Chapter 7 - The Alien Discovers Unemployment, Sex And Travel

When I took my Royal Society for the Arts exams in Maths and English Language what I learned most of all was how to lower my hopes. I enjoyed writing, even for the exam. I tried to be creative in the English Language exam, partly to amuse myself. But my imagination outstripped my ability to complete what I wanted to write in the allocated time. I was not the essay writer that I fancied myself as being. But I enjoyed the creativity of scraping by. I was still only sixteen by a few days when college closed earlier than expected because the last of the exams that they hosted were done and over. When the gates locked behind me much more was shut down for me than just that college year.

With college closing any lingering interest in electronics I had permanently closed down. I got credits in both theory and practical for the R.E.T.V. course work. I did well given how much I could apply myself to the subjects was limited by a lack of employer. But if I had failed the effect would have been just the same. Without the support of an employer I was going nowhere with electronics. I had no friends my own age who studied the subject, I did not buy 'Practical Electronics Weekly' and I had nowhere in the parental house to spend time working out how what different circuit boards and components did. I had a soldering iron and some bits of circuit board that I could identify the components of, but not the greater whole they were previously intended for. I did try some work on an improvised asbestos surface in my bedroom but it was useless. 

When Mother first agreed to/supported me going on the course with the careers teacher she knew in advance that her agreement was a ruse on her part. She knew that she would later quietly 'pull the plug' on my interest and make sure it could never be pursued as an interest.  At one level it was not cheap and self contained enough for it to be a hobby, at another level if no employer would pay me to learn then why learn about it? So the point of doing the course became to find out the depth of the lack of support that future employers were going to give me. At best she saw my interest as being on a par with the 26 part magazines, say 'Model Trains Weekly' or the like, that were advertised every New Year on television, where most buyers lost interest by the time the third issue of the magazine came into the newsagents. I believed that if a local employer had known me well enough to have taken an interest in me, then I could have had a job repairing televisions and radios. But I could not both complete the course, complete the remedial maths and English language courses, and find the employer to be trainee for at the same time. When I was free I asked all the small local television repair shops about trainee work and I was politely rebuffed by all of them, verbally rather than in the formality of a letter. 

After dad had signed on to the dole Mother was better off in one way than she had been when dad was working. When dad was working she never knew how much he earned. But anyone could know the benefits rates and guess what benefit dad claimed for and therefore how much money he got each week. Not that she knew how much he drew on secret savings to spend on the drink each week. I was on my own when I filled my first dole form in. Dad could have helped me when I filled in forms similar to those he had filled in. He didn't. Though he was happy to say 'I could have helped you.' after the form was sent off. As I puzzled through the questions I was reminded of one of the jokes the pupils told when I last went around my sister's school with Mother on their open evening, shared when the teachers were out of earshot. 'The point of us pupils learning good written English is to make sure we fill the benefits forms in better when we leave.'. Not that my parents wanted me, or anyone else, to be unemployed and claiming benefits. Without checking out what it was actually like, they saw the jobs market as similar to what it was from the 1950's to the late 1960's. Then jobs paid well and a person could be in one job one week another job the next, and there is a powerful undertow of shame attached to being on benefits with so much work 'out there'. 

Mother was the only one of us still in work, partly because most of her work was 'unpaid housework/gardening', shopping and washing for pensioners, and more. For which she was paid in cash every week. Then there was the ten hours or more a week she worked in a local second hand/junk shop, cash in hand so she was in no position to admit to it. The work could be quite tough, apart from welcoming customers she spent a lot of time cleaning the insides of second hand cookers that the owner had bought for resale to dole claimants who got grants for cookers and fridges, and more, when  they moved house. The owner of the shop was rumoured to be a millionaire, but finding out how true, or false, the rumours of such wealth were was discouraged as 'intrusive'.   

The Dept of Social Security had no such reserves with benefits claimants. One of the more difficult things to get was a bank statement of the particular sort they liked that proved your savings at the point claimants made their claim. They demanded to know, where it was 50 p or £500, and played upon our fear that they could ask the banks behind our backs, even though that seemed unlikely. Over the years that I was on benefits I adapted with the claims system, and found it easier to say I had no savings at all rather than get the special letter from the bank that they asked for. 

