Chapter 16 - The Alien And The Shadow Of Property Ownership

Settling back into the parental house routines after going to Glastonbury was a reductive experience, made even more reductive by how I had finished all my exams. I had nothing more to expect from the college than my results in six weeks time.

My going to Glastonbury felt like some sort of pilgrimage. Whatever the experience actually was, I went expecting my having got there to change me. But it didn't, not at first at least. CND apart, the people around me did not want their lives to be changed and were utterly resistant to recognising that anyone around then might want to change their life. After I returned to the parental home Mother's first question was 'Where is the laundry to be washed?' which was a somewhat brusque welcome. Her second question came later when she had the time to pretend to listen. It was 'Have you taken any illicit drugs?'. There was no logical or truthful answer to her second question. I could have neatly sidestepped her enquiry by saying 'I have not heard the statistics for drug busts at the event. Have you?'. The point for me was that she knew next to nothing about drugs and yet feared I might be taking them. She wanted to remain uninformed about drugs so that she could continue to worry about whether I had ever taken any, and the drugs had taken me away from her. If I had admitted that I had taken some drugs and that it had all been calm and controlled then she would have made that reason for her to be anxious and uncontrolled. For all I could guess at, she might have wanted me to hand myself in to the police for simply having been to Glastonbury. 

Her Final question was 'Was the money well spent? How much money did you waste?'. There I could answer her directly. By explaining the process of buying the Weetabix for the tokens for the railway tickets where because of our long journey breakfast cereal became very good value for money. I am sure she was unconvinced by this answer. I knew that she thought that any money I had that was not being put towards me put towards a deposit to buy a local flat seemed like waste to her. But equally any practical detail to do with the subject of me buying a flat was very much avoided. We did not look together in estate agents' windows for flats for sale, and between us we had made zero engagement with, and had zero experience of, the financial mechanics of the property market. We did not look i estate agents windows because we feared that either there would no flats for sale or they would be such a price as to prove that we were fantasists of the worst order, or there were flats that were within dreaming distance for us, but they could never be a reality and the flats themselves might well depreciate in value if I ever managed to get a mortgage on one. 

Mother could have made a half valid point, if she had thought out how to phrase it so it sounded natural in the context. In the times before I went to Glastonbury, and for some time after, I was spending much more time with friends than I spent at the parental house. This included keeping late and unpredictable hours. I was getting closer than I wanted to know to being angrily told by my parents 'You treat this house as if it is a hotel.'.

But, to read Mother more charitably, if she seemed to worry for the wrong reasons whilst I was having my fun then she had her own experiences to reflect on, where her having fun had gone wrong on her, where she had not seen trouble coming before it arrived. She had married a man who expected her to 'read his moods' whilst he said nothing to her and whilst he was abrupt and distant. I never understood what absence of words made that imbalance of expectation seem 'normal'. I empathised with her other major reason for worry a lot more; how she ended up leaving her parents house had been a trauma to both her and her parents that all parties had endured for several years. She wanted to stop that pattern repeating through trying to control how I left the parental house. But what she was blind to was that with her wanting to be that controlling about my choice of new address said address would be an extension of the parental house, where the potential for family based trauma would follow me. With the advent of any new address I might well feel entitled to break with the past and want a clean start to make life in the new address work for best on it's own terms.

There was a second front opening up where I wanted change and change that was being offered to me seemed to be more of a help to who was offering it than it was to me. Paid work. Mother's masterplan for me was that I would have a permanent well paid job and live in a flat that I was buying that was located near the parental house. This way I would remain under her influence. It was curious how there was no assigned space in her masterplan for me having a girlfriend, or even having friends. The job which had paid for the deposit on the flat would anchor me in the town, and she would keep the flat tidy, do my laundry, and keep me in the family by inviting me to eat with family often. The first problem with her plan was that the jobs were not there. The second problem was that when I was on my own and I had looked at estate agents' windows then no flats ever appeared there. Neither for rent nor for purchase. If any flat appeared briefly then it looked mildly depressing in appearance, and overpriced compared with full houses. But not all work was gone.

Physical violence was thankfully very rare in the parental house, though I had memories of occasionally being grabbed by the ear by my parents when they thought that words were not enough for them to make their point with me. What conflict there was mostly purely verbal. Whilst I was waiting for my exam results Mother lectured me a lot about real work, and real money, with which I was to buy myself a real flat, with no sense of process. Part of me wanted to grab Mother by the ear and drag her loudly complaining through the town at arms length, and first take her to the job centre first and instruct her to look at the boards as if she were me. Then take her by the ear again to the estate agents and tell her 'YOU will go in and enquire about what flats they have, and how to get them NOW'. And if that was not enough of a reality check then our last port of call would be the building society where the manager would tell her about how difficult a mortgage might be for a teenager on a low income might be for me. Of course I did not visit and did not take Mother with me anywhere; she would never go where she did not want to anyway. If I had got the two of us through that reality check then there would not be much left to save for, we would know we were defeated before we even thought of how to apply ourselves. I don't know which of us would feel the most remorse for our dreams, or know why we felt it.

