Chapter 6 - The Alien Loses A Pound And Finds A Sixpence

Winter revision towards my first ever mock exams came awkwardly to me. In my unheated room at the top of the house where the only light in the room came from a bedside lamp plugged into the mains extension and from the frosted glass of the draughty skylight. My revision there made it clearer than usual how much the room was a store room. Though I never saw myself as 'being stored' up there, which proves with hindsight how well the double-think of 'family values' worked. I was much keener on the chatter coming from the radio than my mock exams. When a presenter on one of the local stations started to share with listeners about starting a pen-pal network via his slot on the evening schedules I felt inspired. I would much rather write letters to girls I would probably never have met via Martin Kelner than practice my maths and English language, even though I had no idea what might make sense to these unknown girls. Memories of the warmth I felt with Kevin in the boarding school/care home came up, where he talked about 'the rubber thing' and each contributed lines to a nonsense short story. I am sure with hindsight, however absurd it seems, I wanted to write pen letters in lieu of having a social life. Hearing Martin Kelner was the nearest I had got to the opposite sex. Both the care home/boarding school the parental house had kept me from the opposite sex, to the point where they were made to seem like the opposite of sex.

Neither of the regional radio stations that I listened to were actually local to where I lived. There were no radio stations local to where I lived. What I listened to was based around Sheffield, the nearest very big city, a county or two away. My naivety about how to connect with other people and the post being reliable were what gave me the greatest hope. Writing to a radio programme and hearing the presenter say my name and play a record that I liked was genuinely exciting to me. One of the popular shows was called 'Somethin' Else' after the Eddie Cochran song which was it's theme song. It was presented by  Winton Cooper, who much later achieved a higher level of fame for reporting live on the Hillsborough football disaster. When he played my three records I was going through an odd phase of liking both the extreme lush musicality of  The Beach Boys and the chug chug chug of Black Sabbath, along with the bluesy end of Led Zeppelin. So when he played my choice they did not flow very well. But he was surprised at the end of The Beach Boys' ' Caroline No' where train noises come in and Brian Wilson's dogs Banana and Louie seemingly bark at the sound of the sound of the train.

One song survived the poor pressing of the Ronco Beach Boys 'Best Of ' that I had, and kindled in me some sort of romantic flame. 'The I Kissed Her' had a slight roughness in the vocal, and the way the castanets and backing vocals wove in and out thrilled me. It was 2 mins 31 seconds of compressed Heaven to me, my idea of a lover's prayer. I eventually got an address of a girl to write to, and the correspondence lasted about four letters, somehow when writing I went into a place in my head like the space I once had shared with Kevin in the boarding school, when of an evening we sat apart from everybody else and zoned out of how we were there by being completely silly.

Any pen pal adventure also got sidelined because academic work took over my thoughts. From the spring of 1978 onward College became a slog for me to get through each week. The sense of being in a long tunnel with the dimmest light at the end was increased by the disappointments that were to come for me and for the family. The first was my discovery that for not knowing when to apply I had lost the chance to study the second year of the R.E.T.V. The full course was three years long. There were only four places in the country who put on the second and third year courses. Had I wanted to be in the second and third years then the time to apply was last October. Other boys in the same class were going because their employers knew when to apply. I felt gutted, betrayed. I had not realised what being on the course without an employer meant, now I knew. I had nobody to turn to who would help pave my way through the careers maze, for the benefit of both of us. What was worse was that I knew if I told Mother she would say supporting words, but she would also make it impossible for me to leave the parental house, and live far away by and for myself.

My parents were opaque about their care and control of me. I was dimly aware of several missed career paths that could have been mine, and indirectly theirs with their support, but I was less aware of how the more they quietly cancelled any and all possible futures for me, the more they reinforced their present life as if it was the only possible near future. Loss of choice for me was gain in choice for them, particularly when they could make it seem that the opportunity had only notionally been there for me anyway. They would not want to be seen folding my future into their present, and they would not be the only ones doing that-parents of teenagers all across the town faced the same dilemmas of shrinking futures and reduced present day life. 

The only question I had left was what interests outside my parents did my parents want me to have? Naturally, if I set the question even for just myself to answer, then I was not going to get an answer worth having. On the one hand my parents 'wanted me to have a responsible job in which I was well paid for agreeable work', on the other hand such a job seemed entirely theoretical, and the jobs they and I saw were jobs that they thought other parents should send their teenage children to do, but they did not want me to do. How theoretical was it? Mother's fantasy job for me was for me to work behind a desk in the council offices. The Council Offices were the most stable and generous employer in the town partly because they employed relatively few people. Between how few staff the council employed and the security their jobs offered such jobs were nearly impossible to get. To get one you had to be in the same political party as a generous councillor you liked or you had to know somebody on the council staff for them to tell you what posts were being internally shared. Then you had to charm the recruitment staff into giving you an application form etc. Mother knew only one councillor, Bob Rainsforth. She denied she disliked him. She knew nobody in the council offices who had access to the vacancies board. Not for the last time I was the focus of one of Mother's fantasies when she did not know how much it was a fantasy, where collectively her fantasies made me feel that who I actually was was unreal.

