tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20041278337965293712024-03-19T20:35:24.914-07:00The Alien LifeHow I survived and outgrew the local life in a small self absorbed town in the midlands of England in the 1970's and 80's, in spite of my having very little social capital.Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-67193434966942110622022-09-22T04:06:00.030-07:002022-09-22T08:28:06.460-07:00Introduction And Chapter Guide <div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><div id="m_8346503987714680982m_-868854786999607039gmail-post-body-2206894638307904001" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 1.5em 0px 2em;"><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">This is my sixth attempt at writing about my life from being a teenager until I left the town I grew up in. The life I led back then was always peculiarly slippery. The opportunities for self improvement were there, but by the time I accessed them, late, they became backward steps, rather than progress. I would be told that I was 'Too old to be improved' by the managers of what I pursued. The help they offered were more meant to help younger, better resourced, people (from better resourced families). They told me about what I should have chased instead, without telling me that it was cheap, never worked, and was discontinued long ago. What I remember most from those times was how the more friendly and sunny many people presented themselves as, the more opaque they actually were. The grumpy folk were the ones I should have listened to closer and trusted more.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My family disliked all change and slowed down every natural change that my growing up should have included by mis-describing my natural life and making a half life out of it. My intent as a teenager was to find out who I actually was, as opposed to accepting who other people said I was. Nearly every time I guessed rightly who I was then other people, particularly my family, would say that I was wrong because their self interest lay in preserving the younger, cheaper, and more passive versions of me that they had made up. My parents thought that they were parenting me well by stopping me from growing up. They wanted me, whilst under their roof, to think of myself in the most detached human terms possible.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />With each previous attempt at writing before this one, who I actually was would appear on the page and then disappear as the opacity of my parents took over the narrative, just like my family did when I was young. When trying to find out who I actually was through the writing I would often get waylaid by the memory of the distractions my parents had once used. Bringing my mind and the page back to me was a test I often failed temporarily. Only the reader can decide whether I won against the distractions. It was not his fault that my teenage self has been so difficult to track down through writing. He was always being eclipsed by the narrative his parents preferred over the person he actually was.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">As Billy Bragg neatly puts it 'They tuck you up/your mum and dad.'. Please accept this final attempt at waking up my teenage self to try to find the alive adult self that there was in him for who he is. He was so well tucked up that he made every call to wake up and grow to be a grown man as a means of further retreat. He had mentors who taught him to retreat, when courage and directness were what was called for. Happy discovering what of him survived.<br /><br />Thank you for getting this far.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-1-alien-in-attic.html">Chapter One</a> - from invisible boy to alien in the attic with neither forethought nor preparation.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-2-alien-discovers-life-through.html">Chapter Two</a> - Probing ideas of competition vs informed consensus via television, what to read and why, the earliest of the many battles against domestic cover ups and misinformation.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-3-what-alien-did-next.html">Chapter Three</a> - Accepting living on less, looking back on the boarding school/care home, Mother's 'never again' stories, a wider choice of reading.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-4-lesser-social-life-of-alien.html">Chapter Four</a> - Misadventures in work, unpaid labour on Mother's allotment, the annual family day trip to Skegness, rejoining S.J.A.B., how to live through science fiction.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-5-what-alien-did-after-that.html">Chapter Five</a> - Education, starting at a disadvantage, witnessing mis-selling, neighbours try to help me directly, dad 'explains what work is about', retreating into music and humour, first discovery of Radio 4, shopping and television routines, that first flat Christmas.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-6-alien-loses-pound-and-finds.html">Chapter Six</a> - Discovering more than music via local/regional radio, a future openly cancelled, Mother's fantasy job for me, dad loses his job, out to the theatre for the first time.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-7-alien-discovers-unemployment.html">Chapter Seven</a> - Leaving education young, beginners syndrome, household improvements, life on the black economy, a lack of experience, expanding choice through dole money, hitching lifts for the first time, the vagaries of sex, dad's choice of shared viewing, bad official advice, bad training, bad sex.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-8-alien-does-christmas.html">Chapter Eight</a> - Another flat Christmas, Mother's mental health, neighbours move, dad totally drunk, the NME as good reading, amateur theatre, misreading '1984', theatre masculinity and 'being gay', rebellion is difficult to make work.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-9-shrunken-alien-pt-1.html">Chapter Nine</a> - Mother's choice of television vs dad's, speculations around alcohol, the lack of interview technique, more non-training.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-10-shrunken-alien-pt-2.html">Chapter Ten</a> - Seduced in the back of the carpet shop, the sex addicted boss, hierarchies in work reflect hierarchies at home, unsuitable clothing, randomness as a choice, suicidal thoughts, weird watching habits and ideas reinforced. <br /><br /><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-11-political-alien.html">Chapter 11</a> - Exploring the roots of the loss of choice, meeting other boys who had left the boarding school/care home, discovering local politics, discovering CND via the BBC, selective amnesia, political activism/sexual invisibility, my first rally, the away-from-the-counter culture, .against majoritarianism.<br /><br /><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-12-alien-recounts-his-many.html">Chapter 12</a> - A real job, actual trust in work, what parents say and what they mean, is this personal growth?, the well divided life, introduced to Christianity, strange local exceptionalism, a run down of life in the local toilets, a social meeting at the blood donors.<br /><br /><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-13-alien-examines-taboo-for.html">Chapter 13</a> - Life feels good, voting for the first time, leaving work, thinking of learning, old vices recur, illness in the family, the least expected encounter, taking sides in the family, plans to study take off.<br /><br /><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-14-educating-alien.html">Chapter 14</a> - The emotional seesaw, an education for the first time in ten years, relearning how to write, old computers, first forays into writing, Youth Fellowship, first live gig proves affirmative.<br /><br /><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-15-alien-goes-to-glastonbury.html">Chapter 15</a> - An attempted history of the local CND, the social passivity of local life, going to Glastonbury for the first time.<br /><br /><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-16-alien-and-shadow-of-property.html">Chapter 16</a> - After Glastonbury an attempted restart with life in the parental house, Mother's plans for me, the onion factory, indifferent exam results, reflections on the times my parents grew up through, female friendship through CND, secret plans, retakes of exams, the 'hotel' phrase changes everything.<br /><br /><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-17-alien-and-impossibility-of.html">Chapter 17</a> - Reflections on sexual experience, directive counselling, more on the television wrestling/the Saturday afternoon family ritual, neutered gay men, my first diary, discovering True Freedom Trust, popular machismo and gossip, old prescriptions never work, Mother finally reveals 'why I was sent to the boarding school/care home' and I am appalled. Greenbelt to the rescue.</span><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-18-alien-and-sound-of-music.html">Chapter 18</a> - One too many people in the parental house, The Glastonbury itch, the open life away from 'home' vs the shut down life in the parental house, more on the seesaw of my parents' marriage, scarily bad planning, fearless unemployment, Graham's music room, the expensive hi-fi, testing the boundaries, making my exit, The Grateful Dead live, loud, and unforgettable.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-19-alien-struggles-to-find-his.html">Chapter 19</a> - My first dodgy landlord, not-quite-cheap living, doing the double, a tatty looking freedom vs a better decorated oppression, Mr Aftershave, anger at the media, back to hitching lifts as viable travel.<br /><br /><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-20-cnd-alien-parties-and-any.html">Chapter 20</a> - The big CND push, showing 'The War Game', wanting to resign, being at Glastonbury second time, The carpet shop man returns, a horrible twenty first birthday party, finally resigning from CND, last 'O' level retaken/passed, brittle encounters in the job centre. <br /><br /><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-21-alien-listens-for-how-it.html">Chapter 21</a> - Reflections on mental health, on reading 'Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', friends who followed Guru Maharaj Ji, back to Social Services, Quaker Keith, teaching myself what to read, reduced isolation.<br /><br /><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-22-alien-and-theological-cul-de.html">Chapter 22</a> - Drifting between churches, I joined the wrong church, my lack background in faith matters, church and history, Pastor Paul, middle class imitations of Christianity, escaping the Pentecostal Church hurt, TFT returns, honourable models of masculinity. parties, the end of the experiment in youthful communal living, learning about depression the hard way, the hardest way back to better living.<br /><br /><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-23-alien-work-and-alien-housing.html">Chapter 23</a> - A survey of different addresses I lived at, my first year on a work programme, the fear of false nostalgia, my first exposure to the song 'Relax' by FGTH and my bad relationship with the song, Mother hatches new plans for me to live near the parental house I accept them.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-24-alien-on-drugs-alcohol-and.html">Chapter 24</a> - A survey of the typical life of my parents found when they came into adulthood including their expectations, the job/wife/drink/owning your own house package, first experience of drugs, non-patriarchal ways of handling wealth, goodbye Mr Aftershave and Wilson Carpets, being older than my newer friends, my sister moves away from the parental house.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-25-alien-and-ignoble-experiment.html">Chapter 25</a> - Moving out/in, I discover Radio 4 for life whilst decorating, a recent and not-quite-new best friend to share that flat with, my sisters life parallels mine, my membership of The Pentecostal Church hits the wrong note, my new popularity, the ongoing student life.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-26-alien-does-arts.html">Chapter 26</a> -I enjoy going to the newly opened Arts Centre a lot, some very odd 'community politics', horrible histories-a local drama, more skirmishes around homosexuality via involvement with the theatre, seeing somebody with A.I.D.S. for the first time. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-27.html">Chapter 27</a> - Friendship change and popularity, different groups of people I intersect well with, the calmest people, Supersonic Steve, Mother's errant instincts, cannabis vs alcohol, the first party, leaving the Pentecostal Church, the second party, my sister's life changes and complicates my life, friendship evolves, my first serious therapy book, one last party, the row after the party.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-28-alien-and-second-argument.html">Chapter 28</a> - The aftermath of the party and the argument, alone and subdued, how to explain to Mother?, victim/persecutor/rescuer, Dorothy Rowe helps me find victory in the face of defeat, Greenbelt again, my favourite few hours of the decade re-described, a new friend for life, the closet door definitively opened, 'the golden girls problem', another change of address, leaving the past behind me. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-29-alien-ceases-to-be-alien.html">Chapter 29</a> -The last local change of address, the quieter better balanced life, a new and calmer church life, same old same old with work and education, changes of plans, a chance meeting proves useful, the occasional sexual partners, first forays into life in Nottingham, a memorable last night in the town.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/afterword.html">Afterword</a> - Conclusion and summary of a long and slow attempt at leaving my past behind me, a lucky escape, the next memoir?.</span></div></div><div style="display: flex; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><div style="clear: left; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.54); margin: 0px; width: inherit;"><div></div></div></div></div>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-1237882769435724942022-09-22T04:02:00.005-07:002022-09-22T09:25:40.551-07:00Chapter 1 - The Alien In The Attic<div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I cannot describe the depth of release I felt that Monday morning, in late July 1977. I was putting in the bin what remained of my three pairs of school trousers, two pairs of which I had literally the arse out of them but Mother refused to buy any more. The pairs with the arse out of the trousers had been crudely patched by the care home staff to last the last few weeks. Both the trousers and my worn-at-the-elbows school shirts went into the dustbin, for the bin men to take away later that same day. I had not had as much fun binning anything for two years, when Mother asked me to carve into small pieces the cardboard box that our new colour television had arrived in. She asked me to slash the box to bits because she feared that if anyone saw the words 'colour television' on the side and the box as it was left out whole then somebody might come and steal the then-new television set from us in the middle of the night without her hearing them enter the house. I was meant to leave school that summer but the school leaving age was raised by one year so I had to stay. What I did to that box was a substitute for what I wanted to do to my schooling and school clothing. But I could not do it, since I had another year to make all of it stretch further. Eventually I stayed at the school for a second year. Finally getting rid of my school uniforms aged sixteen felt like casting off years of a long, very tired, non-education where I did not understand why I had to stay there or what I was meant to be doing. That non-education would take years of late study to recover from, and it would still warp my adult life in more ways than anyone at the time, particularly me, could foresee. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I had only turned sixteen by a few days when the boarding school 'for the maladjusted' that I had attended for the last five years closed for the summer. I was one of ten boys who were taken on the five hour journey in an overfull school minibus where, one by one, we were all dropped off at our parents' houses. Most of them would return in September, I would not. Me and my suitcase, crammed with tired school uniforms, and the few items of casual clothing owned were the last to be dropped off before the minibus went back to the school. I went through the front door of the parental house, once inside I took my suitcase up to my attic room and left it there to be unpacked in the morning, and 'settled in'. I say 'my attic room', the decoration was distinctly female and made it as plain as it had ten years earlier that the room was much more the property of Mother than it was meant for use by anyone else. If I tried to point out to Mother or dad with even the mildest self evident reason the disconnect between how if it was meant to be 'my bedroom' then why was the decoration so female in character? Then what I said would be seen as provocative beyond all defence. I would be told 'Yes, it is your room, but there will be no changes to it, any more than the rest of the house will change.'. A similarly diverting explanation would follow if I asked about the school I'd just left. I'd be told 'You were maladjusted in the school, but you are not now since you left', as if the school was now the <i>cause</i> of the maladjustment, when originally I was led to believe that the school was the <i>cure</i> for my not adjusting to life in the parental house. Arguments in this house often looped in on themselves that way, where any original point to the argument got buried beyond retrieval and ended trying to understand anything much.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">However the arguments looped in on themselves it remained clear that my life had been blown off course, but my life was not the only life so misdirected. Every schoolboy who had once hoped to leave school and start an apprenticeship at age fourteen had been made to wait for their apprenticeship until they were sixteen, when most of them were diverted away from the expected apprenticeship and directed by careers officers to do something they had never thought they wanted to do. They were not told that apprenticeships were being phased out. Had the apprenticeships been there when I would fourteen have left two years earlier, and by now I would be towards the end of my second year as an apprentice where for still living with my parents I would be esteemed as a worker. Instead I was accepting the going on the full time college course that my mother and the careers officer had agreed that I should do in which I had an interest enough to agree with them to do. But I could not imagine any knowledge I learned occupying any physical space in the parental house. The attic space was the only place I might try to do anything and the female atmosphere of that room would make any interest I took up a struggle to maintain there.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The routines of the parental house seemed okay at first, but for the past five years the longest I'd stayed there continuously had been the six week long summer holiday. I had no idea how I'd feel living there long term and going to college as a student, full time in lieu of the original apprenticeship might feel. I was quite used to substitutions, a cheaper idea replacing another, more expensive, original idea where the implications of the change for the future were never discussed. There were surely letters and discussions between Social Services and my parents prior to me returning for a permanent life in the parental house. But I knew as little about my parents as I knew about what Social services said and did, and kept records of. I knew nothing, I went where they sent me without knowing what my parents had agreed to with them. I would have liked to have signed off from my social worker, Mrs Hunt, in my own right, like the near-adult I thought I was. It never happened.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the twenty-first century the issue of surveillance capitalism via digital media is well known if somewhat sketchily understood. In the analogue world of 1977 the Social Services were not seen as part of any 'surveillance society'. Yet the way that they collected and compiled information on children and parents, and the highly selective way with which they shared what they knew, and hid unknown amounts of information that they had compiled without being seen to, made them appear to be one part spy network, to one part 'soft policeman' and it made them to be wholly feared, because they divided families through mental health labels when mental health was a taboo subject within families. The view that anyone took of Social Services depended on their level of engagement with them-the less anyone had to do with them the more benign they seemed. The more anyone had to deal with them the less they trusted Social Services, even though they had to take the intent of Social Services at face value. As sort-of-policemen they often used very odd phrases, which made interrogating their motives by using plain speech difficult and dispiriting. But it was plain enough to all when anybody dared to retrospectively look at the records they kept on the children 'in their care' who were now adults that Social Services behaved as if they were a law unto themselves.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">One point that was clear to all was an economic one. For my parents, the longer the school kept me in the last two years, when I felt that I should have been able to leave, the less the parental house had to pay for my upkeep. Now the household budget would have to expand to pay for me in full. if dad had 'a free ride' for thirty nine week a year for the last two years then it had to end sometime. Would dad give Mother more housekeeping money to pay the extra I took to feed and keep? I was reluctant to return to the parental house for a different reason, I was leaving the neutrality of the anaglypta wallpaper painted sea green of the bedrooms of the care home behind for a decor that was more inhibiting, where, naturally, it's inhibiting effect was denied.<br /><br />If I hoped for change when I returned then I was in for a disappointment. When I returned to the parental house permanently, my parents took up exactly from where they had left off me living in the house full time five years previously, as if nothing had changed in the intervening period. The sense of dad being shut down was the same, the sense of Mother working hard because she had to and to keep dad onside with the household was present too. This lack of change came to the fore with short term career choices. When I turned eleven Mother had described me as 'having an interest in electronics' when really I wanted space away from family, and to get it I spent the summer in the backyard looking at the decades old radiogram they had thrown out because it no longer worked. It was the most interesting thing in the yard. Based on my desire for time apart from family that hot summer five years earlier in the yard, bored but quiet. I was now going to college full time for a year to study something I had never been given the space to gain a grasp of. On the upside, the exams in English and Maths would be a catch up after everything that teachers had not taught me in those subjects for five years because they thought, well I don't know what they thought, all I knew was that whatever they said, it was some sort of cover up. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />In my new place in the parental house my interest in electronics still did not get as far as a workshop space in which to take circuits apart and reassemble them, as my mate in school John Jackson had had since he was thirteen which had made the subject a vocation for him. The nearest Mother permitted herself to think about electronics was to save the glass that showed the radio stations when the radiogram was taken away from the yard, and letting me regularly change the battery on her small portable radio on which she listened to BBC Radio 2 in the mornings. I could wistfully gaze at that piece of painted glass in my room, with all the radio stations on it and do very little else. That piece of painted glass held all the force of sentiment that Mother put into it, making a piece of junk a symbol of an interest she claimed I had, and yet through the symbol she made sure that interest could not go anywhere, change my life, or change how life in the parental house worked. Having junk was better than having nothing.<br /><br />Being in full time education, and on a grant whilst getting family allowance, rather than working and getting a pay packet with which to bargain for space and personal choice meant that I was put in more of a financial and social bind than I would like to have been. But it was only the update of an old bind. In the boarding school I had been on half the amount of pocket money other boys the same age as me were on. By Summer 1977 I was on 50 pence a week pocket money, compared with other sixteen year old boys getting a pound. And my pocket money came out of the full family allowance, a fund that Mother got for me which in turn gave her oversight over what clothing I had, and might be bought for me that never ran to anything stylish and durable. If I had not learned my low self esteem from my schooling, then I would have gained it from how I was clothed. But being in full time education gave me one leverage point with dad when he got antsy that his money did not buy as much beer as it previously had; he paid less tax because I was still in full time education and if he was not claiming tax relief for me being a dependent than he should have been. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Up to the time of my return full time to the parental house I thought dad had done well out of my absence, financially, partly because I had no interest in the price of beer in the pubs-dad's hobby. because I was listed officially as a child/dependent on full time education money for me came to the parental household through dad's tax allowance. But for the last five years I had cost him and the household nothing except the stamps Mother put on the letters she sent to me, for thirty nine weeks of the year. I saved the extension of this argument, that if he paid less tax because I was listed as a dependent on his tax code, then that money should go to Mother for later. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">If I had nowhere to do electronics in the parental house, then nor did I have hobbies and interests that engaged anyone my age or cost anyone anything much. All I had up to the age of sixteen were some scrapbooks with royal coverage in the red-top newspapers going up to Summer 1973, and Mother's idea that 'Liked collecting stamps' as if I were some commoner juvenile version of George VI for whom quiet hobbies were 'good for the nerves'. In the latter Mother bought the commemorative stamps from the post office when they were issued. For decades after, when I applied for jobs where there was a space where I had to list hobbies and interests I used to put words to the effect of 'I don't have hobbies that I can't afford', as being able to pay for the hobbies was what counted. I did not realise that if I could name a sociable hobby then I might reveal a social skill in getting on with people that the employer might employ me for. There was always more space on those forms for proving sociability than there was in the parental house for hobbies and interests.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">If I could say that I had developed at all, then I had developed to be on my own and into having no shared interests partly because everywhere I was sent, boarding school/care home, or the parental house, made me feel so temporary. Also where I had developed I was co-opted by Mother when dad would not be the helpmate she wanted him to be. It was another strange fold down/inversion of normality that Mother was my proxy for friendship, my minder and guide, for nearly everything that passed for 'my social life' up to the age of sixteen to the age of nineteen. This reached the stage where when some less perceptive people saw the two of us together, e.g. going shopping around the town, they assumed from our body language that Mother and I were man and wife. But I was never the helpmate Mother wanted. I simply stood in for what never arrived then, and would never arrive later. Dad was meant to be the helpmate to Mother, but his helpmate of choice was the drink, and the drink would not let him be seen with Mother attending sober minded non-alcohol based activities. I stood in where dad steadfastly refused, because between the two parents' lopsided way of parenting I was left with no choice.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I had never been taught how to choose to refuse something without seeming ill willed to myself about it. I had always been verbally coerced in such a way as what I was presented with appeared to be less coercion, more a matter of social necessity. So for three years I did not know how to refuse Mother anything. Apart from my own, frankly odd, behaviour at the age of ten and eleven, one of the reasons I had been seen as 'maladjusted' was about how much I was seen to be under the influence of my mother. In the 1970's the popular theory ran that a teenage boy needs the example and company of his father and men like his father, for the boy to become a man, and for the boy to become the rhetorically heterosexual male who makes homosexuality and 'being maladjusted' seem invisible, if not non-existent. I say this theory existed, in every discussion I ever heard back then that attempted to personalise the theory one real life example then either the argument got mangled beyond all credible explanation, or the theory could never apply close to home. It could only apply hypothetically and to examples far away.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">But I had the evidence of how it applied to me and to my family. Whatever the school did to put some physical distance between me and my mother, she was the one to ring weekly, she was the one who wrote all but one letter to me, week in week out, for over two hundred weeks over the five years that I was at the school. I doubt that either the school or Social Services ever attempted to prompt dad into communicating more readily, and increasing his personal contribution to me becoming an adult, to balance up the combined presentation of gender they both made as parents. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In later years I would repeatedly come across this 'too much of the mother, not enough of the father' explanation for male homosexuality. Every time the proponent of the theory put it forward they would have no answer for how the person who was 'historically gender unbalanced' might agreeably improve their gender balance through the life they still had as adults. If an individual had made workable choices out of 'being gay' as an adult then change was seen as 'too late' for any easy or comfortable reversal of their perceived sense of their sexuality. Blaming the errant father was either ineffective scapegoating, or 'trying to bolt the door after the horse had left', too little performed much too late for it to be useful.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">So, there I was, the alien in the attic every night, in a room that if both of my parents had decorated it together a decade ago then ever since Mother had set the agenda for how the room was used. Dad never came into the room. The nearest he got to being in it was that if I were needed in the living room then he would shout through the door at the foot of the stairs -stairs which never had a light fitted above to make it easy for me to see where I was putting my feet-for me to come down because 'Mam wanted me'. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Mother came up when there was food to be retrieved or when the bed had to be stripped or remade. The attic was the room that was most used as a store room in the house. It was as if the house had female and male poles to it, where the female pole was the attic. It was where Mother was most omniscient and omnipresent in the house, just as the living room on the ground floor of the house was where dad had most influence with his choice of wallpaper, furniture and the television that was always on if he was in. In the time that I was away Mother had used the attic as a rest space for herself, away from the marital bed when she felt uncomfortable there. The attic was interesting for a while, as a place to hide and be away from the reach of dad forever choosing what television programme we would watch next. But then anyone hiding in the attic too long would be confronted by how bunged it was, they would have wondered what the six boxes, all three foot high and two foot by two foot square were hiding. I made no real mark on the room all the time I was there, my character was under-developed and materially I had nothing to make a mark with.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">If my parents' marriage was severely lopsided, with my father simply refusing to present himself as he was to any of us in our own right, then one of Mother's weaknesses was that of hoarding which was hard to detect as a weakness when it was presented as thrift. The axis of the unbalance of it all was that the more money that he wanted to spend on beer the more she felt she had to be a hoarder, and scrimp and save to make every last penny she did get work harder, the more dad expected Mother to absolve him of household responsibility.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Mother stored household things in every room in the house except my sister's bedroom and the bedroom that she shared with dad. Where things were most used they were stored close to where they were going to be used. But in the midst of these most used things Mother remained a random and forgetful hoarder, where keeping the goods can't have been about making money go further, it must have been about something else. In the medical cupboard there was the unused twenty odd year old bottle of olive oil and dropper for softening the wax in our ears. In the pantry there were the decades-old jars of rice and pasta that she had never learned how to cook, and feared that we would reject if she tried cooking with them. On the top shelf of the pantry there was the tin of lemonade powder from the days of rationing which had ended circa 1952. On the pantry floor there were too many bottles to count of the blackberry vinegar that she made as a cold cure every year from steeping sugar and blackberries in white wine vinegar which she then boiled to stop it turning alcoholic. That she would never get colds enough to use even half of it was beside the point.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Thus one of the virtues of my bed was the two foot height of space underneath it, which was filled with bottles, boxes of jams, and other containers of foods that would be periodically brought down to refill more everyday use stores of food that got used up. The nearest I had to choice in how it was presented was changing the sheets of the single hospital bed every Sunday, and Mother led in that. 'Hospital corners' she would say and I did them every time.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The only thing that I could definitely say was mine alone was the small but growing collection of records I had. It consisted mostly of ex-chart and ex-juke box singles, and a few Beatles albums. Though I was openly proud of recently buying my first copy of 'Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' with some of my sixteenth birthday money from the local record shop 'The Music Centre'. My records were kept with the family's records, all the dud Elvis Presley mid 60's film soundtrack albums and the randomly acquired Music For Pleasure and Top of The Pops LP's that were kept in the cabinet below the record player that had replaced the radiogram. Dad had managed through his ignorance to damage the amplifier of the record player by disconnecting one of the speakers because he thought it was too loud. There was no use telling him he had done wrong; either he would deny it all or brazenly say that it was his to damage, if damaged it be.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">It was common for men to make mistakes and own them as if they were virtues. It was also common for women to think they had made mistakes when they hadn't, and for them to fear men's mistakes by recounting them as stories in which men always did things right. But later the women would recount the story differently where not only were the deeds of men now wrong, those deeds had always been wrong, a mistake all along and none of it should ever be allowed to happen again.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">One of Mother's 'never again' stories of male failure came from the four years when she was single and her sister Alice was newly married to Terry, 1956-60. When, as a newly married man, Terry settled into not going out to the pub to please his wife he started making fruit wine with fruit grown on his allotment. He set it all up in bottles in which he put corks to seal them. Some of the corks had water based valves in them that let out the air pressure that built up in the bottles, but not all. He ran out of valves.Naturally the batch that were plain corked that he did not have the water valves for were a risk. One night when Mother was around to see them and chat, she was most alarmed at the sound of the popping of corks out of bottles. The pantry floor overflowed with spilt wine and there was much cleaning up to be done. It became Mother one of her more enduring false warnings about making mistakes, she never mentioned the water based valves that the wine should have had in the corks. Terry learned from his mistakes though, he kept on making the wine so it exploded less. When I went to see Alice and Terry, as part of my having to follow Mother round I was given a glass of his latest batch of home made fruit wine to taste, along with all the adults in the room, twenty years after the story of the batch that had exploded was retold for the umpteenth time.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In that one act of Terry over-ruling Mother's reluctance, and giving me the same as he had given everyone else in the room Terry showed me what equality and inclusion were. But then he was a socialist, although he talked little about it because he knew his belief was best shown by his actions. It would have been awkward for me to wish that he were my father in that moment, rather than the person who very distantly actually occupied that role being my father. But if I had wished that, then it would only be the first of many times that I met men who shared a generosity of spirit with me that made my previous family experience seem mean and meagre.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Terry was the earliest example of wiser drinking that I knew of, 'Never drink farther than a short walk to your bed' was a phrase that I adopted much later in life, when I was learning how to live more honestly with myself than how my dad had ever lived with himself.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 2 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-2-alien-discovers-life-through.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-39509214841445223762022-09-22T04:00:00.004-07:002022-09-22T09:26:13.215-07:00Chapter 2 - The Alien Discovers Life Through Television<div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The way dad used the television was manipulative, to the point where he tried to make it a virtue that he was transparently manipulative. We could watch what we wanted or turn the set off when dad was not around, but when he was around he chose which of the three channels we should all watch from an angle when his chair faced most directly towards the set. When choosing what we would watch he might have said that the broadcasters were being manipulative, because they provided so little of the entertainment that he was partial to. What felt most manipulative was how dad appeared to use the television set as if it was an obedient but noisy child, where the noisier it was the more obedient it was to him. He used it to make us, Mother included, quiet and obedient and child-like by comparison. With hindsight it was clear that a restful quiet in the parental house was the one thing dad could not cope with, and his control of everyone in the parental house through the television meant that he never had to cope with quiet.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">His choice of viewing was always to find the most sporty or crass looking reporting of the news, the sitcom with the cheapest characters who shared the mouldiest jokes, the television programmes with the least information value. It was as if the lack of information in a programme meant that the programme could withstand being repeated more easily; we would remember real information that was worth paying attention to so it had to be updated. With cheap jokes and stereotypical characters that never needed updating they could be repeated to infinity.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Most evenings of the week and Saturday lunch time dad went out to the pub with his mates. He spent enough hours there mid-week every week for it to be the equivalent of a part time job. Add the weekend hours and they added up to a full time job. Around the time I was sixteen Mother went out on her own more too. I was left at home to mind my twelve year old sister many midweek nights. On our own we watched television or turned the set off to play board games. It felt liberating to not have the adults, well the parents, around insisting they were right and our choices were always the wrong ones. Our ideas differed from theirs. If we wanted to giggle at the names of elderly actresses like Googie Withers, who starred as the governor in the prison drama 'Within These Walls', then we could. It was as if their very names were jokes.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">On my own, with my sister in bed, the programmes I liked were guided by Uncle Terry's choices when Mother and I visited him and Alice. I liked BBC 2 programmes like 'Call my Bluff' and the science documentary series 'Horizon'. I liked the way that there was rarely any continuous onscreen presenter with the programme. The programme would usually be a film about a particular branch of science, with explanation for what was happening coming from an off-screen narrator who spoke sparsely and let the visuals lead, with the occasional interview where it fitted in to the narrative. The presentation put the subject first and the makers of the programme far behind, well behind the scenery so to speak. I had often experienced teaching from teachers where they made who they were seem more important than what I was meant to be learning from them. As a television programme 'Horizon' was a good teacher, they let the subject lead. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Another sign of a good television programme was that there was a book that I could read that would be a more detailed source that explained better what was being shown on the screen. Thus it would be that I read both 'I Claudius' and 'Claudius the God' by Robert Graves after the BBC television adaptation of both books, along with other books by Graves where with his pagan views he interpreted events that Christianity claimed to have the sole viable narrative of. It was brave stuff for a teenager to read. I would not like now to speculate the percentage of material in those book that went straight over my head back then, where simply stepping outside life in my own times, the late 1970's, through reading, seemed like a necessity to me as much as my reading seemed like a folly to the rest of my family.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">For as long as I was on tiny amounts of pocket money per week I would either follow Mother because she requested me to be with her for an evening, or stay in and watch the television programmes on my own that I knew dad would never approve of, they were too intellectual. When I had to have money to make new friends and I had very little I was unintentionally following dad's example. The television was my friend, it was the better informed cousin or older brother I wanted when there was no human equivalent, when there never had been. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />I could not explain to either dad or myself why I loathed what he found to be compulsive television and he loathed what I loved. He was practically addicted to sport on television, whereas televised sport reminded me of the miserable time I had in school, with sport. I had done incredibly badly with school sports because it was competition without mentoring, or the stick without the carrot. I was half okay with the idea that my badness in sport made others seem better. But when the sports teachers wanted me to improve I could not see the point. Other reasons for disliking televised sport were that it was all recorded, rarely live. Because of that it was more television than sport. I was watching a recording of a competition which I disliked and within that I was viewing what was already deeply pre-digested that I had no part in it except to watch it glassy eyed with incomprehension. The exception to this rule, the shared meeting point for dad and me, was snooker, because it was presented live, as it happened and It was slow, quiet and calm.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />Dad never explained anything, he left explaining to Mother, who he knew would leave out of her explanations anything he disliked. Among the subjects he avoided explanations for was why he disliked news and political analysis programmes, and so liked televised sport. Maybe he saw rhetorical aspects in televised sport; with it's immersive focus on the action of the sportsmen, televised sport was a way of avoiding logical arguments that knew of but had never thought through. The more televised sport he watched the more relieved he was that he felt less need to think. As a family we never allowed each other to discuss politics, religion, sex, or money. This rule was reinforced to the level where nobody in the family was even allowed to think far enough as to ask 'Who made the rules that banned these subjects so absolutely from discussion? And when did they make them? And how much further in the world did they apply?' What those rules meant to me was that we were not allowed to think, because thoughts and logical arguments required framing via the use of words-ban the words and you ban thinking altogether. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">If dad's choice of television programming was severely anti-thought, then under his orders the television reinforced the house rules when it was disallowed from presenting anything to do with politics, sex, religion or money. If dad did believe that could present stories that kept to self censorship rules of the house then both directly and indirectly, so much of what television presented <i>did</i> comment on those subjects-albeit with a fair amount of showbiz flummery to dilute any sense of direct instruction.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The level of showbiz insincerity was at it's peak with television wrestling, which I found both compulsive viewing and agonising in it's effect on me in the parental home. Television wrestling was the Gordian knot of all television presentations for me. Years before when I was ten, triggered by my being bullied and unable to fight back in school, I had endured a nervous breakdown and for seven months after I was put on heavy antidepressants which often left me feeling rather absent from myself. My family saw me as simply as being in some strange sort of limbo, rather than having had a nervous breakdown. They thought that only adults they did not know could have nervous breakdowns. I was put on pills to keep me calm and bring me round again. I did not know what I had gone through but I felt as if the pills froze me more.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Frozen in thought and deed as I was, Mother made sure I took the tablets, whilst why I had to take them was a subject on a par with money, sex, religion and politics in terms of being subjects fit for discussion. Also banned from all talk was what had led up to me taking these pills. But in this period of my mental fragility every Saturday afternoon around teatime dad would insist that the wrestling be on in the background whilst we ate. All through this period, and long after, I would sort of 'trip out' on the television soundtrack coming from behind his head, every grunt groan and noise of a wrestler making a noisy and painful landing came to me from somewhere past dad's head. The characters of the winner, the 'plucky' loser, the cheat who did his cheating moves to the camera but away from the referee, all echoed the different school children who were part of why I had the breakdown. The roar of the crowd watching the wrestling echoed the noise of the classroom when the teacher was absent which was when the breakdown happened. At age sixteen, and having avoided it all the time I was in boarding school, those sounds and that drama came back to me from behind dad's head as if his head was a wrestling ring with wrestlers and a referee in it. His head was certainly a place of open conflict, particularly when he denied that it was drunk. This denial added to how I was personally divided by the television wrestling, where if dad had said in a way that invited confirmation, and actions to follow, that the wrestling was fixed and the way it was filmed made it even more artificial then I would have been saved a lot of conflict. But no, the conflict and denial had to continue. Add to that conflict how my now sixteen year old self was full of raging hormones, and the proto-homoerotic images of large men in tight trunks being tactile and aggressive with each other and what you have is me seeing well past the label 'light entertainment'. As I peered into the fake sincerity for signs of rules being well observed I saw only my frustrations dramatised, and yet again whatever argument I started out with ended up by looping in on itself. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">One of the better reasons that attracted me to what was shown on television was how unlike the parental house it was. Whatever we saw on it, every space was a single use space for showing us one thing at a time. Every activity was done in one space and that one space had one function that one time. With the house being so small and with Mother's hoarding making every room except my sister's and my parents' bedrooms multi-use almost simultaneously Mother made the parental house something like an inside out TARDIS; where the TARDIS was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, our house was smaller on the inside than the dimensions in space it took up suggested it should be. What Mother could never get rid of made it smaller, and through those things we still travelled back in time in the parental house. What Mother kept carried the stories we lived by, which by their nature stopped us having new stories to tell.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-align: left;">Nearly nothing of what surrounded me was mine, after all I had not lived there for three quarters of the past five years and I had even less before that.</span> What I owned in my own right included some records, mostly singles, and quite a few cheap paperback books, most of which were juvenile in nature, particularly the 'Russ Tobin' series of books by Stanley Morgan. Tobin was a sexually immature adult male who lived in a world of infinite choice including sexual encounters that, literally, fell into his lap, from which there never any consequences. I perversely enjoyed the reductive exercise where the more juvenile and evasive the sexual detail in the books became when they described seemingly chance sexual relations, the better I thought I understood them. But I was young and secretly horny enough to believe anything, particularly when I was never likely to have an open conversation with anyone about what to do or like, sexually, and what might have been good or bad about it.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My dad read cowboy books, american magazines, and cheap detective thrillers with lots of near-but-not-quite sexual encounters in them which he got part exchange money back for when he returned them for new titles in what we would now call 'a pop up book shop'. I drew from his example there: just as dad's cowboys and detectives were presented as lone agents going through hostile rural or urban landscapes, so it was for me with Russ Tobin; opportunism never had consequences, it could only lead to increased and unaccounted for opportunism. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">However silent and secretive I was about being a would-be erotic fantasist, to Mother I tried to be what she wanted me to be when I was with her. How could I do anything else? Mother was clear about money; everything about it was based on duty, not opportunity, much less opportunism. Thus it was that when we had to break the household rule about not talking about money I had to lead her in us doing so, because she would not take any lead in any discussion about choice with money.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Unexpectedly, I had been given money for going to college, a 'maintenance grant' of £1 a week for the year, a cheque for £40. It was the first cheque I had ever been given in my life and my inclination was to follow the agenda I previously lived by; I had never had much money in my own right so it was best I give it away so as not to let it cause jealousy. I did not know what I had been given it for. I talked to Mother and I said that since she paid out so much money for me weekly then I wanted her to have the money, since I was kept I should learn to do without. I had seen how little she got by on and I saw easing her financial discomfort as a reasonable thing to do. She was vehement about not wanting it, she made it seem that I was tempting her to steal. It would have been helpful if she had picked up on the word 'maintenance' and said 'That money has been given to you so you can buy all the A4 pads, a calculator, pencils and pens etc that you will need throughout the year', but she did not. She suggested that I put it in my account in the Yorkshire Penny Savings Bank, though I had no idea what sort of bad weather I might need to cover me against, or when it might happen. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">She then explained that from when I had returned 'for good' dad had increased the money he gave her by £1 per week and the budget and the food she served were not stretching very well. Half the £1 went to me in the form of pocket money anyway. I understood more then; dad was the one with the money and he was the one who should be increasing the household budget by £5 a week more, but he had not volunteered so far. What was more, he made it near-impossible to ask him about housekeeping money, even if part of what was being spoken of was about maths as much as it was about money. Since we were barred talk abut money, sex, politics or religion, little could be said. I thought that since we were not barred from talking about was maths then that was the way to ask dad directly for more money. He was numerate, unlike some men of his generation, though he strove to hide most signs of it. He knew that the more he hid what he knew the less we could expect of him in the way of understanding.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">So it was one dinner time, in between eating mouthfuls of food, I explained to dad what he was doing in figures he could not ignore and I said to him directly that he needed to give Mother £5 more each week if the household budget was to remain in balance. In the harsh artificial light of the overhead circular fluorescent tube I could not tell what colour dad's face turned, but if ever a face looked like a storm cloud then that was what his face looked like at that moment. What I did not realise at the time was I had the advantage of surprise, he simply expected everyone to obey the rules of conversation without him ever giving any explanation of anything. He did give Mother more for the housekeeping, probably half of what he <i>should</i> have given her, but still more than the £1 a week he had given whilst he silently knew, and denied to himself and others, that it was not enough.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">That said, I soon understood that the power of surprise can only be used once. With dad I was in the situation of being unable to pick my battles, he always had the advantage of setting my battles with him on his terms because he owned the parental house. In the longer term it was thinking like this that personally turned me off property ownership. I did not want to be that secretive and distant. When force and secrecy are the nearest there is to morality, and they hide behind a distant politeness, then that politeness creates a deferrence in others that becomes equally distancing. This was something I had dimly perceived from the life and routines I observed in the care home/boarding school, where even now I would find the handful of boys around the town who had attended that school where when we met we would puzzle over life now and life in the past that put us in that place. None of us had the forethought and courage to ask Social services directly why we were sent there, and to see what files they had kept on us.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The easiest cover for the necessity of secrecy was shared television watching. Much of what was considered 'family viewing' was the audio/visual equivalent of a reading age of around ten at best, which matched the newspapers we read every day. The more limited in intelligence the programmes were, the more their virtue and purpose became that we could form a consensus of opinion around them as a family. Secrecy meant that forming a consensus around how we saw each other was far less likely or possible; too much would have to be revealed. The more intelligent and argumentative the programme became the narrower the consensus that we could form around the points it raised. The best programmes for forming cheap agreement around were the beauty pageants like 'Miss World', where the programme makers made the sexism they exemplified seem inoffensive beyond belief, and it made the beauty industry, the selling of make up etc an instrument of world peace even with the beauty treatments pandering to white majoritism and being tested on animals. But we valued agreement much more often than we rejected a programme for dumb us down. Television unified us in a passive consensus which seemed to be a good thing in a world where we were afraid of disagreeing with each other. None of us had learned at that time how to cope with us all being complex and individuals. When differences separated us from each other we had to hide our differences, however awkward such open opacity became.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">As the household alien I felt that I was at my best when I watched Dr Who. For the first time I watched a whole season of episodes. I followed the arc of the story however, absurd it seemed, avidly. I felt dad's distant approval from across the room when I sensed that he knew that my watching the programme made me obviously happy. He let me watch it even though we all knew that his choice would have been some glossy high-budget low-on-continuity american drama where the point of the drama was the size of the cars and men were real men because they all carried guns about with them. The gun made the man. Dr Who was a different universe to all that, literally.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 3 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-3-what-alien-did-next.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-64675733839410048532022-09-22T03:58:00.002-07:002022-09-22T09:26:57.851-07:00Chapter 3 - What The Alien Did Next <div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">That summer of 1977 I was just days, weeks, away from never hearing again the dozen or more role calls and bells that rang each day that I used to respond to without question in care home/boarding school. I would never experience them again except as rather isolating memories of times that nobody else around me knew about. The old rules, bells, and triggers of the school were rapidly replaced by spoken calls to watch the television with the family, or to prepare the table for us all eating before Mother plated the food in the kitchen. Other calls were to help Mother strip beds of sheets and remake the beds, prepare for going shopping or going to the allotment. That I followed promptly is witness to how well the previous set of cues had worked. Where in the boarding school television was incidental to the eleven bells and roll calls a day, what television showed at any given moment was much more integrated into the schedules of the parental house. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I might well have known that if my parents had made sure I had money and time of my own then they would have been granting me greater choice about how to live. But, whether the routine was connected to employment, alcohol consumption, or running the house they were bound hand and foot to their own repetitive routines. If both my parents and I were bound by routines then there was one big difference between me and them. They had friends with whom they experienced something like temporary equality and shared respect as they met other adults through their routines. I had no friends yet, and I would not find any through following the new routines led by my parents. The people I met as I followed Mother around acknowledged me, but they always acknowledged her much more. Mother both wanted to use me for the strength I could give her and wanted to instill in me the line from 'the protestant work ethic', 'work hard and you will get what you want, you will be rewarded'. At the age of sixteen I did not know work would reward me from work that would leave me disappointed. What I dimly saw was that over the last five years I had been presented with many chances for choice and reward which rewarded others more than me, where I felt inclined to ignore those choices rather than embrace them. Sport as 'rewarding teamwork' was one such set of choices.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">That was how I accepted the little that I was given. I did not know that I was 'doing without' to no particular purpose. I did not miss the better choices and having more. I saw choice as the choice to be indifferent. With such a small amount of money of my own and my time mostly taken up around college work, or around family, it was a novelty when every so often I was found I had time to myself to explore how I might organise myself if I had even more time. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">It was liberty enough for me to have a key to the house and be given a second hand watch that worked and would not wear out in months like the last one had, so I now knew what the time was.With the new set up I could let myself in and out without my parents being gatekeepers for the house all the time, like the staff were in the care home/boarding school had been. I had been given my first watch out of necessity two years earlier when during the summer holiday Mother had gone into hospital for an operation at short notice for a fortnight and I had to take my sister and myself to the hospital where Mother was recovering. I needed the working watch because whilst I might have been able to read the clock on the platform of the railway station when we got off the train I still had to get back to the platform at the right time for the right train back to the parental house. As if it was meant only to cover the emergency, the watch proved so old that it wore out and was thrown away six months after I was given it. My parents could have got me a good watch the first time, but Mother's stay in hospital was arranged at such short notice and her ill health was such a surprise for all of us that they had done the right thing that fast to get Mother to the hospital. All preparations for me and my sister outside the operation was, quite literally, an afterthought.<br /><br />In the care home/boarding school I had poor physical coordination and rarely received any help with it, nor was it discussed in any coherent way with me. It was only towards the end of my time there that I learned how to fail in sport with good grace. Then I could fail more comfortably because I was leaving. All the time before that I was in a catch 22 situation of every time I tried harder to compete and be more adept in sort I always failed by an uncomfortable margin. And the level of discomfort made my trying harder even more uncomfortable. All the time I was a sports failure and uneasy about it. The failure put me ill at ease with other boys who either failed more gracefully or were natural winners. But I was not the only one to fail at sports, generally team sports create very few winners and the winners tend to be the same few all the time. After creating the winners the biggest category were the happy losers who occasionally won. I was in the last category, the unhappy losers. Some sporting types could use their unhappiness to make them better players whilst they rarely won. I had the wrong sort of unhappiness, the sort where being forced to compete became cumulatively irritating and depressing.<br /><br />Part of why I was to study electronics was because it was desk work under instruction but on my own. My coordination and level of comfort around others fitted the quiet and relative isolation of what I was learning which was a comfort to me after losing so often in sport, and feeling bad about losing, had left me unwilling to engage more. With the support I expected to get from the course I hoped to prove that I could do something sufficient that I might be accepted as competent at it by an employer. The more sporty boys from the school surely got far more sociable and rewarding training opportunities than I did. But that mattered less when their lives were continuing well away from mine. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Another example of the limits of my coordination, closer to home, was that dad trusted me to ride his bike safely but I was never allowed to learn how to repair the puncture when one of the tyres went flat. He would never share in/show me the process of taking off the back wheel, with the three gears on it, and putting it back on securely the same way. He was not going to teach/show me and there was nobody else to show me. I accepted being allowed to watch, but not do, after all much of my life already seemed like that. But it did little to give me confidence and improve my sense of coordination. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In one way it was enough that I could ride the bike. I was not like Mother who in another of her infamous 'never again ' stories talked about being a teenager and somehow falling off the bike and into a bed of nettles which she said that she was allergic to the stings of. She never got on a bike again. As with many such stories, nine tenths got missed out in her telling of the story, most of which we could not even guess at, like Where did it happen? How did she come to fall off the bike? Whose bike was it? And was that how she discovered she had an allergy to nettle stings? If that was not where she discovered this allergy then where and how did that happen? I always pictured the event happening on the road out her home village and a passing car frightened her in the worst possible place, against a bank of nettles in the heat of summer, with the nettles at maximum height whilst riding a bike her dad owned. But not being told the whys, hows and firm details was always the way with trauma, the result was safer to report with the details AWOL. Describing the process of what led up to the trauma was much more fraught, and risked diminishing the character of the person traumatised in the eyes of other people.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />Any hobby that I wanted to have where my family did not prepare it for me had to be within my capability and be cheap. It had to require little to no help from anyone else, and given the hoarder Mother was it had to take up very little space for me to be allowed to keep it without it impinging on space she controlled. The hobby had to work without me having friends too. Friendships required money and I had little. Any new hobby/friendship was also required to respect the secrecy that surrounded my past in the care home/boarding school because when I went there it was impossible to explain why I was there. And now I was out of the place then explaining why I used to go there made me sound like Mother where she talked about the immediate effect of the trauma but not the process that the trauma started from. The last reason for hobbies being cheap and antisocial was more practical and self-evident. In some households it is fine for children to bring other children into the house. It was wrong to do that in the parental house. Mother's hoarding would be as self evident to any guest/visitor as it was blind to us because we lived it.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">This left me little choice of how to use the time in which my parents left me to my own devices. One constructive choice was to join the local public library, which I did. I had been a member of the public library in the town where the care home/boarding school was for the last three years I was there. I regret now that I kept no record for my future self of what books I read back then. What I can say about my library borrowings whilst in the care home/boarding school was that I had no guide to follow as to what to borrow, and there were no school reading lists for me to draw inspiration from. Nor did I have friends in the school who read as much as I did who could act as a human reminder of what books I liked and why.One prompt to choose what to read was the films we watched on television, whether it was 'The Cruel sea' or 'To Sir With Love', or 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'. There must have been many other books adapted into films that were considered light adult reading that I was a bit too young for where I followed the prompt, regardless of the result. <br /><br />I liked reading grown up books that I guess grown ups read less because I saw my reading of them as badges I gave to myself as proof I was nearer being an adult when I was going to get a few other credits of my maturity. When I joined the library from the parental house I still had no guide as to what to read and I still kept no lists for future reference. One reason I kept no lists for future reference was my handwriting, which was done with my left hand and it looked like my Mother's hand writing. She despised her handwriting, even for simple shopping lists, and would do nothing to improve it to make it something she, and others, might despise less. My writing was more legible than hers, but I held a pen awkwardly and I needed somebody to tell me how to work on how I held a pen with less pressure. But it was not just that I did not have a mentor, I had never heard of the word 'mentoring'. Before I started the electronics course I wrote quite a lot but not lists for self reference in future, what I wrote were mostly letters to Mother from the care home/boarding school along with letters of thanks to distant relatives every New Year for the small Christmas gifts I had received from them. Dad pooh poohed those letters as I wrote them. I did not realise at the time he was disapproving of the relatives for them being Mother's relatives, as much as the gratitude with which I wrote.<br /><br />As interests and hobbies went I had the library books to read and return, and the seven inch singles that I had liked in the care home/boarding school too. I liked them because I could afford them and because they linked in with the weekly treat of watching 'Top Of the Pops'. I had not yet discovered the world of cassettes, cassette players and how time consuming it was to make recordings off the radio, though before the end of the year I would get that far. What found me more before the world of cassettes were the rituals around popular music, which moulded themselves around how my week went. It started with being Woolworth's every Tuesday lunch time when the new pop charts were announced, and when the staff noted down the new positions from BBC Radio 1 as they were broadcast I would overhear what she was copying down. Two days later at 7.30 pm there was 'Top Of The Pops' half an hour of chart based music to enjoy, culminating in the playing of the number one record, unless it was banned as some were that summer, so it got played over the credits that closed the show. By the weekend I would be browsing the small shopping tray at the side of the records dept for what singles were being sold cheap because they were going down the chart, or had left it. I could easily spend plenty of time there, apparently running an errand for Mother who always wanted something small for the parental house but extending my stay whilst lingering around the ex-chart singles box. Whatever the formal reason for being there I always lingered at the record department the longest.<br /><br />If I was there on a Tuesday lunchtime I could watch the staff as they rearranged the white letters in the grooves of the black board which they put high up on the wall to tell the public the top twenty singles and albums. There was a key difference between me following the music that went in and out of the charts that closely and the way that men, including dad, followed sport. Music and sport were both competitive popularity contests, but when music became less popular it did not disappear like yesterday's sportsman and his achievements did. Music would still be written about and the writings about it could still be found if anyone was determined enough to find them. Albums would reappear at random in second hand shops and other places well after leaving the place they were first sold as new. As I was soon to find out. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Whereas if a sportsman or a team became the bad news of the day once too often in short period of time, then they would all too easily cease to be the apt subject of conversation between drinkers who needed heroes. This bad news effect could happen because of their sporting performance, shameful acts in their private life being made public, or because their team's finances were going awry. Whatever the reason, the team becoming bad news reduced the testosterone levels that fuelled the chatter about the game, and changed the conversational habits of drinkers.<br /><br />The biggest record shop in town was called The Music Centre, it also sold record decks, needles, hi-fi, pre-recorded and blank cassettes and white goods. The white goods took up most of the space in the shop. They sold a lot of singles and also had a vast array of rock albums for sale, by artists that at that time were just names to me. Apart from their ex-chart singles which I made a beeline for, nearly all their stock was above my pocket money grade. But I had started to develop tastes and ideas that were more my own than the previous ideas I'd had. There were four music papers that were sold in W. H. Smiths. Before the end of 1977 I bought one every week, I started buying 'The Record Mirror' the most pop oriented paper of the titles available. I became much more informed via my second hand copy of the definitively useful reference book called 'The NME book of Rock'-edited by Nick Logan. It is still read and referred to today, decades after it was first published.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Through 'The NME book of Rock' I was gradually drawn towards the weekly magazine that was most oriented towards the albums that were released weekly, The New Musical Express. It was a newspaper about music where the point of the writing was that it was <i>meant</i> to to go over the reader's head, the literary equivalent of progressive rock. Often the writing and cartoons made a humour out of contempt and nihilism that seemed funny for no obvious reason. I already had a love of long words being used for their own sake, but still used with more precision than seemed apparent, the New Musical Express tapped into that grand style. Reading the New Musical Express every week made me feel like a more comfortable alien within the family. But to those who thought they knew me it probably made me even more alien.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">The stock of books in the library seemed mostly to have been originally published in the 1950's, with later reprints of the same material. Some of my earliest borrowings were the 'The Coarse Art of.... ' series by Micheal Green, of which there were eight books as of when I started reading them. They covered the subjects of rugby, sailing, acting, moving, sport, golf, drinking and cruising and they were to reading what the Carry On films were to film comedy. There was always plenty of broad humour in the books, and the humour was somewhat more sophisticated and better organised than what you might find in a red top newspaper, but it was not so far beyond the popular press as to seem too removed from popular culture. After that series, and also from the 1950's onward I discovered British and American Science Fiction. Within that genre there were plenty of authors to choose from in the library. From one author to the next, worlds seemed very flexible. Early on, and more by accident than my specific design, the publishers of the books became my guide. As I found different works and different authors published by the same publisher I became more aware of the breadth of the genre. If I was slow to see how some of the worlds I found in the books openly borrowed from the world that I lived in with all it's wars, sex, religion, and violence then the authors treated these ideas with much more imagination than ever my family allowed themselves and each other. And the cohesion of the family as a unit/ a dramatic theme was quite rare in these books, which was an escape for me. Tribalism and singular male adventurers were more the norm, with an exoticism that the cowboy books my dad liked could not even begin to match. When I was absorbed in books I felt much more secure than when I was in the world.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 4 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-4-lesser-social-life-of-alien.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-79820810657928816732022-09-22T03:55:00.006-07:002022-09-22T09:27:30.628-07:00Chapter 4 - The Lesser Social Life Of The Alien<div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The following is the measure of how much I was inattentive, and 'a slow developer'. The newsagent's shop where every Saturday Mother payed for the daily papers for the week was pokey, but amid gloom one week I found the pluck to ask if they wanted a paper delivery boy. The pay was pathetic, but for having initiated the conversation I was in no position to argue. financially, I was in the same position that I thought that many other sixteen year old boys were. We were treated as if we were younger than they were, but money had been available to us somehow. I was surprised when the owner of the shop said 'Yes' so promptly and offered me a trial straight away. I lasted three days on the job. On the first two of them I was given help and guidance. On the third day I was on my own. I was awake and presented myself at the crack of dawn, on dad's bike. The lad who was teaching me the round did the best he could in the inadequate time he was allowed to show me everything he could. The owner of the newsagent was not going to give me a second chance. I was bound to make a mistake on my first day on my own. So on the fourth day when I turned up he gave what I had earned in three days and told me to go home. I did not feel 'cheated' by being sent away so promptly. Nor did I feel as if I had let myself down, though I was disappointed to be rejected quite <i>that</i> soon. It was clear to me soon after that the trial had been set up to fail me. It was nearly as clear to me even later that if I had been accepted in the job and been able to do it, then it would not have been an achievement. What was least obvious to me was the newsagents embarrassment at anyone <i>asking</i> to deliver the papers, particularly somebody who was sixteen when it was typical that newspaper boys gave up the work for something more lucrative and purposeful at the age of fifteen, or younger. If I had known in full how highly the odds were stacked against me being able to train and do the job properly then I would have tempered my hopes and never asked to do it.<br /><br />I had been going to Mother's allotment with her for as long as she had an allotment. Originally when she took me it was to do some work whilst childminding me. For nearly as long I had been going she had let me do only certain limited tasks. The task she trusted me with most was mowing the paths either side and in the middle of her now two allotments with her old push mower. It was a job I enjoyed, but she liked me doing it because it combined maximum use of me with keeping me off the allotment itself. Mother and I both had poor coordination. Mother's way of adapting her poor coordination was to disguise it in how she planned and ran her allotment. Rows of different salad goods and vegetables looked straight on the plans that she made on paper every year, but always the rows were crooked in reality because her eyesight was like her writing, something she refused to get help with even when such help was free for the asking. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Both of my parents were born before both the National Health Service, and it's wartime predecessor, The Emergency Medical Service were created. They were born in times when self sufficiency was a matter of mistrustful pride. This pride worked best for it's owners when it made other people make mistakes that they could not recover from sooner than when the pride felled it's owner. This sequencing made the proud seem self-reliant, and their dependents somewhere between haphazard and helpless. For Mother her allotment was active, self evident, self-reliance in which she hid her refusal to get free the help that she mistrusted <i>because</i> it would have been free. With the pride of self reliance, help can never be free-it costs the proud their pride.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />The more benign way of seeing how Mother saw her allotment work would be that in the 1960's when singer-songwriters like Roy Orbison appeared, they not only wrote the songs they performed, they also arranged their own material. In the arrangement they made sure their voice was central to how the musicians were arranged to play around them. They made it so that they could always reproduce the arrangement of the song on stage if their voice was strong enough. If Mother was the singer, then the way she arranged her allotments, crooked rows or straight, was her song and I was one of very few very lowly backing musicians who were kept at a distance from her whilst she gave herself the central role.<br /><br />I could do more than she let me do. She kept me doing so little because she always thought I did not know a weed from a plant and would not look where I put my feet. I knew what was a plant was not by the crooked rows. But like the inadequate trail to be a newspaper boy any explanation she gave me turned into a self fulfilling prophecy where when she explained a task badly and I followed the instruction she disliked the result and chose to decline all further instruction. The pay off for her was keeping control, which made her feel secure. But then again one of her most repeated and more openly distrustful malapropisms was used every time she was given any sort of guide to how to use something. She would say 'Let me read the destructions here... ' as if they were going to be the reason the result came out different to what was expected. With a parent like that who needs enemies? Even now I maintain a garden, but it has no straight lines of plantings in it. Instead it has many fruitful near-wild patches which are all the more pleasant for how the wilderness balances off against the minimal maintenance that makes sense.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />As a pretend family we went on the town's annual pretend holiday every summer, including that summer. The Liberal Club one day family coach trip to Skegness was when men who overtly avoided their families for most of the year pretended to be with their family for the day and families tried to ignore how they were ignored by the male heads of family. When I was young enough to not understand these events I liked them because we went by steam train and I liked steam trains. I liked the sulphurous smoke they put out which was good for clearing my bad sinuses. The steam train stopped taking us when the local railway line was closed in 1968 and my bad sinuses remained unrecognised as a limit to my concentration until I was in my mid twenties. For now I was officially an awkward teenager with a past too obscure for it to be worth explaining in accurate detail.<br /><br />The coach journey was chaotic at the start as everybody assembled and heads were counted before departure. The journey was noisy but nearly fun and it took over an hour. The coach park was always about half a mile from the shops and the beachfront. Being part of the family on days out like these was something to endure. The organisation required seemed to take any sense of reward or rest out of the day. The men stopped pretending to be with their families when they got bored with the idea, which by a consensus that bordered on instinct/drive was when the men knew that there was a pub within walking distance of wherever they were. The women and children went in self sufficient family units, sandwiches and flask check, towel check, trunks/bathing suits check, beach toys check etc all bagged up and carried by the female head of household to the beach with children in tow. By age sixteen I was neither a creature of the pub nor a disciplined biddable sub-unit of the family. The best I could do was take a book with me and try to help and organise where I was allowed. I was not allowed to not be part of the day and the family, I might go into the arcades where the slot machines and pinball machines were and I was not allowed in such places either away or when I was nearer the parental house. My sister was allowed near them as long as everyone turned a blind eye that she went. That year I walked on my own to a beach nearby which had previously been a military firing range. I looked for military shells rather than sea shells, and found a nice one to take home. A few short years later army surplus shops would be places I would delight in going to for their cheapness, and for the durability of the goods they sold. Going back to the home town from Skegness on the coach, we were torn between knowing how tired we were after pretending to be happy all day, and wishing that we were somewhere, anywhere, else but where we were on the bus.<br /><br />When men went to pubs it was not that they barred women and children from going, more that women and children had to go to their own pub with their own money if they went at all. My cousins on Mother's side were older than me, of an age to legally drink. So it seemed friendly when Mother went to join Colin and Heather at a family friendly pub one summer evening. She took me, the alien/pretend human with her. Mother was the cousins' chaperone for the evening. Colin and I could talk about music a bit but his tastes were complex and those of an older teenager compared with mine and he had much more money for buying records than I had. But I liked the ballad of a single 'Wonderous Stories' that had been a hit that summer by progressive rock band Yes. When I found I had nothing to say to the company on my own I looked at the 'B' sides of the singles that were listed in the jukebox and paid my money. As Mother's air of false sophistication wore off through the evening the thread of the conversation lapsed into a silent dead end and still had not heard the track I had paid to hear. We left before the song played. But even that small loss was recognised and brought me recompense a year later, when Colin was clearing out his pile of back copies of the New Musical Express. Mother was on hand to receive them from her sister Alice on my behalf. The creative recycling which overfilled the house had finally rewarded me directly.<br /><br />To child-mind me further, and more consistently Mother made me rejoin the local St John Ambulance, where our shared membership became the means to other days out together, as we both went on duties for S.J.A.B. It should be obvious to the reader by now that whatever she did Mother was lonely, and when she joined groups she made me join too. My joining hid how her joining the group failed to make her an effective helper or a good team player and failed to reduce her loneliness. Only me being close by whilst Mother struggled to fit in reduced her loneliness. I may have been of marginally more practical use when I walked with her there and back. Where it all got complicated, almost icky, was that we fell into some odd trap where the body language we adopted around each other was more that of helpmate to each other than mother and son. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Members of S.J.A.B. did notice this, and tried to help me out of the boredom I felt for being around her so much. The organisers of S.J.A.B gave Mother a position of authority in which she was meant to act alone and be responsible for us all indirectly, but she did not have to benignly order other people about. That was something she was clearly bad at doing. After over ten years of duties in S.J.A.B. They made her 'Head of Stores'. That she joined S.J.A.B. to get away from anything that looked like a title and housework was beside the point, for staying around long enough she was bound to get some title/position of responsibility handed down to her. If she couldn't give orders and did not want to leave then 'Head of Stores' was the only choice left. It took some years before it became clear to me, and it saddened Mother, when I found that between my low boredom threshold, the flat hierarchy of the place and the half useful work we did, my only choice was to leave. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">As a substitute for St John Ambulance, for Mother's sake I subscribed to her public service values by giving blood twice a year. In the Town Hall Mother would escort me from the bed where I had given my pint to a chair near the tea and biscuits. But even there future trouble lurked, unseen. I met a man I would years later willingly, but often ineptly, have sex with. That first meeting with Manchester Al after giving blood and sharing the biscuits and tea with him proved to be an interesting counterpoint to how family had sliced and diced all that could be said about sex into how adultery was horrible, the shame of bastardy was well deserved by on whoever it fell upon, and both were private and invisible in society, like my homosexuality.<br /><br />Meanwhile the times seemed more innocent. I enjoyed being around Mother. But my favourite inactivity was reading on my own. Since British Science Fiction was part of my favoured reading that summer I got a particular dystopian title out of the library. it was sufficiently dystopian that I felt uncomfortable reading it in the parental house. I had to read it somewhere where I felt less watched and I did not have to worry about the time. I told Mother that I was going to see Gran and Grandad and she gave me sandwiches to take with me. My book was 'The Mind of Mr Soames', published in 1961 and written by Charles Main. I went off on dad's bike for seven miles to do what I told Mother I was going to do. When I saw Gran and Grandad I arrived between meals and drank tea with them, and did not admit to having the sandwiches. My grandparents were both in their mid to late seventies so their quietness together and low energy levels were quite restful. I stayed under an hour and left them. I took myself and the bike further along the river bank and simply read and read a lot more.<br /><br />It was an odd book. In its sideways take on the world it dealt with adolescence and showed the limits of good scientific intentions. It was also a variant on the Dr Frankenstein story. A thirty year old man who has never been awake is kept alive but in a coma. Without thinking like parents, scientists seek to wake him up. As they do this they have to predict his behaviour and the environment that would suit him most. Will he be like an infant because his brain development is starting from scratch? Or will he behave like the thirty year old that his physical body presents him as being? You can guess what happens. What surprised me was that without distractions I managed to read the whole book in one sitting without skipping a phrase or a sentence. Whilst I puzzled over some of the ideas in it I found the plot easy to follow, and I recognised the ideas the author had borrowed from other authors remarkably well. The scientists laboratory was a new and untested experimental space, and the boarding school/care home I'd been to was meant to be 'an experiment in schooling', it was easy to draw a line from the book, limited as it was, to my life. <br /><br /></span></div></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">I was never going to do what Mr Soames did, run amok among people who only belatedly realised how poorly they understood his developmental needs. But I knew a thing or two about the feelings and behaviour that are natural to an adolescent that are long held back and then misunderstood. I also thought I knew enough about people who act like they are in charge and think they are right who disallow others from thinking and doing differently. I was going to meet many people who were wrong and thought they were right in future.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 5 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-5-what-alien-did-after-that.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-23126924850861901452022-09-22T03:53:00.006-07:002022-09-22T09:28:01.240-07:00Chapter 5 - What The Alien Did After That<div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When I started college in September in some ways it seemed like a continuation of the boarding school, the class size, ten, was the same in both places. I was glad, though, that it proved to be a bigger leap forward than I first realised. Going to College full time meant finally having a sense of purpose. Finally I had teachers who actually needed me to learn what they presented, rather than have me passively accept being taught passivity, the way the boarding school had done. For the first time in my life there were exams that we had to aim to pass. I was an exception in one unfortunate way. Everybody else in the class had an employer who let them study as part of their training. I had no employer, and no job lined up. The Radio and Television Electronics class (R.E.T.V. class) was the main reason I was in the college. But my taking English Language and Maths mattered to me personally, even if my attending these courses was me doing catch up. The maths and english classes had the highest numbers attending. The R.E.T.V class required close study, along with lab work, so the class had smaller class numbers.<br /><br />The subject required the largest individual use of equipment oscilloscopes, voltmeters and other equipment for measuring voltage, amps, wattage, resistance, and strange units like farads. We had to have our own work spaces for assembling circuit boards with components, using solder and soldering irons. I spent half my time college week in that classroom learning from scratch about practical electronics. What John, the day boy, in the care home/boarding school had shown me, but not let me try, in his house over the previous three years was a help to me. But much of what I was presented with was new and hard to learn. The hardest lesson to learn was the sense of being at the bottom of the class, for having no employer and not being part of some longer term plan where I knew that what I learned would immediately be used and enhanced by who was paying for me to be there. But at another level it was a novel enough experience for me to have such a clear sense of the choice of being able to learn.<br /><br />Even without an employer to turn to, the R.E.T.V. course was the first vocational training I had offered. I enjoyed having text books to study closely and homework to do. It soon proved that doing my homework anywhere near the television, or in any room that was for simultaneous multiple use, was a nonstarter. I did my best homework in my room, far away from family and noise, even though I did not have a proper desk at which to spread out my work and books, the nearest there was to a desk was the shallow and small child's size desk that had been put in the room ten years ago for decoration. Eventually time in the library proved the best way to study. There I could not be called away on whatever family errand seemed more important to the caller than my studies. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />The care home/boarding school had avoided all preparation for me getting qualifications, including the basics of CSE's, I had to study Maths and English. This became where class size became an issue for me. The bigger the class numbers, the more I struggled to learn. The maths class was fifteen pupils. This was the class where, when I was late, I would apologise to the teacher and quite cheerfully say 'Better late than never' to which he would reply 'Better never late.... '. Mr Metcalfe was one of the first teachers to become personable to me, he would introduce me to many cultural ideas that were unrelated to Maths. The English Language class had twenty five pupils in it, and the female teacher was quite detached. There my problems centred around having to write a lot whilst I wrote with my left hand. The problem remained unrecognised by the teacher. With my left hand I held my pen awkwardly and squeezed it so hard that my hand would ache with holding the pen for any prolonged period of time. Also I covered what I wrote with my hand as I wrote more.<br /><br />The class that I struggled most in was Social Studies. No writing was done there, but it was a class that absolutely challenged my concentration. The biggest challenge was a physical one, getting the number of pupils required to attend the class into the relatively small classroom that was used for it. The second problem was the age range of the pupils who took the class, sixteen to the oldest pupils in the college. The final difficulty was structural; the class was more or less a one hour long debating society led by a teacher. Coherent debate was difficult to lead with that many pupils over such a broad age range.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">A lot of what we debated was about how we should behave and how we thought society ought to behave towards us. There was often a certain sharp edge to our debates, sharpened further by the more rebellious pupils in the room. With the age range being so broad, those weekly lessons were a substitute for the daily assemblies we had all endured in school in the past. But where weak and inclusive religious sentiment had overtly guided those assemblies the values that guided that class were secular and about getting us to agreeably live within the framework and means that the adults, police, teachers, and our parents, had set for us. They were about getting us to say what those boundaries were, as if by us saying them that proved that we agreed to them. Such reasoning often failed, with chaos being the result as the minority rebels led the debate. One lesson stood out for me over all the others, perhaps because it was the most simple of arguments. It started with the teacher asking us, auctioneer style, when we went to bed at home. He started at eight in the evening, went through eight twenty eight thirty etc and got to near eleven at night before the last boys put their hands up. Being younger, I was one of those who put his hand up earlier. I put my hand up when the teacher said nine. What that class taught me was how my honesty, if not literalness, for not knowing when to lie to big myself up, made me different to other pupils in ways that previously I did not appreciate. This was not necessarily bad, after all I doubted that those older boys, who lied with great confidence about when they went to bed, would not know for sure when their lies might rebound on them until the lie was found out. The aim of the class was to give us a sense of each other, and feel included. What made it's mark on me that day was how literal minded I was. I did not know when or how to tell a lie, and I did not know when telling a lie perhaps might get me out of avoidable difficulty.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The view my family had of electronics went no further than whether the on/off switch and the channel changer did what they wanted it to do when they pressed it. I was on my own with my attempt to learn what connected to the on/off button inside the box. I was the one to search in the summer for German audio via some of the less used television channels on the set, apparently a peculiarity of transmissions during hot weather. For all the curiosity the rest of my family allowed each other we might as well be not much more than human on/off switches with each other, but I knew we were capable of receiving stranger transmissions than the predicted ones. If the on/off button worked okay then it was best to avoid all unnecessary 'play' with the tuner, that too worked as a metaphor for not allowing each other to change, and not allowing external pressures to push change onto us. But, as I was finding with how I knew I had changed but 'my room' had not, change was something if you did not work to make work then it would shrink you. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">With hindsight, the family credulity towards electronics was amazing. I was happy for them to ask and me to explain, but the absurdity of some of the explanations they accepted did none of us any credit. Years earlier Mother had set her small radio to Radio 2 Medium Wave, rather the clearer signal on Long Wave because the BBC had changed what they broadcast. There was a 'whooshing' sound that came with the signal on medium wave, even when the radio was well tuned. I had not done enough research to know the proper answer, but she asked me what caused the whooshing noise. I said 'Because we are in a valley and the signal has to get over a hill', I chose to explain the whoosh as if it were like a wave beating against an obstruction, the local hills. But hills do contain magnetic fields which will obstruct analogue radio signals. Mother got an explanation that was both poetic and scientific at the same time, not that she cared about the qualities either explanation.<br /><br />My grandparents were technophobes as well. Though for having grown up and lived in the countryside, probably without domestic electricity when they were young they had better reasons than many for caring little about electrics and electronics. It was a pure chance when one autumn Saturday I was at their house for tea they said that a television repairman was coming later that afternoon. They could no longer watch BBC 1 on the set. The man arrived and they described the problem to them in full. I knew that they could have found BBC1 on the channel they had reserved for ITV but I could not tell them that since they were explaining it to the repair man and I was an accidental witness to, well, what was going to be a bogus sales pitch. He saw their age and saw the set, and set, and quickly saw that the set was a working antique. I forget his false technical explanation, but the effect was that they bought a new colour set off him, on the spot.When BBC1 could be found on the other other channel, were they interested enough in retuning the ITV channel to the BBC, and forgetting about ever ITV again, or buying a new set. Though sooner or later the old set may have gone wrong in such a way as replacement was inevitable. Presumably the old set was taken away by the repairman, and dismembered for the parts in it that were still serviceable. My grandparents found that they did not like BBC1 in colour and never grasped how to make an image black and white if it pleased the more. The pleated cloth in a loud pattern that once covered their old set which they removed for watching now covered the new set more or less permanently.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />Given how little I had in common I had with Bill and Marion, our neighbours from opposite us across the road, I got on surprisingly well with them. They were more mother's friends than they were mine. I saw them as Mother's friends more than mine, so I was surprised in October when I was in the parental house on my own and they saw me and invited me to have a cup of tea with them. They asked me how I was doing in college. As we chatted they casually suggested that I should apply for an apprenticeship in the factory where dad worked. Neither parent said much when I floated the idea with them. The nearest there was to a response was dad visibly appearing to be even less present in the room than he usually was for no obvious reason. The larger story about apprenticeships was not a hopeful one. It started with the unions, because if the unions were demoted then apprenticeships were surely binned. In the national news there were rumblings from the unions about claims for more money, and threats from the political right where if the right got what they wanted then they would 'smash the unions', destroying the once unionised jobs too. Without the right wing threat getting anywhere near 'taming the unions' there was already enough uncertainty around everything to do with paid work.<br /><br />Like the newspaper delivery job that was never really open to me I was surprised when I got an immediate response about the apprenticeship. I got a letter telling me of the time and date for an interview to attend, dad said nothing when he was told, but from the look on his face he was unimpressed. The building I went into was vast, grey and grubby, the office was surprisingly small. I felt dwarfed by the grim grey office I waited in, until I met the man who was to interview me. The boss was a man called Bob Rainsforth. He was the local fat cat/employment fixer. My parents did not tell me that they had known him for years or that their way of dealing with him was to be friendly with him to his face, but otherwise try to avoid him. To them he always had some big scheme to sell his audience that depended on other people's money, including them, but it always put him first. I half knew that he was dad's boss but not what sort of boss or person he was. My parents' silence was difficult to interpret, I went into the interview with nothing more than Bill and Marion's initial naive encouragement that I should ask. The interview would have been better described as a polite dismissal. I was summoned to ask about apprenticeships but his answer was always going to be 'There are no placements at present. Nobody knows when there might be apprenticeship places.'. The score after the interview was Snake Oil Salesman 1, Plucky Sixteen Year Old 0. I would see him many times over the next decade, but only towards the end of that time would I make sure I got the better end of my encounters with him.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />With Bob Rainsforth I was out of my depth to the point that I did not know by how much out of my depth I was. But what I was facing was such a deep and solid cynicism that it even denied that it was cynicism, and further insisted it was generosity. It refused to allow itself to be read for what it was. If my interviewer had the bigger picture on the local economy and I did not, then they were still cynics and any future they hinted at was going to be them than who they tried to sell it to.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">What made Marion and Bill encourage me to ask was that they were blow-in's, they were new to the town by about two years, but it was because they were blow-in that they still had hope. They had not been ground down to indifference by all the directionless and contradictory conversations people made seem normal . After the non-interview I thought I understood better why dad was so quiet, so opaque, about his work. His choices were to accept the word of a boss he utterly disbelieved in, find another job like the one he had in another town, or stare into the prospect of unemployment until he could pick up a similar job, with a boss he trusted more, in the same town. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">If I understood dad being silent about his uncertain work options, then beyond a rather possessive propriety, I still could not explain to myself the reasons for his silence in so many other areas of his life, his birth family, his not letting Mother how much he earned, and just how does a drinker structure his social drinking time? Which with dad was over twenty hours a week. It was galling, but no more galling than usual, when dad clammed up as I tried to talk to him after seeing Bob Rainsforth. Dad said that my main aim in seeking work should be good pay, which since it was so obvious hardly needed saying. He offered no figure on what 'good pay' might be. I knew from the one sight of Bob Rainsforth that he was a slippery figure, and that dad was right to mistrust him. But dad had no choice. I began to wonder if there was just one scale of slipperiness, and if there was where did Bob Rainsforth fit on it and where did dad fit? Might they be nearer each other, in how evasive they both were? I wanted a road map to guide me through the training and skills choices there were, dad was not giving me that. He avoided outright any reference to the variations in the terms and conditions of employment that he surely knew that I would be presented with. Nor did he quantify what low pay and high job insecurity were, or say why people might do such jobs.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When he said 'A good job is one that pays well' he even avoided saying that the job was that the pay might be good because the job was unionised, like his job was. But what I knew about his thinking about the unions add up about as well as the family budget had before I intervened on Mother's behalf at the dinner table. When they did a good job and got him the pay raise he approved of then he accepted it. But away from them he implied that he and others could have got a better pay rise without the help of the union. How that might have been done was never tested. The unions always stepped in and put a stop to dad's laissez faire fantasies. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The red top press was the height of shared reading in the parental house, as they were all over the town for that matter. What I knew about work, the unions and training prospects I had learned from the red top press. Dad was in a union; I was not; as far as I knew there was no union for sixteen year old's who were in college full time without an employer backing them for me to join. Dad said nothing about how he felt about being in a union, beyond hinting that he could have got a better pay deal by himself than they got for him without saying how he would have got it, which was dad bragging at his best. If he disagreed with what he read then he said nothing about how he felt. I only had the red top paper that he allowed across the threshold of the door to go on as to how he thought. There was more bluster between us, and then there was silence. What I took away from the disagreement I had with dad was that dad knew all along that there were no apprenticeships to be had. He also knew that employers who granted prompt interviews were likely to do so because rejecting would-be applicants without giving a reason was a straightforward task for them. If dad had spoken of what he knew he could have stopped me asking. What I wish I had realised sooner was that he never had any answers, never really cared, and disliked being actively helpful to anyone who was not one of his drinking mates or brother and sisters. But I was still too tender to swallow truths that were that ugly, whole.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />That argument was a rare example of discovering through attempted engagement with him how little dad wanted to say about himself to us. Mostly he wanted to pass through our lives as if he were some closed book we were not meant to know existed, lest we try to open it. My being logical was all I had in an unfair situation, where he knew his stonewalling was always going to make him the winner in any attempted discussion, however logical I was. If I tried to say I no longer cared about what I was trying to discuss then he would say 'Then why did you raise the subject with me ?' leaving me nowhere to retreat to. Dad knew all that and made sure he was not going to help me understand better, any more than Bob Rainsforth would ever be genuinely helpful unless there was something more that I did not know about in it for him. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />My best way out of dad's stonewalling as parenting and contributing to family life became music, and music based radio. This meant listening to BBC Radio 1. Before Christmas I had my first portable radio/cassette recorder. With it I could retreat from the decor, and discover in my room what previously I could only pursue in the public space of the record section of Woolworth's and in The Music Centre. With my new sounds at the top of the parental house I could temporarily shut out the stonewalling that was going on downstairs. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I was given my first radio at the age of thirteen, a small pocket AM radio. Thereafter I'd had different radios and even a vertical 'pop-up-toaster-style' record player that played 7" singles for use in the care home/boarding school. They seemed to get easily lost or broken in the to and fro between the care home/boarding school and the parental house, neither of which seemed like settled places. That I was indifferent to them, because they seemed cheap to me, hindered my preserving them for longer usage. On the new radio/cassette recorder I listened a lot to BBC Radio 1, but also to the regional stations on FM where in the evenings there were shows that were sort of 'Terry Wogan for teenagers+better music'. With Wogan the music was filler for his banter, on the shows I listened to neither was filler; the talk and music were a combined package. At weekends the music programmes played some of the heavier and longer pieces of popular music, made for and mostly consumed by youths a few years older than me. I was not yet ready for my 'heavy metal' phase, though like most teenage phases it would arrive in good time.<br /><br />At the suggestion of the maths teacher Mr Metcalfe I also listened to Radio 4 for the first time in my life. One of their comedy programmes was called 'The Burkiss Way' and it was a sort of Goon Show for the 1970's. No pun could be too strained, no voice was too odd to be used, no joke was too tired to be re-framed by the team of writers and performers in some new way, where the age of the joke determined how long the punchline took to arrive. The older the joke was the more delayed the punchline became. E.g the suggestion that Sophocles was the brother of John Cleese, or Q-where did Tonto get his mortgage from? A-The Lone Arranger. A lot of the humour was taken up with showing up the absurdities and pretensions of television which made it unlike most of BBC Radio 4's other comedy output at the time. Listening to the programme was a triple win to me. I learned more about satire, learnt more about current affairs, and the programme gave me the comfort of being able to laugh at things that previously I would have seemed absurdly serious where I needed to see the absurdity to see why they were taken so seriously.<br /><br />One of my favourite jokes from the programme was one actor shouting 'Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me' to which the reply was 'Noel Gordon!'. She was the queen bee, the unmoved mover, in the highly popular but badly acted soap opera that was 'Crossroads'. In the Crossroads motel she ruled over shaky sets, wooden dialogue, and the telephone ringing at odd times mid-conversation to abruptly end a scene with a mix of authority and resignation that had to be watched to be believed. I saw it most nights it was on because that programme was one that Mother liked so much that she took it at face value, so we all had to like it with her. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />The radio also gave me partial respite from the most unhealthy routine of the week, Saturday afternoons with dad. Saturday afternoons had been the same for the last seven or eight years. When dad married in 1960, right through to 1969, he worked every Saturday morning he was in the parental house. In 1969 the factory ended the fixed Saturday morning shift. This gave dad and his workmates time to wash and preen themselves after breakfast on Saturday mornings so they could meet up at one of their houses, often dad's and be in the pub from the moment it opened to the moment they stopped serving. They all got drunk every week, without fail. Dad returned to the parental house, and to his chair and turned on the sport, and let himself go into auto-pilot, and be completely inattentive of everything except the channel the television was on. When I was far away in the care home/boarding school for effectively half that eight years and I did not think about what I was missing. I did not know how safe I was, well away from that routine. And maybe without me away from the house the routine might have seemed a little less disturbing, with more room in the house. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />By 1977 we all knew how much we could not say, even to ourselves, the repeated horrors every week of dad being drunk and unapproachable, and his occupying the centre of the room. Mother made a virtue of the necessity of getting out of his way. She prepared early, and left to collect shopping lists for the two pensioners she shopped for, went shopping for them us, and for her widower next door neighbour, seven people in all. She took me with her to keep us occupied too. My sister had friends she spent time with. Shopping for seven people and juggling four lists in different shops and stalls was quite some displacement activity with which to forget about where dad was and what he's doing, but it worked. Shopping delivered by 1.30 pm we had enough time to escape to the allotment with the vegetable matter for the compost. Up till recently I had gone with her to the allotment, but from that autumn I did not go to the allotment with her in the afternoon, I stayed in my room and listened 'The Burkiss Way on the radio, played my singles on the Dansette record player, read my latest library book or did more homework.<br /><br />By 3.30 pm Mother would return to the parental house from the allotment and prep the Saturday night fry we always had. I would be called down to set the table and put margarine or butter on white sliced pan loaf. Dad had butter on his bread, we had margarine on ours. Meanwhile dad turned up the volume on the television sound up to screen out all the activity going on behind his chair. By four o'clock the food was being plated in the kitchen and we had to be in our places. Always I had to be in my place first, dad second, my younger sister third and Mother who served us our individual plates last. Without her having the most mobility among us the meal would have been impossible. But her maximum mobility also made her the only one who could get anything that was away from the table for us whilst we were in our fixed paces. It would have been easy to see her as 'jumpy' around dad who was at the table and now looking at his steak and chips as if to say 'What is this? I don't want it.'. The television would still be loud from where he had turned the volume up before. A series of grunts, groans and crowd noises would come from behind dad's head as the wrestlers on World of Sport vocally and physically got to grips with each other and the audience booed the bad guy for cheating out of sight of the ref. If radio gives listeners good pictures then the picture I got from behind dad's head with it's high volume audio track and my proximity to a man who would have been better off sleeping off his hangover in a quiet place became a regular form of torture to me. When I did see the pictures rather than just hear them it was worse. Men in trunks being tactile looked homo-erotic to me and unknown to everyone in my family, if not the whole world, my apparent lack of machismo meant that I was already drawn towards that direction.<br /><br />Every week that I was there dad would want to get out of his hard backed chair early, barely having attempted to start on the weekly steak that Mother insisted was his by rights, as if we had to put him on a pedestal and giving him expensive foods whilst we had cheaper foods was the best way to do it. He would make my sister get out so that he could get out and take his near-full plate and his plate of bread with him. As he left he would always say that he would enjoy the steak in a sandwich with the bread later. But what always happened was that the cat would come along and sniff the food, he would tease it and eventually offer the steak to the cat, in the kitchen. This was the kindest and most approachable he ever was to the cat. I forget what happened to the bread and butter. Mother never said what she thought of putting dad on the pedestal he apparently deserved to be put on, and his making pet food of her offering. Who knows? She might have been quietly happy for the cat, though in her rules cat food came out of tins. As for me I felt annoyed at the repetition of privilege-as-farce every week. But then nobody in the family knew how weird I felt from the wrestling coming from behind the back of his head.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />The television channel would be changed to BBC 1 for the news followed by the cartoons, which was when we were allowed to leave the table because we would have finished eating and cleaned our plate with a slice of the pan loaf I had put margarine on. The unease that I felt for being trapped in the corner with no escape from the noise would dissipate as I watched 'The Pink Panther' cartoon, which was six minutes of reliable tightly edited surrealism. My favourite episode was the one where he hoovered the room which was pink like him and then hoovered himself until there was just his hand that waved the viewer goodbye as it got sucked into the hoover extension. Then came the cosmic pantomime that was Dr Who, it had the sense of humour and sense of good and evil that I could follow without having to worry about where it was going.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">At the time I never coined the key questions in my head. What did Mother <i>think</i> when she was buying the steak from the butcher's stall? Did she find herself picturing the cat whilst making the purchase? She surely knew that the steak was going to be given to the cat whoever she told herself and the butcher it was for. What did she think, beyond 'I want to be out of this house fast' when she was preparing the steak every Saturday lunchtime, for it to be cooked to tender in a very slow oven throughout the afternoon? What I knew most was how much my sister and I were ruled by Mother's hatred of food waste. We ate what she put in front of us at least partly out of a fear of her. What I felt at the meal table was outrage at the open double standard of the behaviour between my parents compared with the consistency of gratitude and empty plate expected of me. <br /><br />Christmas and New Year made minimal impact on me. When college stopped I followed Mother around as she instructed, whilst on my own in my room explored the delights of the seasonal Radio 1 schedule, including my first exposure to John Peel's Forgotten Fifty, the fifty best songs of that year as chosen by Peel, including songs voted for by postcards listeners sent in to the programme. There was some progressive rock there, a lot of pop and plenty of reggae to open my ears wider with. That would also be when I first heard Pink Floyd properly, with the song 'Pigs' from their album 'Animals' which would later feed well into my first discovery of the writings of George Orwell.<br /><br />What most startling to me that season of goodwill was the sense of inferiority I felt when I realised how much I was somebody to be bought presents for, rather than a person who was choosing what to buy other people. I was now old enough to clearly recognise the lack of imagination involved when people bought me socks. Perhaps I should have been more glad that I did not return the lack of imagination with something equally cliched. Christmas was when passivity towards each other and 'the event' stood in most for goodwill to all. If dad seemed a little more broody than expected then we took it that he set the distance he was from us and if he wanted to be more immediate then it was up to him. If we had taken his mood as a sign that he felt his job was not as secure as it might have been assumed to be then there was nothing we could do or say about it. We all knew he was not as indestructible as the Pink Panther, who week after week survived everything. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">None of us could begin to imagine what lay beyond the cliff edge where the sign said 'danger mass male unemployment ahead, do not go any further'.</span> </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 6 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-6-alien-loses-pound-and-finds.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #757575; font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html" style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">here</a><span style="color: #757575; font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">.</span> </p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-65613969777900574502022-09-22T03:51:00.004-07:002022-09-22T09:28:30.829-07:00Chapter 6 - The Alien Loses A Pound And Finds A Sixpence<div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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 <i>of </i>sex.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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 <i>and</i> 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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. <br /><br />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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. <br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /></span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">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.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 7 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-7-alien-discovers-unemployment.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-86122333907307723412022-09-22T03:49:00.002-07:002022-09-22T09:29:07.324-07:00Chapter 7 - The Alien Discovers Unemployment, Sex And Travel<div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.<br /><br />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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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, <i>and</i> 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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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'. </span></div></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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'. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.<br /><br />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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.<br /><br />Hitching lifts was fun, but it also gave me purpose. I <i>needed</i> 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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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'. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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<i> </i>was<i> </i>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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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, <i>and </i>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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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'.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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 <i>but</i> <i>for</i> <i>employers.</i> 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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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. </span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">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.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please read Chapter 8 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-8-alien-does-christmas.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-79251542700616839302022-09-22T03:46:00.003-07:002022-09-22T08:46:21.163-07:00Chapter 8 - The Alien Does Christmas<div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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-<wbr></wbr>was-what-happened approach made any threats she endured seem worse than all the other non-events she misremembered. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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....</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />Mother may have thought differently about her getting the magazines for me when in the new year I decided that I <i>must</i> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 '<i>That</i> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">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.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please read Chapter 9 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-9-shrunken-alien-pt-1.html">here</a>. </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-18397172933030526042022-09-22T03:44:00.004-07:002022-09-22T09:30:07.807-07:00Chapter 9 - The Shrunken Alien Pt 1<div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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 <span style="color: #202122; text-align: left;">Shughie McFee</span><span face="sans-serif" style="color: #202122; text-align: left;"> </span><span style="color: #202122; text-align: left;">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.</span> 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.</span></div></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The audience were at their most reassured when they <i>collectively</i> 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.</span></div></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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 <i>could</i> 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. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. <wbr></wbr>He knew that I would leave the room rather than watch it with him. At the time I lived in a bubble of never being drunk. I could never reflect how much drinkers who get drunk exist so completely in their own bubble, to the point where they think that wherever they are the space they are in is exclusively theirs. Had I observed that much I would have thought harder about staying in the parental house as long as I did. The nearest I came to realising how useless I was to reason with a drunk was my reflection on a line in The Beatles song 'With a Little Help from my Friends'. There was a line in the song that went 'What do you see when you turn out the light?/I can't tell you but I know it is mine.' where the drunk was the one who was in the dark and I was one of the people in the dark owned by the drunk whatever I might have thought otherwise.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />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.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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 .</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">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'.</span></div><div></div></div></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 10 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-10-shrunken-alien-pt-2.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575; font-family: georgia;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html" style="font-family: georgia;">here</a><span style="color: #757575; font-family: georgia;">.</span> </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-38965525196314034022022-09-22T03:41:00.006-07:002022-09-22T09:30:43.237-07:00Chapter 10 - The Shrunken Alien Pt 2<div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Having no idea what to expect, I arrived no better dressed than before on the Monday, on time, as instructed. The shop was quiet. I sat around most of the morning waiting to be told and shown what to do. I was told very little and shown nothing. Alan had two employees, they were both men who were about ten years older than me who were dressed in jeans and work shirts when they arrived. I made tea for them. They both drove, and together they fitted the carpets for Alan who had three vehicles, his own car and two vans. All three of them are married. With no customers in the shop they played out being Jack-the-lad figures. The first thing that I could not understand was why when married men met and liked each other they normalised the pretence that they were all single, and were all God's gift to women. I could imagine alcohol as a transformative ingredient there, but those three were sober, and supposedly working. I was finding out how much being, male, single, supposedly celibate, and sleeping in the store room in my parent's house had left me seriously underinformed about my own gender. The reason the two carpet fitters were there was to be briefed about their work for the week, where they had to work together to carry around the carpets that they fitted, amongst other heavy tasks.