Looking for work at the age of seventeen was my first conscious experience of Catch 22 or the Gordian knot, the knot that tightens in on itself when anyone tries to untie it. Employers barred applicants who had no experience from applying for positions with them. As employers they would collectively disagree to any and all action that did not advantage some individual employers enough, and disadvantage their opponents more. The second part of the catch 22 or Gordian knot was explaining any of this to Mother when she tried to share with me how she fretted over my future, as if it was up to me to stop her fretting.

 

Apart from my being uselessly fretted over by Mother whilst being casually rejected by would-be employers, I liked being unemployed and on benefits. For the first time in my life I had both money and time to myself. Up to the time before I was on benefits if I had time then I had no money and with Mother around to use up my time I had neither money nor time. But she made good use of my time with shopping, gardening or some other, family related, pursuit. Having my time seemingly used well was better than having neither time nor money of my own in the past when I had been responding to the ten to fifteen bells and roll calls of the boarding school/the care home every day. Those days still seemed close to me, what I would not have given to be in touch with my best friend then, Kevin. But without the care home/boarding school as a common current point of reference between us my attempts at writing to him floundered.

I had an uncertain ten days wait whilst the Dept of Social Security processed my claim, set me a time and date to sign on, and set me a date to be informally interviewed at the labour exchange about how often to go there and what sort of jobs I should be applying for. The latter was a formality. The unemployment rate for adult males was over twenty percent since dad's factory had stopped all production. Youth unemployment was nearer thirty percent.

Nobody in the family had a full driving license. Dad had a slowly expiring learner driver license from when his scooter had worked, for about four years. In 1978 nobody could remember when the scooter last worked. It was now permanently parked in the backyard. The cat was the only person to find a use for it, when he stretched out on the seat in the sun for hours on end. I had no license at all and I was a highly unlikely candidate for being taught to drive. Between the patience from the teacher that it would take to get me to overcome my nerves and what that patience would cost in lessons, the money required alone made me too nervous to try. 

But that did not mean that I was going to remain stuck around the town. When I went out alone to find out things without help from family I soon realised the limits of the place, limits they liked and I didn't. I wanted to see bigger places and in the school minibus I had been through Lincoln many times, and the bus never stopped, except to drop other pupils off. Also I had been to Lincoln with my sister when Mother was in hospital for a fortnight several years earlier. So over that summer I started going to Lincoln maybe once a week. I could hitch a lift there, leaving early in the morning and I got a cheap slow train back early in the evening. Initially I went to find out what was there, in the market and main shopping areas. The more I went the more I found, not that I could afford to buy much but finding the hole-in-the-corner second hand record shop to browse was rewarding every time-even just seeing strange covers and odd looking artists who gave their albums strange titles just blew me away.

The first lift I ever got was with Mother when I was under ten years old. Our host was a friend of Mother's from the time she lived in the village where my grandparents lived. I tried hitching once at the boarding school/care home. I half scared the life out of the staff on duty that day assigned to collect me from strawberry picking I was sent on with best mate Kevin. Now I was starting on my own. My parents knew and understood why I hitched. If I had the extra time it required and I had only so much money and I wanted it to get me a given value of goods then I could not spend money on both the transport to the shop and the goods, I had to get to the shop for free, or at a cheaper price I could afford. I became complicit with Mother's hoarding instinct when I went out for the day mostly to enjoy myself but I returned to the parental house carrying a caterers size jar of salad cream and other caterers sized goods, long distances on foot because they were cheaper in the long run than buying small bottles. Buying cheaper foods for the house made it easier to believe I was 'pulling my weight', even though I knew financially I was not. With jobs like buying caterers size jars of this or that, as compared with the smaller bottles, I made a virtue of my time on my own to Mother. Doing errands for Mother that she would not have thought of for herself was better for both of us than my offering her half my dole money for housekeeping turned out to be. 

When I offered her fair housekeeping money out of my dole money for keeping me in the parental house she asked for far too little to keep me. I did not want to do what dad had once done to her and I had to correct her on this. I did not want her to be afraid of my money or me, particularly when I don't know which she was most fearful of. I made sure she had what she needed to keep me and resisted her talking herself into a humility that was awkward for both of us.

Hitching lifts was fun, but it also gave me purpose. I needed to get away from where I was more  known by who my parents were more than who I was in myself. One thing I never did in those teenage days was keep any sort of record of where I went, when I went and who I met, but one thing I learned was that with seeking lifts you have to have some sort of story that shows you to be practical and have the wherewithal/drive when you need it. l am not sure what I showed to the drivers who gave me lifts at age seventeen, but I must have had some sort of outward charm. 

