Chapter 5 - What The Alien Did After That

When I started college in September in some ways it seemed like a continuation of the boarding school, the class size, ten, was the same in both places. I was glad, though, that it proved to be a bigger leap forward than I first realised. Going to College full time meant finally having a sense of purpose. Finally I had teachers who actually needed me to learn what they presented, rather than have me passively accept being taught passivity, the way the boarding school had done. For the  first time in my life there were exams that we had to aim to pass. I was an exception in one unfortunate way. Everybody else in the class had an employer who let them study as part of their training. I had no employer, and no job lined up. The Radio and Television Electronics class (R.E.T.V. class) was the main reason I was in the college. But my taking English Language and Maths mattered to me personally, even if my attending these courses was me doing catch up. The maths and english classes had the highest numbers attending. The R.E.T.V class required close study, along with lab work, so the class had smaller class numbers.

The subject required the largest individual use of equipment oscilloscopes, voltmeters and other equipment for measuring voltage, amps, wattage, resistance, and strange units like farads. We had to have our own work spaces for assembling circuit boards with components, using solder and soldering irons. I spent half my time college week in that classroom learning from scratch about practical electronics. What John, the day boy, in the care home/boarding school had shown me, but not let me try, in his house over the previous three years was a help to me. But much of what I was presented with was new and hard to learn. The hardest lesson to learn was the sense of being at the bottom of the class, for having no employer and not being part of some longer term plan where I knew that what I learned would immediately be used and enhanced by who was paying for me to be there. But at another level it was a novel enough experience for me to have such a clear sense of the choice of being able to learn.

Even without an employer to turn to, the R.E.T.V. course was the first vocational training I had offered. I enjoyed having text books to study closely and homework to do. It soon proved  that doing my homework anywhere near the television, or in any room that was for simultaneous multiple use, was a nonstarter. I did my best homework in my room, far away from family and noise, even though I did not have a proper desk at which to spread out my work and books, the nearest there was to a desk was the shallow and small child's size desk that had been put in the room ten years ago for decoration. Eventually time in the library proved the best way to study. There I could not be called away on whatever family errand seemed more important to the caller than my studies.  

The care home/boarding school had avoided all preparation for me getting qualifications, including the basics of CSE's, I had to study Maths and English. This became where class size became an issue for me. The bigger the class numbers, the more I struggled to learn. The maths class was fifteen pupils. This was the class where, when I was late, I would apologise to the teacher and quite cheerfully say 'Better late than never' to which he would reply 'Better never late.... '. Mr Metcalfe was one of the first teachers to become personable to me, he would introduce me to many cultural ideas that were unrelated to Maths. The English Language class had twenty five pupils in it, and the female teacher was quite detached. There my problems centred around having to write a lot whilst I wrote with my left hand. The problem remained unrecognised by the teacher. With my left hand I held my pen awkwardly and squeezed it so hard that my hand would ache with holding the pen for any prolonged period of time. Also I covered what I wrote with my hand as I wrote more.

The class that I struggled most in was Social Studies. No writing was done there, but it was a class that absolutely challenged my concentration. The biggest challenge was a physical one, getting the number of pupils required to attend the class into the relatively small classroom that was used for it. The second problem was the age range of the pupils who took the class, sixteen to the oldest pupils in the college. The final difficulty was structural; the class was more or less a one hour long debating society led by a teacher. Coherent debate was difficult to lead with that many pupils over such a broad age range.

