Chapter 9 - The Shrunken Alien Pt 1
After the 'job (non) training' on my first Y.O.P.S. scheme ended, mid December 1978, I had no signing on to do, my 'training allowance' arrived automatically. I was settled back into the routines of the parental house where, unexpectedly, I found some of them newly reassuring. I not alone in this. With me about more in the parental house, Mother's spirits slowly rose from where they had sunk the previous Autumn. Part of how this happened came directly from how tightly I fitted around the early evening family meal routine.
The meal would finish by 6 pm, Mother would wash up and I would dry the dishes immediately after the meal. Then she and I would get comfortable and watch 'Crossroads' together. What could be more improving for us than to be transfixed daily by Meg Richardson registering mild pain and weak outrage as her guests and staff did what they should not have been doing, daily? Would the reprobates ever look consistently sheepish enough after being caught out and told off? And then there was the glamour of the show, well it was glamour to us. But seriously, that month or so that family routines were in lock-step with the repetitions of the soaps brought Mother back from where her spirits had left the previous autumn. Perhaps Mother reasoned that if Meg Richardson could survive daily losses, and look so well on them, then so could she. I was more engaged at the low level dead-pan farce of it all, vaguely aware of how near to self parody the show was, and the utterly straight face the actors kept when a scene went flat, lost all drama. I was mildly transfixed by the gay chef Shughie McFee and the way he created more heat than light with his kitchen tantrums in his rather camp Scottish accent, which would later dissolve into gratitude towards those around him. We seemed to be rather happy when we were immersed in this inattentiveness, even though such inattention could only last for so long before we had to recover from it.
There were three channels and very little daytime popular broadcasting. A lot of the programmes were slow. If television and its audience mirrored each other then television gave the impression of the audience, whether young, old or in between, of being safely middle aged. The plainness of the factual programmes both disguised and made a virtue of the low budget on which many of them were made. There were series that aspired to look thoughtfully beyond the present and deep into the past. These were usually on BBC 2, and they were considered 'cult viewing'. This automatically made them attractive to me. But nearly all popular television was about fake anxiety alternated with fake reassurance. Soaps and beauty pageants for the wives, sports for the husbands. Genuine anxiety and real fears were confined to the individual, they were too scary to be observed by the family.
The audience were at their most reassured when they collectively bought into how fake a television show was. When a programme got high ratings that inferred that it was safe, but if the programme projected any sort of fantasy then there nearly always was some sort of risk. Because the family bond via television was less about how family members actually connected with each other, and more about how each family member felt similar to other family members for passively sharing in the fantasy on show. A good example of this was how as a family we tried to guess which young model the judges would choose in the beauty pageant shows, whilst we collectively failed to observe how all the contestants were so groomed that the biggest winners were the multinational companies that sold the look they wore. This was how television appeared to replace some of the historic 'community' roles of popular faith/religion. The fake emotions I enjoyed most were usually made by the BBC drama department. I particularly enjoyed seeing where real effort had been put into transposing the anxiety and reassurance of the day into unique settings which refreshed those anxieties, through shows like 'I Claudius'. I liked what thoughtful reviewers in newspapers called 'quality writing and production values'. Like the most thoughtful faith or religion, such programmes showed as much forethought as television, and therefore life, ever allowed anyone. Later on I would enjoy reading the paperbacks of the collected television reviews of Clive James. He put more fun into reviewing the programmes he watched than there was in them, which made the programmes seem to be more fun than they actually were. Long after the programmes he reviewed were not even faded listings in old newspapers he made his reviews of programmes laugh-out-reads. I would have had to have been a heavy drinker to buy into the values of all the televised sport that I was coerced to watch. Drinking that much was a habit that only working heads of households could afford. Locally there were fewer of them with the near thirty percent unemployment rate, but dad was one of them. Not that reducing the amount men drank came easily to them.
The drinkers I knew of I always thought of as poor at calculating risk, and good at denial to the point where they never even saw themselves as drinkers. And if due to some strange circumstance they were forced to recognise the damage that drink could do they would still say that so far it had done them no long term damage. They would deny that dirty drinking glasses had one of the vectors for Tuberculosis in the 1940's, when dad got the disease. If he had been asked about that he would almost have been more loyal to the disease than he would be grateful to the then-newly-formed NHS which cured him of it.
