Chapter 18 - The Alien And The Sound Of Music

Whilst I was mildly anxiously waiting for my 'O' level Maths results in early 1982 I was enjoying attempting to avoid a serious three way argument in which I was the centre and focus of the argument and I was the one who least wanted to be the subject, where I could neither avoid nor address the argument. 

My dad wanted me out of the parental house but he could never say so, for two reasons. The first was that Mother would never let any argument for me being kicked out of the parental house be uttered, whether the argument was raised in public or raised in private/secret. The second reason was that for dad, when he got his own way it only felt like he was getting his own way when he never had to ask or think before he got what he wanted. From the choice of which channel the television should be set to everything else, he was the same all the way through. The more serious the issue the more it had to be dealt with his way without consulting him first. The only way we knew that he wanted me out of the parental house was because his body language told us. His body language was the part of him that most often expressed his discomfort most openly, where he had never perfected how to lie and disguise what was going on with him. If we chose to do what we thought we wanted, based on the discomfort of his body language, then he took the credit for what was done himself even though what had been done was by others on his behalf. The inability to credit others where it was due was where the problem lay. Because he never had to ask for anything, he never had to give credit to the person who got him what he wanted. Doing for him what he wanted was, literally, a thankless task.

We were half way through the fourth year of being four adults, including my not-long-left-school teenage sister, living continuously alongside each other in a house that nobody wanted to  acknowledge was always more comfortable with just three people in it. All four of us were very different characters, each of us trying to create our own social life in the town whilst using the parental house as our base, whilst we each denied with each other that the house had one too many people in it for fear of the one who said being made to leave. After so long of being this way we were testing the most basic levels of household cooperation. Something was going to give sometime, somehow. Already, over Christmas and New Year the dreaded 'hotel' accusation had been fired at me, 'You treat this place as if it is a hotel'. When Mother said it I had 'read' her comments partially as a recognition of how emotionally flat the season of good will had become for her. Part of me did not want to know if there was something more long term to her accusations, than her feeling flat. In particular I did not want her argument to be dad's opinion conveyed by proxy when so often he himself saw us as being like his personal hotel staff.  

In my new friendships I was used to being chatty and open, and for us to be able to have different points of view with nobody being made to be the loser for being disagreed with. I did not want to be forced to deal with accusations where the numbers were where the strength of the argument lay. Three people holding one opinion against one, me, holding a different opinion. I resisted going along with dad's minimalist mime act/making Mother his mouthpiece as she herself had no opinion of her own that was at least as important to her as his opinion. She had been adapting herself around all his variations of this minimalist mime act for twenty five years. She was the one person who was meant to know him as a person but be herself in the process. What I saw in his silence when she spoke for him was how easily he could push her into doubting herself, or into merely being his proxy in that moment. His silence could mean that he was pleased and therefore she should be pleased with him too. If his silence was opaque, then to me it sometimes made her opaque when she spoke out. 

The only work that dad allowed Mother to compliment him in, the work that he allowed her to do alongside him, was when he was putting wallpaper on walls of the parental house where he allowed her to paste the lengths of wallpaper that he cut. He refused to share any other household duties with Mother, particularly where teamwork might prove that she knew at least as much as he did about what to do and how to do it. He would not be seen dead within 100 feet of a shopping trolley, and she might well have wished he were dead if he were to suggest that he have anything to do with shopping. For a fair number of years I had more or less agreeably stood in for him, particularly when the look on his face said 'I don't have to do this. I am not doing it. Get who you like to do the work instead. Leave me out of this.'. But the more helpful I was, the more my help exposed the imbalances between Mother and dad, and made me look as if I lacked both initiative and masculinity.

