Chapter 3 - What The Alien Did Next

That summer of 1977 I was just days, weeks, away from never hearing again the dozen or more role calls and bells that rang each day that I used to respond to without question in care home/boarding school. I would never experience them again except as rather isolating memories of times that nobody else around me knew about. The old rules, bells, and triggers of the school were rapidly replaced by spoken calls to watch the television with the family, or to prepare the table for us all eating before Mother plated the food in the kitchen. Other calls were to help Mother strip beds of sheets and remake the beds, prepare for going shopping or going to the allotment. That I followed promptly is witness to how well the previous set of cues had worked. Where in the boarding school television was incidental to the eleven bells and roll calls a day, what television showed at any given moment was much more integrated into the schedules of the parental house.  

I might well have known that if my parents had made sure I had money and time of my own then they would have been granting me greater choice about how to live. But, whether the routine was connected to employment, alcohol consumption, or running the house they were bound hand and foot to their own repetitive routines. If both my parents and I were bound by routines then there was one big difference between me and them. They had friends with whom they experienced something like temporary equality and shared respect as they met other adults through their routines. I had no friends yet, and I would not find any through following the new routines led by my parents. The people I met as I followed Mother around acknowledged me, but they always acknowledged her much more. Mother both wanted to use me for the strength I could give her and wanted to instill in me the line from 'the protestant work ethic', 'work hard and you will get what you want, you will be rewarded'. At the age of sixteen I did not know work would reward me from work that would leave me disappointed. What I dimly saw was that over the last five years I had been presented with many chances for choice and reward which rewarded others more than me, where I felt inclined to ignore those choices rather than embrace them. Sport as 'rewarding teamwork' was one such set of choices.

That was how I accepted the little that I was given. I did not know that I was 'doing without' to no particular purpose. I did not miss the better choices and having more. I saw choice as the choice to be indifferent. With such a small amount of money of my own and my time mostly taken up around college work, or around family, it was a novelty when every so often I was found I had time to myself to explore how I might organise myself if I had even more time. 

It was liberty enough for me to have a key to the house and be given a second hand watch that worked and would not wear out in months like the last one had, so I now knew what the time was.With the new set up I could let myself in and out without my parents being gatekeepers for the house all the time, like the staff were in the care home/boarding school had been. I had been given my first watch out of necessity two years earlier when during the summer holiday Mother had gone into hospital for an operation at short notice for a fortnight and I had to take my sister and myself to the hospital where Mother was recovering. I needed the working watch because whilst I might have been able to read the clock on the platform of the railway station when we got off the train I still had to get back to the platform at the right time for the right train back to the parental house. As if it was meant only to cover the emergency, the watch proved so old that it wore out and was thrown away six months after I was given it. My parents could have got me a good watch the first time, but Mother's stay in hospital was arranged at such short notice and her ill health was such a surprise for all of us that they had done the right thing that fast to get Mother to the hospital. All preparations for me and my sister outside the operation was, quite literally, an afterthought.

In the care home/boarding school I had poor physical coordination and rarely received any help with it, nor was it discussed in any coherent way with me. It was only towards the end of my time there that I learned how to fail in sport with good grace. Then I could fail more comfortably because I was leaving. All the time before that I was in a catch 22 situation of every time I tried harder to compete and be more adept in sort I always failed by an uncomfortable margin. And the level of discomfort made my trying harder even more uncomfortable. All the time I was a sports failure and uneasy about it. The failure put me ill at ease with other boys who either failed more gracefully or were natural winners. But I was not the only one to fail at sports, generally team sports create very few winners and the winners tend to be the same few all the time. After creating the winners the biggest category were the happy losers who occasionally won. I was in the last category, the unhappy losers. Some sporting types could use their unhappiness to make them better players whilst they rarely won. I had the wrong sort of unhappiness, the sort where being forced to compete became cumulatively irritating and depressing.

Part of why I was to study electronics was because it was desk work under instruction but on my own. My coordination and level of comfort around others fitted the quiet and relative isolation of what I was learning which was a comfort to me after losing so often in sport, and feeling bad about losing, had left me unwilling to engage more. With the support I expected to get from the course I hoped to prove that I could do something sufficient that I might be accepted as competent at it by an employer. The more sporty boys from the school surely got far more sociable and rewarding training opportunities than I did. But that mattered less when their lives were continuing well away from mine. 