A lot of what we debated was about how we should behave and how we thought society ought to behave towards us. There was often a certain sharp edge to our debates, sharpened further by the more rebellious pupils in the room. With the age range being so broad, those weekly lessons were a substitute for the daily assemblies we had all endured in school in the past. But where weak and inclusive religious sentiment had overtly guided those assemblies the values that guided that class were secular and about getting us to agreeably live within the framework and means that the adults, police, teachers, and our parents, had set for us. They were about getting us to say what those boundaries were, as if by us saying them that proved that we agreed to them. Such reasoning often failed, with chaos being the result as the minority rebels led the debate. One lesson stood out for me over all the others, perhaps because it was the most simple of arguments. It started with the teacher asking us, auctioneer style, when we went to bed at home. He started at eight in the evening, went through eight twenty eight thirty etc and got to near eleven at night before the last boys put their hands up. Being younger, I was one of those who put his hand up earlier. I put my hand up when the teacher said nine. What that class taught me was how my honesty, if not literalness, for not knowing when to lie to big myself up, made me different to other pupils in ways that previously I did not appreciate. This was not necessarily bad, after all I doubted that those older boys, who lied with great confidence about when they went to bed, would not know for sure when their lies might rebound on them until the lie was found out. The aim of the class was to give us a sense of each other, and feel included. What made it's mark on me that day was how literal minded I was. I did not know when or how to tell a lie, and I did not know when telling a lie perhaps might get me out of avoidable difficulty.

The view my family had of electronics went no further than whether the on/off switch and the channel changer did what they wanted it to do when they pressed it.  I was on my own with my attempt to learn what connected to the on/off button inside the box. I was the one to search in the summer for German audio via some of the less used television channels on the set, apparently a peculiarity of transmissions during hot weather. For all the curiosity the rest of my family allowed each other we might as well be not much more than human on/off switches with each other, but I knew we were capable of receiving stranger transmissions than the predicted ones. If the on/off button worked okay then it was best to avoid all unnecessary 'play' with the tuner, that too worked as a metaphor for not allowing each other to change, and not allowing external pressures to push change onto us. But, as I was finding with how I knew I had changed but 'my room' had not, change was something if you did not work to make work then it would shrink you. 

With hindsight, the family credulity towards electronics was amazing. I was happy for them to ask and me to explain, but the absurdity of some of the explanations they accepted did none of us any credit. Years earlier Mother had set her small radio to Radio 2 Medium Wave, rather the clearer signal on Long Wave because the BBC had changed what they broadcast. There was a 'whooshing' sound that came with the signal on medium wave, even when the radio was well tuned. I had not done enough research to know the proper answer, but she asked me what caused the whooshing noise. I said 'Because we are in a valley and the signal has to get over a hill', I chose to explain the whoosh as if it were like a wave beating against an obstruction, the local hills. But hills do contain magnetic fields which will obstruct analogue radio signals. Mother got an explanation that was both poetic and scientific at the same time, not that she cared about the qualities either explanation.

My grandparents were technophobes as well. Though for having grown up and lived in the countryside, probably without domestic electricity when they were young they had better reasons than many for caring little about electrics and electronics. It was a pure chance when one autumn Saturday I was at their house for tea they said that a television repairman was coming later that afternoon. They could no longer watch BBC 1 on the set. The man arrived and they described the problem to them in full. I knew that they could have found BBC1 on the channel they had reserved for ITV but I could not tell them that since they were explaining it to the repair man and I was an accidental witness to, well, what was going to be a bogus sales pitch. He saw their age and saw the set, and set, and quickly saw that the set was a working antique. I forget his false technical explanation, but the effect was that they bought a new colour set off him, on the spot.When BBC1 could be found on the other other channel, were they interested enough in retuning the ITV channel to the BBC, and forgetting about ever ITV again, or buying a new set. Though sooner or later the old set may have gone wrong in such a way as replacement was inevitable.  Presumably the old set was taken away by the repairman, and dismembered for the parts in it that were still serviceable. My grandparents found that they did not like BBC1 in colour and never grasped how to make an image black and white if it pleased the more. The pleated cloth in a loud pattern that once covered their old set which they removed for watching now covered the new set more or less permanently.

