Chapter 25 - The Alien And The Ignoble Experiment

Moving out of Beaumont St was necessary for so many reasons that at the time it felt better to avoid listing them all. They were all too depressing. At first, and for a long time after, the place I moved to felt very good. From the start the Trinity Street flat felt like it could be made to be a place for me and my friends, the first such place I had ever had. If Mother had plans on being a special friend to me then she was going to be one among the many I had. If that meant conflict with her then I would meet that conflict when it came to me. I had to trust myself. I had enjoyed being welcomed by my friend's so now was my first chance to offer the same. The space was just too big to keep Mother and me, and it would seem absurd to have friends and not let them in.

It was true that I had to serve a month's notice on the Beaumont St address, which gave me the reason for the delay in my change of address. But whatever Mother said to me about the new address when she showed it to me it, there was something  missing in her account of when the flat had last been occupied. Looking at the state of the paint and wallpaper throughout the flat I estimated that the flat had not been lived in for more than a decade. This made me wonder when Mother first learned about the flat, when she first asked the shop owner about it, and when he gave her an affirmative reply. I often wondered where Mother got her ideas from, and how she got them. If that was like wanting to see around the previous corner for where the present day ideas for living came from then I felt I was right to be curious. 

It was called a flat but it was the top two floors of a large house where the ground floor was a junk shop/second hand shop. It had two attic bedrooms, a box room style bedroom, a huge open plan living room that was 16 ft by 33 ft with a pillar in the middle where the chimney was. In one living room corner a previous tenant had built a drinks bar, though the wall shelving behind it that there must have been for the drinks was like the drinks themselves, long gone. All of the ceilings except those in the kitchen and bathroom were very high compared with anything I had known before. The hearth/chimney worked, it was ready for a fire to be lit in it. The kitchen was small. In it there was a kitchen cabinet with frosted glass windows which was a relic from the 1950's, a fridge, and an electric stove. The toilet and bathroom were more spacious, and had better natural light into them than the toilet and bathroom in Beaumont St. To reach all these rooms there was a 20 ft by 7 ft hall with an impressive black and red coloured tiled floor with paler tiles at the border, which was all intact, and a long flight of stairs with broad steps. 

When I moved there the first task was to update my claim with the Department of Social Security, and the address for other paperwork like my black and white television license. Getting meter readings for the flat, and setting up an account with the electricity board for the first time was more paperwork to deal with. The second task was to claim all the Department of Social Security grants that were going for painting and decorating and other costs with moving. Decorating the place after years of neglect was my first duty within the tenancy, for which I had a grace period of not being required to pay rent. The walls were very high and the ceilings also needed painting. It was going to take a lot of paint. I was surprised at the level of credit I had in the bank of goodwill with friends around my own age, and well above. Lots of people were willing to help either by giving their time or donating items they no longer required that were still quite usable. As grateful as I was for what I was given, I was unused to receiving so much. 

The gift from the place that has lasted longest, I still have it, is my permanent discovery of BBC Radio 4. I felt like I had 'come home' with what I was listening to, 'PM', the news at 5 pm with Valerie Singleton. I listened to Radio 4 for hours on my own whilst painting the walls that were covered with anaglypta wallpaper. At the age of twenty two I was well below the average age of a Radio 4 listener but I was glad to join the club. I had yet to discover the dramas and documentaries that I might like that were on their schedule daily. What first impressed me first and most was their news coverage. There were times whilst painting when I wondered when the last tenancy ended, given the state of the decoration that I was covering up. But mostly I was glad to be away from Beaumont St.

I was quietly pleased at how smoothly and promptly the official paperwork had been processed. I had got my end of the process right which meant they made my life easier than I previously expected. There was a family history of future plans being talked up and then botched through a lack of diligence with the paperwork and other processes required to make the plans work. There was a whiff of Orwell's '1984' about how my family reacted to failed plans; we often behaved as if the plan had never been formulated in the first place. The previous tenancy had been a subdued, rather murky and Pinteresque, struggle for me, where if life there could be divided into three acts then those acts were solely due to changes in the arrangements that the different landlords made, I was seemingly in some sort suspended animation for all my attempts at living. 