All teenagers have obsessions, ideas they have where they cannot think clearly, logically, and in proportion about something and they are banned from admitting their confusion. My teenage obsession was with bodybuilders and bodybuilding, a suitably distant and rare phenomenon among the everyday people of the town I met, thankfully. Though there was one stall holder who had the physique of a rugby-player who was on his stall every Tuesday market. He would insist on being topless and wearing white tight shorts, or shorts and a tight fitting T shirt with white pumps and socks, to draw attention to himself and the ladies underwear he was hoping would sell to passers by. If he had introduced himself to me, topless, and told me his name, I would have assumed he had a sexual agenda with me, and I would have had difficulty just saying my name, for being in a circumstance I did not know how to escape from. The introduction would never have happened, but that might preyed upon me.

My obsession was more safely mediated through a few soft porn magazines that dad had left about that I later hid away in my room, thinking he would not miss them. The magazines were mostly full of written stories of sexual machismo, suburban wife swapping, and barely suppressed sexual tension and voyeurism among all male crews on submarines. In the wife swap story the actual sexual detail of the wife submitting sexually to her male neighbour got rather blurred, so I had to guess who was doing what to who. The locations were an advance on the Russ Tobin adventures I was used to, but not by much. The real reason I hid the magazines were a couple of adverts that featured bodybuilders. It may have started earlier but where I felt telling myself it had started was with television wrestling. Then it progressed through watching Ron Ely as the 1970's version of 'Tarzan' which was made for children's television, but in loving technicolour his bronzed swimmers build with his neatly designed loin cloth hit me squarely in the sexual fantasy zone. Then in 1978 it continued with a then new televised competition, which dad insisted that I watch with him, 'The World's Strongest Man'. 

I have written before that there were four subjects that we were not allowed to talk about in the parental household, they were money, sex, religion, and politics. If that list left anything important still permitted to be coherently shared in open discussion then I didn't know what it was. What was more, whatever we learned about those subjects would have been learnt indirectly, and well away from the parental house where it was banned from direct discussion. Also such information would have to be kept well away from the parental house to be allowed to survive. Whatever misunderstanding we shared about these four subjects had free reign to multiply in the parental house. Debunking a poor understanding meant talking directly about subjects which we were banned from talking about. We could neither debunk our ignorance nor end the ban that perpetuated it. We could not even ask who set the ban up, who had made it 'family values', or why they had done that.

The contradiction between what dad would say and what television I would have to watch with him to stay in his good books for a short while was glaring. Dad made me watch muscle pornography with him. That it was pornography was as true as films that showed well made food, being made and well served were food porn, where the film of the making of the food being made was foodie foreplay. I can't prove what dad thought. But I think he defined pornography as something sold from the top shelf of the newsagents, which he did not buy, and nobody he knew bought. In this way he both distanced himself from the books he knew existed and denied that their appeal was at least partly a process that was learned, it started in the brain. The more indirectly he could imply that sexual and other appetites were not of the human body or mind, then the more directly he made it seem as if such appetites did not exist. Amongst many things that explanation avoided was that if nobody bought top shelf magazines, and they were still published monthly, and were still published in a market that was actually expanding, then somebody somewhere was making a big loss, not least of all the newsagent. The idea of the human body being the source of the appetites of the parental house could not get an airing in a house where we acted as if we were clothed at all times to pretend we didn't have bodies. 

In the parental house only people on television could act as partially unclothed and they were filmed so far from the house that their partial nudity would always be porn, but of the sort that could not offend, after all it was on television so it could not be 'real', except when it was. I watched 'World's Strongest Man' with him, and in a show where size mattered, everyone was big but some were more defined than others. The curious thing was how different it was to the wrestling-as-porn. With the television wrestling the cheating and the tactility were the tags to guilt and secretive pleasures. On 'World's Strongest Man' there was no cheating and no tactility, just big men moving big objects in competition with each other. It was an open competition, nobody knew who would win, though we knew who had already been eliminated in 'Britain's Strongest Man'. The rules were well observed, the competition was more detached. All that 'Strongest Man' had in common with the wrestling were the occasional close up of a big hairy chest, a highlight for me, and shouts of encouragement.  

