Chapter 8 - The Alien Does Christmas

Christmas and New Year proved to be an underwhelming experience in the parental house. We knew, but could not say, why; Mother had been threatened with sexual assault the previous October whilst at her allotment. I don't know that any such assault actually happened, but the nightmares she related to us in the mornings in the months after were real enough. Mother often took an allergic reaction to events around her that nearly happened but didn't. And having taken the reaction we had to wait until she let go of it. This what-nearly-but-didn't-happen-was-what-happened approach made any threats she endured seem worse than all the other non-events she misremembered. 

Rather than admit she was in shock to her doctor, after the near-assault she would button hole us with her latest scary dream when she caught us, usually around the preparation of breakfast, so we were not actually listening. In avoiding the doctor she may have had a point. If she had articulated what happened to her to Dr Ward then he would have half listened, asked her a few leading questions that proved that it nearly rather than actually happened. He would have given her a prescription for some pills. She would have accepted the prescription as a sign that the consultation was over. If she collected the pills then she would have to refuse to take them. She valued her anxiety over the artificial calm, and would claim that tablets 'might be addictive'. So we were the cheaper and more authentic placebos that worked better for her than Dr Ward would have done. We, particularly me, would accept her contrary evasions at nearer face value than he would. 

If we were good for nothing else, my family-myself included-were fine for illustrating irony. When not regaling us with her dreams Mother often lectured me on the value of self reliance and hard work, whilst relying on me to be her audience to make her point. Had she gone any further she would have been lecturing me on 'The Origins of the Protestant Work Ethic', whatever that was. I would have liked to have made a point to her about mutuality listening and interdependence. But any points I tried to make would have been batted back at me as she returned to skirting around the safer victimology of the near/non-assault. She remained upset at me for not guarding her on the allotment when she thought I should have been there 'to protect her'. As if having me hanging around the allotment was a clear enough 'don't come near' sign to other allotment holders. It was not, and she knew that. We avoided discussions of her being so fragile as a female as to need a bodyguard for the first time in ten years. She knew that the allotments were a male territory, albeit softer male territory than unionised paid employment. Everywhere was male territory. It was both predictable and lamentable that she expected my loyalty after the event without explaining why she needed it even after she knew she needed it as much as she said.

My response to accusations of negligence was to pointedly choose to follow Mother when she went to deliver the year's Christmas cards. If following Mother around seemed like an extension of the depressing deference I had just finished showing on the the training scheme, then at least the scheme gave me enough money to feel okay about submitting to Mother's iron whim. I walked the streets of the town with her at night to help her deliver the many cards she had written to all the relatives who we had not seen since the previous Christmas card delivery, and exchange the usual pleasantries with them. Mother got what she wanted and when I 'lacked initiative' I lacked it on her behalf. The biggest change in the routine was was visiting former neighbours Bill and Marion in their new house built on a nearly-new private estate.

Until the Summer they had lived across the road from us. Mother lost an ally when they moved but she seemingly survived the loss, though if they had been there after what nearly happened at the allotment, then I am sure they would have taken some of the heat out of Mother's shocked response. But as neighbours they were gone. This visit would be the last time we would see them. They let us in to a rather large and under-furnished house on a scarily characterless estate. Either the move had changed them, or what Mother had endured changed how we related to each other. There was a clear sense of disengagement between us, as if they never expected to see Mother again, even though they had given her their address and she had tried to keep contact with them. The visit was embarrassing, but good manners redeemed enough of the event for us to recognise not to go there again.

When the Y.O.P's/Y.T.S. scheme ended in early December. It was a relief, the scheme had run out of things for us to do several weeks before it finished. I'd half adjusted to being in a class of thirty odd seventeen year old boys but I was always distant and politely defensive with them, particularly when boredom set in after we were given less to do. I was glad when I was returned to automatic signing on. No more forms to fill in. I enjoyed having more of my time to myself, it meant I could hitch lifts out of town. I did not know what was meant to happen next or when it was meant to happen, but I knew now that if I asked for a particular Y.O.P's placement from Y.C.A.S. then they would make it a point of principle that I did not get it. What I half wondered was how much I could use their contrariness? What if I named a trade I wanted to avoid as if I wanted to do it, then would Y.C.A.S. make sure I got nowhere near that trade? My first dilemma with that question was which trade to say I wanted that I actually didn't want. There were so many....