<br /><br />In the afternoon the shop was quiet. It seemed like it was shut. After lunch Alan asked me to sit in the back room and wait for him. For all I knew he might have locked the door and put the 'shut' sign up. That Monday afternoon he seduced me. I was sitting down in the only chair in the room when he came in, wishing I had brought a book to read to pass the time more usefully. He stood in front of me and kept a sociable distance from me. When he started talking it was normal conversation, I tried to maintain my side of it and I thought I was doing okay. But as we talked he moved and stood closer, almost standing over me. I can see the rugby training that had gone into the shape of his thighs through the tightness of his trousers. Having got inside my personal space, and I had not moved the chair back he made an about turn in the conversation so quietly that it was an about turn did not register with me. In neutral tones he talked about Japanese manufacturing, then he said 'I wonder what country of manufacture my underpants are. Shall we find out?'. He gets very close to me, still sitting in the chair and gets me to open his flies and investigate, until I am confronted with his erection. It was quite small but very firm. I tried to suck it, because that was how I had been sexually programmed. It is what I liked doing when cottaging. He stopped me and insisted that I wank him off whilst he stood over me. We said nothing whilst I did this for him. When he reached the end he wiped up the mess with a tissue that he had in his pocket all along.<br /><br />With variations, this is how most afternoons went in the shop for the next six months. Some time between three and five in the afternoon he came into the back of the shop where he made me wait for him until I was bored with my own passivity, and the distance he put me at from him. Sometimes he lied down to enjoy it more, but the routine was the same; he had the blood supply to the part in question, I was the one who was good with my hands. No talking was allowed. It spoiled his concentration on what my hands were meant to be doing. I didn't keep count at the time, but I estimate now that I wanked him off over a hundred times in that back room within the period of my placement. My sexual services were the first reason for him accepting me as a trainee, the rest of me was scared and cack-handed beyond use.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">One time he got a scared middle aged woman in the back of the shop for what I learnt much later would be called 'a zipless fuck', sex fully clothed apart from his open fly that went from start to finish so fast that only he got anything out of it. He passed her on to me for me to do the same but I didn't do it. I was physically unable to. Even if I were able to perform, I would still have been thoroughly put off by the grubbiness of the circumstances. Instead I said some kind words to her and gently bade her put her clothes back on, as if we had both been misused. Sometimes he thought that what turned me on was to experience a wall of human muscle because he thought I had fantasies of that sort of physical pressure against me. I did have those fantasies, but to me they were safe fantasies. In real life I was never going to meet men that shape, and if one appeared then the chances were none that he would make my fantasy real. The reality he clumsily presented mentally shut me down, rather than sexual aroused me as he hoped. We were both surprised at how I could not react how he expected me to. Part of my negative reaction was because with the sex we were always as near fully clothed as possible. The shop was too exposed a place for him to be comfortable with either of us being naked. He has a wife, she might ring and insist on calling by. Alan also disliked me taking any sexual initiative with him. If I made to discreetly touch him sexually he would gently seek to stop me, though he has no objection to taking my had and putting in on his crotch whilst he is driving.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />The worst of this was less about how mechanical, opaque, and unexplainable Alan made sex seem, and how selfish he made himself with all that, bad as that was, nor was it that the bad sex made me nervous around Alan and made me not want to do the work I was there to do, but the worst was in how when he pushed me to sexual behaviour with him, emotionally it echoed Mother's relationship with dad. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the parental household Mother's relationship to dad was one of passivity. Dad's relationship to Mother is one of opaque control. He kept his private life private from her. He with-held whatever information he could about his money and himself. He with-held from Mother what happened when he drank, how much he spent on drink, who his drinking mates were, and much more. Though to be honest about this some of the with-holding was about how little notice he took of what he was doing at time, and some of it was natural amnesia caused by the drink itself. Dad kept divisions between his birth family, his work mates and the family he'd made, and these divisions affected the family worst, because as family we were all meant to put each other before non-family. Dad put weaker family links before supposedly stronger family links. We sometimes felt as if we were last in his life. Historically Mother endured so-called 'low self esteem' as she tried to make plain for family what dad made opaque. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In my placement Alan was like dad, to me being like Mother. My place in the carpet fitting team was undermined before it was ever attempted. The two carpet fitters were getting no money to train me, the boss took the money, and around the two carpet fitters I felt spare and useless. I lifted and carried etc, but I was scared of knives. In the parental house Dad would sharpen the only carving knife in the house after which Mother would refuse to use it after because it was sharp and therefore dangerous. So their conflict continued. Fitting carpets against walls requires cutting them with a Stanley knife. I always shirked from using knives whilst out with the lads until the last day of the placement where I did use a knife once. By then it is too late. I had long failed the teamwork test. The non-existent supervision of the Y.O.P's scheme was meant to make youths fail themselves so adults could get on and undermine each other.<br /><br />Then there was how I failed the clothing test. I had no pairs of jeans and work shirts fit for going out carpet fitting in. Mother was still making me wear out the school type trousers that she had bought cheap some time ago. Now I was seventeen, and they were much too tight for them to be either comfortable, or practical for work. One day before lunch I bent over to pick a roll of carpet up and the arse of my trousers split, top to bottom. From near the waist to the crotch came completely undone. It was a rare moment of inclusive laughter amid the haunted silences and open opportunities I seemed to not want. It was as if I were Charles Hawtrey in 'Carry On Carpet Fitting'. I was glad to go to the parental house to change. It was a clear sign to Mother that I needed better fitting trousers, she was still choosing my clothes for me. <br /><br />The worst long term effect of the placement was that for several years after I left the scheme I could not stop myself seeing Alan as a friend. I knew he was mostly motivated by sex and that he was controlling during sex. I have no idea now how I came to see being controlled as being friendship. Partly it was that it was sex with clothes on in the business premises of the owner, so the sexual activity felt like some humourless parody of sex. I did not know what to call what we did. For the most part it felt like a repeated series of frozen moments whilst we were both fully clothed. It was repetitive and most unerotic. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Many might say that sex in public toilets was unerotic and impersonal. But if randomness is all you are offered in life then you accept it. There, in the public toilets, the men arrived to randomly find each other, and left when they had had enough. They met there because their idea of sex could not find room in the properties they lived in. Whatever else they were, the men in the toilets were not stuck or frozen with each other the way I felt in the back room of the business premises of Wilson Carpets. In the toilets we could walk away, though to walk away and be able to tell the truth of where we'd been and why we were there would have taken both a lot more courage than we had and the abandonment of a huge amount of taboo, that the taboos would not fall at all easily was the problem.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">At one point during the placement I was stuck in the parental house on a Saturday afternoon. Because of the daily wanking Alan off to order midweek I had become too depressed to go to the allotments with Mother and pretend to guard her whilst she worked. I was on the settee whilst dad had the sport on too loud for him to be asleep whilst it was on. I don't know where the urge or idea came from but I walked into the kitchen and put the blunt carving knife to my wrist and stood there and started trying to cry but I could not force the sense of grief and loss well enough to make it come to the surface. Dad heard the noise of me attempting to cry and walked into the kitchen with sound from the sport still on too loud to talk over. He took the knife handle from my grip and put the knife away in the drawer and walked back to his chair and went back to his armchair to the sound/sight of the sport. He said nothing throughout the whole scene. He said nothing afterwards either. I felt empty and dry. I felt unable to articulate how I felt even if there were somebody who said they would listen; there was nobody to listen to me.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Dad did not betray it at the time, but my weak suicide attempt made some lasting impact on him. Some time in the first half of 1979 he bought me a 405 line black and white television set that I could watch in my room. Up to a point I could watch whatever I wanted on my own in that spare room. If I happened to be in the parental house when the Saturday sport was on I need no longer be quite so tortured by how repetitive dad's tastes in entertainment were. Though the wrestling/afternoon meal routine remained intact for years to come. I gave myself further choice by finally buying that music centre I had promised myself and it did make a difference to hear the separation between channels when I set the speakers apart. The electrics in my room were primitive, one wire from a mains socket from the floor below went into a socket at the back of my room. That was it. It took some sorting out to get everything connected safely but I had enough confidence to fix that. I was not going to ask dad for help.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />Having my own television had it's down side. One evening when Mother was out dad called me down from my room to see something on the local news magazine programme on television. When I looked I saw an enormous black bodybuilder who was in the television studio in just a pair of pale trunks. He was literally dwarfing the two regular male presenters who are camping up their own relative weakness compared with him because either that was their authentic reaction to him and the show was live, or because they had been told to do that by their studio manager. They had revealed the bodybuilders presence in the studio early in the programme. It was clear that they were going to get as much mileage out of him being in the studio as they could get. Even as I was in the sight of my dad the sight of this figure went straight to my groin. I felt I compelled to immediately go upstairs, turn my television on and watch the big black man flexing on my own and give myself immediate sexual relief. Dad was mildly perplexed that I left him that fast and that I seemed to behave so strangely with him. But he had no idea what sexual buttons he was directly pressing by inviting me to watch that sort of television.<br /><br />Neither of us asked the other what they thought about this big black bodybuilder filling the screen. If I had asked dad what he thought of the figure he would have given me a compartmentalised answer, based on the compartment he put me in. Since I had never been an adult with him his answer would not be an adult answer. My thoughts about the bodybuilder would have returned to experiencing a progressive loss of personal space and the sheer size of the man. The close ups of the body of the body builder filled the screen and set off those thoughts with me. The interlocking flexing of different muscle groups were potent similes for how everybody except me agreed with each other about how the personal space I had should be used for their advantage rather than mine. Each flex illustrated my lack of choice and how, nothing as I was, I should admire other people. Poverty of personal space reaped it's own punishment; rule by and from other people. That the sexual reaction was both taboo and my first reaction was sexual was simply the icing on the cake for people who wanted to keep me boxed in.<br /></span></div></div></div></div></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">The most polite and agreeable thing I could have said to dad was the obvious; that the body builder had an extra-ordinary physical presence which was clear even through the limits of the television screen. What I could not say was that the body builder's presence through the screen seemed stronger to each of us than the sense of presence that we offered each other in person.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 11 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-11-political-alien.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-54099415575581480672022-09-22T03:39:00.005-07:002022-09-22T09:31:23.564-07:00Chapter 11 - The Political Alien<div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In 1979 I had no choice but to go into the world whilst following the only rules I knew, which were that money, politics, sex, and religion were never to be discussed anyone live in front of me. The reason given for the rule was that people might be offended by any disagreement they had to accept. The loopholes in the rule was that the subjects were allowed to exist as the long as they were not discussed, and they could be mentioned on television and in print, as long as the consumer of the view kept what he had read to themselves. That meant I was banned from seeking good advice on how sex should be negotiated for, for it to be wholesome and healthy. The nearest I got to advice I thought was good was when Woody Allen was asked on BBC television if sex was dirty he replied 'If it is good, yes.'. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Alan Wilson was not the first person to coerce me into un consensual sex. That dishonour lay with two boys in the boarding school who's actions six years earlier, in 1973, I could neither forget nor remember with any comfort. The memory of what they did brought with it too much pain and misunderstanding for me to cope with. What they did was horrible. After they were found out and I was separated from them the matter was declared over. But however much the boarding school/care home said it was over for them, with me the memory of it was a red hot burning ember that was not losing any of it's heat in any hurry. It hurt me and would hurt me for a long while yet.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />To the boarding school/care home I appeared to not be hurt by what they did. Soon it seemed as if the event had never happened. But to appear unhurt I had to learn to lead a life where my feelings were divorced from my words and actions. My body and mind had to split off from each other for me to cope. If this made me a masochist and further made me poorly physically coordinated, then there were a lot of us like that in the school. Our masochism was some sort of shared school 'normal'. It was only when we left that we were seen as utterly abnormal compared with better coordinated and educated children who went to normal schools. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">After leaving I occasionally met a few of the boys who had gone to the same school in the town after they left. We all left the school with worse wounds than the parental wounds we went in with. We all seemed to be frightened of the people we were meant to be. Adam Blaine was a nervous wreck who had no energy. Jon Cronshaw was polite company in small doses but not long for this world for physical health reasons. I endured a depression that was going to last for decades and would require the work of half a dozen therapists, sequentially, for it to be rooted out and made manageable. When Adam Jon and I met we met because of our shared pasts but tried to live in the present, where still we could not do right for us all having 'the wrong past'. We were all outsiders, when we were angry and openly upset as sometimes happened because all three of us were 'thin skinned', we became outsiders towards each other.<br /><br />If by following the parental house rules I had so comprehensively bungled the idea of choice with sex then how badly could I misunderstand politics? 1979 was a good year to find out. In March the Labour government fell because of a vote of no confidence in it's dying days. Though it should have gone to the country six to nine months earlier than it did, whilst there was still some energy in it's message. But that it didn't was proof of it's paralysis. That said, the earlier it went the fitter for re-election it would have appeared to be. I saw some of the election television debates. Labour sounded <i>exhausted </i>the Tories were alarmingly slick and prescriptive. Oddly I was given the vote even though I was only seventeen. The card came through the letterbox and there in front of me was the choice of who to vote for.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The town's MP was called Marcus Kimball, I read his name in letters sent to the local press that requested that he protect the jobs in this factory or that work place, which was in imminent danger of mass redundancies. He only ever responded in the 'I can't do anything' line of reasoning. He made the local press an echo chamber in which we heard nothing more than our own words and concerns fed back to us. Though I liked to read the reviews in it of the latest play put on by The Theatre Club in the arts section. At least with The Theatre Club people saw them. Our MP may as well have been invisible, declared officially missing. He could be dead except that if he died there would be change; the next invisible nonentity would have to be voted in. It would be some time before I heard the term 'rotten borough' to describe a parliamentary constituency where the sitting MP does as little as possible to represent the people living in it because the borough was in the hands of a party or family who practically owned the voting process and misrepresented/disenfranchised many who lived in the constituency through the MP's indifference towards them. Our town was the nearest anyone could experience to life in a modern rotten borough. We could vote, but the man who always got returned as 'our MP' had no interest in us.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Mother was doing the ironing when with the same naivety that I had once asked 'Mother what does 'left dress' mean in a pair of trousers?' I asked Mother who she voted for. When I asked her about the instruction in trousers she was embarrassed at the question but answered it, when I asked her about how or why to vote she was embarrassed and gave me a non-answer. Her reply was brief and gnomic, 'I vote for Napoleon.', as if to say 'I am not telling you who I vote for; I don't even admit to myself who I vote for.'. Her response could have had a certain playfulness, she did not reject outright who to vote for and why. She could have described the place of the town in the constituency but she didn't. She always had an admiration of all things French and so made obscure references to the second French republic of December 1848. There the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III, was elected as French president and later installed himself by military force as emperor for the duration of that republic. What Mother meant by the phrase 'I vote for Napoleon' if she had expressed it was 'I vote with the majority. Whatever that majority votes for I vote for too. I believe in majoritarianism.'. That was how Napoleon III made votes work for him until he found he did not need voters any longer.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />The town I lived in was an exception to the constituency it was part of. The constituency covered an area of land of mostly rural and military use. The farmers had their landed interests and there were five air bases where the RAF had occupied land that they had bought in the 1930's within a twenty mile radius. The town was the most concentrated mass of voters within the constituency, but it was isolated for being so urban when the rest of the constituency was so rural. The constituency had returned the same Conservative member since Winston Churchill had resigned as Prime Minister but remained an MP, and Anthony Eden had been made Prime Minister after Churchill, 1956. Marcus Kimball was elected in a by-election and he made an art form out of avoiding the concerns of his electorate from the start of his first term as MP. The election of 1979 was going to be his last term as an MP before he was going to officially return to what he had spent most of his time on in the last twenty years, his interests in rural affairs, hunting and animal welfare.<br /><br />After listening to Mother I voted, but not for the candidate who always won. I did the opposite of what Mother did and started a long run of voting for candidates who never won but their parties continued to put candidates up whoever else won, thus proving the right of the public to a candidate rather than narrowing voter choice. I voted for who and what I could believe in rather than put my lot in with whatever majority was going which I always felt outside of. I instinctively mistrusted the majoritarianism that Mother attached herself to. I both voted left and dressed to the left. Mother was not impressed with the only poster ever to appear on my bedroom wall which had a black and white picture of Margaret Thatcher with sharpened molars, underneath it declared 'Margaret Thatcher; Britain's Nuclear Threat'.<br /><br />Like my interest in many other subjects, my engagement with the politics of nuclear disarmament came first and most effectively via television. There were several scientific and social documentaries on BBC 2. My favourite was 'Horizon' because of how efficient and informative it was. It was fifty minutes long, the length of a school lesson. It usually had a voice over by actor Paul Vaughan to clarify the scientific argument being portrayed in the film and it always edited the footage it used very well. It was quite cheap to make, but it put a premium on intelligent logical explanation. 'Horizon' looked thoroughly but calmly at what would happen if the defence via the threat of mutually assured destruction broke down. It looked at what would happen if one side disbelieved that the other side would strike back faster if under the duress of unstable domestic and international politics they pressed their nuclear button anyway.<br /><br />The programme was horrific, but it could never be anything other than horrific. The 'Horizon' documentary calmly went as near to the hysteria of the banned BBC film 'The War Game' (1965) as any filmmaker had dared to attempt with a new Conservative government in power. It might well have been that the prospect of a scientifically measured mass destruction fed into, and confirmed, my already quite strong sense of having an undiagnosed depression anger and hysteria from all the bad sex that I seemingly could not stop myself from wanting/accepting. I would not be the first or the last to be secretly disabled, even as I tried to protest, if that was the case. But unlike the secretive bad sex the possession of nuclear weapons and the cold war were public issues that were real and tangible. Nuclear weapons were surely something about which it was both allowed and necessary to show some collective concern about, much more than the private vices of one individual. I thought I could do something about nuclear weapons, though what the most useful thing was that I could do was debatable. Debate was healthy because it was open and open-ness was much better than secrecy. As a cause it got me nearer meeting new people closer to my own age with very much more liberal and articulate convictions and ideas than my family had, those convictions from new friends gave me the sense that there was something I could do, which half cheered me up.<br /><br />Nuclear weapons were a hot issue in the UK of the 1980's, which was still living out The Cold War. But from the moment that nuclear weapons had been sited in the UK by Prime Minister Anthony Eden in 1956 they had been the cause of mass protest. That protest was derailed and superseded by protests against the Vietnam war in the late 1960's. Even after the Americans had retreated from Vietnam in 1975 CND did not recover it's former membership numbers. Nor did nuclear weapons appear in the election campaigns of the different parties in 1979. What put nuclear weapons back on the political agenda was the discovery in December 1979, seven months after the election of Mrs Thatcher, that the previous Labour administration had quietly recommissioned the next generation of Nuclear weapons the previous December without the matter being aired in the House of Commons. The discovery of this decision enraged a lot of people for two reasons. Firstly they were angry at the hidden decision that they did not want secretly being made for them. Secondly they were angry at the then present Tory government who wanted the weapons, like previous Tory administrations had, but who could now make Labour seem partially responsible for what was Tory policy all along. Thus people became angry at how politics made all the political parties seem alike, and all Conservative. It felt like a moment predicted by George Orwell, at the end of 'Animal farm' 'The farm animals looked at the humans and at the pigs and at the humans again and could not tell which was which'.<br /><br />But people are not farm animals, and from the time that the secret decision by the former Labour administration was revealed, along with announcement of moving the goals of the policy forward to the UK paying more for less control over the weapons, the decision's former secrecy roused many to anger and boosted National CND numbers by hundreds every week, giving new life to small local branches of CND the length and breadth of Britain.<br /><br />Grace Slick of psychedelic folk/blues band Jefferson Airplane is one of many people who is credited with being the first to say 'If you can remember the 60's then you weren't there.', with reference to the drug culture that encouraged engagement with the experimental new music of the period. The drugs also discouraged all clear recollection of why they were enjoyable after they had been collectively consumed. I could make a similar statement about how the decision making process of the local branch of CND was formed in the town. I no longer remember how my personal disbelief in the protective shield effect of nuclear weapons connected with the similar beliefs held by local people in the town. Music had something to do with it. In 1979 The Glastonbury Festival was revived, after being a festival in 1970 and 1971 and falling into abeyance thereafter. The first Glastonbury CND Festival was held in 1981, in this new format the festival raised funds for CND, raised CND's national profile, and made the festival the annual got-to weekend mini-break event for the youthful members of the many newly opened small town CND groups. All movements and ideas need a calendar and a peak experience once a year to renew faith in the idea, with Glastonbury, small town CND groups found their focus, CND worked through the music business, and the musicians and the cause created their annual peak event well outside the inevitable London protests, which a lot of regional groups only selectively attended.<br /><br />The main reason I have now forgotten much about how my local CND was formed was less because of recreational drugs, and more because of sexuality. I was gay and closeted. I was practically half a person all the time I was in it, when nearly everyone else had a partner and was assumed to be heterosexual. With that assumption assumed they were presumed to be living the fullness of that life. The strange obviousness of me not having any girlfriend and showing no indication of wanting one, much less thinking how to want a girlfriend made me seem openly incomplete. The sense of incompleteness was multiplied by my being secretary of CND because nobody else wanted the job. Officer-ships had to be fulfilled if we were to have an operational bank account. But when it came to doing the work I had no prior experience and did not know how to ask others who shared our aims and beliefs for the right help.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In theory my literate liberal and leftist friends should have helped me more as secretary, and helped me out of the closet, so I could be a better CND secretary. But for all that they might have recognised my hidden side, they knew nothing about how to help somebody out of 'being the closet'. What they were up against how locally, in practice but not publicised, was homosexuality as a domain had already been claimed by patriarchal and often creepy married men on the make for serial adultery. With no declaration about it and them usually drunk they went looking for sex and covertly found each other in public toilets in which they saw the sex they got as not just a temporary comfort, but something nearer a virtual currency in their imagination. The local analogue version of bit-coin. These married men made homosexuality publicly mean permission for gay sex for them with whoever they wanted, outside of marriage because of their belief that 'gay sex did not count as heterosexual adultery', rather than the alternative belief that was rarely articulated that promiscuity was not necessarily a given with homosexuality and a healthy freely chosen and publicly respected monogamy between men should be very much possible if they made themselves companionable for each other.<br /><br />It was my fate for my sexuality to have to be hidden. With that fate I was to not be in a relationship and I was to lack the ease of conviction that others who shared my leftist politics seemed to have. For them CND was only the latest organisation they had joined. For me it was my first. And yet for all the inequality of experience I did not give up. CND gave me a social life away from what I had to hide away from even to myself. We had meetings in the historic building that was The Quaker Meeting House, where the local Quakers both supported and joined us. We discussed what we believed, what we had to do to prove what we believed to others, and in the business section of our meetings how we might raise the funds to further the campaign given that we were a financially poor/ideas rich organisation. These meetings with the Quakers were my first introduction to Christianity in my own right as an adult, after going to church as a child with Gran a decade earlier. Many of us lived on benefits and the organisation had very little seed money with which to grow.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">One of the several paradoxes we lived with was about the effects of hustling the locals for small amounts of money in a friendly way from local people. Many people gave to us because of who we were more than what we believed. The more they gave the more we were reminded of how like the locals we were, rather than us being the exceptions we wanted to be and how agnostic most people were about our improbably grand aims. To people who gave money to CND it was a small amount of money on an each way bet against Armageddon. For us we were all giving our belief, our time and money and we were not going to get any of it back if we were wrong.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />It might seem absurd and mildly surreal for a small group of people, never more than twenty and barely more than a quorum, to meet every two weeks if not more often for several years to agree to campaign together against something that they were incapable of stopping either by themselves or in conjunction with others, but the wish to campaign was also a wish to combine forces with other groups in the region like ours. One thing I gained from CND was to feel less confined by the town I lived in. Too many of the people I knew felt affirmed by their confinement to the town because of how little money they had and repeated lack of choice in how it was spent. Living alongside them made me feel like we were all actors in a soap opera with a rather circular script. My sense of life alongside them depended on me trying to see beyond the repeats in script that reassured other people without alarming them. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Accepting the CND script of recognising the threat of nuclear weapons in order to want the threat to be abolished was a way of looking as far outside of ourselves and outside of the town as any of us could look. Perhaps for my being closeted and gay, and having the hope of being free of my invisibility because of my sexuality then I had more faith than some in the local CND who were settled and heterosexual. I placed greater hope in there being life elsewhere for me than they needed to, given how many that supported us were in a couple.<br /><br />In summer 1981 we went with many of the region's CND groups on a coach to London to join the big protest at a national CND rally. The nearer we got to the central site of the protest the more of us there were, and the more anonymous we seemed. And yet we knew that our intentions were to be part of a larger number, because we thought big numbers mattered to the government we were protesting against. I remember our group walking with many others from the same region in front and behind into a tunnel where only some of us saw the surveillance camera filming us as we passed towards the protest. In our protest we felt subject to the secret state, a state that we could only make guesses about. None of us knew where going on the march might lead us. But the idea of the camera looking at us as we used public transport stirred up strong feelings of mistrust.<br /><br />I was as unknowing and unclear about the drugs culture as I was about heterosexuality, and both affected the local CND more than I knew. My take on drugs was very distant and second hand. It came to me most through the records I bought, where the musicians took recreational drugs to make the music and I thought I could hear chord sequences where the drugs had created their effect even though I was listening to them whilst clean and sober. It felt natural to lie down and close my eyes when I listened to Pink Floyd's 'Echoes', if only to avoid the visuals of the storeroom/bedroom that I was playing 'Echoes' in, which were distracting from the music. There was a little more to be understood, second hand, about recreational drugs from reading the myth-making rock journalism about the famous trio of 1960's 'acid casualties', Syd Barret, Peter Green, and Brian Wilson. But two of them would eventually recover from their former distress sufficient to record and perform live again, and the third was always more celebrated the more mythologised accounts of him became. Stories of Syd Barret should more accurately be read as cautionary tales against taking large amounts of hallucinogenic drugs, particularly whilst touring.<br /><br />With the local drug scene and CND the linkage was about who among us liked going to the pub after meetings because the pub was where the dealer would sell a little cannabis or something more powerful to whoever was in the know. CND social activities were good cover for their sales. It was impossible to know what to say when I found out much later what the people concerned kept from me at the time. I could have said something about infiltration being not from government but from illicit capitalism but I didn't, by then I was 'out' and finally understood the appeal of illicit activities from the hindsight of no longer being forced to use public toilets to find sexual partners. 'Wise too late for my wisdom to be useful' was my overall response. Selling drugs was like doing magic tricks, it relied on the majority that saw it not recognising it for what it was and being both ignorant and impressed with how it was done. Like the Grace Slick quote I started with here, recognition excluded the sense of participation.<br /><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Two years after the election the local Conservative Party announced to popular indifference that our MP, Marcus Kimball, was going to stand down, as if we did not know he was going. The obvious local response was 'Oh, is he still alive?' which was calmer than the graffiti on a rail bridge over a road in the town that appeared in 1979 where the anonymous quote was 'Slit your own throat-Vote Tory'. The graffiti was promptly refined to be a criticism of the voting system rather than the Tories when somebody removed the last word of the quote to make it 'Slit Your Own Throat-Vote.' That graphitti stayed there for over a decade. In the announcement they also named his successor, a man called Edward Leigh. Both Kimball and Leigh came from the wealthiest families in the county, both represented the ideals of the landed gentry far better than the hopes of the working man, or more to the point with the declining fortunes of the town, the family man who was looking for work. But where Kimball had perfected the art of detachment from his constituents, Leigh was something of a high profile campaigner, albeit on a different stage. He got himself publicly known for being important in The Coalition for Peace Through Security, a pro-nuclear weapons pro-USA pro-NATO campaign group which was started by a few wealthy people who had access to the media to counter the popular success of the CND message.<br /><br />There was a strong reaction across the UK against the increasing dependency on American values. Many UK citizens and a fair swathe of the press disbelieved that 'nuclear weapons made the country stronger' when America's finger was the one closest to nuclear trigger, not that locally we were capable of the high profile campaign that the Greenham Common women put up. The idea of an independent British nuclear deterrent was openly mocked. I had been mocking that idea for a couple of years but I did not have the media access Edward Leigh aspired to. The presentation of this man as the constituency's next MP was the catalyst for us to up our game. Late in the spring of 1982 we had a whole week of meetings around the town with different speakers taking on different aspects of what we campaigned against. The week culminated with us showing in the town hall the film that had become legendary for it having been banned from national broadcast on BBC 1 television in 1965 'The War Game'. It showed what the effects of a nuclear bomb dropping on England would be like for ordinary people and it did not stint on showing the effects and making them seem personal to the individual. I watched the film with the public and soon learned why it was banned. It portrayed a world where wealth and prosperity, and therefore the social class system, were utterly destroyed for an extremely long time.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Governments govern by maintaining and controlling the public's aspirations to prosperity and wealth; showing a world where the government are beyond woefully under prepared by what has dropped from the skies, where they are extremely coercive of the few civilian population who are left alive, and showing a government who to rule at all, indeed to stay alive, have to hide in deep underground bunkers was the worst public relations humanly possible. I think I joked at the time that Harold Wilson got the film banned for it's possible effect on the market for housing and mortgages.<br /><br />I'd like to say that however much I was opposed to the purchase of more nuclear weapons and the UK's continued membership of NATO I tried to accept that there was some logic behind Edward Leigh's arguments. But I disagreed. The Conservative Party were the party of first-past-the-post in elections, and they overtly wanted to be the-first-to-use-the-bomb in fighting wars. Much of their reputation relied on them winning narrow victories where history buried the alternative opposition scenarios. For being around so long Conservatives acted as if they were the inheritors of the principle of the divine rights of kings, only their principle was the divine right of the Conservative Party, to be in government. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">It was out of their belief that only they could govern that they felt Britain needed to be first (well third or fourth) to own a weapon that was so destructive that it could not be used, that it was also expensive and complex to keep. That as a government they had ceded so much control of to America proved that they were openly against the autonomy of the UK in it's own right as well as it being anti-libertarian because their idea of government was about the few deciding for the many, and the many being told as little as possible about it.<br /><br />Edward Leigh was going to become our MP less because the local public wanted him to be and more because that was what his patrician family had bred and schooled him to do. He went to six public schools and a continental finishing school, he was their gift to the county and the country. His choice of party was inevitable because he was from a first-past-the-post family. I believed then as now in the more difficult politics of forming coalitions and achieving consensus through open debate, and of redistributing wealth downwards. I may have had some self interest in the idea of redistribution towards me for my having so little in life relative to others, and for having endured my non-education. Even if I'd had a lot more and been better educated I would still believe in redistribution downwards.<br /><br /></span></div></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Ultimately I believed that however much it might be made to seem so, wealth and might were not right simply because they said they shouted the loudest and drowned out every other voice that might reach the ears of the many in the process.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 12 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-12-alien-recounts-his-many.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-70351723673691916172022-09-22T03:37:00.003-07:002022-09-22T09:32:00.289-07:00Chapter 12 - The Alien Recounts His Many Divisions<div style="text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I was not in the carpet shop for most of the last month that I was meant to be 'being trained to fit carpets', a training for which I showed no interest or aptitude. Alan sent me away on unofficial leave because after five months he had had enough of me being neither use nor ornament to him. The carpet fitters went back to the fluent self sufficiency they had before my arrival. The money Alan got for 'training' me was worth more to him for me not being around than if I was around. Given the awkwardness with which I did not fit in I felt better for being released too. If any of them thought that the Y.O.P's scheme was grossly mis-designed, as well they might, then what might resist realising was how they played their part in it's mis-design. The best part was that by the end of July when I reached my last day, and I had to go in and make my formal goodbyes, the break made them sound more sincere than they probably were. I had left enough good will with the shop for my goodbyes to be genuinely well received.