So I was in the room with dad when the big men filled the small screen and I felt part frozen, part queasy, part 'I want to go away and have a secretive wank on my own', and he looked on what he saw as my contentment approvingly. Later I would recall the images, when they removed their tops to be interviewed after a round they had won and the camera would get in close, as they uttered banalities. Because we behaved as if we were fully clothed all the time I could recognise my reactions of anxiety at the size of the men combined with my sexual longing for them also. But it was 'safe family values' to distrust what I also deeply recognised. The attraction felt like some terrible tug of war in my head, a tug of war where dad's rules always won and I was never excused or cut any slack for not being the inventor of these rules. So the images continued on the screen and as they continued they wielded a well-out-scale well hidden effect on me. My obsession with bodybuilders was a burden that I could neither carry well in my head, nor rest from carrying around with me.

I surely needed an accurate, proportionate, guide to constructive masculinity, but I was not going to get that in that town or in the parental household, not whilst dad chose what we watched and hid his character behind it. I was more trapped than I could realise that I was, because men being opaque through muscle and aggression were the accepted working class images of masculinity. What I wanted was middle class, was to theorise a masculinity that was physical enough but was also thoughtful, tender, and openly show intelligence as opposed to gut instinctive reactions. Over the next ten years I would so easily be drawn towards several male teachers and carers, as people who could help me fill the space in me which was marked out 'male to male empathy required here' that I did not recognise with dad all the time i was under the influence of the parental house. I knew of nobody who could have helped me lighten the load of my feelings about muscle and sex, and reduce the feelings of isolation, but then I knew of nobody to help me choose what to read for pleasure and learning either. And the help I got with understanding electronics was more shallow than I first thought and it had abruptly ended. 

The sense of being isolated by my own feelings both worsened and eased when dad put a black and white television set in my room for me to watch the television programmes on, that he did not want to see. I well remember the 1970's version of the film 'Room At The Top' where as well as some spiky observations of social class there was a rape scene where the social climber goes on the hunt with the landed gentry for the first time and rapes the wife of the master of the hunt. It was as bitter a social class revenge scene as could be imagined. But then I was slow to learn that in 1970's sex scenes were put in films to goad the censor and give censor something to cut which the film maker made it difficult to do when they made the sex scene too integral to the film.  

If I tried to talk about what this rape scene over with any open adult they would have gone through the symbolism and social class element of the film, and we would have weighed up whether it was convincingly acted and whether the scene captured the social class argument or not. Finally we would have discussed the feudal nature of wealth, where ownership is absolute, of the scene. But the new working class masculinity was now supposed to be measured against the new working class feminism, which had changed marriage. Whatever gender/role re-balancing was going on around me seemed to be highly reductive, dad losing his job Mother having to say nothing about her work. Also, with television being as full of machismo as it was, from the casual sexism and innuendo of Bruce Forsythe saying 'Give us a twirl' to Anthea Redfern on Saturday night to the male dominated sports programmes where whoever won it felt like it did not matter, to the cringe-worthy beauty pageant programmes, men designed what was on television to please themselves and belittle others. The images and soundtrack  existed to feed and reassure the adult male ego.

One format on television that reduced the pandering to male insecurity was 'the talking head' format, literally where the camera remains still and focused on one person sat in a chair talking. I started to watch one programme in this format, the film review programme 'Film 78'. Barry Norman seemed sensible. He talked about what he knew about, new films in this instance, for thirty minutes. In some inserts he went on location with directors. As I watched it weekly I could have called the programme 'All the films I will never see because there is no movie house near me'. But the point of the programme was that it made the television a window onto a bigger world that did not need to reassure insecure males they were the tops, unless the film reviewed was about that. He reviewed the film 'Pumping Iron' which starred a young Arnold Schwarzenneger and showed a brief clip of it. Naturally the clip made a deeper impression on me than Barry's dry wise words the film could. But events turned out differently to the related obsession with wrestling that I also had. I was surprised when I saw a book of the same title as the film in the library by the co-author of the film Charles Gaines. I read it several times. Whilst the book could have been science fiction for the Californian lifestyle it portrayed what the book showed was that for all their size, even very big men who knew how easily they impressed smaller people with their physique could feel insecure at times and doubt themselves.

The late 1970's were times of few solutions, and rising numbers of problems that needed fixed, if for instance, full employment were not to become a sick fantasy that made the long term unemployed feel permanently ill. It was easy to despair about local government. It was easy to mock and say that the local civil service served the local community badly, and suggest that the local public did not recognise the corruption when those charged with recognising public interest found their own interests more enticing than those of helping the public. Never was this more true than with youth employment/training services, where if youths knew that they could not vote and that they did not own property, they still did not recognise how they were practically the property of their parents and could be misled via their own interests. Youths could not know how easily they would become the training equivalent of cannon fodder.

