Chapter 24 - The Alien On Drugs, Alcohol, And The Unattainable

The first decade of peak prosperity in post-war Britain, 1957-1967 started the same year that my parents first met. They met at the most generous of time of that year, a Christmas party. They were friends until they started courting. What courting meant to both of them was both going out less and saving for the future, until two and half years since they first met they publicly shared the decision to marry and dad bought a house. I don't know what the push factors were when they went from friendship to courting/saving for a house. Like as not, whilst courting they both lived in relative discomfort at different addresses, where they hoped that the marital home would be more welcoming than where they both were. I doubt that they thought through what it would be like to share a front door and create a private world behind it. As fractions of the wealth of Britain filtered down into the small town in which they lived it surely carried them forward through every scrape and expectation, from before when they met through their courting years, through to their shared life in the house dad bought.

What happened in 1967 to start the downturn? In November of that year the international money markets forced the British Labour government of the day, led by Harold Wilson, to devalue the British currency, the pound, by 14 % at a stroke. There was a cabinet reshuffle and Wilson rode out the crisis. After that episode Wilson became known as 'Mr Slippery', for his use of phrases like 'the pound in your pocket' which resisted describing to the public what they surely recognised with the crisis, which took months to go from small to large, and ended sharply with the devaluation. With this story the public were learning daily how when government money fluctuated and shrank in value then the fluctuations would affect their lives, one way or another. 

In the 1960's there were two types of married men, those who gave their pay packets to their wives and those that did not. My dad was in the latter group. Every week as he handed over the money he taught her to expect and with handing over the money he told Mother what he wanted, whether it was actually what he wanted or whether he was bored with domesticity and wanted to test her to prove to himself he was still alive. The bigger test was on her and it was constant. It was knowing that she never knew how much he earned. She was unable to even begin to guess how much he spent on drink with his mates over any given period. Well she might have asked 'Wither prosperity now?' as she performed the weekly uncredited miracle of making the household budget stretch to cover what it was expected to cover whilst he spent money as if there were big holes in his trouser pockets that he stopped her from repairing.

For a married man in a small town there were three pillars in his life. One pillar was work which earned him money, which like his marriage gave him social status, the other two pillars were drink and home ownership. Of those latter two pillars one was the socially accepted reason for a married man working, the other was some sort of respite that it was common to rely on from well before the marriage to all through it. If the respite in drink seemed short term, then the fact of having your work mates sharing your respite with you seemed like respite in the longer term. 

With modern prosperity in small towns like the one I lived in, well paid work for men, property ownership by married men, and large scale alcohol consumption by married men became practically fused together into a role model by the gender involved in all three. But what happens when one of the pillars crumbles? In the 1970's pay did not keep up with bills, or the price of beer. Later, jobs that had once effortlessly given men social status with each other, much more than their lives with their wives and families had done, began to wither. Soon redundancies were whispered about, rumour became fact, factories closed. Those closures were sharp and brutal.

Men kept their houses. But their houses ceased to be the social status raising asset that they had once been. Men hid their redundancy money from the government. Some of them drank through their redundancy money as slowly as they could, thinking a new job would arrive and put them back at the top of the local pile. The new jobs created by employers were specifically designed to not support marriage or home ownership because employers declined to be that supportive of their employees. But still the men who were young two decades ago were slow to recognise how modernisation was now spelt as s-h-r-i-n-k-a-g-e. The new jobs but they were insecure by design. The young men that got them could not compare what they did with the work their fathers had done.

By the start of the 1980's two out of the three pillars that married men had once depended on, well paid unionised work and home ownership, were now in clear decline. A decline that there was a big resistance to recognising. I was too young to know what the best of times had been like for those married men, but I was old enough when the decline hit to know that the confidence that those married men once had was now in clear retreat. The more the shine came off their once higher status lives, the nearer I got to trying to make work what was left of the old hyper-masculinity. Through the YCAS, YTS, and the The Community Programme I was one of hundreds of extras who were organised by Councillor Bob Rainsforth to make his misconceived schemes come to life as he re-enacted the central role of Khlestakov in Gogol's 'A Government Inspector'*, in a town that both colluded with him and disbelieved in it's own collusion.