For my living around dad, who was now unemployed, I saw a lot of televised sports. I could never have said to him that it was more television than sport, but that was just one thought among many that his moody silences squashed. In November 1978 'Newsnight' was the new serious flagship news analysis programme. It was on for four nights a week between ten thirty and eleven fifteen in the evening on BBC2. I disagreed with dad about this programme harder than the politicians on the screen disagreed with each other. I could watch the first ten minutes comfortably. Then the programme would change the news story. Then, on cue, dad appeared inside the front door carelessly drunk. He would prop himself up with the nearest armchair, survey the scene, see me watching 'Newsnight' and go to sit in his chair and then get up and change the channel when the Newsnight team went to the next item. He wanted his sport, anything that was not rugby or cricket, or any other brain dead entertainment there was.
In mid January 1979 the Youth Careers Advice Service sent me an appointment time to see them. I enjoyed my month of retreating behind family routines which I did mostly because as far as I could tell nobody wanted me to do anything else. This would be my second and last turn as an item on the Generation Game style conveyor belt/list of names the Youth Careers Office had to offer employers where I was meant to be trained where I was told to go for the next 26 weeks regardless of whether I wanted to train in that or not, The training money given by government to employers was what counted most. I felt 'rested' when I went up the stairs to the Y.C.A.S. office, but when they two ladies started talking about my next placement I felt the sense of freshness desert me. The previous placement was a councillor's vanity project and his vanity had moved on. Only the Y.C.A.S. office staff knew how many of the town's employers were involved in the scheme and the full list of different trades that trainees could train in. If I had looked at the list of trades and then it might have been interesting. There might be a trade that I felt half-interested in. But the office staff acted like they were gatekeepers for employers, who always should have first choice. The Y.C.A.S. seemed to want to dole out placements out to trainees as if they were fearful of the trainee's self interest, blindly. 'One for you, one for you, one for you, one for... '. It is hard to know, but to me it felt Y.C.A.S. mistook creating indifference towards employers as creating deference towards employers, as if character in youth was a bad thing.
The Y.C.A.S. ladies sent me to be interviewed for a placement on a Friday afternoon in late January in a carpet shop, one of many places that I knew nothing about. I checked that I knew where the interview was to take place and left the arrangements at that. The carpet shop was one of two shops and a small block that had once been part of a block of many more shops, with dwellings behind it. The shop premises was probably the same age as my parent's house, eighty years old. From the outside the shop looked gloomy. Everything behind the small block of shops had been knocked down to create a large car park.
My failure started before I left the parental house for the interview on the Friday afternoon. I had very few 'good clothes' and what I had included trousers that were uncomfortably tight. But Mother's rules were that the clothes I had I had to physically wear to nothing, even when they became too tight, before I was allowed clothes that fitted better. I got no help and on my own did my best to look 'smart but casual'. I entered the shop on time, at about 4 pm Friday afternoon, last week of January. When Alan Wilson looked me up and down after the introductory five minutes I realised that the way I was dressed was a mistake. The way He looked at me told me that he could see how much my mother chose my clothes and she chose them to project a lack of confidence. Alan was a handsome casually dressed man who had a distinct bullishness about him. He was in his early 30's. He was five foot seven inches tall, clean shaven with a receding head of sandy hair, and a full chin with a 'Kirk Douglas' dimple in it. From the look of him, he had clearly played a lot of rugby until very recently.
There were two ground floor rooms in the shop, one front and one back. In the back there were six foot high racks on three sides of the room, including covering the back wall with the window in it. There were three rolls of either carpet or vinyl flooring on each rack. There was fluorescent strip light overhead and the sense of being in a square cave. In the front room there were the same three sides of floor to ceiling two metre wide carpets. But where the back was a cave the front had the shop windows running the width of the front of the shop to let light in. The best lit part of the front room was to the left, where the shop window let in natural sunlight in on the owner's strategically placed desk. There was an unlit back passage accessible from both ground floor rooms, with a sink at the near end. The passage led into a yard where there was a deserted looking 1940's-style outdoor toilet. There was a narrow set of stairs between the two ground floor rooms. The upstairs rooms stored small ends of rolls of carpet. They had to be small to be taken up the stairs. Finally at the foot of the stairs there was a narrow passage from the front room to the back room, mounted against the outside wall in that passage was a telephone which did not ring very often and which only Alan was allowed to answer, though in exceptional circumstances he allowed messages to be taken on his behalf. The volume of materials that went in and out of the shop was vast and heavy given it's small size.
