost a currency in itself. When Al finally settled and stayed around the town he fell prey to the drink culture, a culture that I quietly sought escape from when I left the town.

I could still think of him as I knew him with fondness, even now. But I also know that in reality both our lives were far more fractured and self-dividing than ever we were allowed to say to each other.

Please find Chapter 13 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.