Mother had a plan to ease me out of the house consensually which would not disturb dad. She talked about it quite a bit, but consistently withheld all detail about how the plan was meant to work. When some of the plan was revealed to me unintentionally my thoughts were 'This is a non runner'. Mother had form for clinging for dear life to ideas that would never work, however feasible the presentation of them seemed to be to her at the time. One of her previous plans for me was that I 'had an interest in electronics' and therefore I should have a job fixing radios and televisions. She had sincerely expressed her insistence in this matter from me being aged ten until more recently when the local jobs and skills market collapsed and trashed the interests of several thousand youths, whether their interests were genuine to them or faked by their parents, leaving the youths on the dole. I am sure any outsider to the family who ever heard Mother talk about me and electronics could recognise immediately how plainly false Mother's narrative was. But I was the vehicle for her fantasy, and for me to end her fantasy and find a career path that the town's reduced finances would not destroy was to destroy something quite powerful that we had once had in common. Even though to me her electronics fantasy had become like the sort of dialogue that mothers with Munchausen's By Proxy try to initiate with the family doctor about the child they are presenting who has nothing wrong with them. The doctor might be able to tell that the mother is doolally and check that the child is fine, but how does the doctor treat the mother, when the mother hides behind the invented needs of the child? 

Mother had a second plan for me, and this plan was for me in which I would leave the parental house where there would be no conflict. Like her earlier plan for me, it was never going to work. The plan was 'Work hard, save all the money you can to the point where you have no interests, ideals, or friends, because you are too busy to have any, eventually you will have enough money, including the money for a deposit, to approach an estate agent and a mortgage company to buy a flat close to the parental house, the location of which would please your Mother.'. Put like that it sounded simple, but then ideas that resist engaging with the world as it is often do sound simple. In public life that is how slogans get mistaken for plans, and well costed policies. Her plan required far more cooperation between employers, estate agents, and mortgage lenders, than there was for twenty year olds at that time. Her scheme also required the competitive world outside the parental house to give us far more financial security than it had so far. As regards work the world was far more cut-throat in the way it reinforced competition than either Mother or I could withstand knowing about in detail. She had male friends in characters like councillor Bob Rainsforth etc. She would talk to them occasionally and ask about the world of work and training, in my view she failed to recognise how they soft soaped and sentimentalised their answers to her enquiries, and how much they were immensely condescending towards her. 

What truly chilled me to the bone about Mother's plan was her idea seemed to be that I should become a robot who did not need friendship, had no convictions or ideas about how to live, and existed solely in order that I should get a property. It sounded like the work and property owning equivalent of being sent to the boarding school/care home where at the time I had no idea why I was sent there. If I were the robot she wanted me to be, then I would not understand the value of either paid work or the purpose of owning a property. Nor would I appreciate her new role in my life in how she wanted to support me. What she wanted me to aim for sounded like a definitively lonely life. 

Putting aside deceptive silences and unrealistic plans, what I was facing up to with my parents as they were, co-existing in the one house, were two opposing principles for how money should be viewed, sought, and spent. With two different explanations.

On Mother's side was the idea that 'thrift always worked'. If anyone made careful enough plans and had protected the resources required to make the plans work sufficiently, then, assuming the plans did not have to be downsized in the process of getting all the resources to the project, the plan should work. My reaction to this idea was unless the project was her allotment which she drew rough plans out for the next year which she was good at, then as often as not she did not know how double or triple minded about any plan she made she was. She had no sense to her of being in several minds all at once as her ambitions downsized themselves and resources ran away rather than working according to the plan. At one point she could talk about some big plan to achieve this or that, at another time she would talk about the thrift required to make the plan work, then some simple maths told me that the thrift would never be enough to get her what she planned. If her thrift gained her anything then what it gained her was a fraction of what she first set out to gain. She would show no open recognition of 'Oops the world has changed my plans before they reached their shrunken fruition'. Her plans for me often came with such a strong sense of fantasy in how they were meant to work, but then there was the compromise and diminishing returns in how they actually worked. I had good reason to have no faith in her plans for me. But often my lack of faith gave me no alternative in which I could begin to trust either.

