Chapter 23 - Alien Work And Alien Housing

Over the six years from when I was first unwillingly assisted to leave the parental house to when I left the county I lived at three different addresses. Mother played a large role in finding me the first two addresses. The details of the third address, a newly refurbished flat, were found for me through a close Quaker friend, Sue H. who nearer my mother's age and had seen me around the town long before I became a friend to her. We got to know each other more equally when she became the third CND secretary in 1984 after I had been the first secretary, 1980-82 and I had returned to the politics of CND after a break from them. My interest was partly renewed by Sue becoming secretary. When she found me that third flat it was a personal favour to me that set up a friendship for life even though I only lived in the flat for two short years.

Through all three addresses Mother kept strong ties with me. Sometimes the relationship felt like her 'keeping tabs on me'. At other times it seemed more like an attempt at a co-equal friendship. A lot of the time the relationship had more to do with the practicalities of her doing my laundry, where resistance to her doing my laundry on my part was futile because it was impractical. My relationship with Mother was at it's most balanced in the third flat, because that third flat gave me most independence from her. I enjoyed making lunch for the two of us when she called round at the end of doing her shopping for five people, three of them pensioners. That was when it felt most like it was just the two of us and when we felt most at ease with each other. I made a mean scrambled eggs on toast for lunch in those days. 

Between 1982 and 1984 I lived in a poorly furnished house on Beaumont St, two miles away from my family. The physical distance from the parental house was a respite for me, though it had unforeseen consequences. I was charged a rent of £7 a week, utility bills included, not that there was much in the house to run up electricity bills with, or a rent book. The electricity bills were in the landlord's name and gas for the cooker was on a pay meter that took fifty pence pieces. It was almost as if the landlord did not want a tenant. He wanted a paying house sitter who he could dispose of at short notice. 

My two years and few months there neatly divided into three phases. For the first six months, up to Summer 1982,  I shared the house with a student tenant who I rarely saw and who left no imprint of himself with me. He used the place more as a P.O. Box and storage space more than as a place to live. He left at the end of the academic year. In this phase I slept in the box room, next to the bathroom. Treating that box room as my own might have felt more grim, had I not left a house where for years I had lived in somebody else's box room and nobody would admit it that it was a box room. 

My new box room was my own even if it was decorated with uniquely tasteless 1970's large pattern wallpaper which consisted of large overlapping oval shapes, attempted flowers, in brown and orange set against an off-white background. I covered the walls of this ten foot by six by eight foot high box room with the front covers and the adverts for new albums by artists, as taken from the three foot high pile of NME music papers that had been sitting in my bedroom/the store room in the parental house for a while before I left. I must have used between 100 and 200 of the covers/adverts. All those black and white images with no space between them including the collage that conflated a nuclear mushroom cloud with a skull and the body of a skeleton, and adverts for albums by The Clash and The Cure among others created a quite powerful gothic effect in a space that was that small that you would not have thought the effect possible. When the landlord saw it he must have mused about who he had let in as tenant. 

The landlord, Charles Lloyd, was evasive at best. He gave the vague impression of being ex-military, and further of having left the military in dishonourable circumstances. This made him a fugitive/con man who relied on living below the radar of officialdom for his income. This impression was reinforced when he invoked the idea of military secrecy about his financial operations. If what he said was some sort of cover, then only he knew what it was cover for and he made sure that nobody wanted to find out. Near-sight of him at the time was unhelpful at best. Whenever I asked him about 'doing the house up a bit', even slightly, he could not move away from the idea fast enough, Had I known how to play the benefits system better I might have suggested him that we 'play the system' together; if he gave me a rent book then in exchange for proof of where I lived and getting my rent paid the Department of Social Security would have given me money for better furniture and amenities in the house that he was unprepared to spend money on. I could not get my head around how he wanted to be Mr Invisible as far as officialdom went. He stuck to his line that my having a rent book might lead the inland revenue to look into his financial affairs. He owned three houses in the town, presumably all three of them in the same unfurnished and neglectfully decorated state. He 'joked' about hoping to be looked after by a rich widow, maybe a series of rich widows, where he would eventually inherit their money after being kept by them. That was his idea of a welfare state for one person, him. I curtailed further discussion of the matter, I was getting too close to wanting to know much less about him than he was telling me.

In the second phase in Beaumont Street, I lived there alone, I moved into the front big bedroom, the rent remained pegged at £7. I made that bedroom as much of a friendly bedsit room as I could. I lost interest in the rest of the house. My old 405 line black and white television from the parental house sat on the chest of draws opposite the double bed. I put my hi-fi and records in the sort of arrangement that was common but unconscious for these things, as if the hi-fi were a shrine to the music as well as something to play the music upon.