Whatever I did with this tenancy I was going to give myself a lead role and make my changes work for me. I was going to step away from how my family scripted family life and how they saw nothing outside of family life. Whilst I was painting I did wonder how long the flat had been vacant and how much sooner I might have moved in, had I or Mother known the flat was there and known to ask the landlord. But if that was a minor worry. I was in by now, better late than never. I also missed my newest best friend whilst I painted. Sean was away. Either he was near completing the end of a pointless three month sentence in a low security institution or he was with his girlfriend on holiday as arranged by his family as a change of air for him after the end of the pointless sentence. We had exchanged letters practically weekly over the three months, as long as my writing was within his letters allowance and did not affect contact from his family. Institution or holiday, his being absent for one reason fed into the next. What had become clearer during his time away was that the most punishing aspect of his three month sentence for him was less the time spent away and more the derailing of his family's education and career plans for him. All his career plans were moot. Nobody knew what to think. That was where Sean was stuck whilst I was painting.

One point I did not recognise at the time, which he might have thought through since he had the time to think, was how we were friends partly on the basis of us both feeling like misfits within our families. Even with events having taken a turn for the worse for him at that point, I reflected that his family were still better at seeing him through, past his uneven times than my family ever would in the same circumstances. My family did not drive or have a car, and never took holidays. They would want me to have for myself what they would not give themselves. What he did not know, because I did not know how to share it with him, was that in the care home/school that I was sent to as a teenager the staff specifically said that if they needed to punish us then they would send us to the very place Sean was in now. The name of the place he was in had been a place that I had been threatened with being sent to, but the threat was never carried out. My 'sentence' in the care home when younger had been five years, with the threat of going where he was or had been briefly hanging over me. He had stayed at where I was threatened with being sent, for the shortest time possible.

It was odd to feel a new equality with my younger sister. Both of us were now away from the parental house. She got her council flat in 1983, I had got this new address in 1984, now we both had front doors that we could let people in through or keep people out. One thing I would not be doing, which I remember dad doing for years, was not turning the television volume down from loud when the assurance man arrived to make him leave faster. Dad did it because Mother had invited the man in and anyone she invited in had to be repelled. The man only came in to collect his weekly or fortnightly sum for the assurance policies that Mother had arranged. These policies were meant to allow us to either have access to big sums of money at short notice or pay out at the end as if they were low interest savings accounts. My assurance was in my friends and if the course of friendship included the sort of awkwardness that dad showed to the assurance man then we did not let it fester, like Mother had to.

As far as boyfriends, or anything similar went, my sister was way ahead of me. I was gay and closeted and had endured or volunteered for many a mauling not knowing I was worth better than what I got. But that was my secret to keep. She had been in some sort of continuous monogamous relationship for four years and counting when she moved to the council flat. But then all along she had the best room in the parental house to herself, and she had been put in that bedroom from when very young and the space was not going to change in character because she moved out. She and Boggo had the best chance any of us could have of a sustainable life away from the parental house. How she would  cope with a live-in boyfriend behind her own front door, in a house where she had to set the boundaries when previously they had met in each other's parents houses remained to be speculated about, and not enquired about too closely. 

If my sister was left alone to do whatever her and Boggo her boyfriend wanted to do in relative comfort with no thought for the future, then I was left to endure my private discomfort about my being gay, alone. The unaccountable thing was how easy it was for others to ignore that discomfort. I made it easier for them, socially I was energetic and engaging in a rather unbalanced extrovert way. Where some might have expected me to engage better with the opposite sex than I did they found it easy to overlook and say 'He is a late developer.'. If with my many friends and this new flat I thought that I might be able to safely avoid what had made my family financially secure but emotionally insecure-the package of the job, the wife, the drink, and the house ownership-because by 1984 that package was no longer properly supported or financially secure, then there were other hurdles I put in my own path. My attraction to the Pentecostal Church Started when I lived on Beaumont Street. It was quite strong, where my family used to be authoritarian and consent was rigged, The Pentes were more overtly authoritarian. They needed more consent from believers for them to be authoritarian. It was easy for me to turn to them as if they were a new family with rules like the old rules, but different. But friends my own age who were making their own escape from the package of the job, the wife, the drink, and the house ownership, who were small town liberals could not fathom why I went. I could not explain to  them if the asked that I went there as a way of 'managing my homosexuality' because I could not tell them I was gay. If my listener was empathetic about where I was, emotionally, then the small town language around how homosexuality would let us down as we reached for word to explain and describe what then was still the indescribable. I went to the Pentes both because I was gay and because I did not want to be gay. At any time I could swing between wanting to know why I was gay and wanting bury 'the gay issue' altogether. What made trying the keep to a stable singular position on my sexuality more difficult was that there was nothing for me to 'come out' into if I tried to accept that I was gay. The most I could do was write to True Freedom Trust and send them my latest emotional wobbles, usually after they had passed where sending the letter off proved that I was past the emotional wobble.