On dad's side the economic principle was secrecy and profligacy. Hide how much money you have from your family and anyone else who thinks they have some sort of claim on you that you mistrust. Never reveal to anyone how much money you have or where it is kept. Always give family the minimum they require, and condition them to expect the least amount from you possible. 'Treat them mean and keep them lean'. Never tell family etc what you do with the money that they don't know you have. Gamble and get as drunk as you want to get, as often  as you prefer being drunk to being sober. Drink as much as your body will accept without you being too ill to drink more. In later years I directly observed the best measure of dad's health was how fit he was to recover from getting drunk. If he could recover from getting drunk he was fit, if he could not recover from getting drunk easily then he was truly ill but would deny it. In this description of my dad it may seem as if I describe him with a bottomless pit of cynicism. But the cynicism was his, not mine. To him secrecy and profligacy would always pay off in the end, even if money got lost or wasted on something that was unintentionally consistent with morality and proved rewarding well beyond him. That was the core of his cynicism, about which he needed to be silent.

These principles coexisted, side by side, in the characters of Mother and dad who often silently coexisted alongside each other in the parental house. If those principles could have been articulated there could never be any discussion about the virtue, sense of choice, or practical value of these different principles. They were both too extreme compared with each other for dialogue between the two ideas to be possible. As housekeeper Mother could and did talk about the everyday, practical, and quotidian facts about finances. There had been a kind of leveling up in so far as with dad on the dole Mother knew how much money he got and if he gave her less than all of it then she knew what he held back. That said, I am sure she knew nothing about the drinking and gambling money that he stashed away here and there, where he did not want her to know how much he spent, or how much money set aside for drink. That was his secret to keep, behind the silence he kept. 

I had reached a point of outright cynicism over whether I had a job or not after my experiences in the onion factory since last Autumn. The visits and interviews at the job centre since the onion factory job had not encouraged me towards any sense of generosity. I don't know how clear my cynicism about work was to my parents. My initial aims were set around getting the result of the Maths 'O' level, a pass when it came, and further going to night class to get the last 'O' level, in Computer Studies which would take me through to June. 

Without even going near the personal knowledge that I was gay and therefore anomalous, I knew that I would find seeking a reliable life-partner difficult. When I saw how personal relationships fitted around paid work, which required a person to own their own front door behind which to get your rest from work and keep other people out, which in turn necessitated property ownership that put the person in debt via a mortgage, all of which you had to supported though paid work...  ...collectively it seemed like some modern Gordian knot to me. If work, property ownership, and relationships, collectively kept me out of them then I'd have nothing. If they let me have what I thought I wanted, then they might well tighten up around me in a way that I would surely want to use the sword that would cut through the knot and give me the release. 

After four failed attempts at work and training where most of the financial gain went to my trainers and employers, I still wanted skills and an education worth the name for myself. I did not know where to start, beyond struggling to get qualifications, where besides the grades the knowledge learned was it's own reward. Everything that seemed to be inter-connected seemed to work best for the haves, nothing worked for those of us who were caught up in the high levels of youth unemployment, who were denied even the label of being honest have nots, when being a have-not was made out to be too much like a self made victimology. Also the parental house, with all its unspoken contradictions, cover ups and evasions, was itself a miniature Gordian knot.

I did not know how I was going to escape these dialogues of the deaf where I was the subject, how I was going to deal with Mother follies, well disguised as aspirations, that were best politely ignored by other adults she knew. I had some empathy with why Mother wanted a smooth transition. In 1954 when she was nineteen she had been the working teenager who went to the dances and stayed out late and missed the last bus back to the village her parents lived in once too often. Her friends got her to her parents house by car not long after the bus would have got her home. They apologised profusely to her father, who was having none of it. In shock she left with her friends that night and slept on the floor of a friend's house and went to work, winding huge brake cables in Marshall's factory, the following day and the day after. Eventually she saw her parents, collected what was hers in their house and left, barred from the house for the foreseeable future. She shared a rented flat for a number of years, and led a full and interesting youthful life.

For a young person to be thrown out of the family house that they grew up in always involves the youth unknowingly and continually testing the boundaries of the life their parents were prepared to accept, coupled with an unforgiving male parental anger. What Mother wanted least of all was to see the same anger in her husband towards me as had been shown to her 28 years earlier by her father. One of the more common ways that people said that they 'believed in The Bible' was to paraphrase the story of 'The Fall' as if Adam and Eve were errant teenagers and God (plural) was the angry father whose anger management skills were far weaker and more direct than he admitted they were.