Given how little I had in common I had with Bill and Marion, our neighbours from opposite us across the road, I got on surprisingly well with them. They were more mother's friends than they were mine. I saw them as Mother's friends more than mine, so I was surprised in October when I was in the parental house on my own and they saw me and invited me to have a cup of tea with them. They asked me how I was doing in college. As we chatted they casually suggested that I should apply for an apprenticeship in the factory where dad worked. Neither parent said much when I floated the idea with them. The nearest there was to a response was dad visibly appearing to be even less present in the room than he usually was for no obvious reason. The larger story about apprenticeships was not a hopeful one. It started with the unions, because if the unions were demoted then apprenticeships were surely binned. In the national news there were rumblings from the unions about claims for more money, and threats from the political right where if the right got what they wanted then they would 'smash the unions', destroying the once unionised jobs too. Without the right wing threat getting anywhere near 'taming the unions' there was already enough uncertainty around everything to do with paid work.

Like the newspaper delivery job that was never really open to me I was surprised when I got an immediate response about the apprenticeship. I got a letter telling me of the time and date for an interview to attend, dad said nothing when he was told, but from the look on his face he was unimpressed. The building I went into was vast, grey and grubby, the office was surprisingly small. I felt dwarfed by the grim grey office I waited in, until I met the man who was to interview me. The boss was a man called Bob Rainsforth. He was the local fat cat/employment fixer. My parents did not tell me that they had known him for years or that their way of dealing with him was to be friendly with him to his face, but otherwise try to avoid him. To them he always had some big scheme to sell his audience that depended on other people's money, including them, but it always put him first. I half knew that he was dad's boss but not what sort of boss or person he was. My parents' silence was difficult to interpret, I went into the interview with nothing more than Bill and Marion's initial naive encouragement that I should ask. The interview would have been better described as a polite dismissal. I was summoned to ask about apprenticeships but his answer was always going to be 'There are no placements at present. Nobody knows when there might be apprenticeship places.'. The score after the interview was Snake Oil Salesman 1, Plucky Sixteen Year Old 0. I would see him many times over the next decade, but only towards the end of that time would I make sure I got the better end of my encounters with him.

With Bob Rainsforth I was out of my depth to the point that I did not know by how much out of my depth I was. But what I was facing was such a deep and solid cynicism that it even denied that it was cynicism, and further insisted it was generosity. It refused to allow itself to be read for what it was. If my interviewer had the bigger picture on the local economy and I did not, then they were still cynics and any future they hinted at was going to be them than who they tried to sell it to.

What made Marion and Bill encourage me to ask was that they were blow-in's, they were new to the town by about two years, but it was because they were blow-in that they still had hope. They had not been ground down to indifference by all the directionless and contradictory conversations people made seem normal . After the non-interview I thought I understood better why dad was so quiet, so opaque, about his work. His choices were to accept the word of a boss he utterly disbelieved in, find another job like the one he had in another town, or stare into the prospect of unemployment until he could pick up a similar job, with a boss he trusted more, in the same town. 

If I understood dad being silent about his uncertain work options, then beyond a rather possessive propriety, I still could not explain to myself the reasons for his silence in so many other areas of his life, his birth family, his not letting Mother how much he earned, and just how does a drinker structure his social drinking time? Which with dad was over twenty hours a week. It was galling, but no more galling than usual, when dad clammed up as I tried to talk to him after seeing Bob Rainsforth. Dad said that my main aim in seeking work should be good pay, which since it was so obvious hardly needed saying. He offered no figure on what 'good pay' might be. I knew from the one sight of Bob Rainsforth that he was a slippery figure, and that dad was right to mistrust him. But dad had no choice. I began to wonder if there was just one scale of slipperiness, and if there was where did Bob Rainsforth fit on it and where did dad fit? Might they be nearer each other, in how evasive they both were? I wanted a road map to guide me through the training and skills choices there were, dad was not giving me that. He avoided outright any reference to the variations in the terms and conditions of employment that he surely knew that I would be presented with. Nor did he quantify what low pay and high job insecurity were, or say why people might do such jobs.