That year was the first time that I became overtly aware of how the normal speed of life slows down during the run up to Christmas, as the hype of 'goodwill to all men' inflates itself to the point where it can only deflate and leave people bored with goodwill by Christmas day itself. Maybe that hype was why men drank more nearer Christmas, it was not just the increased time that had to drink in.

I was on my own in the parental house one afternoon. On BBC 2 I was watching one of those 'classic' films that television presents as seasonal because programmers think it is a treat for the viewer when it has nothing to do with Christmas, when I heard a knock at the front door. On opening the door I saw an old man I had never seen before. He explained to me that he was one of dad's drinking pals and he needed my help to walk dad back to the parental house since dad had passed out in the armchair in this pensioners flat. Who knows how much dad had drunk, or how he got there. But as the old man said, dad was splayed out and fast asleep in this man's wardened pensioners flat, still clutching a small empty rum bottle. I did not ask how the warden might respond if they saw the pensioner, with a sleeping drunk who had not signed into the building in his room. This was no time for prurience. One of the lady pensioners Mother shopped for lived in the same ground floor complex. Her niceness hid a certain moral steeliness that I knew I wanted to avoid. Nobody needed female consternation at the obvious. Instead I walked with the pensioner back to his room. We took a shoulder and arm of dad's apiece and as I took the greater weight we slowly walked/dragged him the ten minute walk back to the parental house and dropped him in his chair. If I had been enjoying the film before I could not enjoy it anymore. I had missed too much and dad was now in the prime place to watch the television. I did the best thing I could, switched off the set and went to my room, and left dad to wake up at his own rate. I had lots of back copies of the New Musical Express to look through.

How I came by these music magazines was one of Mother's more win-win rescue/hoarding decisions. Her sister Alice was throwing them out from her son Richard's bedroom early in the autumn. Alice asked Mother if I would like them. Mother asked me and I said 'Yes' to Mother. Alice and Terry arrived in their old car, Terry driving, and the magazines were taken out in bundles. When the car was empty Mother thanked them and they left. Then they were taken up two flights of stairs to my room in armfuls, over several journeys. A three foot high pile of back copies of the New Musical Express dating from 1975-78 inclusive. They were my Christmas gift that arrived early. I was that glad to have them. Being given that big pile of magazines more or less pushed me into getting a better grasp on the popular music that I thought that people my age listened to. Much of the journalism in the NME was pretentious, but it was felt that pretension was the surest way their journalists had of proving their ambition. They knew that the lifespan of the average pop group was about three years and the more popular the group the more likely it was that they had a rather tenuous control of their business affairs. They also knew that the musicians with the greatest self belief wanted their musical careers to be for life. But such hopes demanded much of their audience. A lot of the music these lifelong musicians wrote was pretentious as well. The effect of pretentious writing about ambitious music was something I often found quite glorious, particularly when I thought the music was good, but the reviewer expressed unease about the album in their review. The best reviews were full length essays, and the journalists wrote like I wanted to write but at the time I did not know how to. The journalists were also good at deflating the seriousness of rock bands with how they captioned publicity pictures that could not be taken seriously after the NME had finished with them.

Mother may have thought differently about her getting the magazines for me when in the new year I decided that I must get myself a decent stereo music centre, on which to hear the albums that I had already bought. Between the reading and the better listening I could see myself quite happily immersed in music. I liked the humour and sarcasm of the NME. It cracked me up when in the midst of a generally serious review of 'Greatest Hits' by Black sabbath one reviewer mused 'Do Black Sabbath play slow because they think slow?'. The quip made the point required about how their playing plodded when it was meant to have a certain swing to it. When another reviewer reviewed a particularly smarmy Queen single he said that the plural of ignoramus was surely ignoramice I corpsed with laughter. The writers at the NME put an archness into the writing and sought a playfulness in the music which the music often lacked. It was in those inky pages that I read my first reviews of Grateful Dead albums without knowing who they were or what they sounded like, beyond the reviews indicating that for every new musical direction they tried the band had not worked out where it would take them next.