In the end my departure from the parental house proved to be a simpler process than I expected, though it still felt personally cataclysmic at the time. Looking back there were one or two rooms that I felt at ease in because of their character. The first was in 'the electronics years', when my closest friend in the boarding school/care home was a day boy called John Jackson. He was a genius with electronics. His bedroom floor was ankle deep in discarded electronics which he was in the process of reassembling and he had all the tools to reassemble the parts he was looking for. I liked his room both because it was away from the school and it got me near a subject I admired, half understood, but I felt scared about. The second room that I deeply admired was Graham's R's music room. With its large speakers suspended from the ceiling, its side lamps, settees and depths of music and tapes of BBC audio like the full series of 'Lord of The Rings' and every radio episode of 'Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy' to listen to, it was a palace to me.

Other friends who were partnered to each other shared their own front doors, and their houses and flats were Council rental properties. I had no clue as to how they got offered the properties they lived in. An informed conversation around how to rent a council property would have been instructive to me, but it never happened. My friendships did not embrace conversations about such basic but vital issues. Their houses were nice and I was always made welcome when I called, but because the house was a family house then they never had anything like Graham's room which had a very special atmosphere.

There was no other way of saying it; I had hi-fi envy of Graham R. His speaker set up, record player and tape deck separates system was one key part of what made that room special, even though the way everybody could spread themselves out whilst listening to the sounds coming out of the speakers was also so part of the package that room represented. I was never going to see, find, or make for myself, a room that would be laid out quite so comfortably and be so music oriented as Graham R's music room. I would never knew to ask him when, how, and how long it took for him to create that room. What I knew most was that the music room reflected who he was and it was a big factor in making Graham a popular figure with many people, and part of how he was uniquely generous towards me. 

If Graham's music room was not within my gift because I was a very different character to him then I could look for a hi-fi like his. His hi fi was the one element of the room that was commercially available that I could copy in my own way.

Without discussing the matter with anyone, On Friday 8th January 1982 I took enough money out of my bank account to pay a deposit on some expensive hi-fi. Since the town was too poor to support a specialist  hi-fi shop I took a single fare for the train to the nearest city and walked the twenty mins from the station to the only specialist hi-fi shop I knew of, which I felt was a good shop to browse. I had browsed the shop before, quite a few times in the four years that I had been coming to the city for any serious shopping that I could not do in my home town. I had admired the hi-fi's in the brochures sufficient to become familiar with how they were described. I went through the routine of asking the sales staff what the shop had, what units fitted with what other units, what hi-fi was top range, medium and bottom. I spent most of four hours in the shop getting my head clear about what I could afford vs what I might want. This included where in 'my bedroom' which to any honest eye looked more a store room for surplus goods than a personalised space, I expected it all to fit. Having made my choices I gave them the £50 I'd brought with me and then delivered my fait-accompli. The remaining £450 they would get when they took the five boxes and me back to the town I came from, as if they were giving me a lift whilst delivering the goods. Talk about daring..... I explained that I would take the rest of the cash out of the bank and give it to them before they dropped my shiny new hi-fi off at the parental house. They said 'Yes, we'll do that'. It all happened as I had thought it should be organised. There was not even a slight sense of doubt in my mind as I got the five cardboard boxes through the front door of the parental house and then one by one up the stairs to the attic/box room that was 'my bedroom' and slowly unpacked them all. That evening I went to see Graham. I told him my good news including that I had not had the time to connect it all together yet and we listened to his tapes of 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy' which cheered us all up.

Over the weekend I was too consumed by how I was connecting the separate parts of the hi-fi together to notice how observant my parents were about this 'expensive new toy' that I had bought. There were comments. Mother worried about whether the electrical wiring to the room would support it. I knew it would. Dad said 'What about the flat you were saving for?'. Since he was walking away at the time he asked I was saved from having to give him an answer. 