Sean probably got the worst of me being opaque with him for him being so close and both of us being too young to recognise that 'sexuality issues' were a strong part of the reason for my wobbles. The worst that could happen to him was the unexpected gap as he changed long term girlfriend which young men had familiar codes for they could use to get through. Neither of us had even the slightest grasp of mental health issues and jargon with which to head off disagreements before they grew too destructive to stop. I found being seen to be popular through the flat was a temptation that was too attractive to resist. In being that popular the person I was acting out was an unsustainable false self which when he collapsed was going to be a horrible lesson for me to learn from, but the only way I was going to be given to learn though. The lesson would be like the difficulties of my getting away from The Pentes, for whom it was part of their authoritarian appeal to hold on to people tenaciously. They were as persistent through the years as the men who secretly pursued me for sex. Both the secretive men and the church thought they were the angel on my shoulder and the other was the devil. With their persistence both became devils to me. Angels, messengers, would deliver the message and leave the recipient to decide how to act on receiving it. Neither The Pentes nor the secretive men would take 'Back off, leave me alone.' as my answer. But after receiving all the help I did from decorating the flat onwards I had to shut down even the secretive men, inadequate outlet for my severely malnourished gay identity as they were. I had to 'come out' instead as this pretend heterosexual that I really wasn't. But to say that I was not straight was not an option.

But first how Sean came to share the flat. Sometime near the end of the weeks of decorating I had time enough to reflect and recognise that I had been the recipient of a huge amount of goodwill, which I would surely be expected to repay in kind. I was more struck by the quantity and quality of the good will than by the amount of unskilled labour that was given to me but which benefited the landlord more. He got his property, which was otherwise in sound condition, redecorated and refurbished to a good basic standard. My take was that if I lived well then whatever the work it took and whoever ultimately materially gained from it my improved life was the primary point. 

The major point that I recognised with Sean was that since he was starting to pick up from where his original career plan had been derailed and he was looking with his parents at how that plan would have to be restructured, then would he want to return to live with his parents? Where else might he want to live? And what sort of space was he going to find to share outside of family? I looked around me and saw how much space there was, and how quickly a large blank space now looked like somebody lived there. I drew the obvious conclusion. I was wrong to feel it, but I felt ever so slightly 'parental' or protective towards him, because he had gone where I had only been threatened with being sent to. I reasoned wrongly. What I should have recognised was that if he had survived an impersonal low security institution for three months and he left it so intact as a person, then between him and his family he was more than resourceful enough to decide for himself where and how to live after.

Were we both more experienced with the Depart of Social Security then that would have saved us some hurt neither of us wanted to give each other, but the idea of him moving in was the start of continuous and variable but always slightly awkward intersection between my family and my friends. Because Mother had got me the flat, and the landlord was a benignly absentee landlord then Mother was unofficial agent for the landlord and watcher over the flat. Call me a coward but when Sean and I discussed him moving and how it might work he was hurt by how I dare not ask Mother to ask the landlord 'Please give Sean a rent book and make him co-tenant'. Asking felt like I was betraying Mother's favour towards me in getting me the flat. The idea of me wanting to share the flat with Sean exposed the limits of my good intentions, where Mother's good intent towards me hindered my further good intent towards Sean without it ever seeming to when the first favour was set up. My family had always operated on the principle of 'compromise the future through how you live in the present' and now with Sean I was proving how I was cut from the same cloth they were cut from.