Most of my friends had welcoming, if openly careworn, well furnished houses. They must have been mystified at how I survived in Beaumont St, where I was half aware of my mood swings. The more charitable and perceptive of them might have linked my moods to the neglected air of a house that I was apparently incapable of fixing. My depressions settled me on like the dust that had found it's home in the worn carpets.

Other people would dust the depression out of me every so often, but they had to be careful. It tended to stick to wherever it landed. Friends did not understand that I had to seek the company of others and their nice houses to avoid reflecting on the neglect at home, This was also why they had to be direct with me when the time for me to leave them came. They did not know that I was stuck in the cycle of lack of rent book/lack of money/lack of tenants rights which meant that I could not get the money that was available to others, to change the appearance of the house they lived in.

In this second phase the landlord appeared less and less. I wondered whether he had found his rich widow for the winter and was staying in her clean warm home over winter. He would have been right if he saw the ice that settled on the inside of my bedroom window. It appeared later that he had been busy at the estate agents.

It was in the midst of this second phase, Summer 1982 to mid 1983 that I was called to work again, Well it called itself work. From Sept 1982 onward I had wasted too much of the school year to return to college and exhausted all my choices in education. I still felt that if I pushed myself with the right subject then I could pass an 'O' level in it but I had lost sight of what subjects I wanted to study or why to study it. In Feb 1983 the latest local government work scheme was being set up by, you guessed it, Bob Rainsforth and his faithful friend Reg Rose. There was not much in the local press about it before it started. It was like the YTS training scheme that preceded it, best kept quiet about.

I had to be pushed into applying for the (mis)use of my time in the scheme but that was normal. I filled in the application form honestly. I saw no reason to lie. Bob Rainsforth must have been pleased with the result. He himself interviewed me. I was civil but non-committal in my answers. At the end he said 'Congratulations Malcolm you have got the job'. I was appalled. I wondered what I had done wrong. I was familiar with applying for jobs for other people to get, where my failure to get the job made the process look like a fair competition. I had learned to wish for the best person to get the job knowing that I was never the best applicant. I could only begin to imagine what depth of indifference, what passive lack of commitment he expected from me in the post. 

What I wanted to keep my distance from was the growing local trend of comparing life in the 1980's to a rose tinted view of life in the 1950's, where the property owners etc in my parents generation compared the new and growing recession with 'the good old days of rationing' which was now 'led by the market', i.e. it worked through 'choice'. But the 1950's comparisons extended when the new work scheme was set up on the site in the town where over thirty years earlier National Service recruits between the ages of seventeen and twenty one went to register to serve their time in the army. The R.E.M.E camp (the acronym stood for Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) had been abandoned at the end of National Service in 1961. Now Bob Rainsforth was going to use the site as his base from which to organise local 'peace corps' work, as paid for by the government.

The youths who cajoled into applying for peace corps work were only slightly better off financially than if they were on the dole and not 'doing the double'. If the youths were secretly 'doing the double' then the scheme made them apply and flushed them out. It put an end to their initiatives by taking away from the youths the time which they were secretly putting to such good effect. Initiative had to be what the parents, wealthier businesses, and property owners of the town defined it as, not what those on benefits did to make their time and money go further than ever it could legally be expected to stretch to.

The scheme to reuse the camp arrived with  two more overtly Orwellian government titles, the first title was 'The Manpower Services Commission'. They were the government department who oversaw the second title, 'The Community Programme', where young people who had never done well would do no better but they might make people who had done well in the recent past a little better off for a short while.

The new scheme worked against me like the lack of mentoring in primary school sports lessons had once worked against me. In both school sports and the scheme the plan became 1-pick out the most talented/highest already skilled workers. 2-Make them the fore-men for particular jobs, at no extra money. 3-Let the rabble loosely organise themselves around the team leader of their choice who because he is not being paid for it had no interest in delegation or structuring who worked under him or how well they work. The team leader expected Bob and his friends to do all that stuff, it was what they were paid to do.

 The scheme was like school in other ways too, we had to be taken to different work sites in the works minibuses the way children were bussed to school. The poor teamwork/bad groupthink started the moment we queued with our lunch knapsacks to get on the bus for today's site and we started to play out the film script 'Carry On Working' to a low key/low grade chaotic effect. If there was one thing that the local economy ran on, second only to the profits of the pubs, then it was inefficiency. Our scheme of part time work for the many was to lead the way in this new economy in unskilled ineptitude.

Our work was to paint and decorate as many of the privately/institutionally owned public places in the town and surrounding area who either could not, or would not, pay for professional painters who would have done a far more thorough job, much faster. But what they did not pay for they did not get. I was inexperienced in painting and decorating because in the parental house that was dad's job and he was uninterested in seeing me skilled up in it. Many of the country churches and village halls within a ten mile radius of the town got a visit from one of our teams. It was normal for the team to be too big for the work so that some of us were always left to twiddle our thumbs a fair amount of the time. Other times there was some covert sexual bullying from the one or two sporty secret willy wavers who were also on the scheme. One of the moral reasons that the scheme was created was that when single male youths were left to a cheap indolence then they would at some point think of sex. Because they were single their thoughts about sex had to be be immoral, therefore being paid to do a spot of painting and decorating was the modern secular equivalent of  'muscular Christianity' where the point was to enjoy being distracted by the game.