A vacancy appeared to work as a labourer in an onion factory that had been hastily set up on the two-miles-away industrial estate. The factory processed onions for pickling. Trays of different sized small onions came in through one entrance in the factory. In the first part of our job we fed them into machines which peeled them. The onions came out of the machines into the same trays as they arrived in when unpeeled. They were then prepared for being bottled in vinegar, which happened in another factory. The second part of our job was to take away the trays of now peeled onions before the machine overfilled the trays at the other end. We stacked the trays of peeled onions one on top of another on a pallet, ready for taking away. The management controlled the speed the machines went at, and stepped in only when there were serious glitches in the process. I was accepted on a month's trial. It was physically demanding work. I can still picture my fellow workers. He was shorter, older and thicker than me with a tanned face and thick black moustache. He was much also stronger than me, not that there was ever time for even the faintest of homo-erotic admiration of the strength of others on my part with that much work to do. I was honest when I hit a fatigue point. I was not strong enough to hoist the heaviest full tray of big onions over my head into the machines for processing. He recognised when I was weaker than him, he covered for me, and not just because he had to. The management would have had to come in and slow the machine down for peeling the biggest onions that went through fastest and therefore required the greatest speed and strength for lifting onto the peeling machine and off it after, I lasted the month but 'failed' the trial. But doing the job was a lesson to Mother from me about accepting any job that came along. Every day of that month I came home stinking of onions after lugging vast weights of them from place to place all day long. Soap and water were not strong enough to take the smell of onions away. I was not sorry to fail the trail, or sorry when I heard that the factory had closed the following winter. It had been seasonal work in disguise all along. 

I got the factory job not long after I collected my exam results from the college. I passed two of the four 'O' levels and got a D grade in another two, that is a fall short of a C pass grade by two or three percent. Having the job kept me busy, stopped me being quizzed about what I should be doing about work, and gave me time to think what to do next. The onion factory job left me too late for me to be able to return to college in the daytime as unemployed and signing on. Instead I signed on for evening classes to revise and retake the subjects I had narrowly failed to get a pass.

I was quite proud of getting my B in the History 'O' level. It changed what history meant to me. After my studies I saw more clearly how to resist the mix of small town anecdote and red top newspaper headline which fudged most of the explanations I got as to why this or that was happening. 

My 'O' level history studies became key to what separated me from my parents. Both my parents were born in the 1930's when as children they directly experienced the least supportive welfare state that the British state had ever devised. Previous welfare systems had punished people whilst appearing to support them. Cruel and feared as the workhouses (1834-1933) were when they divided families, what they did was still provide a dis-spiriting 'support' for the poor. But the great depression broke that system of support. In line with the broken national finances the welfare system that succeeded the workhouses offered the most meagre of financial support whilst penalising the worthy poor and publicly scapegoating the unworthy poor. The old got a small government pension, won for them in spite of a resistant House of Lords in 1911 by Lloyd George's government, only twenty odd years before my parents were born. Health services and doctors were either strictly private or by public subscription/charitable. There was no  'health system' as such, all doctors were private and there were hospitals that had been built by voluntary subscription and philanthropy where  even when they were built, the financing of care within them was a fragile business. Come World War Two, and post war times, and life was both better and worse. Patriotism easily tipped into a targeted mean-ness of spirit, whilst where government took charge they levelled up nutrition and health care but it was easy for some people and political parties to ask 'Can we do our levelling up without government help?' and use that to try to plan for a return to the worst of the inequalities that went on before the war.

Between the poverty of the 1930's and the rationing of the war and post war period new divisions between parents and children opened up that could not be closed. It was 'patriotic' for poorer parents to make small amounts of money and rationed goods stretch, and for parents to overtly ration hope in their children, whilst being charitable to the truly needy. One of the phrases that I recently became allergic to from my parents was 'We did our best for you'. What the phrase revealed to me was both an eagerness for us all to have the best, in the best of all possible worlds, and a refusal to recognise that their mistakes might have been more recoverable from were they to had been admitted to sooner after they happened.