What would I have said if he had not walked away, if he had stayed? The following is what my answer should have been. 'The dismal truth, dad, is that you and I had never talked about this flat when we could have, and we should have. I don't know how often you have wondered out loud to Mother why I was still in the house when you were expecting me to leave. I don't how often she would drop hints to you about the plan for the flat, without ever explaining in detail how the plan was meant to work. You knew that Mother knew all along that the plan for me to buy a flat would never work. Where we are now is what you, dad, and Mother have achieved between you.'.

Mother was right enough in wanting to put off what seemed to be the inevitable repeat of what happened to her twenty eight years earlier, when she was thrown out of her parents house with no notice. What Mother wanted more than anything else in the world was to avoid a repeat of that expulsion. But she was wrong in not having a workable plan, and I could not help her either. The way money and work worked against me was going to make sure that I was never going to get me on the property ladder. 

If dad had asked me why I spent the money I did on the hi-fi then there was a relatively fair and brief answer. 'I like music to be immersive and it could only be immersive if the hi-fi was expensive. Apologies for not running to the minor further cost of a pair of good quality headphones, so that those who did not want the sense of immersion in their ears did not have to have it.'. 

Graham saw the hi-fi when it was fully set up the following week. He was impressed with the hi-fi itself, what he thought of the room it was in was surely on the 'charitable side'. It was rare for him to see me in my room. My working rule was that the closer the friend, the less inclined I was for them to see the room, partly because they had to go through the rest of the parental house to get there and the way the room was set out and decorated reflected was simply not me. The new hi-fi and the albums I had accumulated could have been an altar to an alien deity with spotlights above them, they were so different from what surrounded them.

I noticed a very brief slightly strange look on his face as he surveyed the room after seeing the hi-fi, as he was registering some sort of discomfort. I also noticed how quickly we left my place for his. But since good friends can recognise and accept the signals between them there was no slight intended or taken when I went with him back to his place for more from the BBC Radio 4 drama department on tape, this time Lord of The Rings. Sometimes fictional worlds seemed safer than our own for how much more fully they were worked out. 

 

I was beyond words in appreciating how much I enjoyed my new sense of immersion in music. It was as if I had been given new ears, when I never realised how much the old ears had slowly shrunken  my appreciation of the music I could hear. But any sense of immersion I had in the music that I could now fully enjoy also brought me closer to the opening up of the argument that I should leave the parental house in some haste.

Within days of me buying the hi-fi. I knew why I had to leave the parental house. Television and food were basic rituals that tied the household together. If dad controlled the choice of television channel, Mother controlled the choice of what we ate. If there was anything left outside of food and television that was loose and needed to be ritually controlled then one parent or the other would rule and create a behaviour around it. My appreciation of music via the new hi-fi signalled to my parents that I had given myself a place where I need not respond to the call to observe family rituals. If they wanted to shut down my appreciation of music given how I used it, then it was  surely too late, given that the money on the hi-fi was spent it was surely too late to attempt it.

I never recorded when and how the discussion that led to me leaving the house started. But I remember it well enough. I was sitting alone with Mother in the living room. She probably quietly turned the television off when a programme we had enjoyed watching ended. Then she started to speak in subdued tones. She said 'This conversation is for these four walls only, you are not to tell anyone else. There is not going to be any buying of a flat by you now. Dad wants you out of the house as soon as possible. He was upset at you spending all that money on yourself. It is far more that he or we have spent on the house together for years. You can't stay here much longer. I have the address of a landlord. You are to write to him to ask if he has a room going. Remember we are not to talk about this again, not with each other or anyone else.'.

It was not the first conversation she had had with me that was more for the walls than the living people in the room. There would be similar 'confidential communications of the obvious' in the future. I was surprised by how creepily she spoke when her usual turn of phrase was more matter of fact. It was the change in tone that made me listen. I knew before she said anything that there was never going to be any flat ownership. She sounded disappointed when she talked about the end of the idea that I should buy a flat. I knew well before she said anything that employers, estate agents, and mortgage companies, all worked in their own interest. I had no stake in how they worked. In the way Mother talked was a measure of deflection form her lack of realism, via blaming me for my own lack of future. I got the address of the new landlord from her, wrote the letter to Mr Lloyd and within days he wrote back. If she had shared that address with me when she got it three months earlier then who knows what disguised family tensions could have been quietly disbursed before they built up, as they had never existed? 