In the 1970's the local 'hippies' and young men who grew their hair long had tried to find their public space in the town, alongside everyone else. But when they saw the 'hippies use the side entrance' signs outside the pubs, the sign might have been 'a joke' but it seemed seriously unfunny to them. If the hippies had attempted to take the openly non-conformist route away from patriarchal work, drinking and property ownership, then I for being at least two steps behind every time they stepped forward chose the less confrontational church route away from what the hippies also saw as an inheritance they did not want. If I ever had a high status job, like my father once had, and been married and owned the house I lived in, then I would hand my pay packet over to my wife for her to give some of it back. What was handed back to me would not be spent on habitually drinking to excess with mates who did the same.

The job/wife/drink/home ownership package passed over me as if I did not exist. I only needed to be a rebel with a very small r to avoid the property owning values package. I was gay and closeted, partly religious, and politically left wing/anti-establishment in outlook. I lived amid a popular drug culture amongst the people my age plus and minus five years in which when I fitted around them for being anti-establishment, but equally I did not for 'being religious'. If how I fitted around the drugs culture was only partly visible to me, then it was entirely invisible to Mother whose view of it was like the three wise monkeys rolled into one, 'Hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil' without her ever knowing what was good and what was evil. Behind Mother's ideas about the moral order of her generation lay a defensiveness and mid-level hysteria that was far more destructive than whatever it was a response to.

I remember my first joint. I shared in the passing round of a joint in Lynne's house where I was one of a small group of people, partying at home after an early CND meeting in the summer 1980. It was the first time I was invited and I did not know what to expect. I was the newbie to doobie that was passed around that night and everyone else there was an old hand with it all. I did not know how much was too little or too much to take, my guide was watching others. What I took hit quite hard but quite harmlessly. There was a non-malicious inclusive humour that rippled around the room when I had to lie down in the space that was least inconvenient to the others there because that was how the cannabis affected me. I don't know where my head went, but I ended up babbling and paraphrasing the Jim Morrison lyric 'Out here we are the stoned immaculate', in my version the lyric was 'the stoned immaculate is where I want to be'. By then I was quietly being taken no notice of and more or less left to sleep it off. In one simple test Lynne and her friends had got the measure of me in how I responded. I was 'in', accepted. I am not a natural for smoking drugs, I had a weak throat and did not smoke, but I trusted enough, and I fitted in when the occasion demanded it.

That night was the first night of nearly a decade of minor skirmishes with cannabis and a few other drugs that never harmed me, though Mother feared I would be harmed. If I don't go into details here, date, location, quantity of drug ingested, etc, then that is because the memories of taking drugs tend to be benignly self-erasing. What does anyone say when other people's fears for them are worse than what the person with the fears is afraid of? I knew how Mother thought well enough to avoid the direct discussion where she told me that for me to be fully a man, my only way forward was to drink in order to network for the work, in order to get the better paid, higher social status, job that would reflect well on how she had brought me up, such that the job would pay for the drink, the marriage, and home ownership that should surely follow. There was no way of telling her that whilst that process had worked twenty five years ago for her when she was young and single, it was not going to work for the people in the town who were now the age that she was when she was single. They had three choices, worked for lower pay in insecure jobs, live on the dole whilst doing the double, or submit the government work schemes where their main purpose is to take the initiative out of people, and prove that they had no initiative to begin with.

But there was another more disturbing reality in Mother's ideas in how drink, housing, work and social status had once meshed together so well that they seemed to be a virtuous circle. Now if once they were virtuous, they were no longer circular. The drink culture, housing, and work that raised social status no longer feed into each other in some sort of perpetual motion the way they once had. This was genuinely hard for even the most perceptive and open of people to get the measure of. The new local economy of the 1980's was like an M. C Escher drawing, it looked good on paper but projecting yourself into was a perplexing experience. Nothing ended where it should, or joined up where it was meant to. If drugs and alcohol were substances and both created networks of consumption and production. Then the difference between the alcohol networks of the 1950's and the drug cultures of the 1980's was that each led to different patterns of relationship and different expectations about property ownership. The alcohol consumed in the fifties in it's own way quickened and pushed drinkers towards marriage which automatically, with high status male employment, led toward property ownership. Some marriages and households were better for the children that ensued from the marriage than others were. But the alcohol culture was the progenitor and driver over all of it.