When he said 'A good job is one that pays well' he even avoided saying that the job was that the pay might be good because the job was unionised, like his job was. But what I knew about his thinking about the unions add up about as well as the family budget had before I intervened on Mother's behalf at the dinner table. When they did a good job and got him the pay raise he approved of then he accepted it. But away from them he implied that he and others could have got a better pay rise without the help of the union. How that might have been done was never tested. The unions always stepped in and put a stop to dad's laissez faire fantasies. 

The red top press was the height of shared reading in the parental house, as they were all over the town for that matter. What I knew about work, the unions and training prospects I had learned from the red top press. Dad was in a union; I was not; as far as I knew there was no union for sixteen year old's who were in college full time without an employer backing them for me to join. Dad said nothing about how he felt about being in a union, beyond hinting that he could have got a better pay deal by himself than they got for him without saying how he would have got it, which was dad bragging at his best. If he disagreed with what he read then he said nothing about how he felt. I only had the red top paper that he allowed across the threshold of the door to go on as to how he thought. There was more bluster between us, and then there was silence. What I took away from the disagreement I had with dad was that dad knew all along that there were no apprenticeships to be had. He also knew that employers who granted prompt interviews were likely to do so because rejecting would-be applicants without giving a reason was a straightforward task for them. If dad had spoken of what he knew he could have stopped me asking. What I wish I had realised sooner was that he never had any answers, never really cared, and disliked being actively helpful to anyone who was not one of his drinking mates or brother and sisters. But I was still too tender to swallow truths that were that ugly, whole.

That argument was a rare example of discovering through attempted engagement with him how little dad wanted to say about himself to us. Mostly he wanted to pass through our lives as if he were some closed book we were not meant to know existed, lest we try to open it. My being logical was all I had in an unfair situation, where he knew his stonewalling was always going to make him the winner in any attempted discussion, however logical I was. If I tried to say I no longer cared about what I was trying to discuss then he would say 'Then why did you raise the subject with me ?' leaving me nowhere to retreat to. Dad knew all that and made sure he was not going to help me understand better, any more than Bob Rainsforth would ever be genuinely helpful unless there was something more that I did not know about in it for him. 

My best way out of dad's stonewalling as parenting and contributing to family life became music, and music based radio. This meant listening to BBC Radio 1. Before Christmas I had my first portable radio/cassette recorder. With it I could retreat from the decor, and discover in my room what previously I could only pursue in the public space of the record section of Woolworth's and in The Music Centre. With my new sounds at the top of the parental house I could temporarily shut out the stonewalling that was going on downstairs. 

I was given my first radio at the age of thirteen, a small pocket AM radio. Thereafter I'd had different radios and even a vertical 'pop-up-toaster-style' record player that played 7" singles for use in the care home/boarding school. They seemed to get easily lost or broken in the to and fro between the care home/boarding school and the parental house, neither of which seemed like settled places. That I was indifferent to them, because they seemed cheap to me, hindered my preserving them for longer usage.  On the new radio/cassette recorder I listened a lot to BBC Radio 1, but also to the regional stations on FM where in the evenings there were shows that were sort of 'Terry Wogan for teenagers+better music'. With Wogan the music was filler for his banter, on the shows I listened to neither was filler; the talk and music were a combined package. At weekends the music programmes played some of the heavier and longer pieces of popular music, made for and mostly consumed by youths a few years older than me. I was not yet ready for my 'heavy metal' phase, though like most teenage phases it would arrive in good time.