My family thought it was novel when a letter dropped through the letter box that was addressed directly to me.  Nearly every previous letter about me had been addressed to my parents. and my parents said as little as they could get away with saying to me about the content of those letters, or how they processed the contents. I was the subject, but they were the client. With this letter the subject and client were the same person. The letter to me was from the new 'Youth Careers Advice Service'. One of the signs of change with work and training was how the language around training inflated to disguise the depreciation in what training being offered to trainees. But even when anyone recognised that then there was nothing they could do about it. My parents 'wanted me to have a job' but also they wanted that job to be secure, pay well, and maybe to give me the confidence that they doubted they could give me out of their own experience. They had no idea how to help me to get what they wanted for me. Neither they nor I were looking for me to 'have a career', and yet the letter was from 'the careers office'.

This 'Youth Careers Advice Service' was a new sub-branch of The Labour Exchange, who were exchanging a lot less labour than they had exchanged even a short time ago. The men who looked after the filing cards in the exchange that the unemployed browsed through- looking for that job they could apply and not care whether they got it or not, lost more face and sounded more lame the more the unemployed passed before them in their pokey office. Y.C.A.S. were meant to be clean slate, because they started from a new office. 

When I presented my letter to the two ladies they seemed keen. I felt like the letter was a prescription and they were the chemist I was presenting it to. I was in the dark as to who they were and what they thought I had done to earn the appointment with them. But the real chemist was away and whatever his script was, the two ladies were there to reassure me, against the odds, all was well.

The similarities between The Labour Exchange and Y.C.A.S. were striking, both were in small offices and both were small, poorly laid out, spaces where the office furniture had seen better days. Both had more files than they had filing cabinets readily organised for. The biggest difference between them was how Y.C.A.S. was up a flight of stairs above a shop whereas The Labour Exchange was entered at ground floor level, and Y.C.A.S. was fronted by two middle aged women. Where as there was grimy masculinity about The Labour Exchange, right down to the staff who ran it. I say 'fronted by two women', they were there to present a softer image to the youths being interviewed than their male superiors could care enough to present. Which 'male superiors'? Why Bob Rainsforth and other male councillors with large scale employment interests in the town, of course.   

When I saw the new Y.C.A.S. office the best I could think was that it was nearly as grubby as The Labour Exchange but it had less character, it had not had the time to develop. As I surveyed the dust and disorder of their office I learned that apparently they wanted to help me find paid work. They talked up the idea of skilled youth employment with an enthusiasm I did not feel, and doubted they felt. But I found no clear reason to be at all defensive against them. I described my education accurately, 'school for the maladjusted' and all. I told them about the previous year studying electronics and getting some basics in Maths and English. For the R.S.A. exam passes in Maths and English alone I might have seemed more presentable than some who passed through their door. I pointed out that I still wanted to work in a television repair shop but I could not get my foot in the door of one on my own.

I was puzzled when my parents were angry and disappointed with my initial report back to them about my 'exploratory' interview with Y.C.A.S.. Maybe it was persistence with the television repair ideas but they were the ones to agree to that about fifteen months earlier. It was more likely that neither I nor they knew then that Y.C.A.S. were only 'an agency'. They were a sign post to where jobs and training were meant to be that they hoped to point us to. If my parents had been there instead of me then the ladies would have just as coy with them. My parents would have come across as shrill when faced with the ladies' polite decline to be transparent, which was merely an extension of the wording in their letter. If my parents were disappointed with me for not getting any firm commitment out of the situation then I should have shot back that if they knew so much then they should broken their own 'don't talk about money, sex, religion, or politics' taboo and said something to me that would have been useful in explaining the politics of paid work in the real world. I told my parents that there would be a second interview, but by then we had stopped listening to each other. Maybe the wisest advice the two ladies could have given me about work and training would have been to paraphrase Dante above the entrance to Hell. 'Abandon hope ye who enter here.', later I thought of that phrase quite often, particularly when resignedly signing on. 

Later in August I was recalled for a second interview. That was when Dante's inscription for Hell should have put more clearly above their door. After the first interview, and before the second, the new Youth Opportunities Scheme, known as Y.O.P.S., had grabbed the headlines in the local press. The headline presented it as some great new hope to replace apprenticeships. But the detail in the money allocated, the timescale it was intended to work in, and how it was going to operate, rather took most of the hope away. I was wrong about the second interview. In the first interview I was was asked what I wanted to do and they led to believe that they as an agency would find me a placement in a television repair shop. 