The drug taking in the 1980's may have led to long term relationships or it may not have, what was true about the new drug culture was that it was inherently less patriarchal than the old alcohol culture was, and it could not lead to high status jobs for men where they bought houses for their wives to clean and look after. Even without the drugs being present in society, those jobs were already gone. The marketplace for buying a house to support a family would never totally dry up, but it would drift to whoever had the money within a society that was altogether far less cohesive than past societies presented themselves as being. The ends and means that had once been circular and seen as virtuous when Mother was single had ceased to be the ends and means they once were, ceased to bind people and drive anything in the way they previously had.

My biggest hero all through the 1980's was the Grateful Dead guitarist and unofficial 'hippy' guru/teacher Jerry Garcia. By 1987, after twenty years of being on the run from dulling normality by any means open to him he spoke of 'Going from drug problems to real estate problems' as if what they had in common was that both needed money and both presented problems. At over forty years of age and after years of industrial scale drug use even he had a mid-life crisis. He had to start to learn how to spend his wealth on something material that he wanted to keep and live with. The generation I was part of did not have the 'wealth problems' he had but when buying houses was sold as being Patriarchal, we did not want to be Patriarchal. We mostly had enough money to buy the drugs or support the causes we thought we needed. If the money that was spent on drugs were converted into savings, through abstinence, then it was nowhere near enough to even look at buying a house. But even if the money were enough to buy a house, then we would have wanted to invest it differently. 

We would have wanted to do what the daughters of wealthy men, who had inherited their wealth and properties from their fathers, did in the nineteenth century. If these young women married, then everything they inherited became their husband's property as if it had never been theirs. If they remained single then they kept control of their property. As the last act of their control over what they owned, in their wills they bequeathed the properties they owned to the town for those properties to become semi-public spaces, halls for rent for public meetings and entertainments, all to be maintained by an appointed board of trustees. In my Gran's village there was the Gertrude Morris Hall, she must have been one such figure. In the town there were several Victorian buildings named after women where in the 1980's we did not know who they were, but if we had known we would have discovered a hidden and successful resistance to Patriarchal values.

When I was preparing to move to Trinity Street I did not know what I was stepping into. I knew what I was stepping away from with the change of address. It was something that I was going to be glad to lose, the sexual loose ends I had carelessly set up when I could not be advised properly in good time as to why to be more careful. I had let through the front door in the person of Mr Aftershave a habitual and secretive sexuality which I had solely on his terms. The sex was not 'the problem'. The problem was the secrecy with which he pretended that it was mutual and consensual. The secrecy made all the sex under duress, and denied me the courage to say 'Thanks for the offer of sex but no thanks-I don't need your secrecy. Now please leave.'. Though the more direct and cathartic 'Fuck off.' would have been more fun. I was too tired and worn down by the secrecy/anonymity of all of it to be either polite or angry. The secrecy made me too tired to think, never mind speak.

My first hope for the place was that it would be a pleasant and positive place to settle in whilst I went through the future cycles of being unemployed/getting more 'O' levels/serving on the community programme. My second hope was that my leaving Beaumont St would of itself make me able to leave behind all the baggage that my secretive bad sex habits had created, as both baggage and habit might become as if they had never existed. My third hope was to use the flat to be the host I wanted to be. I had plenty of friends who I visited, if this place was good enough then they would want to visit me. Whether Mother would worry about drugs I would not, I knew enough to know that I had a certain public profile that 'not druggy' which would make good cover, and if a few friends brought something to smoke then they would be discreet about it.