The standard definition of 'a closed shop' was one where all the employees of a large factory were unionised in two or three different unions where all new employees and trainees were inducted into one union or another, and paid their dues/accepted what the union won for them. But from the point of view of my inexperienced sixteen/seventeen year old self, and well beyond those years, there were all sorts of different closed shops in employment. Any job description that insisted on experience, experience that most would-be applicants could not get because they could not get the job, or insisted on rare qualifications that few had access to, or references where few could get quotes from the right sources, collectively put average applicants in a Catch 22 circumstance that barred their acceptance. That was what a closed shop meant to me. And council jobs were the least of it. These closed shop specified jobs would follow me for years as if in theory I could apply for them. In practice I would never get the job. These 'closed shop jobs' cluttered up the jobs to be applied for in the local labour exchange and justified the existence of the labour exchange but did not help the labour exchange exchange much labour. 

I passed the labour exchange every day when I was in town and going to college or returning to the parental house. It was a hole-in-the-corner sort of place on the edge of the town centre with the atmosphere of a barely legal betting shop. I had even looked in there when I had the time, and admired the primitive filing card system. I was sure many of the cards were jobs long filled that were left in the filing system to make it seem as if there were more vacancies than there actually were. If anyone And picked the card for a vacancy that was long gone the card would be removed in front of them as it being there a mistake, but it would be returned later. Like many government systems it was run for the benefit of those that ran it, not those who were publicly meant to gain from it.

A month after I found the future that I thought was meant for me was cancelled dad also found that his future had been quietly cancelled too. He was one of several hundred  men who were made redundant nearly simultaneously. He lost his job in the factory that he had worked in for over twenty years. His factory was one of two heavy engineering firms in the town. Both had gone through lean years recently and had changed nearly everything about themselves that they could to 'catch up' with the new technology and production practices. They changed what they made, how they worked, who owned them, and who they sold goods to. But the more they changed, the fewer changes they were left to still make when their future seemed no more secure than before. Until suddenly this guillotine of mass redundancy fell, seemingly out of the blue. A few men kept their jobs as security and keeping the place clean and fit as the last of the goods in the place rolled out, and a new owner was looked for. But no new owner arrived for decades.

Dad knew the worst could happen any time. He could have told us what he knew when he knew it, but he only told us anything when the story became front page news in the local press. He brushed off any concern we might have had before we could say anything. He said that he would be no worse off in the short and medium term. His redundancy pay was quite a lot. When it was salted away in different relatives bank accounts with IOU's being written to account for where the money went it would tide him over for a long time. There was no plan for finding the next job, any plan he might have had would have been the same as the hundreds of other men who had been made redundant at the same time. If there were any vestige of advantage left for his having been in the union then he said nothing about what it might have been. The assumption was still that dad would have got another job and kept his self confidence and self reliance, in so far as being dependent on your new employer, probably now without the support of a union, was self reliance. As his family we did not know what he knew before he told us. If the mass redundancies had not become a local press story the moment the redundancies were planned he would have said nothing to us.

It was most likely that he had talked it through more with his older brothers and sisters though. They would be who he was hiding the money through, and they knew him best. If dad was opaque with us then the person he was regularly most opaque with was the next door neighbour who was a nosy/bored retired bachelor called Stan who staked his place in our lives by calling round to swap red top newspapers with us every evening. Watching them say nothing to each other for ten minutes was a minor spectator sport we could not avoid and always felt like intruders, for observing what was in front of us.

Some of the redundancy money went to clear early what remained of the twenty five year mortgage, which had run for nearly eighteen years and still had seven years to run. I did not know what money went where, it was all way above my pay grade of £1 a week pocket money. If I had been shown the sums and what figure went where I would have understood the maths of it, but not have been able to take in that it was real money at work in a real world. My parents not only made sure that to me the opposite sex remained the opposite of sex, they made sure that my grasp of money made money seem unreal. That the details about the money were kept deep in Mother's bureau was all I was allowed to know. I heard dad talk of 'getting a new job soon' to the work mates who now dropped by because they all had more time on their hands, but it was said without conviction. Hearing talk like that took the air out of the room and made me want to leave the parental house, for somewhere, anywhere, where people smelt less of deceiving themselves and others.  

Who knows what dad told his drinking mates in the pub? Or what they said to him? In a way it did not matter. The drink would make them mishear each other and forget the details later anyway. To them pub conversation was like their beer, their words flowed like the piss they took when their bladders demanded to be emptied. In both they agreed; 'We don't buy beer, we rent it. Better out than in.'. The pub took back their words after they forgot what they had said to each other after they had said it the same way it took their piss. The most enduring and sustainable amusement in the were the games of dominoes they all played.