Another example of the limits of my coordination, closer to home, was that dad trusted me to ride his bike safely but I was never allowed to learn how to repair the puncture when one of the tyres went flat. He would never share in/show me the process of taking off the back wheel, with the three gears on it, and putting it back on securely the same way. He was not going to teach/show me and there was nobody else to show me. I accepted being allowed to watch, but not do, after all much of my life already seemed like that. But it did little to give me confidence and improve my sense of coordination. 

In one way it was enough that I could ride the bike. I was not like Mother who in another of her infamous 'never again ' stories talked about being a teenager and somehow falling off the bike and into a bed of nettles which she said that she was allergic to the stings of. She never got on a bike again. As with many such stories, nine tenths got missed out in her telling of the story, most of which we could not even guess at, like Where did it happen? How did she come to fall off the bike? Whose bike was it? And was that how she discovered she had an allergy to nettle stings? If that was not where she discovered this allergy then where and how did that happen? I always pictured the event happening on the road out her home village and a passing car frightened her in the worst possible place, against a bank of nettles in the heat of summer, with the nettles at maximum height whilst riding a bike her dad owned. But not being told the whys, hows and firm details was always the way with trauma, the result was safer to report with the details AWOL. Describing the process of what led up to the trauma was much more fraught, and risked diminishing the character of the person traumatised in the eyes of other people.

Any hobby that I wanted to have where my family did not prepare it for me had to be within my capability and be cheap. It had to require little to no help from anyone else, and given the hoarder Mother was it had to take up very little space for me to be allowed to keep it without it impinging on space she controlled. The hobby had to work without me having friends too. Friendships required money and I had little. Any new hobby/friendship was also required to respect the secrecy that surrounded my past in the care home/boarding school because when I went there it was impossible to explain why I was there. And now I was out of the place then explaining why I used to go there made me sound like Mother where she talked about the immediate effect of the trauma but not the process that the trauma started from. The last reason for hobbies being cheap and antisocial was more practical and self-evident. In some households it is fine for children to bring other children into the house. It was wrong to do that in the parental house. Mother's hoarding would be as self evident to any guest/visitor as it was blind to us because we lived it.

This left me little choice of how to use the time in which my parents left me to my own devices. One constructive choice was to join the local public library, which I did. I had been a member of the public library in the town where the care home/boarding school was for the last three years I was there. I regret now that I kept no record for my future self of what books I read back then. What I can say about my library borrowings whilst in the care home/boarding school was that I had no guide to follow as to what to borrow, and there were no school reading lists for me to draw inspiration from. Nor did I have friends in the school who read as much as I did who could act as a human reminder of what books I liked and why.One prompt to choose what to read was the films we watched on television, whether it was 'The Cruel sea' or 'To Sir With Love', or 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'. There must have been many other books adapted into films that were considered light adult reading that I was a bit too young for where I followed the prompt, regardless of the result. 

I liked reading grown up books that I guess grown ups read less because I saw my reading of them as badges I gave to myself as proof I was nearer being an adult when I was going to get a few other credits of my maturity. When I joined the library from the parental house I still had no guide as to what to read and I still kept no lists for future reference. One reason I kept no lists for future reference was my handwriting, which was done with my left hand and it looked like my Mother's hand writing. She despised her handwriting, even for simple shopping lists,  and would do nothing to improve it to make it something she, and others, might despise less. My writing was more legible than hers, but I held a pen awkwardly and I needed somebody to tell me how to work on how I held a pen with less pressure. But it was not just that I did not have a mentor, I had never heard of the word 'mentoring'. Before I started the electronics course I wrote quite a lot but not lists for self reference in future, what I wrote were mostly letters to Mother from the care home/boarding school along with letters of thanks to distant relatives every New Year for the small Christmas gifts I had received from them. Dad pooh poohed those letters as I wrote them. I did not realise at the time he was disapproving of the relatives for them being Mother's relatives, as much as the gratitude with which I wrote.