Writing of avoiding sex, some work teams formed themselves naturally, I was in one with another man called Graham. We got on well when we were paired. We got the work done. A shared interest in music and a thwarted education were what made work with him click for me. In October 1983 I remember us preparing and painting the ground level boards in front of the stands of the local lower Northern league football ground stand the usual white with Graham. We would both have rather been in a college classroom studying towards the next 'O' level but were now trapped in these menial tasks for  menial money. He had brought his radio with him and it was tuned to Radio 1 the way you would expect given the times. It was the modern 'workers playtime', cheerful music to work to whilst not paying the radio that much attention. 

At 11.30 one October morning Richard Skinner, standing in for Simon Bates, announced the next record 'And now for 'Relax', the first single by a new band 'Frankie Goes To Hollywood'. A version of the song had appeared on 'The Tube', the frothy live C4 music programme, a year earlier. I was in the parental house, dad was asleep in his chair with nobody else about. I was watching 'The Tube'. Fred the house cat had claimed my knee as his cushion, when on came this short clip of a band who played a funk tune on mostly drum and bass that was not fully worked out with vaguely suggestive lyrics. They were dressed to the nines in leather and bondage gear, tight fitting shorts and the like. The women backing dancers looked like rather intimidating prostitutes with their blonde fright wigs and tight brief black outfits. What their dress sense might have left to any deluded viewer's imagination, the camera work did not. It was rather close and intimate. One of the band had a moustache that was similar to one of the members of the only other group who were known for being gay up to that point, The Village People. But The Village People were American, but America was a place of distant and safely packaged fantasy. This new band were British and presented the gay sensibility more directly and blatantly than ever before. 

That October morning was the first time it had been played on daytime radio. Graham's instinct on hearing the start of the record was to want to keep the radio at a distance from him, until the song was over. I suggested we bring the radio a little closer, not that I was suggesting anything personal by that. Neither of us having discussed the subject matter and vibe of the song, his response vs mine was typical of how taboos were both maintained and kept being broken at the same time. His response was a prim 'I know what that song is about and I don't want to know about it, thank you.'. My attitude was one of trying to be both innocent and attentive whilst knowing more about the taboo subject from experience than other people were prepared to acknowledge. I did not mind knowing what I knew; denial was not going to work for me. But where Frankie Goes To Hollywood wrote and sang about gay sex in a stylised way, as if the activity was not just mutual, but also hyper-sensual and hyper consensual, I knew that how they sang about sex was unlike any gay I had ever had. My encounters were secretive, one sided, and grubby. They said to me 'degrees of discomfort were the point'. The disconnect between the depiction of ecstatic theory and reality of grubby and secretive local practices was impossible to fathom.

For decades after it was released 'Relax' had a horrible personal effect on me whenever I heard it. Given how many copies it sold and how often it was repackaged and remixed long after it ceased to be a banned novelty song. It was a very long time. When the song was banned by the BBC the band were the first band who had the BBC completely over a barrel with the banning of 'Relax'. Merely saying the title of the song became a trigger/reminder to the public as to what the song that could not be played was about and why they were not hearing it, which in turn made not being able to hear it seem pointless. Songs had been banned from BBC Radio and television before. But no song that had been banned before so tightly defined it's subject matter and mood through it's title. From soon after I first heard the song it was as if the band and 'Relax' reminded me of my ugly, guilty, little secrets which if they ever stopped being secrets would not stop being ugly and guilt-laden. This was my catch-22. 

But if I could be released from the secrecy, then the ugliness and guilt might become more manageable. The first place I could dare to be honest was in my personal diary-but even there putting into words the feelings and actions I felt became a different exercise in euphemisms. But they were a little nearer being explicit than my parents would have allowed me to use. The band themselves were not responsible for the small town ugliness and guilt that I had picked up from anonymous sex with so many married men. Their complete lack of guilt about their sexual fantasies 'merely' highlighted other people's guilt about sex to the nth degree. I was just another guilty listener triggered by the song by all the secrecy I had ever been taught to have about sex.

When I finished the year on The Community Programme I was relieved. Even before I left the scheme I felt quite deeply the irony of them being the biggest employer of young people in the town, by some distance. That first stint on the Community Programme set the trend for the rest of the decade. For the next ten years I was either in the Community Programme, in college studying, or happily unemployed and waiting to go back to one of the other two activities. One of the promises of the Community Programme that broke the fastest was that it was work experience that young people could say to private employers that proved they were fit for work. But any private employer who looked at an application form that included Community Programme work would reject or black list the applicant. They wanted their employee to have a better class of work experience than that. The one-upmanship of private employers kicked in straight away when The Community Programme was anything they were presented with.