When mass unemployment arrives it is not just employment that disappears. Job and trainee placement interviews disappear too. In the eighteen months of being available for work this was only the third interview of any sort that I had been offered, and one of the previous interviews was designed as a swift polite brush off before I got there. This was for a training place, rather than a job. But running through all the training it was suggested as if the employer meant it that if the trainee did well then they might get a job doing what they trained as. Against that I had to ask which employer would take youths on without being paid to by the government? As trainees we had no clothing allowance, and no safety net if anything failed. The government was effectively paying employers to child-mind us and dressing it up to parents and the media as something that was well organised. Training was a necessity for making youths more fit for employment.
I had no interview technique because I had no reason to have any interview technique. What I knew about talking and being listened to, and projecting confidence, I had learnt from my parents which would surely count against me. In front of the carpet shop owner I could not even successfully hide my disappointment at being on the scheme I was on. The first impression Alan had of me was 'decent but blank'. But he already knew that the best thing about me was the government money I came with. I had no words with which to describe experiences I'd had that showed him I had useful form for being trained, or any sense of application around work.
I was honest to the point of naivety about my school background. I was uncoached about what to say about the school I went to and what not to say about it. Nobody in the school or since had told me 'Tell employers/trainers this, this, and this, don't tell them that, that, and especially not that', and explained why to say what I should say. I would have been curious as to how they would have helped me work round the glaring omission of having not even a single CSE Maths or English exam from the school years. The people who knew the most about the boarding school were the people who talked about it least, social services and my parents. They were always too busy for me to ask, had I wanted to know what to say or not say about having been to the school. They made my school experience seem invisible, when to me the time there had been an intense and difficult set of repetitive activities .
I crashed through the interview saying what I wanted to about my schooling and my life, without thinking about it. Because of the boarding school there were these strange left turns, transparent gaps and evasions in what I said. But Alan Wilson was equally evasive, he never asked me if I had any interest in being trained or in fitting carpets. The unspoken truth was that I was free labour to him.
Something horrible happened three quarters of the way through the interview. At the time it happened, and often since, I never knew the point at which it started or why. It probably started after he asked me if it was a boys only boarding school to which I could only say 'Yes'. From that admission by me, and from my body language as I spoke, he made two calculations. The first was that I had endured some sort of bullying and second was that I was not sporty-which I was to learn much later was a standard lie applicants told to get a job in a work interview, because sportiness was a shorthand for being good at teamwork. To get away from my sense of discomfort as he pressed me about my being bad at sports I moved the talk towards television sport. But there I ended up talking about my dad as a non-listening presence, which was another inhibiting and awkward dead end discussion point. He then made a third and fourth calculation there, that my father was weak and the origin of much my sense of being bullied that there was a sexualised component to the school bullying, based on his memory of his own schooling where he had been some sort of alpha male figure who never had to account for the consequences on others of his actions.
Like some sort of anti-therapist who exploits the weakness of others by appearing to be helpful he then pushed the conversation towards the easiest way there was to confirm his assumptions. He led the conversation away from who I was/where I came from, towards abstract talk about competitive sportiness. With fifteen years of age over me, and having played a lot of rugby, he knew better than I did the difference between playing in a real team sport and the macho fantasy angles/voice overs that television always put on competitive male sports. There the apparent hyper-masculinity of the players counted for more than their teamwork and training. So he talked about teamwork, and the longer he talked the more he linked teamwork with sporting muscle/machismo. The more he painted this lurid and compulsive word picture of the small me being among men who were collectively and notably more muscular than I was, the more he worked/worried me into a corner, until he saw how uncomfortable I was with how he talked. By then I was too uncomfortable to say I was uncomfortable. To supposedly calm me down he invited me to move my chair to the side of his desk and he moved his chair to where we faced each other in full view, I was not sure where to look. Then he started with what he really wanted to talk through, this fantasy he wanted me to have of me being invited into the changing area of a rugby team, and me not knowing where to look for seeing big men with muscular naked bodies. He finished the scene with my eyes alighting on the biggest rugby player in the room, who was sitting on a chair drying himself and who was sitting with his legs wide apart to reveal that he was very well endowed. The muscles of his body rippled as he rubbed the towel over himself. In this fantasy, sight was as far as I got, in the scene the rugby players did not even acknowledge me. But Alan had me exactly where he wanted me before his next move. When we parted he said 'See you Monday Morning, nine o'clock. The paperwork will be sorted out next week'.
Please find Chapter 10 here.
Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.
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