One Saturday, ten days later, I saw the house and the landlord at the time he wrote and suggested that I be there. I was disappointed with both the house and the landlord. The house was shabbily half-furnished with a mustard brown leatherette settee as the highlight of the living room. There was a baby bell gas cooker in a makeshift kitchen and a standard sort-of clean sort-of grotty bathroom. The landlord personified fake sincerity, itself. I got the box room with the vilest 70's wallpaper anyone could imagine. It was big orange and brown square flowers against a off-white background. The room was cheap because of the wallpaper. The landlord would not let me have a rent book, the rent would have to come out of my dole money. I was relieved that Mother had not been with me, if she disliked it enough for me to suggest that I refuse it, then neither of us had any plan B to enact. 

Moving into the new address was piecemeal and odd. Anyone with a better sense of organisation and the money to match would have filled a large taxi with everything they had and gone with the taxi to the new address, several times if there was that much to transport. I moved a lot of what I had, including the expensive hi-fi in a shopping trolley the full two miles, completely moving everything by taking as many journeys with the shopping trolley as I needed.  

I started this chapter by writing that I wanted to make my going to Glastonbury a life changing experience. The time there, for the brief three days that it was, was the most exhilarating sustained positive experience I could imagine myself having. In picking me to be there it was what Lynne wanted for me. Suddenly I had no parents for a short while, and I had none of the personal history that went with having the parents I did. Now, whatever the Glastonbury spirit had released in me had done it's work over eight months. I had pushed my parents to agree to let go of me half-agreeably. I had also pushed them to let go of all the putative plans they had ever had for me, and they had let go, reluctantly but definitely.

Soon after I had completed the move, one Saturday in early February 1982 Graham and I agreed to go record shopping for the day the farthest I had ever been, Sheffield. He had been there once or twice before. In Virgin Records in Sheffield we spent around £20 apiece on albums we had never heard or seen by artists we trusted. The albums were mostly budget price too. The weirdest looking of the records, that we both bought a copy of, was 'Anthem of The Sun' By The Grateful Dead'. The album would have been worth it for the sleeve art alone. 

We met up again the following Tuesday when there was just me and him in his music room and he played side one of the album as loud as we felt comfortable, very loud. What we heard so astonished us that we did not have the energy to play music by any other band, or even side two of the record. What we heard were overlapping multiple versions of about four songs or jams, audibly it was hard to tell when a half formed jam became a fully formed song, that weaved in and out of each other and were recorded on top of each other. It was bewilderingly sometimes you could hear several versions of a song at the same time and it was difficult to pick out the different versions. When one song ended another multi-layered musical explosion would start. We felt wrecked. 

Side one of 'Anthem of The Sun' was a sort of mobile Glastonbury on record for me, three day of music compressed onto two sides of vinyl, each of twenty mins duration. Both the three day event and the album captured a sense of joy that was an intense peak experience. And Graham's music room was what made that first listen to the album so complete, I would hear the album and other material by the band thousands of times over the following decades. Sometimes 'Anthem of The Sun' would appear in my head as a highly distracting ear worm when it is least opportune. But I would never regret that February visit to Sheffield with Graham when we first saw that very strange looking record cover and the budget price and both go for it.

Everyone else in my family had tin ears and did not care about audible distinctions in music. To this day I don't know why I was different to them in that way. What I half knew was that the indifference they had to me and music with their tin ears both became the motive and means of my escape from them. My family's collective tin ear both made my escape from them necessary, and provided the means of the escape. They were that unperceptive about music that they had not even the first clue about why I needed to escape from them.

It would take my friends many years to get out of the town in one piece, and take their ambitions with them. The local resistance to joining up with the rest of the world was that strong, and decades more for anyone who left the place to get the place out of their head after. But all that would follow for me, eventually.

Please find Chapter 19 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.