At the suggestion of the maths teacher Mr Metcalfe I also listened to Radio 4 for the first time in my life. One of their comedy programmes was called 'The Burkiss Way' and it was a sort of Goon Show for the 1970's. No pun could be too strained, no voice was too odd to be used, no joke was too tired to be re-framed by the team of writers and performers in some new way, where the age of the joke determined how long the punchline took to arrive. The older the joke was the more delayed the punchline became. E.g the suggestion that Sophocles was the brother of John Cleese, or Q-where did Tonto get his mortgage from? A-The Lone Arranger. A lot of the humour was taken up with showing up the absurdities and pretensions of television which made it unlike most of BBC Radio 4's other comedy output at the time. Listening to the programme was a triple win to me. I learned more about satire, learnt more about current affairs, and the programme gave me the comfort of being able to laugh at things that previously I would have seemed absurdly serious where I needed to see the absurdity to see why they were taken so seriously.

One of my favourite jokes from the programme was one actor shouting 'Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me' to which the reply was 'Noel Gordon!'. She was the queen bee, the unmoved mover, in the highly popular but badly acted soap opera that was 'Crossroads'. In the Crossroads motel she ruled over shaky sets, wooden dialogue, and the telephone ringing at odd times mid-conversation to abruptly end a scene with a mix of authority and resignation that had to be watched to be believed. I saw it most nights it was on because that programme was one that Mother liked so much that she took it at face value, so we all had to like it with her. 

The radio also gave me partial respite from the most unhealthy routine of the week, Saturday afternoons with dad. Saturday afternoons had been the same for the last seven or eight years. When dad married in 1960, right through to 1969, he worked every Saturday morning he was in the parental house. In 1969 the factory ended the fixed Saturday morning shift. This gave dad and his workmates time to wash and preen themselves after breakfast on Saturday mornings so they could meet up at one of their houses, often dad's and be in the pub from the moment it opened to the moment they stopped serving. They all got drunk every week, without fail. Dad returned to the parental house, and to his chair and turned on the sport, and let himself go into auto-pilot, and be completely inattentive of everything except the channel the television was on. When I was far away in the care home/boarding school for effectively half that eight years and I did not think about what I was missing. I did not know how safe I was, well away from that routine. And maybe without me away from the house the routine might have seemed a little less disturbing, with more room in the house. 

By 1977 we all knew how much we could not say, even to ourselves, the repeated horrors every week of dad being drunk and unapproachable, and his occupying the centre of the room. Mother made a virtue of the necessity of getting out of his way. She prepared early, and left to collect shopping lists for the two pensioners she shopped for, went shopping for them us, and for her widower next door neighbour, seven people in all. She took me with her to keep us occupied too. My sister had friends she spent time with. Shopping for seven people and juggling four lists in different shops and stalls was quite some displacement activity with which to forget about where dad was and what he's doing, but it worked. Shopping delivered by 1.30 pm we had enough time to escape to the allotment with the vegetable matter for the compost. Up till recently I had gone with her to the allotment, but from that autumn  I did not go to the allotment with her in the afternoon, I stayed in my room and listened 'The Burkiss Way on the radio, played my singles on the Dansette record player, read my latest library book or did more homework.

By 3.30 pm Mother would return to the parental house from the allotment and prep the Saturday night fry we always had. I would be called down to set the table and put margarine or butter on white sliced pan loaf. Dad had butter on his bread, we had margarine on ours. Meanwhile dad turned up the volume on the television sound up to screen out all the activity going on behind his chair. By four o'clock the food was being plated in the kitchen and we had to be in our places. Always I had to be in my place first, dad second, my younger sister third and Mother who served us our individual plates last. Without her having the most mobility among us the meal would have been impossible. But her maximum mobility also made her the only one who could get anything that was away from the table for us whilst we were in our fixed paces. It would have been easy to see her as 'jumpy' around dad who was at the table and now looking at his steak and chips as if to say 'What is this? I don't want it.'. The television would still be loud from where he had turned the volume up before. A series of grunts, groans and crowd noises would come from behind dad's head as the wrestlers on World of Sport vocally and physically got to grips with each other and the audience booed the bad guy for cheating out of sight of the ref. If radio gives listeners good pictures then the picture I got from behind dad's head with it's high volume audio track and my proximity to a man who would have been better off sleeping off his hangover in a quiet place became a regular form of torture to me. When I did see the pictures rather than just hear them it was worse. Men in trunks being tactile looked homo-erotic to me and unknown to everyone in my family, if not the whole world, my apparent lack of machismo meant that I was already drawn towards that direction.

