Chapter 4 - The Lesser Social Life Of The Alien

The following is the measure of how much I was inattentive, and 'a slow developer'. The newsagent's shop where every Saturday Mother payed for the daily papers for the week was pokey, but amid gloom one week I found the pluck to ask if they wanted a paper delivery boy. The pay was pathetic, but for having initiated the conversation I was in no position to argue. financially, I was in the same position that I thought that many other sixteen year old boys were. We were treated as if we were younger than they were, but money had been available to us somehow. I was surprised when the owner of the shop said 'Yes' so promptly and offered me a trial straight away. I lasted three days on the job. On the first two of them I was given help and guidance. On the third day I was on my own. I was awake and presented myself at the crack of dawn, on dad's bike. The lad who was teaching me the round did the best he could in the inadequate time he was allowed to show me everything he could. The owner of the newsagent was not going to give me a second chance. I was bound to make a mistake on my first day on my own. So on the fourth day when I turned up he gave what I had earned in three days and told me to go home. I did not feel 'cheated' by being sent away so promptly. Nor did I feel as if I had let myself down, though I was disappointed to be rejected quite that soon. It was clear to me soon after that the trial had been set up to fail me. It was nearly as clear to me even later that if I had been accepted in the job and been able to do it, then it would not have been an achievement. What was least obvious to me was the newsagents embarrassment at anyone asking to deliver the papers, particularly somebody who was sixteen when it was typical that newspaper boys gave up the work for something more lucrative and purposeful at the age of fifteen, or younger. If I had known in full how highly the odds were stacked against me being able to train and do the job properly then I would have tempered my hopes and never asked to do it.

I had been going to Mother's allotment with her for as long as she had an allotment. Originally when she took me it was to do some work whilst childminding me. For nearly as long I had been going she had let me do only certain limited tasks. The task she trusted me with most was mowing the paths either side and in the middle of her now two allotments with her old push mower. It was a job I enjoyed, but she liked me doing it because it combined maximum use of me with keeping me off the allotment itself. Mother and I both had poor coordination. Mother's way of adapting her poor coordination was to disguise it in how she planned and ran her allotment. Rows of different salad goods and vegetables looked straight on the plans that she made on paper every year, but always the rows were crooked in reality because her eyesight was like her writing, something she refused to get help with even when such help was free for the asking. 

Both of my parents were born before both the National Health Service, and it's wartime predecessor, The Emergency Medical Service were created. They were born in times when self sufficiency was a matter of mistrustful pride. This pride worked best for it's owners when it made other people make mistakes that they could not recover from sooner than when the pride felled it's owner. This sequencing made the proud seem self-reliant, and their dependents somewhere between haphazard and helpless. For Mother her allotment was active, self evident, self-reliance in which she hid her refusal to get free the help that she mistrusted because it would have been free. With the pride of self reliance, help can never be free-it costs the proud their pride.

The more benign way of seeing how Mother saw her allotment work would be that in the 1960's when singer-songwriters like Roy Orbison appeared, they not only wrote the songs they performed, they also arranged their own material. In the arrangement they made sure their voice was central to how the musicians were arranged to play around them. They made it so that they could always reproduce the arrangement of the song on stage if their voice was strong enough. If Mother was the singer, then the way she arranged her allotments, crooked rows or straight, was her song and I was one of very few very lowly backing musicians who were kept at a distance from her whilst she gave herself the central role.

I could do more than she let me do. She kept me doing so little because she always thought I did not know a weed from a plant and would not look where I put my feet. I knew what was a plant was not by the crooked rows. But like the inadequate trail to be a newspaper boy any explanation she gave me turned into a self fulfilling prophecy where when she explained a task badly and I followed the instruction she disliked the result and chose to decline all further instruction. The pay off for her was keeping control, which made her feel secure. But then again one of her most repeated and more openly distrustful  malapropisms was used every time she was given any sort of guide to how to use something. She would say 'Let me read the destructions here... ' as if they were going to be the reason the result came out different to what was expected. With a parent like that who needs enemies? Even now I maintain a garden, but it has no straight lines of plantings in it. Instead it has many fruitful near-wild patches which are all the more pleasant for  how the wilderness balances off against the minimal maintenance that makes sense.

As a pretend family we went on the town's annual pretend holiday every summer, including that summer. The Liberal Club one day family coach trip to Skegness was when men who overtly avoided their families for most of the year pretended to be with their family for the day and families tried to ignore how they were ignored by the male heads of family. When I was young enough to not understand these events I liked them because we went by steam train and I liked steam trains. I liked the sulphurous smoke they put out which was good for clearing my bad sinuses. The steam train stopped taking us when the local railway line was closed in 1968 and my bad sinuses remained unrecognised as a limit to my concentration until I was in my mid twenties. For now I was officially an awkward teenager with a past too obscure for it to be worth explaining in accurate detail.

The coach journey was chaotic at the start as everybody assembled and heads were counted before departure. The journey was noisy but nearly fun and it took over an hour. The coach park was always about half a mile from the shops and the beachfront. Being part of the family on days out like these was something to endure. The organisation required seemed to take any sense of reward or rest out of the day. The men stopped pretending to be with their families when they got bored with the idea, which by a consensus that bordered on instinct/drive was when the men knew that there was a pub within walking distance of wherever they were. The women and children went in self sufficient family units, sandwiches and flask check, towel check, trunks/bathing suits check, beach toys check etc all bagged up and carried by the female head of household to the beach with children in tow. By age sixteen I was neither a creature of the pub nor a disciplined biddable sub-unit of the family. The best I could do was take a book with me and try to help and organise where I was allowed. I was not allowed to not be part of the day and the family, I might go into the arcades where the slot machines and pinball machines were and I was not allowed in such places either away or when I was nearer the parental house. My sister was allowed near them as long as everyone turned a blind eye that she went. That year I walked on my own to a beach nearby which had previously been a military firing range. I looked for military shells rather than sea shells, and found a nice one to take home. A few short years later army surplus shops would be places I would delight in going to for their cheapness, and for the durability of the goods they sold. Going back to the home town from Skegness on the coach, we were torn between knowing how tired we were after pretending to be happy all day, and wishing that we were somewhere, anywhere, else but where we were on the bus.