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">On the Monday after the Y.O.P's course ended the first thing I did was to fill in the forms to sign on. I expected to be unemployed for some time, as the catch 22 of 'lack of experience' went ahead of me and stopped me applying for jobs. The second thing I did was visit the Labour Exchange where I was given a job application form to fill in straight away where they said I stood a chance of getting the job because the employer was not asking for prior experience. The job was as shelf stacker in the cheapest supermarket in town, Kwik Save. If there was a better job for which I did not need experience to apply, that staff knew about, then I did not know what it was. Nobody spoke about the first-come-first-serve character of how the inexperienced and unemployed found the jobs they could apply for, which if they were not the best jobs they were what was available at the time of asking. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I spent one week on the dole. Half way through the week I was interviewed by the manager of Kwik Save. I was offered the post of 'stock assistant' a short two hours later, starting the following Monday. I was unemployed for so short of time my claim hardly seemed worth pursuing. I had no sense of reward for filling in my new UB40, licking the edges to seal it, and delivering it to the DSS. All I had done with Kwik Save was fill in a form and sound credible as a would-be employee when interviewed in person.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Mother's response was interesting. She, like dad, was apt to say to me 'Get a job; any job.', as if job applications were like lottery tickets and winning job applications were like winning lottery tickets, though the size of the prize may be unpredictable. They were uninterested in the details I had to go through to get the job, presumably because the process bore no similarity to what it was like when they were eighteen and applying for jobs. Mother was still doing her cash in hand job for the local second hand shop, where second hand cookers and fridges were brought in, cleaned and sold to benefits claimants who got grants to replace white goods they had, that had stopped working. She must have seen a larger than usual turnover of goods in the last six months, as ever larger scales of unemployment took a hold of the town and more people went on benefits they said they did not want but found themselves claiming. I never knew what she thought about her role in this new reduced local economy that had made her job of minding the shop and cleaning the cookers seem so vital. Dad was signing on and he must surely have felt irritated every time he asked how much he had worked in the last fortnight, when clearly there was no work to be had for men of his experience and expectation. If he had done any work then it was like the money he kept for drinking. It was his secret to keep from the government and from his family. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The job of stacking the shelves and cleaning the floors in a supermarket required the applicant to have one head, the right number of limbs, and those limbs and head were in all the proper places. I had that much, along with a civil tongue in my head for guiding customers to goods they could not find because we had moved them, which was a small but vital bonus. Only a person who was unfussy and in need would apply to be paid to do an activity so basic and repetitive and I was both. My application was never meant to be seen as a career move. But there was still muted talk in the family of me 'having a career', not that they could quote examples of other youths, or other parents who set their offspring on a clear career path. I don't know where they got such talk from, possibly the redtop newspapers. Careers had not been invented when my parents had started work. My parents had worked, both paid and unpaid work, rather than 'had careers'. Careers were for the staff of the careers office, but not for the youths who they summoned onto meetings for the youths to be divided by being selected for strange non-training schemes. How I might have a career when nobody in the family had ever had one before me, and whilst many of the hierarchies that might once have made a career seem viable were slowly collapsing in front of us, was a mystery to me.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">If my supermarket job was a lesser lottery ticket, as Mother suggested, then surely I was still okay. The next job could only be better, and first jobs are comparable with first rungs on a ladder. Many first rungs seem the same, the higher rungs are where the differences in personal growth seem clearer. Looking at employers was no help at the time. Employers competed with each other and were defensive or unnaturally neutral in their language towards applicants and would-be employees, as if to say to them 'We have very little choice, so you are going to have even less choice'. In this atmosphere all talk of mental health was taboo. Any mention of the subject, however neutral and however much it was not about the person speaking, was seen as proof of personal weakness. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Over the two years of waiting to join the jobs market proper I felt that a lot had changed for me. I had endured the substitution of my first attempted career path, radio and electronics repairs, twice for half-baked training courses in two skills that I never wanted where the government money to train me was the driver. I had discovered gay sex, and discovered new and unquantifiable levels of secrecy with sex that it would take me years to figure out how to unpick. In the social life that I could acknowledge I enjoyed being in The Theatre Club where I felt my acceptance most when the old joke about 'those with small parts' was used. I was now getting those small roles to act. I had taken a serious interest in not-quite-local radio where the quality of the music mattered and the different disc jockeys could be engaging enough for listeners to write to them, which I did and they played the music that I requested. The music they played took me into a world of my own when I played it, well away from my family with whom agreements were often supported by half-guesses and deliberately avoiding asking, I felt relief. I had voted in the May national and local elections and I had started to engage with local politics via my latest hobby horse/belief, CND. There finding fellow believers in the same radical politics was difficult, but that difficulty did not stop me trying, and hoping that I would find the right shared space for belief in change.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I was still caught in some sort of paradox about what to put on job application forms about my schooling, and what to say when I suspected that in any normal school qualifications passed were normal and I had none. As it was I took to the policy of 'tell the truth and shame the Devil', with job applications. If an employer was genuinely ashamed of schooling on my job application then I did not want to be employed by the Devil anyway. If the Devil made work for idle hands then he would probably cheat the workers of their wages. I still wished that I could talk honestly about the school I came from with somebody other than other pupils from the school, and my honesty be taken at face value with some sort of affirmation.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Finally the job put me front and square in front of Mother's mix of snobbery, thrift, and indifference. I saw first hand the double mindedness that was part of her when I saw how she liked the cheap supermarket for getting her shopping from but she disliked how her thrift was indirectly related to how much I was paid. Me working that cheaply for her good was 'the wrong sort of thrift' for her.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />My homosexuality was in line with the profile of homosexual activity in the town. It was visible for anyone who knew where to look for it but invisible to those who wanted to pretend that it did not exist. I had to pretend to be among the 'it does not exist' majority to acknowledge-and be part of-the secretive and marginalised minority. But there was a strange affirmation for me in the large pile of music papers, most of them back copies of the New Musical Express. Many of the cartoons bypassed the usual barriers between the 'it does not exist' majority and the expressed the hopes of the marginalized minority. There was one particular cartoon in one of the music magazines which commented on how opaque the silence around homosexual behaviour was. I cut it out and kept for years the same way I had cut out and kept the poetry column in 'The Daily Mirror', which started after Robert Maxwell took it over and selected from publications he owned to put a more literary spin on what was otherwise a very lowbrow paper.<br /><br />In this cartoon there was a slim young man in a small run down high rise flat. He lay face down in quiet despair after submitting to a 'sexually dominant' carrot with a mean closed face on it, he was some sort of business man. The carrot was giving a dismissive parting greeting to the distressed and exhausted youth as he left the flat. I found myself drawn to that cartoon without ever once recognising that for all the differences between that scene and what I had gone through in the carpet shop, the dismissals I had endured were exactly like those of the wretched young man in the cartoon. Reading the cartoon was like me looking in a mirror at a parallel world and recognising my face in it, even though I was actually there. For all that, what I valued most was the recognition of humour and absurdity of sexual secrecy in the cartoon.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My more acceptable and sociable energies were applied to my work, moving stock, stacking shelves and sweeping floors mechanically for forty hours a week on a rota that allowed me a mix of midweek days off, being there early, staying late, and working two Saturday's a month. The simplicity of the job mopped up most of my energies with remarkable efficiency. I still got depressed at different times, and with the taboo on talk about mental health I was disallowed from understanding why depression happened. Work warned me instead, I was put on the first warning twice. Both times I have no idea how I recovered. I was thankful that I only needed the first warning, of three, both times. The pressures that I could not give a name to came from how badly my family were getting along and they made me feel unequal to my fellow workers, who I apparently was co-equal with. Nowadays people admit to depression and because of that know that it has causes and means of being relieved. If the relief is applied then the symptoms lift like morning mists. Back then the morning mist became a red mist, an anger that it took defensive action to turn away from. I don't know what I would have done if I'd have been given the sack, I am thankful work relations never came to that.<br /><br />One aspect of the job that pleased me was that I had to use a Stanley knife every day to cut holes in the cardboard boxes so that the customers could get the food into their trolleys. In the previous training I had experienced a trauma and awkwardness with knives where to nearly the last day I refused to use the Stanley knife that belonged to the lads to cut carpets as part of the team because I saw the knife as their property, and I felt frozen out, not part of any team, when I was with them. I now seemed to have quite good physical co-ordination and confidence with Stanley knives on cardboard boxes in spite of my being left handed. The staff also got first dibs on food that was edible but the packaging was damaged so it could not be put out for sale. Mother liked that side of the job and happily accepted food items I brought home which saved her having to buy them at full price. I was also happier than dad ever was for her to know how much I was paid, even though she said that we were not to talk about money. I did not need the secrecy that he obviously felt he needed to maintain his higher social status. I was happier than he ever could be with my lower social status work too.<br /><br />Like dad did with his birth family, the family he had created, and his drinking mates, I mostly kept dividers between the different interests. It rarely happened that the several different worlds that I kept apart from each other collided. And the sex in public toilets was that highly cordoned off that I denied to myself that I did it. When I was in work and Mother came into the shop and I was stacking shelves I was sociable as we passed the time of day not just because of who we were to each other, but because the shop liked positive customer/staff relations. She was the same when I went into the shop she served in, though in some ways in our places of work we felt more at ease than the parental home left us. The life in the toilets was creepy, but creepy in a way that resisted all labels, including 'creepy'. It was not the first time I'd been in a place that resisted apt and unfavourable labels. Part of the creepiness was an inability to comment on the place because the place suggested a nameless and immersive submissiveness to it. If it could have been pointed out to me that I was 'playing hide and seek from a fuller idea of relationships' I would have agreed but nobody dared suggest that. If they had I would also point out that I was living as a dependent in the parental house, which practically forbade choice. There were at least two 'regulars', people who when we met in the toilets we recognised each other by each other's face and the sound of our walk and that recognition became a non-verbal contract, almost a relationship, between us. The use of names would have destroyed the sense of immersion and sense of a contract, just as much as my describing to myself the social mechanics of that world at the time would have hollowed out the character out of the activity.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Imagine my reaction when one of these regulars saw me at work taking big boxes of washing powder off a pallet and stacking them on a shelf. I stopped and pretended that he was a customer as he made comments about looking forward to when he would see me next. I could not stop him from talking to me. What horrified me was how rapidly his body language changed on seeing me. It went from 'supermarket neutral' to 'creepy' instantly. I will pass on the irony of him trying to talk dirty whilst I was putting out washing powder, in favour of mentioning the querying looks I got from some of the other staff, people who I counted as friends who knew nothing of the other side of my life, as this man nearly 'outed' me in front of them. Another time there was just me and the manager doing overtime and as the work was due to stop and he had to shut down/lock up etc. he said 'I am going into the office to change my trousers before we leave' which put me in a real tailspin because of the memory of Alan. I felt ill and froze as I asked myself Is this a 'come on' line? Am I returning to Y.O.P's territory again?'. I was wrong, he was just changing his trousers. Whether it was Mother, Mr Creepy, or the boss, each event proved to me how separate these worlds were, imaginatively, from each other, but also how close these worlds were to each other physically, via me. Each world claimed a part of me, and each part claimed a restricted recognition, and refused to recognise the parts that the other worlds claimed on me.<br /><br />Since I was one person on my own in my room, another to Mother and family, another in work, another when the body language and expectations disallowed elsewhere were allowed free reign in the silence of the toilets, another politically against the wishes of my family, and yet another who plays small roles in amateur theatre, then there was no obvious reason to add one more identity to the list, the singular identity of being 'a Christian'. The team of staff who worked on the shop floor of Kwik Save consisted of two or three full time workers and up to half a dozen part time workers. The part timers worked every Thursday and Friday evening, and some Saturdays. Never before had I been part of a team where we were all so close in age. Previously when I was with boys near my age, we did not like the scheme which rather affected how we saw each other. In Kwik Save we seemed much more to be there by choice. and like them I was living with my parents but they had all had relatively normal childhoods, and they were still at school on the exams conveyor belt, studying for 'A' levels. For the first time I could compare my families and parents with a normal family relatively safely.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />The two part timers I liked most were Keith and Phil. Both were younger than me but saw no difference in the age gap. Both lived in single parent families, though Phil's father was only recently separated prior to a full divorce coming through. Phil and Keith were both members of the newly formed mixed denomination Christian Youth Group who met in the rooms of the local Unitarian Church. If I was one of the older ones there then we all lived with our parents and were all looking for a safe and proper life outside of our families, who saw our safety as being dependent on them. I was one of the few in the group with non-Christian parents and a non-Christian background. For all the difference that it made I was made just as welcome as if I had the Christian background that they might well have preferred me to have to fit in more exactly. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Phil and Keith fell away from the youth group early on, as the pressure they felt for them taking several 'A' levels in school increased. I stayed in the Christian Youth fellowship for most of ten years, about four years longer than I 'should have'. It seemed a calm place to stay for somebody who lacked drive and a sense of direction. Given my age advantage I should have led the group more in studies and exercises than I did, or what I drew from the studies. I regret how I idled there.<br /><br />In the September of 1979 I signed up to a non-vocational night class in college, on local history. It was run by an enthusiast and it was mildly educational. Before I started the course I imagined that my town was like many towns across the country, that there was a template for all these small towns where the local history was similar but different to other market towns. I expected the interest in the course to come from the variations where my town differed from others. What I was taught was how localism as expressed through local history resisted comparison to other places, resisted all standardised time lines and shrank into exceptionalism via often poorly sourced and related anecdote. The fact that stuck with me was how during the English Civil War (1642-51) the town changed sides seven times. The context for each change was the strategic opportunities the town offered the victor, control of the inland waterways for moving freight useful to the victor such as uniforms, rations and arms. That towns changing sides in the civil war was a standard narrative was not explained to us, nor was it explained that the point of civil war was about one side or another taking a town. The viewpoint of the lecturer was more concerned with the exceptionalism of the town than with the constantly changing lines of attack and defence between the two sides of the civil war.<br /><br />But local history was not the only place a strange exceptionalism had taken hold of the way life was explained. In the 1970's the law about gay sex what that it was legal between two men over the age of 21 but the terms on which it had been made technically legal also made legally negotiating for the sex, or even friendship or companionship where sex was allowed to exist in theory, impossible. What law reform there had left many other prohibitive secondary laws in place. If they were observed they would have added to the sense of homosexuality being a completely theoretical non-activity and non-identity. In detective thrillers the phrases that describe the most mysterious plots were described as 'locked room mysteries'. The 1967 law that permitted homosexual behaviour, whilst prohibiting all discussion of it, made homosexuality very much 'a locked room mystery'. But the 1967 law was an improvement on the 1885 law, which it replaced. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the 1885 law that made homosexuality illegal the original purpose of the law had been to raise the age of heterosexual consent to sixteen, from thirteen and to safely outlaw prostitution. Late in the debate in the last reading of the bill clauses were added to it that in theory made the punishment for underage heterosexual sex worse for the adult male perpetrator. In theory the new law in theory sought to limit female prostitution, in practice new clauses sought to make sure that men who bought underage prostitutes could neither be blackmailed nor prosecuted for not knowing and not checking the age of the girls they bought for sex. In the final amendment that was added, in a nearly empty chamber at 2 am effectively all homosexual behaviour became banned because a punishment of two years hard labour was to be passed down to anyone convicted of 'gross indecency', as anal sex was euphemised, and that was whether it happened 'in public or in private'. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The privacy part of the phrasing was what caught Oscar Wilde out and broke him as a man aged forty six, in his prime as a writer. Over the decades that followed many further laws were passed which tightened the law against permitting men to discover each other with a view to the gay sex and the full same sex relationship that they might have in private. The 1967 act ended the punishment of gay men for having consensual sex in private and ended the blackmail that was well known to happen to gay men in the 1950's.<br /><br />There was something of the 'Schrodinger's Cat' logic at work with homosexuality. Like sex generally, at the level of conversation homosexuality did not exist, whilst as a physical activity it very much did exist, and for me it had many euphemistic cues, like the television wrestling dad insisted on viewing. How gay sex was negotiated when there could be no conversations around it made it strange stuff indeed. The difficulty was coming up with how to make it clear when you meant 'No, not with you' to somebody when there was no other person about, and they knew your face. They would not blackmail you for money, but they might try to blackmail you for the sex you did not want to have with them. This happened.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The vast majority of the visitors to the toilets were much older than me and married. Many were not-quite-sober as they visited because they were on their way home from the pub. What had given them the false courage for the activity also required them to need a pee which gave them reason to be in the toilet in the first place. That the cottaging scene was a subsection of the drinking scene gave those who waved with their willies strong cover, the amnesia created by the drink which it was difficult for their wives to want to interrogate.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Against the odds I met two men who were unmarried, sober at the time, and under thirty whilst I was still a teenager at the toilets. I attempted to meet them in places where we could talk and negotiate well beyond the reduced agenda of compulsory secrecy, and waving willies as if they semaphore flag poles.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The first one was Mr Patch which was not his real name but I will call him that because he walked around the town wearing jeans with a badge on the crotch of his jeans where the writing in black cotton against a yellow background he declared 'Gay Pride'. Naturally the patch was on the side he 'dressed', to the left, and, yes, the jeans were a tight fit on him. With that sort of advertising he took some of the waiting out of wanting. But I was made to wait more than you might guess. We spoke because we were nearer in age than the usual callers in the toilet and we were both young compared with the usual men in their forties and above in there, who were looking for men much younger than themselves. With the nearness in age we guessed that neither of us was married and one of us might have 'somewhere to go to', a bedroom door behind which to lock out the world from around us. We did not know which of us might have had the space until we asked each other. Mr Patch had his own council flat. But it was on the very edge of the estate that was farthest from the town, forty five mins walk away. So the waiting was put back into wanting for another day.<br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I went up to see him in his flat maybe once a week or a bit less over the summer of 1979, until he ended the relationship. I did not want to stop seeing him, even after discovering by accident that from well before he met me he was in an established relationship with an older man and that older man wanted the relationship to be monogamous. Mr Patch was aided in both his relationship and his infidelities by his living on his own. He worked as a farmers labourer and had straight friends who seemed to not bat an eyelid at evidence of his homosexuality because they took him as a 'jack-the-lad' figure instead. In private Mr Patch allowed himself to be controlled by the older and more wealthy single man, whatever his image with his mates. Before Mr Patch ended the relationship/attempted friendship I told my parents that he existed and had to tell them a fair number of unconvincing lies about how and where we first met, and what the friendship consisted of.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">What Mr Patch wanted from me was nearer sex than shared meals and chat. What I wanted was something much warmer and more friendly than being taken into the back room of the carpet shop to wank the boss off, which up to that point was as near to a relationship as I had got at that point in my life. I wanted my friend to have a place that felt worn but loved, that reflected affection in how it was furnished rather than the store room I slept in. What I wanted was that when there was sex to be shared, it should not be cold technique or like some sort of fixed programme. It should be like the furniture, where the room and sex both reflected a shared acceptance and warmth. Mr Patch's council flat was a slightly run down/under-decorated bachelor pad. His physical affections were similar, brusque but friendly. I never learned about his past. I think he had been adopted or fostered when much younger. The council flat was the social services signing off all support for him. I visited him for a whole summer. Towards the end he politely told me that I could not visit him any longer. But as a final friendly gesture he invited me out to pick potatoes with him and his friends as part of his group on a local farm. As I stood on the picking machine which vibrated the mud off the potatoes I was there to check that the potatoes were not rotten etc. It <i>seemed</i> like a fair way to end an affair. I was not heartbroken when my visits ended. I'd done my crying by the time he gave me notice, but I did feel the loss when the visits ended.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The second gentleman was called Manchester Al, though he had a Liverpool accent. He was again perhaps only ten years older than me, but like Mr Patch his being single which made him seem younger. He was single because he was an ex-soldier who had served in Northern Ireland who he had recently signed out of the army, where in secret he had been introduced to homosexuality. He was handsome, fit and strong, which was rare amongst the men I half-knew, this made him attractive.</span></div><div style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">We first met in public after my first or second blood donation. He was a fellow blood donor who caught my eye after I had given blood and Mother had escorted me towards my tea and biscuit. I think he caught Mother's eye too, Mother put Al and me close together for our tea 'So we had each other to chat to'. There was a persistent charm about him, but equally there was a persistent evasiveness. He could say anything and make me want to believe that some part of it might be true. But if what he said was pure charm, and was utterly false, then by the time I realised that it was too late. But he maintained the charm with me for all the time I lived in the small town. Over most of a decade there were occasional trysts, well away from the public toilets, where to varying degrees we tried to get past the silence around sex and genuinely please each other. But in them we both realised that any attempt at an honest homosexuality made us both seem like fantasists to those around us. We wanted a world that we could make but the world we had stopped us making that world. In the shut down small town, what we wanted could not exist and never would.</span></div><div style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Sometimes he disappeared for ages, and returned with some excuse that if it was suspicious could not be faulted, other times he presented himself around the town as if he had never been away. He never stopped being handsome, nor did he stop having some sort of escape clause or reason to disappear again after the latest random meeting with him. If I wanted some more mature and tender side to him then what I got in private was often a relentless sexual tease in which he was obvious about what he wanted, but he would never say it out loud, and in the he presented himself he would try to make me responsible for his sexual needs. Al was the first man who for all his evasions made sex out to be something better than the grubby deal others had made it out to be, where grubbiness was almost a currency in itself. When Al finally settled and stayed around the town he fell prey to the drink culture, a culture that I quietly sought escape from when I left the town.</span></div><div style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I could still think of him as I knew him with fondness, even now. But I also know that in reality both our lives were far more fractured and self-dividing than ever we were allowed to say to each other.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 13 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-13-alien-examines-taboo-for.html">here</a>.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></span> </p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-7554843893354135412022-09-22T03:34:00.004-07:002022-09-22T09:32:47.337-07:00Chapter 13 - The Alien Examines Taboo For Hindsight <div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My job as a shelf stacker and floor cleaner in Kwik Save continued. Between my sense of duty and how mechanical the job was I sometimes even felt appreciated there. It was the most constant and public part of a life where the job gave me good cover from all the other divisions of myself that I either had to endure, or had created without realising the long term consequences of what I was doing. Whilst working in Kwiksave I was safe from awkward questions. Nobody was going to ask me any questions where the answers might involve admitting to anything awkward. My regular attendance at The Christian Youth Fellowship was also the first public beginnings of my public commitment to Christianity. I enjoyed being with them, and I certainly liked the youth group leader, teacher John Sargent, who was one of the early men I knew who would give me time just for himself, usually by driving me back to the parental house after Sunday meetings. We had a shared interest in music but he also regularly sensed when I needed some sort of encouragement or was vaguely troubled. Two of the subjects banned from being mentioned in the parental house were now a regular part of my life, money, through work, and religion. As for sex and politics, they two had surfaced and would surface again. And then there was the unmentionable unmentionable, death.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Politics had come up when I had been sent votes in both the local and national elections in May 1979, aged seventeen. Knowing nothing about how to choose who to vote for I had asked Mother and her answers were unhelpful and evasive. Not only was the candidate and party we voted for 'meant to be confidential', according to her the public would be better off with the right to the vote, but never being told or notified when they were meant to vote. The less people knew about voting the better off the country was. Other times when we both watched what we could of 'Newsnight' before dad got home she might have commented, somewhat opaquely, 'They all piss in the same pot'. Whatever the party the different MP's were allied to they all have the same level of individual financial self interest, whatever their different public declarations about 'serving the public'. So denial of denial then, or cynical evasion, family were not going to give me much of a sense of choice about how to think constructively about politics. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Mother could have been more transparent and informative about politics by explaining the mathematics of the first past the post voting system and the value of voting for candidates that don't win to keep alive the idea of choice in the list of candidates for next time. Mine was one of the many votes cast for a losing candidate in May 1979 that disappeared into the void of candidates and parties who would lose each time they stood, but would never stop standing in elections because they felt they had a duty to provide an alternative to the party that kept winning.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">A year after those elections I put myself on the losing side of an argument again, this time in work. The part timers who worked at Kwik Save each said individually at different times to the boss 'We need time off because we have 'A' levels exams to revise for'. At first he seemed to bend a little with their argument, and attempted to make alternative arrangements where they might stay. Then when he realised the scale of time off being requested and he sacked all of the part timers in one go. The boss realised that even if they all stayed a while then one by one they would all be gone in two months time anyway. He decided that it was best to create a clean break with a new set of part timers. I gave the boss a cleaner break than he wanted when I decided to leave in sympathy with the now departed part timers. He did not want me to leave, but I became intent on leaving with Phil and Keith. Before it happened I had no clue that there would always be these employment/education cycles and when education for employees was at it's most demanding then employers would find it easier to replace part time employees until the next peak demand time.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">With Phil and Keith taking exams I suddenly thought 'Could I do some serious study? Could I take some exams one day too?'. With serious support from their families they had pre-booked their plans for University when they got their results too. Even by short term hindsight I got from seeing Phil and Keith's home lives change over the ten months I'd been in Kwiksave I realised that I had more choice than I was told I had. One choice I only half regretted was that had I the time to consider I could have stayed on in the same job until at least the summer and got more money. Then I could have left Kwik Save to go on the dole mid-August where I would have reassured officials there that I wanted to study 'O' Levels part time and would be happy to take any job interview they sent me to, though I could not account for what employers made of me.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Between May and September the biggest change for the unemployed was the closure of The Labour Exchange and the opening of the town's first job centre. What was the difference? The white perspex lettering against an orange perspex background above the width of the premises. Also the cards that described the jobs were now laid out vertically alongside each other on the walls rather than in a filing rack in front of us, and the staff seemed slightly more professional than in the previous premises. There was more room in the place as well. Not that any of that made the lack of jobs seem more numerous or attractive. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Phil and Keith left the town in August of that year, I had been glad of them being about for the few months we were all at a loose end, they had put some shape into my life that I had enjoyed whilst they were there. But one by one they each left for their universities and I suddenly felt more alone. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Over the summer, and with close friends gone, I started to use the public toilets more often than before. The reasons behind the increase were simple, I was alone more often and in the town with the summer sunshine men wore lighter, more revealing, clothing which I found to be a mild form of torture. Market days were on Tuesday and Saturday, often I helped Mother on those days. But even as I was meant to be being useful I could be quite easily distracted by some of the handsome and sporty stall holders who made an innocent show of attracting women customers as they bared a muscular forearm, or wore shorts and T shirts that oddly seemed to designed to reveal more through the tightness of the fabric than if they wore nothing at all. They would say that they were dressing for the weather, but it was clear to me that they dressed to appeal to the ladies and increase their sales. I survived through being with Mother at the time. On my own later I felt impelled to seek some secretive but shared sexual relief.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">That summer rumours started in Mother's birth family. Mother's older sister, Alice, shared concerns with Mother about the health of her mother, known to me as Gran. They seemed to be about nothing at first. The view was that Gran was tired, as she was surely allowed to be at close to eighty years of age. Then the word 'cancer' was whispered. At first Gran denied outright to anyone that it mattered that she was even tired. But the slowness with which she denied being tired became the proof that she was tired. Then the whisper changed to that she had been to see a doctor about feeling tired and had not shared with anyone, possibly not even Grandad, what the doctor had told her. It was quite possible that in the consultation the doctor had not listened to Gran and she had not been able to explain to him why she might be tired, so there was nothing to report. Equally keeping what the doctor said to herself kept her nominally in charge of what her family knew. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Even as different families and households we lived apart from each other, Gran's household, Mother's household and Alice, her sister's, household were remarkably similar in structure. The women in the family kept awkward conferences among themselves before telling the men in the family what they thought the men needed to hear. The men were often puzzled outsiders, puzzling over what they were outside of. I was too young to be counted as a man, I was still part child, for all sorts of reasons too long to go into here. So I could listen to the women at a distance closer than the men got, as Mother Alice and Gran tried to agree with each other on the single simple story line to share with those outside of them what Gran was suffering from.<br /><br />Gran and Grandad owned their own home, called Maydene because Gran's first name was May. It was two former workers' cottages from circa 1900 made into one dwelling. In the back of everyone's mind as the rumours flowed was the phrase 'where there is a will there are relatives', i.e. where elderly relatives had to be cared for and they have money then their carers were seen as less than altruistic by those less able to contribute to the care. The carer who did most to care usually staked the biggest claim over the cared for person's finances. It was common among female relatives to see jealousy and greed when concern was expressed for another relative's well being. Seeking control of the wealth that the ill and elderly relative had through care of them was an accepted form of abuse. This was Gran's main reason for keeping news of her tiredness from her daughters. She could not stop herself and her worldly good being argued over after her death, but she would do all she could to shut down others arguing over her worldly goods whilst she was still alive.<br /><br />Because Gran shut down all informed talk about it with her family by definition she made any discussion between other family members about her health 'behind her back'. Mother, Alice, and Heather, Alice's daughter, tried to talk, in a united way but all three were competitive and secretive. and talked as if they were gamblers playing cards where solid information was the pack. I knew before Alice did that the cancer had been confirmed. Out of either my being tired of the game playing from Gran downwards or my wanting to be plain speaking I told Alice. If ever anyone 'set a hare to run' I did. Alice was known to be kind on the surface but prickly and thin skinned underneath. It was inevitable the she would blow up for her sense of not being the first to know, and the first to withhold the information from others. The second inevitability that came to pass was that Alice would pull rank on Mother because Alice's husband had a car and could arrange visits and shopping runs for Gran more easily than Mother could for being dependent on the bus service, not that gran was bowing out of going to market every week quite yet. Much later Mother found her way out of rank being pulled on her, when her closest male friend on the allotments agreed to take her in his car to see Gran and Grandad one evening every week.<br /><br />As an alien I had proved to be a leaky vessel for information. My defence is that I craved the clarity of plain talk and in my own way made sure I got it, whilst getting a fair amount of criticism from several female relatives for imposing my needs over their wish to delay all decisions until they could get the decision they wanted to without being seen to. Cancer became another subject to go on the 'not to be discussed' list. With the little that had been said I could not work out which was worse the cancer the cure, Both could be tiring. Gran's age and general health was what made the cure worse than illness. Nobody knew how much her decision to accept the diagnosis and do nothing about it was an act of Christian faith on her part. Her Christianity was something that everybody knew about, and myself apart, declined to share. All those who said they had no faith felt uncomfortable around her open faith, it was something that made her more her own person.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I was in the dog house with the female side of my family when one August Sunday afternoon I walked to the public toilet in the car park. The height of humour there was misreading the meaning of the 'pay and display' sign outside the toilet itself. I was going to display without paying and complete my willy waving duties in the toilet because I was at low ebb, I had nobody to see, and there was nothing else to do. I was there for a while on my own in the far left cubicle, the hole in the wall facing into the middle cubicle when somebody occupied that middle cubicle. He started partially undressing, and even sort-of waving his willy sort of at me, but waving it half away from me also. I had noticed how some men liked to tease, because they liked to suggest that they were well endowed whilst they were not. I knew how if the tease engaged me then I found it difficult to extract myself from the lies they were getting off on whilst I was getting less out of it. But I continued to look through the hole in the wall, just above waist height that was smaller than the diameter of a man's hand. Very soon alarm bells rang and any sense of the hoped for limited release completely drained away from me, from the hole, the cubicle I was in, from the toilet, from the whole town, and for all I knew the whole universe.