Every week that I was there dad would want to get out of his hard backed chair early, barely having attempted to start on the weekly steak that Mother insisted was his by rights, as if we had to put him on a pedestal and giving him expensive foods whilst we had cheaper foods was the best way to do it. He would make my sister get out so that he could get out and take his near-full plate and his plate of bread with him. As he left he would always say that he would enjoy the steak in a sandwich with the bread later. But what always happened was that the cat would come along and sniff the food, he would tease it and eventually offer the steak to the cat, in the kitchen. This was the kindest and most approachable he ever was to the cat. I forget what happened to the bread and butter. Mother never said what she thought of putting dad on the pedestal he apparently deserved to be put on, and his making pet food of her offering. Who knows? She might have been quietly happy for the cat, though in her rules cat food came out of tins. As for me I felt annoyed at the repetition of privilege-as-farce every week. But then nobody in the family knew how weird I felt from the wrestling coming from behind the back of his head.

The television channel would be changed to BBC 1 for the news followed by the cartoons, which was when we were allowed to leave the table because we would have finished eating and cleaned our plate with a slice of the pan loaf I had put margarine on. The unease that I felt for being trapped in the corner with no escape from the noise would dissipate as I watched 'The Pink Panther' cartoon, which was six minutes of reliable tightly edited surrealism. My favourite episode was the one where he hoovered the room which was pink like him and then hoovered himself until there was just his hand that waved the viewer goodbye as it got sucked into the hoover extension. Then came the cosmic pantomime that was Dr Who, it had the sense of humour and sense of good and evil that I could follow without having to worry about where it was going.

At the time I never coined the key questions in my head. What did Mother think when she was buying the steak from the butcher's stall? Did she find herself picturing the cat whilst making the purchase? She surely knew that the steak was going to be given to the cat whoever she told herself and the butcher it was for. What did she think, beyond 'I want to be out of this house fast'  when she was preparing the steak every Saturday lunchtime, for it to be cooked to tender in a very slow oven throughout the afternoon? What I knew most was how much my sister and I were ruled by Mother's hatred of food waste. We ate what she put in front of us at least partly out of a fear of her. What I felt at the meal table was outrage at the open double standard of the behaviour between my parents compared with the consistency of gratitude and empty plate expected of me. 

Christmas and New Year made minimal impact on me. When college stopped I followed Mother around as she instructed, whilst on my own in my room explored the delights of the seasonal Radio 1 schedule, including my first exposure to John Peel's Forgotten Fifty, the fifty best songs of that year as chosen by Peel, including  songs voted for by postcards listeners sent in to the programme. There was some progressive rock there, a lot of pop and plenty of reggae to open my ears wider with. That would also be when I first heard Pink Floyd properly, with the song 'Pigs' from their album 'Animals' which would later feed well into my first discovery of the writings of George Orwell.

What most startling to me that season of goodwill was the sense of inferiority I felt when I realised how much I was somebody to be bought presents for, rather than a person who was choosing what to buy other people. I was now old enough to clearly recognise the lack of imagination involved when people bought me socks. Perhaps I should have been more glad that I did not return the lack of imagination with something equally cliched. Christmas was when passivity towards each other and 'the event' stood in most for goodwill to all. If dad seemed a little more broody than expected then we took it that he set the distance he was from us and if he wanted to be more immediate then it was up to him. If we had taken his mood as a sign that he felt his job was not as secure as it might have been assumed to be then there was nothing we could do or say about it. We all knew he was not as indestructible as the Pink Panther, who week after week survived everything. 

None of us could begin to imagine what lay beyond the cliff edge where the sign said  'danger mass male unemployment ahead, do not go any further'. 

Please find Chapter 6 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.