Where this affected family was that family values relied on consistent and consistently shared narratives, we knew each other by what we could say about ourselves. That was one reason I valued Mother's stories about her life when she was single, even when I was barely aware of the detail she missed out whilst aware I was unable to ask her for the right detail. Mother made herself 'readable', after a fashion. My dad was like a novel with too many pages missing for who he said he was to make any sense. if we knew he was lying to us then we could not work out why, for what ultimate gain. What we could say was that to him marriage seemed to be about him keeping his truth to himself, as if any facts about him were like his redundancy money, best kept for him by his birth family. He would only tell Mother anything on a 'need to know' basis, and as children he saw that we did not need to know anything about him, though we got some of what he shared with Mother. 

Dad mistrusted us far more than we ever could mistrust him. We never knew how much we didn't know about him. Because people resist asking questions that they know they won't get answers to, we rarely checked with each other about what we could be sure of about him. In May, two months after dad's job had been taken from him, Mother and I had a very different but similar experience of family secrets, at the theatre. I liked my maths teacher, Mr Metcalfe, he was somebody I saw as a friend for how personable he was to me particularly when he knew I was having difficulties with concentrating on the maths he was teaching. Mr Metcalfe became the first adult friend I found on my own after Bill and Marion who lived across from the parental house. He was also a member of the local amateur theatre club. I was happy to buy two tickets from him to see the Theatre Club performance of Chekhov's 'Uncle Vanya', which he was part of. The last time I had anything to do with the theatre was three years earlier when I had acted in a play based on an ancient Greek drama in the town rewritten/adapted by a local amateur writer whilst I was in boarding school, though there was the short comedy sketch I had performed in drag for the school's own entertainment whilst in boarding school. I still had the script of the play I was in, as a keepsake for my having been in it. At the time I was miffed that there was no follow-up project, but theatre became like everything in boarding school-we were allowed to sample subjects but continuity of study and activity was disallowed. 

Literate live entertainment was very rare where working men drank for entertainment, most women were married, and for drinking men the safest public entertainment for their wives was playing bingo. There were lots of pubs for men to choose from, and the only live music to be found in any of them was tired middle aged cabaret singers who sang to themselves whilst being ignored and talked over by their audience as they sang. The last cinema had gone bankrupt six years earlier and been converted into a shop that sold toys and televisions. The nearest there was to movies being shown were the local spiritualist society who showed films to the faithful of sightings of ghosts as part of their mission, and to reassure themselves of their beliefs. As a church they kept an extraordinary low public profile. It was by pure chance that I discovered that they showed themselves in these films when I asked them why they were going into their building. 

Mother had to know something about what we were going to see, so I read up about play in the local library before we went to see it. As was always the way with Mother, she claimed that she had learnt about Anton Chekhov in school, but what she recalled shrank rather when compared with my freshly made notes. Her claims for her memory and education often shrank in the explanations she gave, accepting that was a given. Then there was the shrinkage of the town we lived in, where the grandeur of a fair few of the late Victorian buildings was at odds with how prosaic the activities that went on in them were. 

The ground floor of the town hall was the location for the weekly market that Mother visited. It was unattractive, full of the sound of people buying food, sowing goods, and other things en masse which bounced off the hard walls, ceiling and concrete floor, then back at the purchasers. It took relatively few customers for the sound to be overwhelming.

The main hall of the town hall was on the first floor, above the market and if the entrance to the market was the front then the entrance to first floor was at the back of the hall. I was surprised at the mosaic floors, the portraits of previous mayors, the broad stone stairs and the polished wooden banisters as we went up, as decoration and structure it was surely meant for somewhere bigger, it overfilled the space that contained it. When we went into the main room there were raked seats on three sides of the room and a minimal stage set of some living room chairs with a writing desk  to one side. That evening's performance was sold out, the audience was full.

For being part of a town that resisted 'the arts', and for Mother and I were conditioned by watching actors on television. There television rather sterilised the power of the acting more than we knew. We took our time to engage with watching real actors perform live, in front of us. But the issues the play presented were surely things we knew a lot about, provincial boredom, when and how to talk about money when it has not been talked about for a long time, who can choose to sell up their interests when those interests affect other people. The play could almost have been about dad losing his job whilst his boss Councillor Bob Rainsforth kept his position as former boss of the works because he had to be there to wind down the remaining assets of the factory that the remaining few 'skeleton crew' now worked in. The universality of the play, and the humour in it were the best introduction to theatre I was ever going to get.

After watching the play, and unconsciously admiring the lead actor's fine goatee beard, I resolved to join the theatre club that summer. I was entirely unaware at the time that I was falling into a script that would run through my life the way that the letters ran through a stick of Skegness rock. That script would be about how I never knew how to be natural with people nearly my own age and I would always be seeking affirmation and friendships among people who were older and more experienced than me. I was always unintentionally proving how I was out of my depth, for seeking a depth of experience in others.

Please find Chapter 7 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.