When men went to pubs it was not that they barred women and children from going, more that women and children had to go to their own pub with their own money if they went at all. My cousins on Mother's side were older than me, of an age to legally drink. So it seemed friendly when Mother went to join Colin and Heather at a family friendly pub one summer evening. She took me, the alien/pretend human with her. Mother was the cousins' chaperone for the evening. Colin and I could talk about music a bit but his tastes were complex and those of an older teenager compared with mine and he had much more money for buying records than I had. But I liked the ballad of a single 'Wonderous Stories' that had been a hit that summer by progressive rock band Yes. When I found I had nothing to say to the company on my own I looked at the 'B' sides of the singles that were listed in the jukebox and paid my money. As Mother's air of false sophistication wore off through the evening the thread of the conversation lapsed into a silent dead end and still had not heard the track I had paid to hear. We left before the song played. But even that small loss was recognised and brought me recompense a year later, when Colin was clearing out his pile of back copies of the New Musical Express. Mother was on hand to receive them from her sister Alice on my behalf. The creative recycling which overfilled the house had finally rewarded me directly.

To child-mind me further, and more consistently Mother made me rejoin the local St John Ambulance, where our shared membership  became the means to other days out together, as we both went on duties for S.J.A.B. It should be obvious to the reader by now that whatever she did Mother was lonely, and when she joined groups she made me join too. My joining hid how her joining the group failed to make her an effective helper or a good team player and failed to reduce her loneliness. Only me being close by whilst Mother struggled to fit in reduced her loneliness. I may have been of marginally more practical use when I walked with her there and back. Where it all got complicated, almost icky, was that we fell into some odd trap where the body language we adopted around each other was more that of helpmate to each other than mother and son. 

Members of S.J.A.B. did notice this, and tried to help me out of the boredom I felt for being around her so much. The organisers of S.J.A.B gave Mother a position of authority in which she was meant to act alone and be responsible for us all indirectly, but she did not have to benignly order other people about. That was something she was clearly bad at doing. After over ten years of duties in S.J.A.B. They made her 'Head of Stores'. That she joined S.J.A.B. to get away from anything that looked like a title and housework was beside the point, for staying around long enough she was bound to get some title/position of responsibility handed down to her. If she couldn't give orders and did not want to leave then 'Head of Stores' was the only choice left. It took some years before it became clear to me, and it saddened Mother, when I found that between my low boredom threshold, the flat hierarchy of the place and the half useful work we did, my only choice was to leave. 

As a substitute for St John Ambulance, for Mother's sake I subscribed to her public service values by giving blood twice a year. In the Town Hall Mother would escort me from the bed where I had given my pint to a chair near the tea and biscuits. But even there future trouble lurked, unseen. I met a man I would years later willingly, but often ineptly, have sex with. That first meeting with Manchester Al after giving blood and sharing the biscuits and tea with him proved to be an interesting counterpoint to how family had sliced and diced all that could be said about sex into how adultery was horrible, the shame of bastardy was well deserved by on whoever it fell upon, and both were private and invisible in society, like my homosexuality.

Meanwhile the times seemed more innocent. I enjoyed being around Mother. But my favourite inactivity was reading on my own. Since British Science Fiction was part of my favoured reading that summer I got a particular dystopian title out of the library. it was sufficiently dystopian that I felt uncomfortable reading it in the parental house. I had to read it somewhere where I felt less watched and I did not have to worry about the time. I told Mother that I was going to see Gran and Grandad and she gave me sandwiches to take with me. My book was 'The Mind of Mr Soames', published in 1961 and written by Charles Main. I went off on dad's bike for seven miles to do what I told Mother I was going to do. When I saw Gran and Grandad I arrived between meals and drank tea with them, and did not admit to having the sandwiches. My grandparents were both in their mid to late seventies so their quietness together and low energy levels were quite restful. I stayed under an hour and left them. I took myself and the bike further along the river bank and simply read and read a lot more.

It was an odd book. In its sideways take on the world it dealt with adolescence and showed the limits of good scientific intentions. It was also a variant on the Dr Frankenstein story. A thirty year old man who has never been awake is kept alive but in a coma. Without thinking like parents, scientists seek to wake him up. As they do this they have to predict his behaviour and the environment that would suit him most. Will he be like an infant because his brain development is starting from scratch? Or will he behave like the thirty year old that his physical body presents him as being? You can guess what happens. What surprised me was that without distractions I managed to read the whole book in one sitting without skipping a phrase or a sentence. Whilst I puzzled over some of the ideas in it I found the plot easy to follow, and I recognised the ideas the author had borrowed from other authors remarkably well. The scientists laboratory was a new and untested experimental space, and the boarding school/care home I'd been to was meant to be 'an experiment in schooling', it was easy to draw a line from the book, limited as it was, to my life. 

I was never going to do what Mr Soames did, run amok among people who only belatedly realised how poorly they understood his developmental needs. But I knew a thing or two about the feelings and behaviour that are natural to an adolescent that are long held back and then misunderstood. I also thought I knew enough about people who act like they are in charge and think they are right who disallow others from thinking and doing differently. I was going to meet many people who were wrong and thought they were right in future.

Please find Chapter 5 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.