Every week there were several cartoons by Ray Lowry (1944-2008) who was peerless in the wit with which he dissected the false pomp of the music business. The music business was often a humourless license to print money, his take on the music business made it seem absurd, made it seem priceless. He was the first writer/artist I discovered who made being openly left wing and an anarchist seem light and funny, full of bathos, whilst remaining apparently sincere in his belief. I liked cartoons anyway, for the shorthand with which they could describe the core of a serious issue and make it funny whilst quietly avoiding all the irrelevant sides to a story. He was probably the best cartoonist/writer I was ever going to find.

But in the real world, socially, I was not doing so well. I joined the local Theatre Club in the autumn. I was accepted surprisingly easily. I was the right age for a small speaking part straight away as a young man in the Tennessee Williams play 'The Night of The Iguana' because they had few youths and the play required one. We performed it in a local school and I was even happy to do the publicity material in cut off shorts and summer shirt wrestling with a stuffed iguana as if I were in Mexico on the stage for the cameras of the local press. But my willingness to perform and be part of a team sprang from me being out of my depth with the other members of the club, more than I realised I was. When I joined I was the youngest member by at least ten years. Most of them were teachers or in similar well educated professions. My education was that threadbare that I did not know how thin it was. I would get an occasional glimpse of the cavernous gap between me and the other members, educationally and in terms of emotional maturity, whilst being accepted. Those glimpses, scary as they were, did not deter me from staying because leaving would be openly admitting defeat and this was my first venture in my home town where the parental house had nothing to do with it.

I wanted to keep on going to The Theatre Club, even when I knew how I had responded and had shut down an open conversation, accidentally. Only some time later on my own looking back would I realise 'That is what I should have said to....   ' by which time I was well past repairing the mis-connection I had created. The level of education in The Theatre Club carried me along with it, in spite of my failings. Many of the members were teachers who were looking for an engaging and sociable hobby that included team work. The depth of the chasm between me and them will be revealed when I say that what they were achieving in a hobby was more than I was achieving in my 'training', and they had real money and highly structured everyday lives as well. Whereas I had a mickey mouse/toy town life, money, and education.

One point I was slow to realise was that putting on plays because you liked them was their way of being active whilst being apolitical. Everybody except me had done all the politics they wanted to at university or teacher training college. The nearest there was to politics in The Theatre Club was the consensus that was to be formed around the choice of play to be presented to the public when we performed four plays a year. Nor whilst I was a member of The Theatre Club did I ever connect acting with homosexuality though there was an obvious link was there if I dug deep enough. Acting was one of the professions that historically was relatively safe for gay men and lesbians. When as actors and actresses they led irregular personal lives then their 'immorality' seemed regular within their peripatetic profession.

There was a lot of kindness there. Never was there more kindness than in the pub at the end of the first evening I went to a rehearsal, at the age of seventeen. At the time I was reading George Orwell's '1984' for the first time and not long before I had unknowingly got caught up in the secretive sex in public toilets. When I found it I did not realise quite how secretive, and yet openly recognised, a culture it was. I had reached the part in the book where Winston and Julia's affair, which they thought was known only to them, had become the property of the Big Brother state as the lovers were arrested. Meanwhile I was a secretly willy waver, wondering from what reading, fiction as it was meant to be, how secretive my activities might be. How much should I feel guilty? In the book sex between Winston and Julia became the reason for Winston's guilt, particularly when Winston was told that Julia was an agent provocateur of the state, I was peculiarly caught up in what I was reading as if I were reliving life in the public toilet attracted to agent provocateurs. All of this I felt but could not find the words for expressing, or the right person to talk about them with. Then there was Orwell's blackest joke, the comment against all sexual affairs. After Winston was arrested he learns that Julia was licensed by the state to lead him on. Orwell wrote of O'brien, Winston's torturer, saying in a kinder moment 'In future the party will abolish the orgasm'. I recognised the darkness of the comment, but not the humour, after all I was in a grey to dark place myself-more than I knew. No wonder Orwell was known as a humourless writer. He put the jokes in the wrong places in his books, which was no help to a nervous and inexperienced reader like me. And all this confused guilt came out in an extremely mangled form in conversation with the Hamish, the elderly homosexual who had bought me my first pint, that first night.