The most I could say to  Sean was 'I'll never chuck you out.'. It was a risk for him to take me at my word, but it was all I could give. When Sean accepted my word at face value then it was a short step further for him to recognise the fix I was in about the flat with Mother. Sean also saw advantages for him in the arrangement being unofficial, not that he said so. We often left subjects and discussions half-finished. If he needed to leave at short notice then he could, I was the only person he had to tell and we held no contract over each other. With my name on the rent book I had to stay and give notice if I wanted to leave. Another point  about flexibility was that he had many more interests and hobbies, and friends he shared them with. So along with the flat he had many bolt holes he could go into that I would only know about if he told me. I was fine with waiting to be told what I needed to know. He successfully rearranged his benefits claim so as to be separate and not infringe on mine. It took him a little thinking through how to do it. If he was slow to tell me the details of how he made it all work I did not see him as being sly for being slow to share how it was done, he was used to a better organised life than mine and I had been slow to realise how complicated the offer was going to be. This was his first place to live away from his parents. When I had my first house away from my parents in Beaumont St I did not have a rent book either, and what I was offering Sean was far better than what Mr Lloyd first offered me. I was disappointed in myself to be unable to offer Sean a rent book, it felt like falling short before we started. I may not even have told Sean that I did not start with a rent book in B St, but rent book or none the Trinity St was worth the effort of working out how to share it.

One other point that persuaded him to trust me was the physical distance he would be from his parents. When I had lived at Beaumont St, two miles away, Sean had lived round the corner with his parents. Now the same distance and route was reversed in his favour. He got the two mile distance from his family and mine were very close by, one of my parents was unofficially my landlord's agent. 

Everyday life in the Trinity flat went very well most days for most of the next two years. The way we lived felt like the imitation student flat share that we intended it to be. The flat share soon extended to Jenny, his girlfriend. I forget how the negotiations around that went, there may have been none, the consensus between us was that obvious. We held an open house with lots of friends at night and it felt good and new and challenging to me. Sean's friends knew that 'I had my religion' and it was something that was often tiptoed around, verbally, because they knew it was real to me and they also knew that part of it was explainable as a set of propositions. But they were unfamiliar with the propositions or and feared that if they invited me for an explanation then that might oblige them to something that later seemed less than the friendship we had without the explanation. I was patient with the verbal tip toeing, why wouldn't I be? Patience was part of my faith. 

My diaries for 1984-86 are like a log book/signing in book. They list who visited the Trinity St flat each day or evening, such that if the names were put into a spreadsheet by date you could see how often different people visited, including which nights Sean, Jenny, and I kept for ourselves. I was courteous and kind to Jenny the way I should be, but if my faith was a blind spot for our guests then her femininity was one of my blind spots. Jenny so often looked stunning when she was made up and had some new dress on. Sean was a lucky man. But for me to properly recognise and compliment her dress sense I would have first needed to sit down with her alone, a rare thing since nearly always she was there because of Sean, and then explain or 'unpack' my being gay to her. Back then closeted gay men were on a scale of un/awareness. The most unaware were so deeply 'in the closet' that nobody recognised it, in the middle some were in the closet enough that others recognised they were in the closet, but they themselves didn't recognise their homosexuality, and the nearly enlightened at the 'nearly out' level recognised that they were gay and in the closet' but had never discussed and were uncertain how much others knew about them or homosexuality generally. I was half way towards being nearly enlightened. I was aware enough that I was 'in the closet', and because of that I liked her in a different way to how a heterosexual man might like her. But for as long as being gay was non-subject, small town life forbade me from sharing much about it. it was a non-subject. Also I was attending a church where one of the less obvious reasons I went there was to put myself further in the closet because I thought I had to. I thought it was all I could do. I can't justify any of that, but it was true. With my attendance at The Pente church I learned how to put up emotional defences that I did not know I did not need, that were bad for me. My salvation came later, and it came from learning how to dismantle those defences so that I needed never to put up the same defences, to anybody, ever again.

A lot of the time Sean, Jenny, and I actually were students. Sean was busy restoring his career path, Jenny was studying for several 'A' levels. From the autumn term I studied two 'O' level subjects. The subject I felt most empathy with was 'Sociology', because it was the subject where if a student could back up an opinion with research they could quote then they could keep that opinion. In classes Jenni and both attended she drew me out to connect to the class and the other pupils better than in the classes she did not attend. I wore the clothes I wore earlier, they were a bit more patched still fine. I still have the caricature she drew of me in class, this odd older student. Some of my favourite quiet times were in the college library, reading 'The Listener' and 'New Society' when I could because they were such a world away from the tabloid values I had grown up with in the parental household. Both magazines represented an elegant, erudite, past that I wanted to be part of me, and both ceased publication before the end of 1980's.

Please find Chapter 26 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.