For most of the time I was on the Community Programme the biggest uplift in my life had come from entering the third the phase of living at B St. The house was sold with me as an unofficial sitting tenant in it to the Studley family who owned the chip shop the other side of the street from the house. 

The upside was that I got a rent book, and got housing benefit for the first time whilst on the Community Programme. The Studley family were doing what Mother had wanted for me, and what dad had refused to have any part in. As parents they wanted a first house for their daughter which was close enough to them that they could see who came and went and she had her own front door.

The down side was that for living on B St for the length of time I now had, I found it hard to think about how to use the new rent agreement for improving the house with the Dept of Social Security. Even with the rent book improving my finances I felt I had lived there too long. Even with work keeping me sociable I went through unaccountable mood swings, which affected my friendships. I never went to the doctor to talk through the mood swings. I hoped that they would blow out of me of their own accord. I didn't know what the source of my uneven moods was. All I knew was that whatever positivity I tried to balance them out with was always short term respite only. Ultimately that address had become bad for my mental health.

With the end of The Community Programme work I returned to having more of my time to myself. I returned to paying ritual lip service to the idea of 'seeking work' once a fortnight, whilst my experience of time vs money returned to what it was before The Bob Rainsforth Experience. I could catch up with friends better. Between the uplift of the changing seasons and a few days holiday in Penzance my moods slowly lifted. With more time to myself I was also closer to leaving the Beaumont St house than I first realised.

In the late spring of 1984 Mother was excited. The details for the perfect flat for me had come into her possession. We both had to seize the moment together to correct the neglect that we had both covered up, together, for last two years or so. The flat she had found for me was perfect for her also. She thought the new flat met both our needs. It was on Trinity St, the main street off which came several rows of terraced houses and it was three terraces away from the parental house. Mother worked in the second hand shop on the ground floor. It was the upper two floors of a once grand corner house at the top of a street. It had a hearth, a box room and an attic bedroom that was roomy compared with the attic in the parental house. It also had a vast living room that was sixteen feet wide and thirty three foot long. It was clear to me that since Mother worked for the man who owned the shop, and the whole house, then she had made enquiries with him and this time her reward was much more than the usual pin money he paid her; it was to have her son as near back in the parental house as ever she would get. 

The wait for the flat/serving notice on the B Street address was where the wheels of Mother's plans for me, and for the flat, hit their first wobble. But on the surface her/our plans were still fine. What Mother wanted for me was that I was to live alone in this huge flat. In her plan I would have had my church friends and known relatively few people my own age. She would be that best friend to me that she thought I needed. The quid pro quo was that she would have access to the flat anytime she wanted it. Given that there was so much space in the flat then it should be no skin off my nose to share that much with her. But there was another side to the quid pro quo that Mother was unprepared for. If I was allowed to somehow privately acknowledge that I was gay then Mother and I could have colluded in knowingly acknowledging, and denying, sex and sexual choice, We could have shared how we kept sex and sexual choice at a safe distance and played hide and seek with taboo. The friendship between a gay man and his mother, often a single parent, was known for how such arrangements 'felt safe' for both the parent and the young gay male. But by her nature Mother was married and her marriage became one of many reasons that I could not even test the handle and loosen my closet door.

Mother made sure she knew nothing about what I did for sex. She tried to make sure I knew nothing about it for myself too. But I was not prepared to unlearn what I did and what I had learned about with so little support, even as it had hurt and perplexed me. I saw what I had learned and experienced as the only way of my learning more, and proving whether what I had already learned was folly or wisdom.

The relationship Mother wanted, but very specifically did not want want labelled accurately, was that of a 'secret fag-hag'* relationship with me. Secret because no secret that is obvious enough to others stays secret forever, and any attempt I made at being open about my sexuality would have changed the balance of the 'fag hag' relationship. Eventually I would openly form relationships that were well beyond her comprehension. With their loose ways and casual greetings my heterosexual 'hippy' friends were already a big stretch for her to comprehend. They would come into the shop where she was in role, so everything worked. But if she was in the flat and my friends were there, there was much more of a sense for me of having to divide myself into several different people, some of whom appeared to not know each other, to make the situation work.

Finally, there was a pragmatic point about my renting the Trinity St address. In 1984 there was still a strong mystique around buying or selling houses where it was comparable with betting, both were done only by men with the money and rights to do it. To Mother and I the idea of buying a flat symbolised both male license and male absence, so renting a desirable flat was a strong substitute for what we both knew we were never going to have.

Please find Chapter 24 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.