A lighter misreading, from life rather than books, happened repeatedly when I regularly bought Mother tickets for all the shows that we put on, particularly shows that I was in. She went out of politeness but rarely engaged with what she was seeing. I misread her acceptance of the tickets and lack of comment about what she saw as an invitation to the next show where she might engage more. Had I been more mature I would have recognised her disengagement for what it was much sooner but the parental house disallowed us the maturity where one of us could say to the other 'I admire your hobby but it is yours. It is not mine.'. I was not the only man to buy tickets for his mother to see the shows we put on, Hamish bought tickets for elderly mother but she was probably educated enough to enjoy the plays. He was aged around sixty and lived with his mother in one of the more upmarket houses in the town. He always wore roll neck jumpers and dressed in varied shades of beige. He gave off an air of being quite distant, formal, but kindly. He liked being prompt in the plays rather than acting.

If I was in a bind and openly uncomfortable with Hamish in the pub for how I lived, then he was in a more comfortable bind, which was equally binding. He was self evidently gay for having never married, being retired, and looking after his mother. But he presented himself as settled and quietly neutral, as if the heterosexual agenda of marriage, property ownership, and children had ignored him and he was fine with that. Tennessee Williams was still alive and was surely out as 'gay' in America when we put on his play 'Night of the Iguana' on in 1978, but Hamish would have been the last to point out the vibrancy of the playwright's life out to anyone. Hamish would have seen the idea and words around 'coming out as Gay' as divisive and 'political'. He had too much invested in avoiding conflict in his life for that.

The younger and obviously heterosexual men in The Theatre Club were the ones who felt safest using a camp turn of phrase as humour when there was call for diffusing social tensions. There was one member of The Theatre Club who also worked for the local fire service. It was part of his profession that he worked out more than most of us put together. Even through his clothes he was obviously rather muscular. He made every other heterosexual male in The Theatre Club seem small and thin by comparison and we all knew it. Like the radical sexual politics in the plays we put on, nobody dare say anything about it. In one summer rehearsal there were no women in the room rehearsing, and about half a dozen of the men. This atmosphere of awe towards him because of his physique lingered in the rehearsal. Because it was a hot summer evening he took off his white shirt to reveal a white vest, the straps of which covered a pair of broad bronzed shoulders, the span and breadth of a medium sized sideboard. I exaggerate, but not by much. In one move he increased the sexual tension all the other males in the room felt. Then one particularly weedy actor said in a camp voice ' 'And don't you dare put that shirt back on again', which made everyone laugh and feel at ease at last.

I stayed in The Theatre Club for two seasons, which was when my life changed course. As a friend to them I saw their productions for years afterwards. I would have stayed longer had I joined later and been more settled in my personal life. I took part in some community theatre adventures that were an off-shoot of Gainsborough Theatre Club, later when I was nearer being at ease with myself. Originally The Theatre Club was the first organisation I saw that I saw as being inclusive. But for me to stay I needed a closer friendship to anchor me into helping put on four plays a year. On the plus side The Theatre Club was a safe way to enjoy the pub culture, on the minus side my education was thoroughly inadequate for being there and I had too much teenage angst to work through.

Both the drinkers and the non-drinkers endured the down sides of the alcohol mono-culture as it ate into family life. As a youth I drank myself ill a few times for no reason that I can think of. But ultimately I thought it best to resist the drink culture. I did not have the mates. I did not have the money. And my dad's generation were macho for the sake of it when they got together, with more thoroughness than me and the all teenagers who signed on every week put together. We felt more obscurely misused by the government than the men who drunkenly laughed off family life could even begin to emulate.

On the surface the local drink culture was part of the late 1970's consumerism we thought we all shared. But the atmosphere of the town was much more rooted in the values of the 1950's where even the grandest rebellions that people imagined they were living out were actually quite petty and had a grey uniformity about them. The Theatre Club had started in the 1950's but the plays they put on reflected a much greater diversity for portraying different eras and sets of values. What I wanted was talk and listening between people that mirrored the diverse choice of plays that The Theatre Club put on. I was very slow to realise that I was not going to find it locally.

In the 1954 film 'The Wild Ones' Marlon Brando is casually asked 'Hey Johnny what are you rebelling from?' Brando/Johnny gives the surly reply 'What have you got?'. If we who signed on and were made money out of by making us perform for dud government work schemes were asked the same thing we would give the same answer, only it would not sound as challenging.

Please read Chapter 9 here.