With the second interview the two ladies was made clear that I was signed up to them as an agency and, yes, they were a government agency. But they were actually a government agency but for employers. As an agency they collected information on youths, for employers who were prepared to train employees to read, for the employer to decide whether they want youth X or youth Y, or youth Z. Whichever youth the employer chose, the employer would be given more money per week to train the trainee than the trainee would get as their 'allowance', and there was no clothing allowance for youths to dress aptly for the training. If the chosen trainee proved to be the wrong one then they could be sent back to the agency and replaced. For the youth there was no such thing as 'the wrong trainer' or the wrong trade. They had to accept the trade and employer who chose them, they had no legal exit and no way of leaving the scheme without a much better employer which with Y.O.P.S. was decreasingly likely to assist anyone in finding. The local employers were the ones in the driving seat, the agency were navigating, front passenger seat, and the youths for whom the scheme was meant to be for, and a help to, were in the back seat or boot, and were not going where they originally thought they were going. They had only been asked where they wanted to train, to make sure that nobody let them train as that, knowing that it was where they wanted to be. 

I might as well have been an item on the conveyor belt of 'The Generation Game' where once the contestants have been moved away from the belt and it has stopped then they had to remember what they saw on the belt to win it. The person I became a prize for was Bob Rainsforth, the man behind the dearth of apprenticeships nine months earlier, the man who gained the most when dad lost his job, along with hundreds of others as the factory he worked in ceased production. He was behind Y.C.A.S., He was the man I was meant to be grateful to for the skills that he would show me and thirty others. He had made the biggest bid for the government money by setting up a thirteen week scheme at the college titled 'Building and Allied Trades'. Even though I knew nothing about him as a teacher, thirty odd of us male youths were going to be taught by him personally, nearly entirely on his own, until Christmas. Other youths were faster to use the phrase 'ego trip' about our teacher than I was, For whatever reason I was less embittered than them.

It felt odd to be in this demoted position, but back in college. The previous year I had been there for vocational and academic study, albeit at a basic level. I was a bit older and odder than some of the class, mostly fifteen year old girls from the grammar school next door for the Maths and English, but then we all shared the goal of learning enough to pass our exams. This term I was doing something it was hard to see the point of. I had no interest in the subject, there was not going to be any job in it, and there was no exam. There was one area where I learned something and that was that for all that my education had some bad labels attached to it, my male peers were less educated, less curious and more cynical than I was. There was also a homo-erotic shot across the bows, so to speak.

If there was a point to our activity then it was keeping Bob Rainsforth busy and rich. We were easily dispirited and bored. The best days were when we all had the hands on practical lessons. But there was not enough practical to do, and none of it was of practical use to anyone, not Bob, not us, not to anyone else either. I did not know why we had to be kept in this imitation economy/imitation of training, well away from the real economy of the town as if we were a surplus to be humoured.

The weakest part of the course was the theory work, which some days consisted of us arguing over bits of the red top press in a classroom, unsupervised because the person who was meant to be supervising us was in the college office legally clearing our presence in the college with the college principal. There was a significance to that red top press that day. It was the first day 'The Daily Star' was published. If these papers sell then they sell on the pictures that first day. The paper had 'One for the Ladies' on page 7. He was big, pale and very muscular. I tried to not linger too long on that page when the paper came round to me, I was not his target audience but if presented with him, or he was presented with me, I don't know what would have ensued.

As I did the previous year, I used to ride dad's bike to and from the college. It was surely at the end of one particularly depressing day where I achieved nothing in college, and knew that something, anything, was more useful than what I was doing that I stopped at the local public convenience to have a pee the way anyone would, in one of the cubicles. I was surprised when I saw a hole in the cubicle wall which let me see the person in the cubicle to my right. He was middle aged, average to poorly dressed, and sexually aroused. He tried to gain my attention with how he covered himself up and rubbed himself. I had never seen anything like it, but there he was. The very idea of his behaviour seemed both very real and way beyond taboo. For it being live in front of me, rather than in a frame like television, I found it powerful and fascinating in a way that made all my previous understandings of sex, gained second hand via television books, or the muscle adverts in the pages of the magazines I had 'stolen' from dad, seem stale by comparison. This was well beyond anything I could give myself an explanation for.