By the time the Trinity St flat became available I felt like I was several years away from my once quite intense engagement with CND, and even longer away from being interested in amateur theatre. It was under two years since I had resigned from CND as secretary, but both the changes I had attempted in myself, and the changes that I had been pushed through, had made their difference in me. And the politics of the bomb were changing too. I still knew Lynne and others in CND to talk to, but the heat had gone out the campaign for me, and the heat had gone out of the friendships through CND that had once seemed to make such a difference to me. I had my experiential badges of honour, 'I went to Glastonbury, twice' etc but they were mine to keep. The baton had been passed on, intact, to those who came after us for them to see where it got them. 

I was now meeting newer, younger, friends who with my keeping of the Beaumont St house I had an edge over. They were living with their parents and were being put through the education system. They were studying hard for their 'A' level exams. For studying so hard that they could not see how much they were working in an exam factory. But they could see that by passing the first set of exams they would get to the second exam factory, which would get them both nearer skilled work and further away from their parents in ways that minimise any conflict that inevitability of parting created between them and their families.

Sean** and Ralph both live five mins away from me, in different directions. I wonder now how much what Ralph and Sean saw in me was a spirit that was misguided but still 'free'. Their parent's houses seemed warm and welcoming to me but what did I know? And anyway they were looking for friends who would inspire them to a life away from family. I was both introduced to, and kept at a certain distance from, their families who seemed happy at the distance I was kept at from them. 

As teenagers Sean and Ralph were both curious about drugs and clever enough to recognise 'magic mushrooms', The law on magic mushrooms was ambiguous. If a person picked and ate it then that was legal but the effect was weak. The law said that processing magic mushrooms was illegal, but if a user wanted the effects then they would have to break the law and make an infusion with them, or put them in food, say in a small omelette. What good custom said about taking drugs, particularly for the first time, is that initiates be in a calm place. With psychedelics the phrase used was 'set and setting', where the 'set' was the mindset the user was in, and the 'setting' was their surroundings. 

They made an infusion of the mushrooms to drink in the house of one of their parents, surely the worst, most taboo bound, place to take even the mildest psychedelics. When they could not reassure each other, mid experiment, then they got scared and the parents 'had to be told'. The parents hushed it up partly because they were more scared of the drugs than their children were. Crisis averted that time. Later there was a bigger, less avoidable, scrape with the law for Sean, in which he was a defendant in a court case that required a minimum custodial sentence. There the punishment was less the being sent away for the shortest time possible and more how the timing of his being sent away seriously derailed both his exams schedule and his career plans. But even there, solutions were waiting to meet him, just around the next corner.

Back to my family, eighteen months after I left the parental house my sister left too. She did it in a more accomplished way than I was allowed. She got her first council flat aged eighteen. Only her name went on the rent book. But her boyfriend of nearly five years cohabited with her. They got a large rather masculine looking dog that I am sure was less scary than it looked, and decided to call it 'Satan'. Like their dog, they had their wild times in the privacy of the flat, but they seemed well enough controlled in public. Their flat was like Beaumont St was for me, more shabby than genteel, or careworn. The council flat was far enough away from the parental house for my sister to imagine she was free of the influence of her parents. 

'Bravo' I thought for my sister, not that I particularly engaged with her about it. She had a job too, which was partly the reason for the emotional distance. She worked in a factory that produced brass fittings for fire extinguishers. She worked in a noisy factory floor where machines threw out the fittings that were rough and had to be milled/washed smooth with smaller machines and packed in trays. The milling left lots of brass shavings on the factory floor which were too small to see through the industrial goggles the workers wore and when they were not swept they accumulated and embedded themselves in workers feet however sturdy the workers' footwear was. I remember seeing her soak her feet on weekends when I visited the parental house, the warm water was meant to draw out of her feet the minute brass shavings that they had attracted. That describes what work was like in the 1980's much more accurately than the glossy evasions that I regularly used to get sold.    

With the new Trinity St flat, so close to the parental house, being on the horizon for me, Mother surely felt that she was getting a son back after losing a daughter. With the new flat I did not know that I would be more involved in my sister's life than I ever had before. We had always been kept a bit apart. But so it proved. 

**Sean was not his name, but it is for the purpose of this memoir.

*For more about Gogol's 'A Government Inspector' read here.

Please find Chapter 25 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.