As interests and hobbies went I had the library books to read and return, and the seven inch singles that I had liked in the care home/boarding school too. I liked them because I could afford them and because they linked in with the weekly treat of watching 'Top Of the Pops'. I had not yet discovered the world of cassettes, cassette players and how time consuming it was to make recordings off the radio, though before the end of the year I would get that far. What found me more before the world of cassettes were the rituals around popular music, which moulded themselves around how my week went. It started with being Woolworth's every Tuesday lunch time when the new pop charts were announced, and when the staff noted down the new positions from BBC Radio 1 as they were broadcast I would overhear what she was copying down. Two days later at 7.30 pm there was 'Top Of The Pops' half an hour of chart based music to enjoy, culminating in the playing of the number one record, unless it was banned as some were that summer, so it got played over the credits that closed the show. By the weekend I would be browsing the small shopping tray at the side of the records dept for what singles were being sold cheap because they were going down the chart, or had left it. I could easily spend plenty of time there, apparently running an errand for Mother who always wanted something small for the parental house but extending my stay whilst lingering around the ex-chart singles box. Whatever the formal reason for being there I always lingered at the record department the longest.

If I was there on a Tuesday lunchtime  I could watch the staff as they rearranged the white letters in the grooves of the black board which they put high up on the wall to tell the public the top twenty singles and albums. There was a key difference between me following the music that went in and out of the charts that closely and the way that men, including dad, followed sport. Music and sport were both competitive popularity contests, but when music became less popular it did not disappear like yesterday's sportsman and his achievements did. Music would still be written about and the writings about it could still be found if anyone was determined enough to find them. Albums would reappear at random in second hand shops and other places well after leaving the place they were first sold as new. As I was soon to find out. 

Whereas if a sportsman or a team became the bad news of the day once too often in short period of time, then they would all too easily cease to be the apt subject of conversation between drinkers who needed heroes. This bad news effect could happen because of their sporting performance, shameful acts in their private life being made public, or because their team's finances were going awry. Whatever the reason, the team becoming bad news reduced the testosterone levels that fuelled the chatter about the game, and changed the conversational habits of drinkers.

The biggest record shop in town was called The Music Centre, it also sold record decks, needles, hi-fi, pre-recorded and blank cassettes and white goods. The white goods took up most of the space in the shop. They sold a lot of singles and also had a vast array of rock albums for sale, by artists that at that time were just names to me. Apart from their ex-chart singles which I made a beeline for, nearly all their stock was above my pocket money grade. But I had started to develop tastes and ideas that were more my own than the previous ideas I'd had. There were four music papers that were sold in W. H. Smiths. Before the end of 1977 I bought one every week, I started buying 'The Record Mirror' the most pop oriented paper of the titles available. I became much more informed via my second hand copy of the definitively useful reference book called 'The NME book of Rock'-edited by Nick Logan. It is still read and referred to today, decades after it was first published.

Through 'The NME book of Rock' I was gradually drawn towards the weekly magazine that was most oriented towards the albums that were released weekly, The New Musical Express. It was a newspaper about music where the point of the writing was that it was meant to to go over the reader's head, the literary equivalent of progressive rock. Often the writing and cartoons made a humour out of contempt and nihilism that seemed funny for no obvious reason. I already had a love of long words being used for their own sake, but still used with more precision than seemed apparent, the New Musical Express tapped into that grand style. Reading the New Musical Express every week made me feel like a more comfortable alien within the family. But to those who thought they knew me it probably made me even more alien.

The stock of books in the library seemed mostly to have been originally published in the 1950's, with later reprints of the same material. Some of my earliest borrowings were the 'The Coarse Art of....  ' series by Micheal Green, of which there were eight books as of when I started reading them. They covered the subjects of rugby, sailing, acting, moving, sport, golf, drinking and cruising and they were to reading what the Carry On films were to film comedy. There was always plenty of broad humour in the books, and the humour was somewhat more sophisticated and better organised than what you might find in a red top newspaper, but it was not so far beyond the popular press as to seem too removed from popular culture. After that series, and also from the 1950's onward I discovered  British and American Science Fiction. Within that genre there were plenty of authors to choose from in the library. From one author to the next, worlds seemed very flexible. Early on, and more by accident than my specific design, the publishers of the books became my guide. As I found different works and different authors published by the same publisher I became more aware of the breadth of the genre. If I was slow to see how some of the worlds I found in the books openly borrowed from the world that I lived in with all it's wars, sex, religion, and violence then the authors treated these ideas with much more imagination than ever my family allowed themselves and each other. And the cohesion of the family as a unit/ a dramatic theme was quite rare in these books, which was an escape for me. Tribalism and singular male adventurers were more the norm, with an exoticism that the cowboy books my dad liked could not even begin to match. When I was absorbed in books I felt much more secure than when I was in the world.

Please find Chapter 4 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.