It was as if at that moment somebody had informally invited me to become a peeping Tom, peeping on other Toms, if not Harry's and Dicks who wanted to share themselves. It was an experience outside of language, not that I had ever learned of any language that would have made the invite more formal. The very idea of same-sex sexual activity in a public place seemed to be built on a paradoxical mix of activity, denial, belief that you are invisible, and a displaced and active sense of sexual dis-ownership, as if all the bits of adult men that were rejected through 'family values' had to go somewhere, and this was it. Five years earlier I had been horribly bullied for a while and then it stopped and that I had been bullied became taboo. Finding this place hit the memory spot in me where in boarding school five years earlier saying I had been bullied became unmentionable, where for instance my parents never knew because they had their own list of taboo subjects and they did not know my experience was among them. Ever since then my head had been an unsafe place to store the narrative of sexualised bullying. I could neither forget that it happened nor find a safe place where the memory of it could be unpacked, after being made so unmentionable. The visit to the toilet that day started the random reopening of some very old very sore feelings that included a strong melancholy and a pain so deep that I could not fathom it.

Naturally I returned there, regularly. Going there became addictive for at least as long as I lived with the silence from my parents where television said what they would not, and long after I lived with my parents too, though less frequently then. The public toilet was a place where silence about what happened there seemed apt. When I was there I felt that I had found a privacy from my parents, a privacy which became more important to me than choosing to be aware that I was obviously doing what should be a private act in a cold public space. But that would assume warmth, comfort, and welcome in a room where I might negotiate with who I shared myself with. I could assume nothing of the sort.

At the same time as I was secretly reliving being sexually assaulted, unawares that I was actually doing that, Mother claimed to have been close to being sexually assaulted by one of her fellow allotment holders. Her assailant was called Bill Cheatam and he was in his mid-seventies. One day he became confused and mistook Mother's long standing platonic friendship for something like the offer of sexual services. For years she had sat in his shed and they would share tea and chat after their work on their respective lots was finished. One day when there was just the two of them he started to talk about how his wife was refusing him sexual services due to her age, eighty something, and her quite severe infirmity. Mother froze, for being unused to such talk, so directly spoken. But she remained, then her sense of alarm was raised itself when he slowly sought to undo the outermost layer of multiple layers of clothing that he was wearing. Then she fled, vehemently claiming afterwards that she had been assaulted. Perhaps she had been verbally assaulted, but only mildly. He was a frail old man, she was thirty years younger than him and much stronger and fitter than he was, so objectively her words after the event were ten percent truth, ninety percent hysteria. But a hysteria that was genuine enough to Mother, and unstoppable in it's vehemence. Mother complained about having vivid nightmares for months afterwards. We heard her descriptions of the nightmares but we knew nothing of how talk Mother towards calmer thoughts and clarifying what did not happen, for which to feel relieved.

I have written in previously about the four subjects that as a family we were not to talk to each other and not to listen to each other talking about either. Sex, money, politics or religion. When we agreed that these subjects should not be discussed we isolated each other and ourselves, by omission and commission. There were exceptional circumstances where we permitted each other to speak and be listened to on some aspect of those four subjects. But whatever we permitted each other to say was so tightly worked as to avoid personal feeling that the result was no more than a  Public Relations statement. This fitted well with our idea of what the churches were for, the public rituals of hatches matches and dispatches. Nothing else. My ongoing tragedy was that sexual assault was too emotive an experience for me be able to speak about within the families rules about speech about money sex politics and religion. I could never use their rules about acceptable speech to explain to my parents how I came to be sexually assaulted in the boarding school, and further explain how genuine the horrors of the assault were for me. To my parents sexual assault did not exist, except as feverishly imagined between nervous and tired allotment holders who avoided each other afterwards, until the older allotment holder died.

My only way out of the forced silence and reliving the tragedy that repeated in my head was for me to privately/secretly believe that I was gay, and that being gay should mean more than it apparently did locally. Further I wanted to believe that, rare and secretive as homosexuality seemed to be locally, it might give me an escape from how stuck I felt with my family. I wanted believe this even though the local idea of homosexuality very much mirrored how stuck I felt with my family. I had found some half-right answers, but it would be a very long time before it made proper sense.  

What was to eventually help me best was a life far away from family, in a city where I could start again on my own, without the rules that family set for all who knew them and were.

Please read Chapter 8 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.