Some of the above was why when Mother wanted a social life as a young adult she ended up leaving her parents home at short notice, and unexpectedly not seeing them for several years. That said whatever Mother thought of how she was separated from her parents she used the time apart from them more constructively than she could credit herself with after she became a parent. Between 1954 and 1957 Mother visited France and Belgium. 1957 was the year that she first met dad. She had plans to go to Germany in 1958, had she got to Germany she would have seen it before the wall went up which would have been a world scale anecdote to share. But when she met dad at a Christmas party in 1957 the plan to visit Germany was shelved for more local plans. If travel broadened her mind then marriage and becoming a parent quickly narrowed it. But occasionally, when we were both adults, she felt expansive enough to talk to me about her travels. Much of the who, what, when, where, and why, of the journeys fell by the wayside as she talked. But what she shared was a glimpse through a smeary window to a place that once existed that none of us could go now.

At some point after the onion factory job ended I knew that I was never going to own a property. The idea of me getting a job that might be secure enough if I was in it long enough and might earn me enough to get a deposit and a mortgage began to smell of onions to me. I took against the idea, though I accepted that it might be right for some, perhaps many, other people. The worst part of it was that I could not say why and there was nobody around who would have dared ask me and draw out my reasoning on the matter.

If having a girlfriend was not part of Mother's plans for me, then having friends in CND who happened to be female came as a surprise to her. Alas the opportunities they offered me, chaste and friendly as they were, did not meet with Mother's approval. 

In the autumn of 1981 Lynne, Chairperson of CND, one of the few friends I had who could drive, inherited her first car from her family. This had the knock on effect of further sharpening unintended disagreements between Mother and me. I was one of the people Lynne invited as she started going to see friends in cities like Nottingham which may have been only an hour away by car, but which when I went with Lynne proved to be several universes away from my family. The terms of the invites were that I was welcome as long as I paid my way which meant that I had to have some of the money from the bank accounts, the books for which Mother kept for me in the finance cupboard. That cupboard was where she kept the whole of my future locked up as far as she knew. As long as I paid my way with my friends it did not matter too much that I was socially awkward. That was something that could be handled deftly with forgiveness, as needed on the way. 

To me these excursions were a continuation of my going to Glastonbury and the study of history, they were part of what I used to put some distance between me and my parents. But to my parents their hold over me seemed to be as firm as if I were still wearing short trousers. Separation was going to be uneasy and disagreeable. At the time it looked like excursions away with Lynne would be part of why the break would be made but events turned out differently to how I expected.

When I was spending money with friends in places Mother knew nothing about, whilst she thought that I should be saving for a future close to the parental house, it was my new friends' new ideas for me which stressed the parental household routines. With Lynne's help I decided that I wanted to be vegetarian. I still believe a diet of well prepared fruit and veg, with herbs, pulses and pasta it is a fine thing to pursue. But in the parental household if any one daily habit glued the family together then it was Mother's cooking. Even when dad absented himself from that table, half his meal left uneaten, he knew to not openly test the limits of the pretend unity and agreement we observed. The rituals around eating Mother's inflexible canteen cooking had been the family bond for two decades, except for the fortnight when she had to go to hospital for a fortnight in the early seventies, when we were frankly relieved to be able to stop pretending.

She ruled in the kitchen, and ruled us though the kitchen. Beyond us making sandwiches on our own and washing up she was in control. My urge to vegetarianism was not just about me not eating meat. It was about me wanting out. Wanting out of what felt like being bricked in, immurement, through family routine. Meat and two veg symbolised everything that seemed to be historic and controlling in the parental house and everything that I did not want at that point. I did not realise at the time how much I was drawing 'You use this house as if it is a hotel' comment nearer to being openly said I tested the vegetarian waters.

At first Mother and I tried being civil about this. I realised that without a meat substitute she would not agree to the idea. To Mother the plate was incomplete without meat, or some sort of meat substitute on it. From the local health food shop I bought something called Sosmix. It was a powder with interesting bits in it onto which hot water was poured and it bound itself together in a sausage meat/stuffing type consistency. It would have smelt nice with onion and herbs in it. But to win her argument that I should eat meat Mother would not touch it herself and took away from me the amount of time it would take to make the Sosmix smell and taste good and eat with everyone else. Poorly prepared as she insisted it had to be, I ate it as if it were the tasteless humble pie they all expected it to be, where they ate their meat with proud indifference.