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Dad was doing the same thing that I was doing in the next cubicle. Up to that moment we had both assumed that the secrecy of the place had served us well, and in a way it had, we neither of us knew that the other visited the place and lingered. Now we both knew and we were both in shock when we hurriedly dressed and left the toilet. I don't know now who raised their voice in public first, but very rapidly we were both in a defensive conversation that generated more heat than light. Dad was angry and I felt I had to defend myself by all arguments necessary. I resisted submitting to dad then and there, particularly when his arguments that I should not be where we had both just been were knowingly hollow. There were solid, well observed, arguments around how and why willy waving happened but he was not going to make them. He preferred to argue that I should do as he said because of who he was, head of the parental household. He also argued that he could do exactly what he wanted, with drinking and gambling, however inconsistent such activities seemed with the rules he made for others. He argued that he could be as inconsistent as he wanted to be as long as nobody knew about it, but his dependents had to observe a more consistent line, whether they were seen to or not. Any logic of his argument was soon exhausted by his inconsistency as he claimed he was always right because of who he was, after which the encounter between us became wholly negative. The only positive to come out of it was my admiration for the roses that were planted near the toilet as we looked away from each other whilst we argued. They were so calm and colourful compared with how we were with each other.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Initially life in the parental house after our brief open air argument seemed no different from previous. When dad and I were alone the television seemed to be that bit louder, as if it was making some extra effort to stop me being angry and wanting him to talk when he would do anything to remain silent. To put the words to the argument I could not make at the time I wanted to believe that it <i>was</i> possible to admit to being gay and in the closet. I wanted to get out of the denial I had to live with that dad thought was necessary not just for him, but for everybody who waved their willies in public toilets. What I did not know was how fiercely dad would attach himself to the idea of denial at all costs, and how painful it would be for me to have to live around that immoral dishonesty. The tension felt worse to me when on the television there was some great display of sportiness or machismo, because that was when the television seemed to more overtly assume the moral headship of the household in itself. If I thought that I should be allowed to observe and follow some more internally consistent model of masculinity then I was going to be disappointed for a long while. <br /><br />Eventually there was some small open disagreement with dad that Mother had, where dad could not use his control of the television to avoid all discussion. The argument started small and specific, but because of all the avoidance of other arguments and communications that had gone on over recent and more distant times the argument widened and reached a point where it became the verbal equivalent of the free for all fight scenes that were seen in saloons in cowboy films which if they were recognised as being anything by the audience were accepted as being the nearest that drinkers and loners ever got to collective emotional release. On Mother's side of the argument was her old sense of grievance at Alice, her sister, but added to that were some serious points about how dad misused the television to shut down how as family members we might relate to each other more constructively. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">At some point I told Mother in front of dad that he sought sex in public toilets. If I had spent my anger at dad that way, then it was to far less effect than I hoped for. When men generally sought to say less about their sexuality, and sexual tastes and wants, to their wives it was because there was a level of mutual incomprehension around sexuality where men and women both projected their misunderstanding of themselves onto each other. With this they multiplied their mutual misunderstanding of each other. With what I said I stepped directly into that multiplied misunderstanding not realising how hard to map it was, so little was said about it. Dad ummed and arred his way past every logical point that was put to him and he refused to recognise that he had been highly inattentive of late by being inattentive of the points put to him. Mother felt hurt at how inattentive and distant he had been.<br />.<br />The argument changed how the house was run and my parents related to each other in front of me and my sister. But the change was slow and far from being an improvement. Dad took to vacuuming the living room floor whilst we were in the room doing something that we thought mattered to us, to prove to us how he was paying more attention to the house more and less attention to the television, as if with the television being on we were the ones attentive of the television. It was too much like flogging a dead argument to ask him to turn the vacuum cleaner off and try to say to him that he was using the vacuum cleaner the way he previously used the television, to distract others whilst giving him control of the space. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I felt impelled to be closer to Mother after the row. But as life in the parental house evolved and calmed down after the big argument that closeness unintentionally took on strange and unsettling turns that left me disturbed. I could take that I would never feel close to dad and that he would ever really trust me for much. My sister would always be closer to him than me. That was his choice, and maybe her choice too. Though because she was fifteen, what her sense of choice was was hard to tell. I also knew to not follow dad's example of being evasive about drinking, gambling and whatever else he had to be evasive about. But my being less opaque about myself than dad made himself left me feeling more exposed and unsupported. Mother too seemed to be more transparently needy in some way as we both tried to find the right distance from which to watch dad go through his strange turns. Neither Mother nor I could help ourselves or each other, and yet neither of us had anyone else we could turn to except each other. My biggest relief was that I never saw dad at the car park toilets where people paid in the car park and displayed in the toilets when I was doing the same. I could take the fact that we both did it, I could not take the 'do as I say not as I do' thinking behind him insisting in his right to do it whilst he gave no exit from it and insisted that I should not. I would have liked us both to find the exit from such pretend invisibility.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Alas he never changed but I did. Two decades later, on a rare visit to see family and friends in the town after being away for some years, I visited a public toilet for it's proper purpose. I recognised the brown suede shoes revealing themselves underneath the metal dividing wall that gave users of the toilet their privacy/exposure. I was as far 'out of the closet' as I could be at the time. In my head I heard the words 'Dad do you want to come home for a cup of tea and a chat about camping out for uncomfortable sex in draft-ridden public toilets for long periods of time?'. But nobody else heard the words. They were the words I wanted to say but dare not. Silently seeing how dad was still allowing himself to be trapped was a sharp reminder of how much our paths had parted. I would still have wanted to 'rescue' him from the trap if I could, I knew I couldn't.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Twenty years since I was trapped I had gone a long way from the traps that had once caught both dad and me. I still had further to go to make sure I did not turn out like him. Neither did I wish to return to how I had in the past when I was a help and support to Mother, when being that support had so limited my exits and choices about how to live.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">But back in September 1980 I was living in the parental house amid these odd times. I was gearing myself up for what I hoped would be my escape plan. I was going to study four 'O' levels, part time whilst signing on as unemployed once a fortnight. Education was going to be my future. In the meanwhile I continued paying Mother the housekeeping I thought that she was due every week. Sometimes what I thought she was due was more than she said she wanted. But if I paid what she asked then I knew that somewhere down the line she would be covering up being out of pocket, as if being out of money were a form of thrift. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">If I had ideas of escaping to live independently, but messily, as a student then Mother's all pervading ideas about thrift would have made sure that they were never fully investigated. I had to accept the compromise of being a stay-at-my-parents-home-<wbr></wbr>whilst-unemployed student. That was the imaginative limit that Mother and the town had set me to live by, not that such limitations could be imposed on me forever.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 14 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-14-educating-alien.html">here</a>.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span></span></div><div style="color: #757575; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: justify;"></div><p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-16464840158148728682022-09-22T03:32:00.002-07:002022-09-22T09:33:49.813-07:00Chapter 14 - Educating The Alien<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> <span style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;">I started college to study 'O' levels in Sept</span><span style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"> 1980, when I was nineteen years old, on the dole, and living in the parental house. It was the first time that I had designed how to use my time rather than having to agree with somebody else's plan for me that also happened to be for their gain. Before these new studies I had gone through three training courses and done one quite basic job over three years. None of what I did on those courses was designed around who I was and what I wanted to do. All of them were makeshift plans with no planning for what to do next before, during, or after, they were completed. At least with the supermarket job I had proved that I could work as part of a team, depending on the team and team leader.</span></span></p><div class="Ar Au Ao" id=":zu"><div aria-controls=":1zf" aria-label="Message Body" aria-multiline="true" aria-owns=":1zf" class="Am Al editable LW-avf tS-tW tS-tY" g_editable="true" hidefocus="true" id=":zt" itacorner="6,7:1,1,0,0" role="textbox" spellcheck="false" style="direction: ltr; min-height: 259px;" tabindex="1"><div class="gmail_default"><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the autumn of 1980 there was not much team spirit left in the parental house. In fact life there had become rather like being stuck in the middle of some strange emotional seesaw, with nowhere to grip and a parent on each end seat. Both parents saw it as their role to exert maximum emotional weight downwards, to upend the other end of the seesaw, as if that was all there was left for them to do. My best choice would have been to leave the house/get off the see saw and see my parents less. But to do that I had to know how to have a plan to find somewhere else to live first. One reason for doing the 'O' levels was about finding out how to think and plan that far ahead. As I was only just starting the education of my choice, I felt unable, as yet, to plan how to change my life and escape from my family. If I was barred from my best choice due to inexperience then my second best position was staying in the middle of the see-saw and learning to balance there better. Learn how to stay where there was the least amount of emotional pressure, the least amount of movement.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">On one end of the seesaw, whilst trying to keep family at a distance from him, was dad. He was unemployed and attached to his similarly unemployed mates. He very politely made the idea of family as a unit seem as detached from him as humanly possible, whilst vaguely implying that we should all still feel like family to each other, but not to him. He was very keen that we should go nowhere near the question of how much money he spent on beer with his mates, week on week. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">On the other end of the seesaw was Mother who from the foundation of the household had held the family finances together and done it with a well practiced thrift. This thrift was ideological in character and it was driven by her memory of rationing from the time of World War two and after. It included her growing vegetables to feed the family. It was impossible, though, to point out to her that what she did was less 'digging for victory' and more digging to keep as much distance between her and the fear of debt as she could get. Through carefully planned spending she tried her hardest to stretch every pound go as far as it would stretch, whilst she knew that the unknown sum of money that dad spent on getting drunk would have saved her a lot of sweat and effort. She did not stint on making the money go farther than it was expected to, often at the expense of all lightness of mood and humour. If there was one thing I wanted to do sometimes it was to lighten her mood. But since only having more money and being assured of it's supply would do that, then that was for dad to do and he was not interested.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When dad made himself unreadable as a person I often found myself pushed towards Mother, in part to 'take his place' alongside her. Dad kept Mother at a greater distance from himself, and kept himself to himself, more than anyone could reasonably expect. I did what I thought I should, even as I sometimes felt press-ganged into service around Mother. But in the last year there had been personal changes for me that made my life around Mother seem more voluntary. I wore clothes that I felt happier wearing, I bought air-wear shoes, bought off the market, flared jeans, bought cheap because they were out of fashion, a Spanish civil war army belt, and ex-East German army shirts with the red yellow and black flag on the left upper arm, belt and shirt sold cheap at the recently opened small second hand army surplus shop, close to the parental house. My first thin but definite beard and moustache helped to make me less the person Mother had previously thought of as being in her image. </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My family had given me an education which had tied me to them, which had also left me unskilled and unemployable, whilst they claimed that they wanted me to have the best of jobs. In addition they saw no value to them in me finding any personal space for myself outside of them, whether that space was to do with work or it was to do with personal interests. What I hoped with my passing four 'O' levels was that the qualifications would give me a foundation of my own, through which to move away from family, which would set me up for both work and life. In any discussion I attempted with family they implied that my education had been for best when it was under their control. In any attempted discussion it was difficult to say to them 'Then why did I not take more exams when I was under your control?' They could not deny that after four false starts in work and training in three years they could not stop me from wanting to learn and to move away from false starts altogether. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">With my 21 hours a week in college whilst signing on fortnightly I chose to study English Language, Mathematics, Computer Studies, and History. My time keeping was good and my attendance of classes was diligent. I wanted the learning to be for it's own sake as well as for what an exam pass certificate might tell some prospective employer. One simple event that happened outside of education was a great help. For as long as we were a family we had cleaned our ears of what we thought was excess wax with the ends of matches. When stuff came out we thought our ears were clean and blamed the speaker when as family we failed to hear each other properly. We did not even use up the small bottle of olive oil that was over twenty years old that was in the medicine cupboard to loosen the wax first. On my own I went to the family GP and sought to have my ears examined. Dr Ward avoided the local joke about 'There are potatoes growing in there'. He was too distant a figure to do humour, though for what I thought he said a joke would have shown me he recognised what I was there for. He gave me drops to put in each ear, three drops for fifteen minutes at night every night for ten days. Then I attended my appointment with the nurse to have my ears syringed with warm water. For all the softener that had been applied the wax removal was still quite painful and I was amazed at the size of lumps of wax that came out. But when the soreness left my ears the results in clarity of hearing were remarkable. I finally understood more about why I went off subject so easily when I was in classes in college and why my concentration had been so poor in the past.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />For the first time in ten years I studied sentence structure, the names for the different parts of a sentence, and I had to check my spelling and use of punctuation. I felt like I was a trainee mechanic in language, I found keeping up with the rest of the class to be hard work. Years later I would be told that I had borderline dyslexia. Back then if my teachers saw that then they never told me. I enjoyed discovering that I had a better vocabulary than the sixteen year old grammar school students I was learning with. Part of my better vocabulary than them came from all the journalism in the music magazines that Mother had been given to give to me. I could not account for how I cut an odd figure in all the classes I attended where in each class I was a little older than the other students but I was catching up a lot more than they were. I had a short thin-but-getting-thicker black beard, thick eyebrows and black curly hair. I was happy to wear flared jeans and tough army surplus dark green shirts; that was my uniform, the grammar school pupils had theirs. Finally, I had a habit picked up from Mother, who was always carrying something somewhere and carrying something else on the return journey. I always had a carrier bag with me, in which I had the materials for the class that were on that day. The grammar school pupils had lockers in the college that they could leave their work in. For my signing up for my courses independently whilst unemployed I never had a locker.<br /><br />The biggest handicap I had, that I did not recognise as a handicap at the time, was that I wrote with my left hand. As I wrote I put a lot of pressure on the pen, held it awkwardly, and covered what I wrote with my hand as I wrote the next word. Before the end of the first half term I was very tactfully told by my lady English teacher 'Learn to write with your right hand, or you will never ever pass any exam. The examiner will fail you for not being able to read your writing'. It was nice of her to leave out of her argument that she could not read my writing either. Partly because of that I did not argue back that I had already passed some exams. The Royal Society for the Arts exam system, equivalent to a CSE exam, in Maths and English Language which had complimented the 1st year City and Guilds Radio and Television electronics that I had passed two years earlier<br /><br />I accepted her advice about the hand I wrote with and started to write with my right hand for the first time since primary school*. It was painful at first. My right hand easily got sore, and at first the lettering looked odd too. But after literally filling a whole A4 pad with lines of practice, some 400 line's worth, holding my pen with my right hand began to feel more natural. The writing it produced was clearly more legible. I won't say the teacher was pleased with me, more relieved that she could now focus on the other problems in my writing because she could now see what I was doing wrong far easier than before. It took at least a college term, until New Year 1981 for the muscles in my right hand to feel comfortable holding a pen for long periods of time. I still printed with my left hand because my printing was neater in that hand than it was in the right hand. other. Printing with one hand and writing longhand with the other cannot be unique. But it must be rare. Encouraged by my teacher, I gave myself the best Christmas present which was going to be useful for the rest of my life. That education could have changed my life more than giving me confidence in a written form, my own new style of handwriting.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />As I studied maths, history, and computer studies-a new subject in itself-and I struggled to keep up with students from clearly more financially secure family backgrounds than my own. I was often tempted to quit where I felt innately more ignorant for being poorer than the Grammar School pupils I was learning with. In history my awareness of party politics surfaced faster in me than it did in the younger students. But as that happened I also found that I had to think more to tailor my opinions around the detail in the historical subject, in whichever bit of British social and economic history 1760-1945 we were looking at that week.<br /><br />With maths I could do the sums well enough. But often I struggled with writing down all my workings out with the teacher, the same teacher who had taught me maths two years earlier. I was too used to doing mental arithmetic, which I was good at. Whenever I failed to show my workings out I was reminded that examiners gave as many marks for showing how the sum was worked out as they gave for getting the answer right. Mr Metcalf would also put the words QED! and we knew the joke that came with it, how the initials meant Quite Easily Done, whilst in reality they meant Quod Erat Demonstrandum, or 'this is to be proved' in Latin. I liked his class because of the room it was held in where the back half of the room was taken up with an eight foot radius wheel with big gearing teeth on it which was connected by an axle to some sort of crankshaft system. Goodness knows what it was physically connected to on the floor below us, or where it all went. We never had the time to get the answers to such questions.<br /><br />The teaching about computers had its archaic qualities too. It was the newest subject on the syllabus and thought to be important for the future. But from the way we were allowed to approach the subject you would have found it hard to tell. The earliest modern idea of a computer dates back to the 1840's. Until the 1930's women who did calculations for keeping accounts, or who added up the votes for different candidates in elections were also known as computers. The earliest electronic computers were the size of large rooms. They were built in the 1940's for decoding the encrypted messages that the Axis powers sent to each other to fight their side in the war. The Allied powers had to know what was in the Axis powers' messages to win World War Two. In the post war era Lyons tea shop used computers for keeping tabs of stock and staff. When Lyons no longer felt that the computer was necessary for keeping tabs on everything, they concentrated on tea and cakes and left the computer business, not realising what it would be worth in future or how far ahead they were in using computers for civilian purposes than anyone else, in Europe at least. From 1980 or so the first microchip based home computers were on the market. They were slow, primitive, and expensive, but amazingly powerful for their size. In the East Midlands of England the nearest we were going to get to a microchip based computer was to see the adverts for them in the broadsheet newspapers that showed us they existed. Microchips did not exist anywhere on the course we were taking.<br /><br />With the 'O' level in computers our work was 90 % pen and paper, 9 % typing and 1 % experiencing the computer directly as we got the results from the teleprinter. We wrote lines of programme in BASIC and typed them into a terminal in the college which was linked to the only computer we knew existed. It was a valve computer that had been made in the 1950's and it was owned by the county education department and it was situated 25 miles away. The computer would run the programmes we wrote the same way it would run programmes from terminals from every college in the county. It would run the programme we had sent it and set us back whatever text it thought was apt. The standard rule applied 'Garbage [bad programming] in, garbage [nonsensical response] out'. With the print out we got to see whether what we had written was what we meant to write, and whether it needed amending. The process was hazardous. The computer could easily 'lose' lines of carefully typed programming because we were in a queue to use it with other users who we did not know about. Unseen and unexplained, something would regularly go wrong between the programmer, the terminal, and the computer itself. Some of us were good programmers and proved adept at the language of BASIC, but even the best of the programmers in the class found the process to be inefficient at best.<br /><br />One disconnect I made on my own was that I was bad at remembering people's names, and often awkward in front of the rest of the class. When I was presented with an idea that was new to me I could not see it as something to be swallowed without question, revised for, regurgitated for the exam, and then forgotten as if the subject did not exist beyond it being the subject of an exam question. I wanted to understand the logic that supported the fact, but the teachers did not have the time to share their workings, with revisions, mock exams, more revisions and then the final sprint before the real exam just months away. I reluctantly accepted that an 'O' level course that was just a year long was no place to debate as you learned, however much it raised ideas that deserved to be examined and respected in their own right. Add to the tight schedule we were on how I was at college whilst I was on the dole and with that I had significantly less support than the grammar school pupils around me, then my frustrations were inevitable, I was the last to learn that I had joined an exam factory in which for those who passed their exams there were many similar factories ahead of them and it was doubtful there would be further exam factories for me.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />I still connected to other people through music rather than who I was and who they were. I felt almost personally anchored, through the shared experience of music. When some youths in the English Department had the idea of a student newsletter it was natural that I volunteered to do the music section and review a couple of albums. This was my first attempt at public writing. I chose to review and compare two records from 1967 that I thought held up to that day. 'The Doors', the first album by The Doors and 'Piper At The Gates Of Dawn'-Pink Floyd. Much of my review of the doors album was cribbed from Julie Burchill's mid 70's reassessment of the album in the NME. The review of the first Pink Floyd album was significantly unoriginal as well. But I had chosen two albums greatly influenced by poetry where the music reflected the substances that the musicians took but the arrangements and the words were both solid and tuneful.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The albums I chose to review would have been well familiar to the local progressive music set, who were just a few years older than me and who really liked the music I wish that I had been around to like when it first appeared, 1967-73. I was a late-comer, an outsider who they accepted as one of them, even though most of them could sing or play an instrument or contribute musically, and they had played live in front of some sort of ticket paying audience when I clearly had not. I was accepted because I became a bit of a fan of music made locally as part of the post-punk movement where the ethos of making and publishing your own music was allied to more melodic and less abrasive, albeit still lo-fi, arrangements than were typified by the original punk movement. I am thankful for the times I shared with them where they minimised the difference between me and them and left me to work out how better to feel and be accepted. The room in Graham Rainsforth's house where we all met was the first dedicated music room I'd ever been in. It was a comfortable side lamp lit room with scatter cushions, many chairs, a hi-fi with big speakers hanging from the ceiling, and a large collection of records and tapes. Graham could play the music loud because it was a ground floor room in an end of terrace house; there were no direct neighbours who might feel that the music was an imposition on them. <br /><br />Music was one thing that kept me in the Christian Youth Fellowship as well. I borrowed and taped a stream of both Christian and secular albums from the leader of the fellowship, John Sargent. Sometimes he had to help me understand aspects of the music as it reflected life. Often he gave me a lift home in his car for the purpose of having a chat about something personal to me that he saw was eating away at me where I did not recognise the tension that I created around other people. He treated me as an adult when I long way short of being one. Never was this truer than when he lent me his copy of 'Animals' by Pink Floyd. I had read 'Animal Farm' and knew roughly the source material Roger Waters was adapting for his biting lyrics. What I was not prepared for was the sheer anger embedded in the music, any more than we handled anger well with each other in the parental household. When I played the last long track on the album 'Sheep' with it's scary synths, bleak lyrics, cruel adaptation of 'The Lord's Prayer' spoken on vocoder by the band's drummer, and the slashing guitar chords of the outro I simply could not process it. John had to explain to me how it was anger that was hyped up by the arrangement which somehow remained supremely musical. He knew without me saying anything to him that the anger that was the problem for me lay less to do with the sound of the record and more to do with how we skirted around each other in the parental house. I forget what he said to pull me through the sense of crisis I felt from listening to 'Sheep'. Whatever he said, it was practical Christianity in action and to this day I am thankful for his being able to 'read' me and pull me through what I was feeling.<br /><br />1980 was the year that a new line up of the band Yes formed. They recorded a new album, and set out to tour the world. The album was popular on immediate release but it's popularity was short lived, on third listening the record seemed to be only a pale imitation of the version of Yes that had gone before. The lyrics lacked the majesty and mystery of Jon Anderson's writing for the band. Nonetheless when we learned that the band were playing at Leicester De Montfort Hall it was an easy decision to find a car full of people to go see them. I was the one who was deputised to get everyone's tickets. We now live in a world of infinite and instant two way communication. Back then life was slow. There was the telephone and letter writing. Most working class people did not have phones in their homes. They used public call boxes. I rang up got the address to write off to, the price of the tickets and who to make the postal order payable to (none of my three bank accounts with small-ish amounts in them had ever issued me with a cheque book) and I sent off the money with the information about the tickets required and the stamped self addressed envelope for the tickets to get to me. It all worked very well until I was honest with John about having sent the postal order off with the request for the tickets and the s.a.e. rather than sending the postal order in response to the tickets arriving. The gig was okay, nothing more. People at the gig sat down to show their lack of enthusiasm until the encore when they played more of their classic material, which the lead singer was clearly slowly getting the grasp of.<br /><br />That was the first of many happy escapes in small groups of us to small venues where live music being played loud was the point of being there. This included us going as a fellowship together to the Christian arts festival known as Greenbelt much later, over the August bank holiday weekend for several years running. But also with my progressive/hippy/CND friends I went to Glastonbury, twice. Coming from a family where the nearest we gave each other to a holiday was one day a year stopping each other going out of each other's sight in Skegness whilst dad got drunk in the nearest pub I discovered that every musical event that I attended had it's merits. However I did it, getting out of the town became important to me if I was to get the town out of my head. And getting the town out of my head was becoming more important to me than I could admit that it was.<br /><br />Please find Chapter 15 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-15-alien-goes-to-glastonbury.html">here</a>.<br /><br /><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span><br /><br />*Up to the age of ten I wrote with my right hand. At the age of ten, due to the combined effects of different pressures from both the parental house and primary school, I had a nervous breakdown. Overnight I changed the hand I wrote with. Either nobody noticed or somebody did notice but at the time could not get time enough with me on my own to point this out. In the midst of my breakdown I did not know which it was, and every adult around me denied that it was a breakdown. At the age I was when I went to college, aged nineteen, I had not learned to call what happened 'a breakdown' either. But if ever this 'normal' education proved to be remedial, then my being persuaded to revert to writing longhand with my right hand was practical proof.</span></div></div></div></div>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-8240202807363698212022-09-22T03:29:00.001-07:002022-09-22T09:00:13.403-07:00Chapter 15 - The Alien Goes To Glastonbury<p><span style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Over forty years since it was broadcast I can still remember the television documentary that persuaded me that the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, and the way it regulated the non-use of nuclear weapons was not as secure as the public were told that it was. That programme was a BBC science programme called 'Horizon'. </span></span></p><div class="Ar Au Ao" id=":xh"><div aria-controls=":1x2" aria-label="Message Body" aria-multiline="true" aria-owns=":1x2" class="Am Al editable LW-avf tS-tW tS-tY" g_editable="true" hidefocus="true" id=":xg" itacorner="6,7:1,1,0,0" role="textbox" spellcheck="false" style="direction: ltr; min-height: 259px;" tabindex="1"><div class="gmail_default"><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">What I don't remember at all was how long the time was between the broadcast of the programme and when the first advert about a CND meeting appeared in the local paper. Nor do I remember who else attended that first meeting. Though I can remember The Quaker Meeting House in which that first, and every early meeting of CND, was held. It was one of the few working historic buildings in the town, but given that it's work was the contemplation of God it was quiet work. The room reflected the two centuries of prayer and seeking God that it had been used for. A few Quakers attended that first meeting, along with some members of the local Labour Party, and the self elect of the local counter-culture who were mostly on the dole and quietly leading double lives. I was with the counterculture up to a point, like them I was happily on the dole. But where they used to be on the dole to create a respectable front for a double life of dealing and using soft drugs, I wanted to be on the dole to catch up with my lost education. They all lived apart from their parents, I was stuck with mine. Publicly they were anti-hunting and held quite the range of broad left wing and feminist opinions that the more the detail behind the beliefs were examined, the harder they were to compare with the small c social conservatism of the town. I was sure that I was the only closeted gay man among them. But given that closeted gay men present themselves, as pretend heterosexuals, if there were any other pretend heterosexuals at the first meeting then they pretended remarkably well. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />One of the aspects of the local social conservatism that frustrated me was how natural it made itself seem. When people knew all the subjects that they did not want to discuss then they mentally made a list of the subjects they never discussed and then denied the existence of the subjects by denying that they had made a list. Admitting to the list might lead to the subjects on the list having to be mentioned. With small c social conservatism 'argument' meant disagreement rather than the logical presentation of a set of linked ideas. Because 'argument' meant disagreement rather than presentation then social conservatism became anti-ideas, for fear of feeling verbally coerced into agreeing with something the social conservative had no interest in. I remember before I joined CND how slow my realisation was of how much I disagreed with the socially conservative view of how much all language was political and the retreat from any fixed idea or proposal was more agreeably apolitical. The politics around nuclear bombs were both abstract enough and horrifying enough that they were the shock that woke me up from socially conservative sleep walking that I saw my parents generation had fallen into, from which they showed no signs of waking up.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">It was both possible and positive to have different motives for wanting to campaign against nuclear weapons. The use of nuclear weapons by any country was as absurd as it was obscene. The stockpiling and non-use of them took up capital and diverted the economy of any nation that did that. The ownership of nuclear weapons made the cold war colder and lengthened the sense of deadlock between the pure propaganda put out by the two so-called superpowers. One of the long term effects of 'cold war' propaganda was to divide different peoples from each other when the people on both sides of the propaganda divide had a lot more in common than they knew.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the meanwhile, with the levels of relative poverty outside of London in England, the purchase of nuclear weapons left the people paying for the weapons that would never be used that they could ill afford to pay for through their taxes. The Quakers even had a campaign of not paying the proportion of their taxes that they estimated went to pay for Nuclear Weapons. It was one of their more striking campaigns of civil disobedience. They even had posters made and put up outside their premises advocating the non-payment of the proportion of tax that was estimated to be paid for nuclear missiles. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">For the early meetings no officers were elected, and whilst some notes were kept of each meeting, different people kept notes and the latest note keeper kept all the previous notes. We were indecisive at best. Some meetings felt like the times Grace Slick described in her aphorism re the disorienting effect of being one of Jefferson Airplane, 'If you can remember it then you weren't there.'. It was surely because when note taking fell to me and I took taking notes more seriously than previous note takers had that I was seen as a shoe-in for being the first secretary of the local CND. I was among the youngest to join. I was the only one who was at college, and the only one who did not have any romantic or domestic attachments. I did not have children, a spouse, or a house to look after, which nearly everyone else in the meeting room did have. The women who were interested in CND were clearly the most able organisers in the room, but they had enough of organising others in the home that they returned to after the meeting. I had so few commitments because I was living with my parents, but anyone who saw my few commitments and thought 'he has it easy' did not know what my parents were like to live with and knew nothing of their effect on my personal history. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In fact, what made me a shoe-in for the role of CND secretary was how I was misread as a person. I had become used to seeking to be useful to create friendships outside the parental house, the same way Mother shopped for some pensioners she knew. It was easy for other people to unobservantly mistake my keenness to help as competence when what I was trying to do was gain experience. CND was the first organisation I had joined where there was no catch 22 barrier of 'must have experience' to activity and membership.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />I was formally accepted as secretary because on my second sequential meeting as note taker I tried to chair the meeting at the same time, because I thought that combining both roles made me take better notes. This led the meeting towards thinking more clearly about what having officers and fixed structures meant. After that I was accepted as CND's first secretary and a chairperson was adopted too. Nobody volunteered to be treasurer but that role did not need to be filled yet, since the secretary could record the small sums that the meetings had raised for future meetings.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I as a secretary I was a beginner, I was better than us having no secretary. More importantly I was the right secretary for the right time. If anyone with a lot more experience and drive had been secretary then with the chairperson they would have tried to lead the organisation from the loose agreement stage it was at towards some programme of activities, or a much tighter agenda, that it was not ready for. So the chairing of meetings had to be light also. And with no treasurer we could not have a bank account or cheque book etc, the choice of treasurer would be the sign of us tightening up, advancing. The first thing the chairperson had to do each meeting was to advise couples who talked to each other as if they were only talking to each other to both people in the couple to address the meeting first, and each other second. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />The major difference in membership that the chairperson and secretary had to apply themselves to was the natural split between those who were in work and those who were unemployed, not least in keeping meetings short and coherent so that the workers could go home early enough to prepare for work the next day. Those in work were naturally disciplined by their work and expected more to happen sooner. The lack of money and having time of their own was what shaped the lives of the unemployed CND members who with the 'manana' mentality and delays in responses they got from government inaction lived by delay in their own lives. With my being unemployed but being in education I was half way between the two groups,</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Up to a point I coveted the laissez faire approach to life of the one-time-hippies who lived rent paid by the state in their own council houses, on state benefits. It was from them that I inferred a philosophy to life that has held me in good stead ever since. Life is a matter of time vs money. If you have little money then time will be your currency. You will still have aims, but your aims will be met through the use of your time, and the self discipline you have with the small amount of money you have got. Well paid work was always for the few. It was never for everybody, however universally attractive it is. With less money and doing the double, dealing soft drugs on the side, they became the quieter advert for the different way of working out life, where low pay and inequality ruled in employment.<br /><br />Unlike some who were quite straight laced and family oriented who were part of CND, when I was invited out for a drink after meetings by the one-time-hippies I accepted. I was fine with what I did not know about, and had yet to discover. When I discovered the little I did about how much soft drugs were part of the shadow economy that by it's nature resisted being estimated or accounted for I thought 'Okay'. On thinking it through it seemed no different to my dad taking to underage drinking at the age of fourteen, in 1947. If the secrecy seemed similar then it was proof that secrecy, taboo, had always gone on around mood changing substances. That one substance was legal over the age of eighteen, and other substances had never been legalised was hardly worth worrying about. How the substance changed the individual's moods was what mattered most, what to get moral about if morality mattered at all.