If my smelling of onions from being surrounded by them at work seemed unrewarding for me, then maybe it was the smell of badly prepared Sosmix in that small kitchen that forced Mother to secretly seek somewhere else, anywhere, for me to rent. In the immediate family we all knew absolutely nothing about renting from a private landlord, not where they and their properties could be found nor what they charged for rent and bills. We knew nothing about how to get housing benefit with me being on the dole. As Mother discovered for herself, the demand for properties to rent to single young men was quite high, but the supply of properties for single men was near non-existent. The council had the biggest rent portfolio in the town and they rented their flats to young single women but not young single men. Their flats were rented to women because women could not own property in their own right, whereas men, even young men, were expected to marry, be in steady work and become property owners as if all three choices came together, as a package. By the time I was available for work the bottom had fallen out of the market for skilled unionised work for young men, and with no union and fewer jobs for young men, period, we were not going to be good for marriage or property ownership. What Mother discovered, and I knew intuitively, was that there was a spreading and obvious dislocation for young men who could only afford to leave home if they had work. With their choice of job gone their choice of where to live disappeared with it. Most local employers now paid their better paid employees too little for them to be able to buy local houses. The private rental sector shrank too. If this the new way money that worked, by seeming to please the few at the level of want but not meeting the needs of the many the way money used to, then I was not surprised if Mother could not make sense of it, and seemed to have little say even though there things we had to do even in tightening circumstances.aa

Mother kept it a secret when her niece, Heather, gave Mother the name and address of a private landlord who had put a 'rooms to rent' card up in a sub-post office window a couple of miles away. The card gave only a distant contact address for the landlord, but Mother imagined the house was near the sub-post office. She had wanted somewhere closer to the parental house, where not so unawares of me she could keep a more controlling eye on me. She wanted more of a role in my future, as if my future was both our futures. Instead of sharing with me that she had the landlord's address, Mother held back and gave Heather sob-stories of domestic discomfort to gain sympathy solely for herself.

I found that the best way of managing the household tensions that I lived in the midst of was to keep on being sociable with the world outside the parental house on my own terms. Though with hindsight some of my late nights and choice of friends must have added to those tensions. I continued to attend the Christian youth group, got to church intermittently, and I supported CND through my secretarial duties and other more practical activities. There was the occasional empathetic symmetry, when Mother visited our CND Christmas fair which I was helping run and I visited the St John Ambulance Christmas fair with her. We both accepted indirect support to make our organisations work better for the public. Music, and swapping tapes of albums with friends, seemed more important than before. I was not aware that I was screening out my family this way, but surely it was the case. Even Wayne, my fifteen year old sister's boyfriend, known as 'Boggo' for his Mohican haircut resembling toilet brush, shared his punk albums with me to listen to. I was also kept busy by the revision work towards my Maths 'O' level exam. The night class was between one and two hours per week but I had to do maybe ten hours a week to revise the subject. So the deal with Mr Metcalfe became that the night class was when I handed my homework in to him for checking and I got given next week's ten hours of revision for me to do in my own time. Any time in the class Mr Metcalfe had with me he spent going over previous homework with me in person. Catching up with maths as a subject was quite a tense time. I surely spent a bit of my time willy waving too, but it was odd how some old respites from the tension of life in the parental house simply stopped being effective.

I retook the Maths 'O'' level exams in November and then rested from my studies. For the whole of Christmas and New Year I did all the basic things with family, but only out of duty. Outside of family I kept my heart my own life. It was predictable that the 'season of good will' would quickly flatten out. It did. If I was half prepared for the flatness then I was not prepared for the phrase 'You treat this house as if it is a hotel' when it was said to me with a conviction that startled everyone when it was said. I don't know what directly triggered the 'Hotel' phrase to be used with such effect. It may have been because my parents resented their address being used for all the posts from CND that head office sent me, as the local secretary. I will never know.

I had no plan of where to move to because I had gone along with being barred from making my own plans to leave on my own terms. I had not even done as much as Mother had, She had secretly found an address to write to, and then stalled from doing anything more about it. In my head I felt 'stuck', completely frozen, about how to move. As far as I could tell it was family that had frozen discussion of me moving in the same way they froze all discussion of religion, sex, politics and money. I genuinely thought that if I asked a landlord to rent a room because he had one he would say 'What is wrong with you? Why don't your parents want you? If they don't want you then why should anyone else accept you under their roof?'. There was a simple answer to this question of course and it was money. With family the currency of family was hyper-loyalty. The shift that I could not make was how with a landlord his currencies were money and reliability, and loyalty meant nothing to them.      

Mother used the 'Hotel' phrase. She felt like the staff of a hotel where all the guests were tired and uninterested in her efforts at a surface image of unity. But if we did what she, as the hotel management, wanted we'd never leave and never have interests that she did not have first say over. It would have been a fine example of 'the Stockholm syndrome'**.

The most useful Christmas gift I was given that year was a diary. That Christmas and over the next year was the first time I recorded some of how I filled my time each day with a vague consistency. As a record of my friendships at the time it is interesting. All the names in it are all first names only, no surnames. No addresses of friends were recorded because they all lived locally and I walked to their houses. When they moved away I missed them a lot, unaware of how obvious it was that I saw them as improvements/substitutes for the family that I had, not that they said they were, or said anything about my family.

Nobody knew how much the next year was going to be both a break from the past and similar to it. But I was soon going to find out.

Please find Chapter 17 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.