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />Every cause needs it's annual celebration as part of its calendar, an AGM, a conference, or something like Easter for Christians, or The Hajj for Muslims, as each sits in the world calendar. CND also worked with that rule. Glastonbury had not run from 1972 to 1978. It returned in 79 and supported the diffuse counter culture causes known at that time but it's finances were unstable. There was no Glastonbury in 1980. In 1981 Michael Eavis, the farmer who owned the land on which the event was held, revived Glastonbury. He enlisted the promotional support of CND and made it an annual happening. Eavis ran it as a CND festival and dedicated the profits from the event to CND, in doing so he raised the profile of CND and revived the festival for years to come. He also raised the public profile of the counterculture that CND typified amongst the young who had outgrown punk and sought a more enduring rebellion against the passivity of socially conservative government values. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In this first year of its revival a group of five of us, Lynne, Tiff, John, Rob and me, were all up for going to Glastonbury. Tickets were a snip at £8 when dole money £20 a week. Getting there and back on a budget dictated by our benefits was going to be a much harder slog. Before we planned this trip the furthest I had ever been anywhere was either the annual family day trip to Skegness which was paid for by dad's Liberal Club, or the odd excursions put on by the boarding school/care home/boarding school. Such as a week camping in the lake district, where I enjoyed the scenery but did not gel with who I travelled with. None of the five of us had a car, though one of us could drive. We had to get to the event by public transport and walking alone, whilst carrying our food, camping equipment and cooking equipment with us.<br /><br />Weetabix to the rescue! In the spring of 1981 Weetabix ran an offer of two train tickets on British Rail for the price of one if we sent them a certain number of tokens off the sides of the packet. It could be a set return journey of any length across the UK. We worked out the price of Weetabix that we had to buy to get enough tokens vs the money we would save on return train tickets from the East Midlands to Shepton Mallet via Bristol, averaged it out by the five of us if Weetabix paid for two tickets, was a bargain. It was partly because of the allure of going to Glastonbury that at the first CND AGM of April 1981 I stayed on as secretary. Lynne became the new chairperson and she dedicated herself to organising our trip to Glastonbury.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The biggest problem with getting to Glastonbury was with the train schedule that we had to follow. We left late in the morning for the first of several connecting trains. After a five hours journey on the longest connection we got into Bristol train station at 2 am and had to stay there overnight to catch the first daylight train that went to Shepton Mallet in the morning. At Shepton Mallet we got our last train, to Castle Cary, which brought us to about three miles from the event. I would swear that the carriages for the last part of the journey were first put into service in the 1940's, they had the wooden beading below the windows. it was as if the travel arrangements were unwinding us with their slowness and impression of being from another era. Life felt sweet in that carriage, so far from all the routines and people that hemmed in our lives 'back home'. Life was slightly less sweet when, tired from lack of sleep, we carried our tents, spare clothes, food and cooking equipment the three miles from the railway station to the campsite. We had packed right because Lynne had organised us well, but what none of us could calculate before trying it out was how best to carry the weight of what we had brought any distance on foot.<br /><br />When we arrived what we saw most was the new pyramid stage, the outer metal sheeting for which we did not know at time was ex Ministry of Defence stock, which was an interesting take on the idea of 'swords into ploughshares' when added to how the pyramid stage doubled as a food store for the cows when the stage was unoccupied by musicians, their equipment and the lighting rigs. It all looked very plain in the light of day. The second thing to observe on the site was where the camping was in relation to the stage, we arrived and set up well before a lot of other people did. Because of this there was nothing we could do as the gap between our tents and other people's tents narrowed. One of the few items we forgot to bring was a flag or identifying banner that we could put aloft one of our tents that would make it easier to find among the sea of tents that was accumulating around us. From years of having no light to see by on the final flight of stairs up to my bedroom/the store room in the parental house I had good night vision and I soon got used to being able to find our tents in the dark.<br /><br />My memory for the acts and musical sets that were played over those three days has faded with the decades, and merged rather with my stronger memory of that acts that played the following year. All the poverty of memory I have now is not helped by how 1981 was one of the years that I did not keep a diary. Add to that how little live music I had seen up to that time, maybe two rather undistinguished gigs and I am left with little to say. But one observation of the three days is clear. When everything went smoothly it naturally seemed less memorable than when there was conflict. Thus the end of the Friday night electric set with political folkie Roy Harper was memorable for the way he over-ran his time slot and we heard, rather than saw, Ginger Baker, who was on next. Baker came on stage, tried to interrupt Harper whilst he was playing and tried to physically eject Harper's equipment from the stage where they both were. Harper sounded like his staying there was all too enjoyable for him. It was the first time I saw Harper live. He made the few records that I had heard by him seem polite and tame by comparison. It was the first of about half a dozen times of seeing him that decade. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">As I watched Roy I was surely more taken with feeling how far I was from where I had grown up than absorbed by where I was. The second to last and last performers on the main stage on the Saturday were equally different, New Order played before Hawkwind, and distinguished themselves by the bassist clearly being drunk whilst performing. In a way it was impressive that they finished their set as chilled as they did. When Hawkwind headlined they were helped by their laser show which projected the immersive effect of their music further out into the night and onto the audience more than any ordinary light show would have done.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The afternoon musical acts that came along covered every genre of music, the blues with Taj Mahal and Stan Webb's Chicken Shack, who sounded tired. The reggae groups, Aswad and Matumbi, who were scheduled for the early evening slots and were generally warmly received and the sax led R&B of Supercharge whose bearded/bald singer Albie Donnelly I was quite taken with the appearance of. Judie Tzuke was a weak headliner who I could not engage with. Also there were a lot of now rather middle aged men with acoustic guitars who had scaled only the lower heights of success in the music business throughout the early 1970's. Gordon Giltrap was the best of them. He was good because he was the most musical accomplished of them all. Manchester speed poet John Cooper Clarke proved a sharp antidote to those middle aged men with guitars with his sharp dress sense, Bob Dylan style bouffant, and speed delivery of punk poetry. That said he probably provoked the greatest response when he swore in rhyming couplets in a mid-afternoon slot, as if that was a clever thing to do. Gong played on Sunday afternoon, in the bright sun. Their playing was good but did not project very far from the stage, and the sleepy sunny atmosphere into which they played they rather put a lot of people to sleep.<br /><br />One point I liked was how when several events were on simultaneously in different places we had to plan our day. Film tent? Open air theatre? Political speaker tent? Or the main stage? Whichever one we attended we missed the rest and would only hear about what we missed later if one of our party attended it. It was surely unintentional when I missed Robert Hunter. He was one of the middle aged men with guitars. I should have seen him because he was lyricist for The Grateful Dead and the nearest that the band would ever get to appearing at Glastonbury, but as their lyricist he had a very low profile. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I was on my way to becoming a deadhead, follower of The Grateful Dead, but I was not all the way there yet. But that first experience of being in the audience for seeing different bands playing live sequentially over those three days got me nearer becoming a deadhead. At Graham's house I had been impressed by their live broadcast on the BBC that spring. The Grateful Dead had broadcast live from Germany to the whole of Europe via the television and radio networks of different European countries. The BBC was one of many to carry the broadcast. Their live sound on that tour was amazing on Graham's hi-fi that spring night. It would follow me down the decades, one way and another.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Glastonbury 1981 was my first attendance of any festival and it was a time out of time for all of us. The time away that resembled normal life the most was cooking and eating together. As sole female Lynne organised the four men so that in an understated, casual, way we acted as a team. One point that puzzled me was Lynne's feminism. When she asserted herself against us four soft males she seemed more like the masculinity she asserted herself against, than she seemed feminine. But then again the passive example of Mother when presented with dad was a much deeper and more corrosive mystery than I could understand by comparison. I half understood the mix of friendship and assertiveness that Lynne aimed for, but I did not understand why the male assertiveness that she borrowed from had to be the way it was in the first place. But I was a male among men, where I of the four us present most sought a different way of being male than what I saw in the masculinity I was supposed to admire. One reason that I was secretary and attempted chairperson was that I sought to be inclusive. Lynne would have been much better at making CND both inclusive and efficient than me, but as a mother, partner, and a daughter she was already doing that with her own family.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I liked the commercial village on the site because it was quite small and easy to get around. Some stalls sold beads and wrist bands, other stalls sold pottery, other stalls sweet and savoury vegetarian food, other stalls promoted radical causes with leaflets and a clip board where people could leave contact details. The stalls at which I lingered longest were the few stalls that sold records and cassettes. I enjoyed a lot of the live music, but between sets I thought to myself 'what can I take back to the parental house and enjoy after the live music is gone?' I bought some bootleg cassettes of the earliest BBC Pink Floyd and Cream sessions, among other music. Years later the original tapes on which these recordings were made were cleaned up and the same material as I bought on cassette became released officially by the bands concerned. That weekend I was ahead of the trend, in my own way.<br /><br />If the music at Glastonbury was meant to be rock and roll, then random sex and drugs might surely have followed for some. Except that those three days were actually chaste and fairly sober for me. There might have been the odd joint shared where I was included but it was nothing serious. Also, like the small town I came from, there was no mention of sexuality at the event, much less any mention of homosexuality. As far as the audience knew all the performers projected a solid heterosexuality too, that was a given. It was just as well that I took so few drugs when I was offered them. The conflicted sexuality I carried around as part of me might well have wanted to find expression when actions would have seemed 'inappropriate' and words would have created a conflict later, when I returned to the parental house. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">To compare those three days with what I knew before; what we were returning to, we had had the choice of probably twenty five hours of live music, much of it, though not all, very loud by home standards and some of which had been a blast. Back home, whatever musical content, it was all much more pre-digested and played at volumes that would not annoy the neighbours. The numbers of those attending the festival were 20,000, the same number as the small town, where for our beliefs CND were a minority of thirty among all those people. At the festival our reason for being there was to be part of some great majority where everyone was there by choice for the three days, rather than being held in place by some backward looking family. The three days of the sense of shared intent with everyone around us were a great fillip for our idealism. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />For us staying up late and getting up early every day to soak up as much of the event as we could, it was inevitable that we were subdued with each other and very tired when we left the campsite early on the Monday morning for Castle Cary Station. Some of us slept on the long train journey up north, out of Bristol. There was still plenty of the glow we had gained from the event when we arrived back 'home'. My tiredness was a very helpful filter when Mother asked me what the event was like. What I missed out for my being tired she would probably have been falsely alarmed about if I had told her.<br /><br />The energy levels were higher when we all met at the Quaker Meeting House for the next CND meeting, after resting. It felt to me that events away were part of what CND was for. The point was less 'Any excuse to get away' and more a general urge to import the energy and drive we found in other places to give more life to our activities around the town. The politics of banning nuclear weapons remained the reason for our meeting, the higher energy levels from other places was part of how we served that reason. I remained secretary. For now at least it was the volunteer job that would not let go of me.<br /><br />We went about our summer activities, including commemorating the nuclear bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August the 6th and 9th 1945 with more enthusiasm than finesse. But refinement was something bigger organisations could afford more because of their size and how much they fashioned themselves as part of the local social order.<br /><br />We were the highly sociably disordered, and would remain ragged but right.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 16 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-16-alien-and-shadow-of-property.html">here</a>.</span></div></div></div></div>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-34674765313502887042022-09-22T03:26:00.007-07:002022-09-22T09:34:21.276-07:00Chapter 16 - The Alien And The Shadow Of Property Ownership <div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Settling back into the parental house routines after going to Glastonbury was a reductive experience, made even more reductive by how I had finished all my exams. I had nothing more to expect from the college than my results in six weeks time.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My going to Glastonbury felt like some sort of pilgrimage. Whatever the experience actually was, I went expecting my having got there to change me. But it didn't, not at first at least. CND apart, the people around me did not want their lives to be changed and were utterly resistant to recognising that anyone around then might want to change their life. After I returned to the parental home Mother's first question was 'Where is the laundry to be washed?' which was a somewhat brusque welcome. Her second question came later when she had the time to pretend to listen. It was 'Have you taken any illicit drugs?'. There was no logical or truthful answer to her second question. I could have neatly sidestepped her enquiry by saying 'I have not heard the statistics for drug busts at the event. Have you?'. The point for me was that she knew next to nothing about drugs and yet feared I might be taking them. She wanted to remain uninformed about drugs so that she could continue to worry about whether I had ever taken any, and the drugs had taken me away from her. If I had admitted that I had taken some drugs and that it had all been calm and controlled then she would have made that reason for her to be anxious and uncontrolled. For all I could guess at, she might have wanted me to hand myself in to the police for simply having been to Glastonbury. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Her Final question was 'Was the money well spent? How much money did you waste?'. There I could answer her directly. By explaining the process of buying the Weetabix for the tokens for the railway tickets where because of our long journey breakfast cereal became very good value for money. I am sure she was unconvinced by this answer. I knew that she thought that <i>any</i> money I had that was not being put towards me put towards a deposit to buy a local flat seemed like waste to her. But equally any practical detail to do with the subject of me buying a flat was very much avoided. We did not look together in estate agents' windows for flats for sale, and between us we had made zero engagement with, and had zero experience of, the financial mechanics of the property market. We did not look i estate agents windows because we feared that either there would no flats for sale or they would be such a price as to prove that we were fantasists of the worst order, or there were flats that were within dreaming distance for us, but they could never be a reality and the flats themselves might well depreciate in value if I ever managed to get a mortgage on one. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Mother could have made a half valid point, if she had thought out how to phrase it so it sounded natural in the context. In the times before I went to Glastonbury, and for some time after, I was spending much more time with friends than I spent at the parental house. This included keeping late and unpredictable hours. I was getting closer than I wanted to know to being angrily told by my parents 'You treat this house as if it is a hotel.'.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">But, to read Mother more charitably, if she seemed to worry for the wrong reasons whilst I was having my fun then she had her own experiences to reflect on, where her having fun had gone wrong on her, where she had not seen trouble coming before it arrived. She had married a man who expected her to 'read his moods' whilst he said nothing to her and whilst he was abrupt and distant. I <i>never</i> understood what absence of words made that imbalance of expectation seem 'normal'. I empathised with her other major reason for worry a lot more; how she ended up leaving her parents house had been a trauma to both her and her parents that all parties had endured for several years. She wanted to stop that pattern repeating through trying to control how I left the parental house. But what she was blind to was that with her wanting to be that controlling about my choice of new address said address would be an extension of the parental house, where the potential for family based trauma would follow me. With the advent of any new address I might well feel entitled to break with the past and want a clean start to make life in the new address work for best on it's own terms.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">There was a second front opening up where I wanted change and change that was being offered to me seemed to be more of a help to who was offering it than it was to me. Paid work. Mother's masterplan for me was that I would have a permanent well paid job and live in a flat that I was buying that was located near the parental house. This way I would remain under her influence. It was curious how there was no assigned space in her masterplan for me having a girlfriend, or even having friends. The job which had paid for the deposit on the flat would anchor me in the town, and she would keep the flat tidy, do my laundry, and keep me in the family by inviting me to eat with family often. The first problem with her plan was that the jobs were not there. The second problem was that when I was on my own and I had looked at estate agents' windows then no flats ever appeared there. Neither for rent nor for purchase. If any flat appeared briefly then it looked mildly depressing in appearance, and overpriced compared with full houses. But not all work was gone.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Physical violence was thankfully very rare in the parental house, though I had memories of occasionally being grabbed by the ear by my parents when they thought that words were not enough for them to make their point with me. What conflict there was mostly purely verbal. Whilst I was waiting for my exam results Mother lectured me a lot about real work, and real money, with which I was to buy myself a real flat, with no sense of process. Part of me wanted to grab Mother by the ear and drag her loudly complaining through the town at arms length, and first take her to the job centre first and instruct her to look at the boards as if she were me. Then take her by the ear again to the estate agents and tell her 'YOU will go in and enquire about what flats they have, and how to get them NOW'. And if that was not enough of a reality check then our last port of call would be the building society where the manager would tell her about how difficult a mortgage might be for a teenager on a low income might be for me. Of course I did not visit and did not take Mother with me anywhere; she would never go where she did not want to anyway. If I had got the two of us through that reality check then there would not be much left to save for, we would know we were defeated before we even thought of how to apply ourselves. I don't know which of us would feel the most remorse for our dreams, or know why we felt it.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">A vacancy appeared to work as a labourer in an onion factory that had been hastily set up on the two-miles-away industrial estate. The factory processed onions for pickling. Trays of different sized small onions came in through one entrance in the factory. In the first part of our job we fed them into machines which peeled them. The onions came out of the machines into the same trays as they arrived in when unpeeled. They were then prepared for being bottled in vinegar, which happened in another factory. The second part of our job was to take away the trays of now peeled onions before the machine overfilled the trays at the other end. We stacked the trays of peeled onions one on top of another on a pallet, ready for taking away. The management controlled the speed the machines went at, and stepped in only when there were serious glitches in the process. I was accepted on a month's trial. It was physically demanding work. I can still picture my fellow workers. He was shorter, older and thicker than me with a tanned face and thick black moustache. He was much also stronger than me, not that there was ever time for even the faintest of homo-erotic admiration of the strength of others on my part with that much work to do. I was honest when I hit a fatigue point. I was not strong enough to hoist the heaviest full tray of big onions over my head into the machines for processing. He recognised when I was weaker than him, he covered for me, and not just because he had to. The management would have had to come in and slow the machine down for peeling the biggest onions that went through fastest and therefore required the greatest speed and strength for lifting onto the peeling machine and off it after, I lasted the month but 'failed' the trial. But doing the job was a lesson to Mother from me about accepting <i>any</i> job that came along. Every day of that month I came home <i>stinking</i> of onions after lugging vast weights of them from place to place all day long. Soap and water were not strong enough to take the smell of onions away. I was not sorry to fail the trail, or sorry when I heard that the factory had closed the following winter. It had been seasonal work in disguise all along. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I got the factory job not long after I collected my exam results from the college. I passed two of the four 'O' levels and got a D grade in another two, that is a fall short of a C pass grade by two or three percent. Having the job kept me busy, stopped me being quizzed about what I should be doing about work, and gave me time to think what to do next. The onion factory job left me too late for me to be able to return to college in the daytime as unemployed and signing on. Instead I signed on for evening classes to revise and retake the subjects I had narrowly failed to get a pass.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I was quite proud of getting my B in the History 'O' level. It changed what history meant to me. After my studies I saw more clearly how to resist the mix of small town anecdote and red top newspaper headline which fudged most of the explanations I got as to why this or that was happening. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My 'O' level history studies became key to what separated me from my parents. Both my parents were born in the 1930's when as children they directly experienced the least supportive welfare state that the British state had ever devised. Previous welfare systems had punished people whilst appearing to support them. Cruel and feared as the workhouses (1834-1933) were when they divided families, what they did was still provide a dis-spiriting 'support' for the poor. But the great depression broke that system of support. In line with the broken national finances the welfare system that succeeded the workhouses offered the most meagre of financial support whilst penalising the worthy poor and publicly scapegoating the unworthy poor. The old got a small government pension, won for them in spite of a resistant House of Lords in 1911 by Lloyd George's government, only twenty odd years before my parents were born. Health services and doctors were either strictly private or by public subscription/charitable. There was no 'health system' as such, all doctors were private and there were hospitals that had been built by voluntary subscription and philanthropy where even when they were built, the financing of care within them was a fragile business. Come World War Two, and post war times, and life was both better and worse. Patriotism easily tipped into a targeted mean-ness of spirit, whilst where government took charge they levelled up nutrition and health care but it was easy for some people and political parties to ask 'Can we do our levelling up without government help?' and use that to try to plan for a return to the worst of the inequalities that went on before the war.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Between the poverty of the 1930's and the rationing of the war and post war period new divisions between parents and children opened up that could not be closed. It was 'patriotic' for poorer parents to make small amounts of money and rationed goods stretch, and for parents to overtly ration hope in their children, whilst being charitable to the truly needy. One of the phrases that I recently became allergic to from my parents was 'We did our best for you'. What the phrase revealed to me was both an eagerness for us all to have the best, in the best of all possible worlds, and a refusal to recognise that their mistakes might have been more recoverable from were they to had been admitted to sooner after they happened.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Some of the above was why when Mother wanted a social life as a young adult she ended up leaving her parents home at short notice, and unexpectedly not seeing them for several years. That said whatever Mother thought of how she was separated from her parents she used the time apart from them more constructively than she could credit herself with after she became a parent. Between 1954 and 1957 Mother visited France and Belgium. 1957 was the year that she first met dad. She had plans to go to Germany in 1958, had she got to Germany she would have seen it before the wall went up which would have been a world scale anecdote to share. But when she met dad at a Christmas party in 1957 the plan to visit Germany was shelved for more local plans. If travel broadened her mind then marriage and becoming a parent quickly narrowed it. But occasionally, when we were both adults, she felt expansive enough to talk to me about her travels. Much of the who, what, when, where, and why, of the journeys fell by the wayside as she talked. But what she shared was a glimpse through a smeary window to a place that once existed that none of us could go now.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">At some point after the onion factory job ended I knew that I was never going to own a property. The idea of me getting a job that <i>might</i> be secure enough if I was in it long enough and <i>might</i> earn me enough to get a deposit and a mortgage began to smell of onions to me. I took against the idea, though I accepted that it might be right for some, perhaps many, other people. The worst part of it was that I could not say why and there was nobody around who would have dared ask me and draw out my reasoning on the matter.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">If having a girlfriend was not part of Mother's plans for me, then having friends in CND who happened to be female came as a surprise to her. Alas the opportunities they offered me, chaste and friendly as they were, did not meet with Mother's approval. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the autumn of 1981 Lynne, Chairperson of CND, one of the few friends I had who could drive, inherited her first car from her family. This had the knock on effect of further sharpening unintended disagreements between Mother and me. I was one of the people Lynne invited as she started going to see friends in cities like Nottingham which may have been only an hour away by car, but which when I went with Lynne proved to be several universes away from my family. The terms of the invites were that I was welcome as long as I paid my way which meant that I had to have some of the money from the bank accounts, the books for which Mother kept for me in the finance cupboard. That cupboard was where she kept the whole of my future locked up as far as she knew. As long as I paid my way with my friends it did not matter too much that I was socially awkward. That was something that could be handled deftly with forgiveness, as needed on the way. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">To me these excursions were a continuation of my going to Glastonbury and the study of history, they were part of what I used to put some distance between me and my parents. But to my parents their hold over me seemed to be as firm as if I were still wearing short trousers. Separation was going to be uneasy and disagreeable. At the time it looked like excursions away with Lynne would be part of why the break would be made but events turned out differently to how I expected.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />When I was spending money with friends in places Mother knew nothing about, whilst she thought that I should be saving for a future close to the parental house, it was my new friends' new ideas for me which stressed the parental household routines. With Lynne's help I decided that I wanted to be vegetarian. I still believe a diet of well prepared fruit and veg, with herbs, pulses and pasta it is a fine thing to pursue. But in the parental household if any one daily habit glued the family together then it was Mother's cooking. Even when dad absented himself from that table, half his meal left uneaten, he knew to not openly test the limits of the pretend unity and agreement we observed. The rituals around eating Mother's inflexible canteen cooking had been the family bond for two decades, except for the fortnight when she had to go to hospital for a fortnight in the early seventies, when we were frankly relieved to be able to stop pretending.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">She ruled in the kitchen, and ruled us though the kitchen. Beyond us making sandwiches on our own and washing up she was in control. My urge to vegetarianism was not just about me not eating meat. It was about me wanting out. Wanting out of what felt like being bricked in, immurement, through family routine. Meat and two veg symbolised everything that seemed to be historic and controlling in the parental house and everything that I did not want at that point. I did not realise at the time how much I was drawing 'You use this house as if it is a hotel' comment nearer to being openly said I tested the vegetarian waters.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">At first Mother and I tried being civil about this. I realised that without a meat substitute she would not agree to the idea. To Mother the plate was incomplete without meat, or some sort of meat substitute on it. From the local health food shop I bought something called Sosmix. It was a powder with interesting bits in it onto which hot water was poured and it bound itself together in a sausage meat/stuffing type consistency. It would have smelt nice with onion and herbs in it. But to win her argument that I should eat meat Mother would not touch it herself and took away from me the amount of time it would take to make the Sosmix smell and taste good and eat with everyone else. Poorly prepared as she insisted it had to be, I ate it as if it were the tasteless humble pie they all expected it to be, where they ate their meat with proud indifference.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />If my smelling of onions from being surrounded by them at work seemed unrewarding for me, then maybe it was the smell of badly prepared Sosmix in that small kitchen that forced Mother to secretly seek somewhere else, anywhere, for me to rent. In the immediate family we all knew absolutely nothing about renting from a private landlord, not where they and their properties could be found nor what they charged for rent and bills. We knew nothing about how to get housing benefit with me being on the dole. As Mother discovered for herself, the demand for properties to rent to single young men was quite high, but the supply of properties for single men was near non-existent. The council had the biggest rent portfolio in the town and they rented their flats to young single women but not young single men. Their flats were rented to women because women could not own property in their own right, whereas men, even young men, were expected to marry, be in steady work and become property owners as if all three choices came together, as a package. By the time I was available for work the bottom had fallen out of the market for skilled unionised work for young men, and with no union and fewer jobs for young men, period, we were not going to be good for marriage or property ownership. What Mother discovered, and I knew intuitively, was that there was a spreading and obvious dislocation for young men who could only afford to leave home if they had work. With their choice of job gone their choice of where to live disappeared with it. Most local employers now paid their better paid employees too little for them to be able to buy local houses. The private rental sector shrank too. If this the new way money that worked, by seeming to please the few at the level of want but not meeting the needs of the many the way money used to, then I was not surprised if Mother could not make sense of it, and seemed to have little say even though there things we had to do even in tightening circumstances.aa<br /><br />Mother kept it a secret when her niece, Heather, gave Mother the name and address of a private landlord who had put a 'rooms to rent' card up in a sub-post office window a couple of miles away. The card gave only a distant contact address for the landlord, but Mother imagined the house was near the sub-post office. She had wanted somewhere closer to the parental house, where not so unawares of me she could keep a more controlling eye on me. She wanted more of a role in my future, as if my future was both our futures. Instead of sharing with me that she had the landlord's address, Mother held back and gave Heather sob-stories of domestic discomfort to gain sympathy solely for herself.<br /><br />I found that the best way of managing the household tensions that I lived in the midst of was to keep on being sociable with the world outside the parental house on my own terms. Though with hindsight some of my late nights and choice of friends must have added to those tensions. I continued to attend the Christian youth group, got to church intermittently, and I supported CND through my secretarial duties and other more practical activities. There was the occasional empathetic symmetry, when Mother visited our CND Christmas fair which I was helping run and I visited the St John Ambulance Christmas fair with her. We both accepted indirect support to make our organisations work better for the public. Music, and swapping tapes of albums with friends, seemed more important than before. I was not aware that I was screening out my family this way, but surely it was the case. Even Wayne, my fifteen year old sister's boyfriend, known as 'Boggo' for his Mohican haircut resembling toilet brush, shared his punk albums with me to listen to. I was also kept busy by the revision work towards my Maths 'O' level exam. The night class was between one and two hours per week but I had to do maybe ten hours a week to revise the subject. So the deal with Mr Metcalfe became that the night class was when I handed my homework in to him for checking and I got given next week's ten hours of revision for me to do in my own time. Any time in the class Mr Metcalfe had with me he spent going over previous homework with me in person. Catching up with maths as a subject was quite a tense time. I surely spent a bit of my time willy waving too, but it was odd how some old respites from the tension of life in the parental house simply stopped being effective.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />I retook the Maths 'O'' level exams in November and then rested from my studies. For the whole of Christmas and New Year I did all the basic things with family, but only out of duty. Outside of family I kept my heart my own life. It was predictable that the 'season of good will' would quickly flatten out. It did. If I was half prepared for the flatness then I was not prepared for the phrase 'You treat this house as if it is a hotel' when it was said to me with a conviction that startled everyone when it was said. I don't know what directly triggered the 'Hotel' phrase to be used with such effect. It may have been because my parents resented their address being used for all the posts from CND that head office sent me, as the local secretary. I will never know.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I had no plan of where to move to because I had gone along with being barred from making my own plans to leave on my own terms. I had not even done as much as Mother had, She had secretly found an address to write to, and then stalled from doing anything more about it. In my head I felt 'stuck', completely frozen, about how to move. As far as I could tell it was family that had frozen discussion of me moving in the same way they froze all discussion of religion, sex, politics and money. I genuinely thought that if I asked a landlord to rent a room because he had one he would say 'What is wrong with you? Why don't your parents want you? If they don't want you then why should anyone else accept you under their roof?'. There was a simple answer to this question of course and it was money. With family the currency of family was hyper-loyalty. The shift that I could not make was how with a landlord his currencies were money and reliability, and loyalty meant nothing to them. <br /><br />Mother used the 'Hotel' phrase. She felt like the staff of a hotel where all the guests were tired and uninterested in her efforts at a surface image of unity. But if we did what she, as the hotel management, wanted we'd never leave and never have interests that she did not have first say over. It would have been a fine example of 'the Stockholm syndrome'**.<br /><br />The most useful Christmas gift I was given that year was a diary. That Christmas and over the next year was the first time I recorded some of how I filled my time each day with a vague consistency. As a record of my friendships at the time it is interesting. All the names in it are all first names only, no surnames. No addresses of friends were recorded because they all lived locally and I walked to their houses. When they moved away I missed them a lot, unaware of how obvious it was that I saw them as improvements/substitutes for the family that I had, not that they said they were, or said anything about my family.<br /></span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Nobody knew how much the next year was going to be both a break from the past and similar to it. But I was soon going to find out.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 17 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-17-alien-and-impossibility-of.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-47276757216203104462022-09-22T03:23:00.006-07:002022-09-22T09:35:25.125-07:00Chapter 17 - The Alien And The Impossibility Of Homosexuality<div class="Ar Au Ao" id=":t0"><div aria-controls=":1sc" aria-label="Message Body" aria-multiline="true" aria-owns=":1sc" class="Am Al editable LW-avf tS-tW tS-tY" g_editable="true" hidefocus="true" id=":t1" itacorner="6,7:1,1,0,0" role="textbox" spellcheck="false" style="direction: ltr; min-height: 259px;" tabindex="1"><div class="gmail_default"><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I knew well enough how sexual experience should be a direct, real and lived experience, both for good and ill. What puzzled me was how what was meant to be direct had become random and indirect experiences for me. I sort-of enjoyed what I did but I found myself frustrated with how I could not convert what I knew and did into a singular and more personal relationship where we/I would be accepted and were approved of. I found that I wanted to talk about what I did and how I wanted it to change every conversation that I attempted with anyone became a prelude to a disconnecting and frustrating experience with them. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Sex was <i>the</i> subject for discussion where when one person does allow another to speak their mind, then the listener appeared to listen, but they listen only for when to shut the speaker down from all further mention of the subject. Either the listener was uncomfortable with any intimate details, or all along the listener was only waiting to get their rebuttal in and change the subject. If the listener seemed patient then it was only in order that later they could tell the speaker that they should never have done what they did and should never seek to describe in any detail to anyone what they should not have done. This waiting to tell the speaker off, root and branch, had a name, 'directive counselling' or 'prescriptive counselling'. It was how counselling regularised taboo whilst suggesting that with counselling there were no taboos.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">This being unlistened to, seemingly because of what I had been through and had to say about it seemed too personal. had been true for me since at least the age of ten, in 1972. Back then I was half out of my head on anti-depressants to subdue me, and it was early in the times when dad would insist that the television be tuned to the television wrestling every Saturday afternoon. It was surely my drug fuelled incoherence that made the wrestling seem homo-erotic to me, but it was taboo that made the mention of how strange I felt on the medication watching the television wrestling unmentionable. Nor could I say how much I found the soundtrack of the wrestling to be intimidating because it sounded like the noises of the school playground. It particularly reminded me of the goading and bullying that back then had recently, literally, done my head in. Between the taboo about mentioning mental health and the effects of medication, and the taboo on all talk of homo-eroticism I felt utterly immured in my own forced silence. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">That dad had a large hangover every week which was another reason for silence reigning whilst the wrestling was on loud. The men in trunks who fancied themselves enough to go in front of a television camera were examples of a kind of hyper-masculinity that appealed very much to working class television viewers, even though with matches being obviously fixed the men were nearer acting out being in a live action cartoon than the commentator could admit. In any other circumstance, e.g. seeing it performed live or it being watched on television with somebody who was sober who would allow discussion around it, then it would all have had the ring of a humorous surrealism that was worth a giggle or two. Where there was humour the viewer could permit themselves to be in on the joke. But framed by the borders of the television screen, with every cliche played utterly straight, and with the thundercloud of dad's hangover threatening us all, there could be no open laughter where taboo was on display and held such sway.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">If I had seen and heard the wrestling once, and experienced dad's vehement silence about his hangover whilst the wrestling was playing, then I probably experienced both together over 500 times before I was relieved of <i>never</i> having to endure that weirdness as 'normality' ever again. But by 1982 I could only begin to break away from the weirdness, and even every time the wrestling was broadcast I found it to be compulsive viewing on my own. I watched the television wrestling for as long as it was on, wherever it was moved to in the ITV schedules over the years, until it was taken off altogether. I used the television wrestling the way men used pornography, as some highly detached filmed example of human behaviour I might like to try out given chance to, whilst knowing that I did not have the remoted chance of acting out such activities.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The Saturday family ritual around the wrestling, where Mother chose when the wrestling was on to serve the Saturday meal, touched me in a place that many of the Christian rituals that I was beginning to attend regularly in 1982 could not get anywhere near. The Christianity that was available to me was like the secular understanding on offer to me, but for different reasons. Both would openly avoid anything to do with matters of sex, sexual activity, or mental health. All Christianity would say was that 'God knows us by our deepest sorrows', as if grief were a natural state and precondition for repentance. Whether secular or faith-led, the best cure for all questions of sexuality was marriage, and if companionship ever led to mental health problems, then the answer was 'We simply can't have everything we seek.'.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I knew people who by their reputation were known to be gay, but who were also known even more for never talking about it. People who knew me could well have attributed something similar to me, whether it was the sexuality or the reticence, and I would be the last to know about it. I had a few experiences where as a closeted gay man Mother introduced me to another highly closeted young gay man called Terry. He was as controlled by his family as I was controlled by mine. It was like introducing two neutered male rabbits to each other. All we could affirm in each other was how much our families preferred us neutered and controlled. I resisted identifying with that but only on my own, and unnamed. By the time I was twenty I'd had several minor sexual affairs. I had experienced what seemed to me to be discreet and consensual sex, though how discreet it was and how much the discretion trumped the sense of consent could have been questioned. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">What was most difficult for me was how any positivity in my outlook on sexuality was overshadowed by some deeply early un-consensual sexual experiences, where I had the words to describe what happened to me. But they were so awkward, painful, and were so deeply buried in me that I could not imagine how the words might be drawn out, and who might draw them out. Even the slightest attempt at saying <i>anything</i> about the loss of consent both turned inside out on me as I tried to imagine saying it, and left me so incoherent and grief stricken at the sense of loss I felt that it was clearly too difficult a subject to go near. I ended up blaming myself for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Between the twin taboos around sexual experience and mental health it was safer to be dumb with shock about these most personal and difficult of experiences than try to say what happened.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">At the time of feeling so blocked up, and partly because I had started to keep a diary every day, I wondered whether I could say more through writing than I could live to anyone around me. But who to write to? How to find them? What to say? How to phrase it all? I remembered the failed attempt at pen friends, via local radio, from only a few years earlier. I knew I had to be more coherent than I'd been back then, the response I wanted mattered much more to me than anything had mattered to me back then. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the Christianity that I was newly discovering I found a helpful lifestyle magazine. It was called 'Buzz', named after the hum of feedback that amplifiers gave out. It was the first nationally distributed Christian magazine. It was as serious about it's Christianity as it was it's journalism, but it was light in it's prose and approach. It was aimed at evangelical groups and members of Christians youth groups like the one I had been attending for some time who wanted to explore the difference between 'being in the world' whilst 'being not of the world'. If 'Buzz' had a wider aim then it was to level up the Christianity of its day through its national distribution, so that the wealthier and poorer parts of the country met each other on it's pages. It also promoted Christian music, which was at the level of 'a cottage industry' in terms of scale. There were lots of acts, and many good musicians. The best musicians had found limited success with the mainstream record companies but there they found retaining their Christian profile difficult whilst they sought popular success. Since their faith was the point of what they did as much as the music, then the faith base across the country had to grow to sell more Christian records and the faith base had not grown in that way. With national church attendance figures stalling at under 10 % level of the population 'Buzz' supported the musicians and kept their audience informed as to where their musical heroes were and what they were doing. In turn this connected all the Christians with the biggest date in the Christian music calendar, The Greenbelt Arts Festival. The magazine also reviewed books, had cartoons and columnists in it. It was comparable with the magazines aimed at women before later gossip magazines like 'Chat' came along. At the back of this magazine were small adverts like you might find in any shared interest magazine. Some of those adverts were for niche ministries. One such small advert said something like 'Are you worried about homosexuality? If so write to..... ' and there was an address and Post Office box number. The advert was for True Freedom Trust who were based in Liverpool at first, though later they also had an office in London.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">True Freedom Trust were not the only people that I might have written to, they were the only people I wrote to. In many cities across England there were gay helplines whose primarily aim was the nurture the gay communities in the cities in which they were based. They all had P.O. Box addresses where people outside of that city could write in and get a positive response by return of post. If there was the lifestyle magazine that did for being gay what 'Buzz' did for evangelical Christianity then it would have listed such addresses. The addresses existed long before the first glossy monthly magazine, first published 1984. The first national newspaper which told of news aimed exclusively at/about gay men was not started until 1987. At the time of my first writing to True Freedom Trust the gay helplines existed, but I had no way of finding the helpline addresses that might have been much more encouraging. Perhaps if I had bought Bronski Beat's first album 'The Age of Consent', released in 1984, when it came out then I would have found lists of gay helpline contacts for across the country. They made such information available as part of the sleeve notes to the album. But I would have had to have been much nearer 'being out' than I was to have bought such a campaigning and 'out and proud' album.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the meanwhile locally there were mild 'behind the bike sheds' levels of private discussion of homosexuality, mainly of the 'Is he? Isn't he?' type. Gossip about the unknown sex lives of popular musicians like Freddy Mercury, Rob Halford, Pete Burns, Marc Almond, and George Michael. Frankie Goes To Hollywood had their radio debut with a session for John Peel and were close to a debut on national television. There was Tom Robinson too, but he was quite dour and straight acting in his protestations. With the pop music of 1982 the gay musicians had the same problems as Christian musicians, with both their convictions were the reasons that they wrote, played, and performed but when national fame through a record company approached it reduced their convictions to some sort of minor lifestyle choice. Where being gay proved different to being Christian with music was in marketing. 'Gay' in the oldest sense of the word meant flamboyant and the more flamboyant the outfits the gay pop stars wore, the more their outfits bypassed the need for verbal comments and said what the stars were not allowed to say. <br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Another way of approaching homosexuality whilst making sure it remained an irregular form of relationship was the first gay pub in the town, The Tiger Inn. I went there a few times and recognised a few of the faces from our more discreet life as willy wavers, not that seeing these folks drinking, willies firmly tucked away, made for a better connection with them. Like all public drinkers, we connected with the drink more than with each other. One reason for this was because the atmosphere in The Tiger Inn was incredibly macho. It was as if the married men of the town thought that they had found some new territory to claim as their own. Although they were mostly slightly too old for it, they had collectively decided to dress on the louche side to find out who there was to be had there for the new sexual opportunism. Many of them would have looked at others and thought 'mutton dressed as lamb' not realising that they were closer to being judged the way they judged others than they realised. If they expected some all-new sexual opportunities they were disappointed, they mostly discovered each other and realised that the pub was no opportunity at all. Marketing 1 Locals 0 was the score at the end of that particular game.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><span style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><div>If the above were the open, broadly secular, evasions that I felt at ease with as I joined in then what did I find in the Christian faith? I can't remember when I first wrote to True Freedom Trust or what I wrote to them. I would estimate that I wrote to them sporadically for five or six years, between 1982 to 1987. After 1987 I felt less need to write to them. The character of my early correspondences with them would have been quite direct. 'I am gay and a Christian what do I do with that combination?'. I was glad that they never ignored me, but I often felt frustrated at how detached their idea of 'support' was. Broadly their answers to my points ran 'We know you are gay. You have told us you are gay. You have told yourself you are gay. If you want to say you are gay then you are entitled to say it. God has never made anyone gay, but he has made many people Christians. Families don't make people gay. If you are authentically gay, and if you are authentically Christian, then you will want to be obedient to God. God will want to be celibate. That how the argument works. We don't know of any other way'.</div><div><br /></div><div>There were variations on the message, nuances where different glimmers of possible origins for homosexuality were inferred and left undeveloped. They might touch on how same sex boarding schools can have adverse effects on some people and the school would deny and cover up these effects. They might touch on the possible effects of dysfunctional non- Christian families, but always where they started what could have been an interesting seam of ideas long before the ideas might develop they would revert back to the argument 'God says that anyone who is unmarried must be celibate, whether they like being celibate or not.' and they would back away from enquiries where I wanted to know how to feel closeness and trust in friendship whilst overtly shutting down and avoiding all sexual feelings and responses. No answer with that one. </div><div><br /></div><div>If I could have written down exactly what my family were like, and described the Saturday afternoon television wrestling routine it might have changed their script, but I never did. Tied to my dysfunctional family as I was, and with True Freedom Trust always putting perfect family values on a pedestal as values to aspire to, what we had was a written dialogue between the deaf. If they had accepted that some families could be imperfect enough to actively cause homosexuality in their offspring it would have helped. But even then the man who successfully claimed that his family made him to be gay-me- might still be told 'God did not do that, and God will reject all unchaste homosexual behaviour.'.</div><div><br /></div><div>I understood the underlying theological point that they were defending. God made sex 1-to be enjoyable enough when suitably socially confined within the privacy of marriage and 2-for the purpose of bringing children into the world. Thus if 'sex is the problem' then 'marriage' might well be suggested as the answer, But for those who were depressed and /frustrated by their continually being single, they were clearly not fit for marriage and clearly not fit for the solution to their problem. To prescribe marriage as the answer to their problems was to further leave them unprepared for what they were decreasingly unfit for. </div><div><br /></div><div>A.I.D.S. changed things but only a little. Years later when the government A.I.D.S. leaflet dropped through my door I rang the London gay helpline from a public callbox, less to ask about safer sex advice, more wanting to talk about how to get out the cul-de-sac or closet that I was stuck in. I spoke to somebody who was gay and 'out of the closet' and their version of being 'out' was to send me away with a flea in my ear for my being in the closet. In the place I was even a flea in the ear for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, emotionally, was an encouragement to me. But by then life had changed the year before anyway.</div><div><br /></div><div>In July 1986 I was in the parental house just with Mother. No other family about. She asked me to find the cellotape in the sideboard. I found it. I also found a letter that had obviously been randomly stuffed away in the cupboard in a hurry, among the tightly packed clothes. The letter was dated late May 1972 and it was from Social Services to my parents. In the letter they confirmed to my parents that my place at boarding school, the same boarding school which as an adult they had told me that I had never needed to go to in the first place, was now fully arranged. Fourteen years after that arrangement had been made I was at last in a relatively good place in life, though it had taken hard work and a lot of patience to get there. Thanks to Mother I was renting a small modern flat that I liked and I had a reliable landlord, I had a few close friends and many acquaintances. My attempts at finding work of substance were proving futile, but I was three years into having discovered the joy of Radio 4. With discovering that joy I found something that tasted of being an adult to me. Part of what had got me to the present state of a positive sense of balance about life was now clearly derived from how carefully my parents had avoided all talk with me about how they had brought me up and why I attended a school that they later said that I had never actually needed to go to in the first place.</div><div><br /></div></span></span><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The letter was 'the smoking gun' that was still hot after fifteen years of being stuffed in a cupboard. The evasions around how my parents made certain decisions about my life then had started in 1971/2. Since then the evasions had been regularised to the point where any sense of personal crisis, botched decision making and any of us feeling personally wounded had been so well smoothed over that we no longer knew where or how to start with asking about it. My parents knew that if they raised the subject with me then they would have to end all further attempts to cover up on their part. They knew I would feel angry and betrayed. They knew that the more they tried to explain what they did and why they did it the more I would view their actions as <i>extremely</i> shoddy. I was glad Mother and I were on our own and we remained undisturbed when the letter appeared out of nowhere and I asked her what it was about, not grasping immediately what it meant. Within minutes of my asking there was severe defensiveness (Mother) followed by a deep sense of being betrayed (me) then there was the expectation I should understand how she was under pressure (Mother) and sheer rage and disbelief in response (me) where I did not know whether to be angry at my parents for making the decision that they did or angry at them for with-holding all they knew about the process of me being sent to the care home/ boarding school. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The oddity of it all was that I was getting on better in myself and with my family than we ever had before. All the ritual of dad-comes-home-drunk-and-<wbr></wbr>insists-on-the-television-<wbr></wbr>wrestling-whilst-Mother-makes-<wbr></wbr>the-Saturday-fry had come to an end. The television wrestling had been moved in the television schedules. Now that I had more privacy from my family I had an improved sense of humour about the self deceptions of private vice and public virtue. I left the parental house that day wanting to never see Mother again, but knowing I would/must. Inside I was numb with shock and boiling with a rage so overpowering that whilst I knew I had friends, I had nobody that I could trust myself enough to tell what I had learned that day without what I was sharing destroying the friendship.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">It so happened that I had written my latest letter to True Freedom Trust only a few days before the scarlet letter from Social Services, where my parents accepted that I should go to the care home/boarding school reappeared out of nowhere. I had written to True Freedom Trust in response to yet another of their letters full of spiritual instructions that I simply had not the resources to follow. Thankfully I was also going to the Christian Arts festival, Greenbelt, in three days. Those three days of preparation before I left were soaked in a private grief for which I had no language. My family were nothing like how they had been led to see them. Privately I was gutted as I joined up with my friends as we departed. They must have seen that I was rather down and decided that saying less about what they could see was as close to being accepting and forgiving as I could receive. They were right, three years earlier I had received 'Christian counselling' at a different Christian camping/teaching weekend and it had been 'directive counselling'. After the counselling reached some sort of awkward stalemate the counsellor decided to close with a quote from Psalm 46, 'Be still and know that I am God' and my response to that was to believe that what she was saying to me was 'Shut up, God is right, you are wrong'. I was still livid but she felt that she had done enough. I did not want any more 'blame the victim' type treatment where when I displayed a sense of being a victim then the counsellor would, quietly but abruptly, retreat from the counselling session mid-session, and leave me to flounder, openly wounded.<br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Everything seemed okay as we set up camp at Greenbelt, we soon sorted out who should sleep in which tent and we left our things in the agreed sleeping space. We each set off our separate paths to explore the different sites that were to be browsed. Throughout the weekend I was two different people. Inside I was a torrent of rage, grief and hurt. Outside appeared to be normal whilst investigating the site and enjoying the teaching, the stalls, and the music. On the evening of the last night of the festival the grief came back to me, much worse than ever before. I felt as if the grief was about to physically knock me out and put me on the ground, as if I were in the prelude to having a grand seizure or an epileptic fit. I found the counselling tent and somehow held myself together and got in the queues for being counselled. I go to the front of the queue. All the counsellors wore black trousers and white shirts which had their name on badges attached to the shirt, first name and second. They all sat at the back of a big tent three feet apart in a and the counselling was done right there, it was still confidential because even if others heard they were for their own reasons. I went towards the counsellor who was free, I thought I recognised his name. I did know it, but he was the man from True Freedom Trust who I had written to querulously a few days ago and his name was Chris Medcalf.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">It must have been confrontational to have somebody before him who he half knew through them writing to him, but was now here in front of him, the real deal, the flesh and blood that was alive and clearly in a bad way. At first I could not speak through the floods of tears. As I put words to my story and how I felt. It was as if I was falling apart from the inside out. He let me cry and talk, cry and talk, on and on, until it was more talk than cry. Adult size that I was, he did not stop me from sitting on his knee when it felt right to me that I should do that. It was definitely a four hanky therapy session, I left Chris <i>four</i> hours later somewhat settled. I had not intended that the time with Chris should become something nearer 'primal scream therapy' than Christians were used to. But twenty years of living and being fobbed off from the future I thought I was due to parents who disguise their fobbing off so well I did not recognise what it was had tested me beyond all rationality and belief. The intensity of the outpouring was natural. When Mother was in her thirties she had to go to hospital for surgery at short notice. The speed at which the need for the surgery was recognised by the doctor and the hospital completed made it the most efficient moment in Mother's entire life. I was having the emotional equivalent of surgery right there, right then. My need had the same immediacy that Mother's medical needs once had. The equivalent of an assessment and four therapy sessions in one go later, the time with Chris was rounded off with talk of my possible future, if I could make it work. I went off to pray with the Franciscan monks in another tent and got my own sleeping bag very late and very tired. Nobody else knew that I had a burden lifted from me.<br /><br />Where True Freedom Trust tried to help through writing, and sticking to scripture, they were out of their depth was in the area of mental health, which was the very area in which I, and surely many other troubled gay men, deeply needed practical help. On that last night of Greenbelt I wrung out of TFT and Chris Medcalf the help I knew I wanted. They were in front of me and I suspect that they were underprepared for what happened.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Whereas everything that happened through exchanges of letters, and sending leaflets out, TFT were never out of their depth, but the people they sent the material to wanted a lot more than the material that was sent would cover.<br /><br />One final point about Chris, back then he was a handsome man with a full head of black hair and a short thick black beard. As a gay man I liked men with beards, it was a source of regret to me that I met so few at the time. My reaction to his appearance must surely have complicated matters and slowed down how effectively he recognised what my needs were. But the complications were small given the depth of testimony about feeling devastated from living out a small town life where I was thoroughly deceived that he had to carefully unravel. That would not be the last time that I found conflict when my counsellor turned out to have a beard when I first met them either. But counsellors would know more about the complications of people needing help, and them being found to be attractive, more than I need to say much about here. Being fancied for their appearances whilst trying to help people is one of the complexities that are part of the counsellor's vocation.<br /></span></div></div></div></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Chris helped me wean myself off relying on my parents' ideas about how to be an adult, which were formed, and were very much still stuck in, the 1950's. He also helped me reset how I saw work and training, which was also echoing the memories of 1950's rationing. With his help I decided that I wanted to train as a nurse. I prepared as well as I could for that future. My plans did not pan out as expected, but eventually bore a very different but equal fruit. Within six years of that one and only time of meeting Chris I learned how much I was happier without paid work, I fell in love, and I was in my first gay relationship before being one half of a long term partnership.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 18 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-18-alien-and-sound-of-music.html">here</a>.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></span> </p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-52143381590045187912022-09-22T03:19:00.004-07:002022-09-22T09:36:12.762-07:00Chapter 18 - The Alien And The Sound Of Music<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Whilst I was mildly anxiously waiting for my 'O' level Maths results in early 1982 I was enjoying attempting to avoid a serious three way argument in which I was the centre and focus of the argument and I was the one who least wanted to be the subject, where I could neither avoid nor address the argument. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My dad wanted me out of the parental house but he could never say so, for two reasons. The first was that Mother would never let any argument for me being kicked out of the parental house be uttered, whether the argument was raised in public or raised in private/secret. The second reason was that for dad, when he got his own way it only <i>felt</i> like he was getting his own way when he never had to ask or think before he got what he wanted. From the choice of which channel the television should be set to everything else, he was the same all the way through. The more serious the issue the more it had to be dealt with his way without consulting him first. The only way we knew that he wanted me out of the parental house was because his body language told us. His body language was the part of him that most often expressed his discomfort most openly, where he had never perfected how to lie and disguise what was going on with him. If we chose to do what we thought we wanted, based on the discomfort of his body language, then he took the credit for what was done himself even though what had been done was by others on his behalf. The inability to credit others where it was due was where the problem lay. Because he never had to ask for anything, he never had to give credit to the person who got him what he wanted. Doing for him what he wanted was, literally, a thankless task.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">We were half way through the fourth year of being four adults, including my not-long-left-school teenage sister, living continuously alongside each other in a house that nobody wanted to acknowledge was always more comfortable with just three people in it. All four of us were very different characters, each of us trying to create our own social life in the town whilst using the parental house as our base, whilst we each denied with each other that the house had one too many people in it for fear of the one who said being made to leave. After so long of being this way we were testing the most basic levels of household cooperation. Something was going to give sometime, somehow. Already, over Christmas and New Year the dreaded 'hotel' accusation had been fired at me, 'You treat this place as if it is a hotel'. When Mother said it I had 'read' her comments partially as a recognition of how emotionally flat the season of good will had become for her. Part of me did not want to know if there was something more long term to her accusations, than her feeling flat. In particular I did not want her argument to be dad's opinion conveyed by proxy when so often he himself saw us as being like his personal hotel staff. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In my new friendships I was used to being chatty and open, and for us to be able to have different points of view with nobody being made to be the loser for being disagreed with. I did not want to be forced to deal with accusations where the numbers were where the strength of the argument lay. Three people holding one opinion against one, me, holding a different opinion. I resisted going along with dad's minimalist mime act/making Mother his mouthpiece as she herself had no opinion of her own that was at least as important to her as his opinion. She had been adapting herself around all his variations of this minimalist mime act for twenty five years. She was the one person who was meant to know him as a person but be herself in the process. What I saw in his silence when she spoke for him was how easily he could push her into doubting herself, or into merely being his proxy in that moment. His silence could mean that he was pleased and therefore she should be pleased with him too. If his silence was opaque, then to me it sometimes made her opaque when she spoke out. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The only work that dad allowed Mother to compliment him in, the work that he allowed her to do alongside him, was when he was putting wallpaper on walls of the parental house where he allowed her to paste the lengths of wallpaper that he cut. He refused to share any other household duties with Mother, particularly where teamwork might prove that she knew at least as much as he did about what to do and how to do it. He would not be seen dead within 100 feet of a shopping trolley, and she might well have wished he were dead if he were to suggest that he have anything to do with shopping. For a fair number of years I had more or less agreeably stood in for him, particularly when the look on his face said 'I don't have to do this. I am not doing it. Get who you like to do the work instead. Leave me out of this.'. But the more helpful I was, the more my help exposed the imbalances between Mother and dad, and made me look as if I lacked both initiative and masculinity.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Mother had a plan to ease me out of the house consensually which would not disturb dad. She talked about it quite a bit, but consistently withheld all detail about how the plan was meant to work. When some of the plan was revealed to me unintentionally my thoughts were 'This is a non runner'. Mother had form for clinging for dear life to ideas that would never work, however feasible the presentation of them seemed to be to her at the time. One of her previous plans for me was that I 'had an interest in electronics' and therefore I should have a job fixing radios and televisions. She had sincerely expressed her insistence in this matter from me being aged ten until more recently when the local jobs and skills market collapsed and trashed the interests of several thousand youths, whether their interests were genuine to them or faked by their parents, leaving the youths on the dole. I am sure any outsider to the family who ever heard Mother talk about me and electronics could recognise immediately how plainly false Mother's narrative was. But I was the vehicle for her fantasy, and for me to end her fantasy and find a career path that the town's reduced finances would not destroy was to destroy something quite powerful that we had once had in common. Even though to me her electronics fantasy had become like the sort of dialogue that mothers with Munchausen's By Proxy try to initiate with the family doctor about the child they are presenting who has nothing wrong with them. The doctor might be able to tell that the mother is doolally and check that the child is fine, but how does the doctor treat the mother, when the mother hides behind the invented needs of the child? </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Mother had a second plan for me, and this plan was for me in which I would leave the parental house where there would be no conflict. Like her earlier plan for me, it was never going to work. The plan was 'Work hard, save all the money you can to the point where you have no interests, ideals, or friends, because you are too busy to have any, eventually you will have enough money, including the money for a deposit, to approach an estate agent and a mortgage company to buy a flat close to the parental house, the location of which would please your Mother.'. Put like that it sounded simple, but then ideas that resist engaging with the world as it is often <i>do</i> sound simple. In public life that is how slogans get mistaken for plans, and well costed policies. Her plan required far more cooperation between employers, estate agents, and mortgage lenders, than there was for twenty year olds at that time. Her scheme also required the competitive world outside the parental house to give us far more financial security than it had so far. As regards work the world was far more cut-throat in the way it reinforced competition than either Mother or I could withstand knowing about in detail. She had male friends in characters like councillor Bob Rainsforth etc. She would talk to them occasionally and ask about the world of work and training, in my view she failed to recognise how they soft soaped and sentimentalised their answers to her enquiries, and how much they were immensely condescending towards her. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">What truly chilled me to the bone about Mother's plan was her idea seemed to be that I should become a robot who did not need friendship, had no convictions or ideas about how to live, and existed solely in order that I should get a property. It sounded like the work and property owning equivalent of being sent to the boarding school/care home where at the time I had no idea why I was sent there. If I were the robot she wanted me to be, then I would not understand the value of either paid work or the purpose of owning a property. Nor would I appreciate her new role in my life in how she wanted to support me. What she wanted me to aim for sounded like a definitively lonely life. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Putting aside deceptive silences and unrealistic plans, what I was facing up to with my parents as they were, co-existing in the one house, were two opposing principles for how money should be viewed, sought, and spent. With two different explanations.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">On Mother's side was the idea that 'thrift always worked'. If anyone made careful enough plans and had protected the resources required to make the plans work sufficiently, then, assuming the plans did not have to be downsized in the process of getting all the resources to the project, the plan should work. My reaction to this idea was unless the project was her allotment which she drew rough plans out for the next year which she was good at, then as often as not she did not know how double or triple minded about any plan she made she was. She had no sense to her of being in several minds all at once as her ambitions downsized themselves and resources ran away rather than working according to the plan. At one point she could talk about some big plan to achieve this or that, at another time she would talk about the thrift required to make the plan work, then some simple maths told me that the thrift would never be enough to get her what she planned. If her thrift gained her anything then what it gained her was a fraction of what she first set out to gain. She would show no open recognition of 'Oops the world has changed my plans before they reached their shrunken fruition'. Her plans for me often came with such a strong sense of fantasy in how they were meant to work, but then there was the compromise and diminishing returns in how they actually worked. I had good reason to have no faith in her plans for me. But often my lack of faith gave me no alternative in which I could begin to trust either.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">On dad's side the economic principle was secrecy and profligacy. Hide how much money you have from your family and anyone else who thinks they have some sort of claim on you that you mistrust. Never reveal to anyone how much money you have or where it is kept. Always give family the minimum they require, and condition them to expect the least amount from you possible. 'Treat them mean and keep them lean'. Never tell family etc what you do with the money that they don't know you have. Gamble and get as drunk as you want to get, as often as you prefer being drunk to being sober. Drink as much as your body will accept without you being too ill to drink more. In later years I directly observed the best measure of dad's health was how fit he was to recover from getting drunk. If he could recover from getting drunk he was fit, if he could not recover from getting drunk easily then he was truly ill but would deny it. In this description of my dad it may seem as if I describe him with a bottomless pit of cynicism. But the cynicism was his, not mine. To him secrecy and profligacy would always pay off in the end, even if money got lost or wasted on something that was unintentionally consistent with morality and proved rewarding well beyond him. That was the core of his cynicism, about which he needed to be silent.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">These principles coexisted, side by side, in the characters of Mother and dad who often silently coexisted alongside each other in the parental house. If those principles could have been articulated there could never be any discussion about the virtue, sense of choice, or practical value of these different principles. They were both too extreme compared with each other for dialogue between the two ideas to be possible. As housekeeper Mother could and did talk about the everyday, practical, and quotidian facts about finances. There had been a kind of leveling up in so far as with dad on the dole Mother knew how much money he got and if he gave her less than all of it then she knew what he held back. That said, I am sure she knew nothing about the drinking and gambling money that he stashed away here and there, where he did not want her to know how much he spent, or how much money set aside for drink. That was his secret to keep, behind the silence he kept. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I had reached a point of outright cynicism over whether I had a job or not after my experiences in the onion factory since last Autumn. The visits and interviews at the job centre since the onion factory job had not encouraged me towards any sense of generosity. I don't know how clear my cynicism about work was to my parents. My initial aims were set around getting the result of the Maths 'O' level, a pass when it came, and further going to night class to get the last 'O' level, in Computer Studies which would take me through to June. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Without even going near the personal knowledge that I was gay and therefore anomalous, I knew that I would find seeking a reliable life-partner difficult. When I saw how personal relationships fitted around paid work, which required a person to own their own front door behind which to get your rest from work and keep other people out, which in turn necessitated property ownership that put the person in debt via a mortgage, all of which you had to supported though paid work... ...collectively it seemed like some modern Gordian knot to me. If work, property ownership, and relationships, collectively kept me out of them then I'd have nothing. If they let me have what I thought I wanted, then they might well tighten up around me in a way that I would surely want to use the sword that would cut through the knot and give me the release. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">After four failed attempts at work and training where most of the financial gain went to my trainers and employers, I still wanted skills and an education worth the name for myself. I did not know where to start, beyond struggling to get qualifications, where besides the grades the knowledge learned was it's own reward. Everything that seemed to be inter-connected seemed to work best for the haves, nothing worked for those of us who were caught up in the high levels of youth unemployment, who were denied even the label of being honest have nots, when being a have-not was made out to be too much like a self made victimology. Also the parental house, with all its unspoken contradictions, cover ups and evasions, was itself a miniature Gordian knot.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I did not know how I was going to escape these dialogues of the deaf where I was the subject, how I was going to deal with Mother follies, well disguised as aspirations, that were best politely ignored by other adults she knew. I had some empathy with why Mother wanted a smooth transition. In 1954 when she was nineteen she had been the working teenager who went to the dances and stayed out late and missed the last bus back to the village her parents lived in once too often. Her friends got her to her parents house by car not long after the bus would have got her home. They apologised profusely to her father, who was having none of it. In shock she left with her friends that night and slept on the floor of a friend's house and went to work, winding huge brake cables in Marshall's factory, the following day and the day after. Eventually she saw her parents, collected what was hers in their house and left, barred from the house for the foreseeable future. She shared a rented flat for a number of years, and led a full and interesting youthful life.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">For a young person to be thrown out of the family house that they grew up in always involves the youth unknowingly and continually testing the boundaries of the life their parents were prepared to accept, coupled with an unforgiving male parental anger. What Mother wanted least of all was to see the same anger in her husband towards me as had been shown to her 28 years earlier by her father. One of the more common ways that people said that they 'believed in The Bible' was to paraphrase the story of 'The Fall' as if Adam and Eve were errant teenagers and God (plural) was the angry father whose anger management skills were far weaker and more direct than he admitted they were.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the end my departure from the parental house proved to be a simpler process than I expected, though it still felt personally cataclysmic at the time. Looking back there were one or two rooms that I felt at ease in because of their character. The first was in 'the electronics years', when my closest friend in the boarding school/care home was a day boy called John Jackson. He was a genius with electronics. His bedroom floor was ankle deep in discarded electronics which he was in the process of reassembling and he had all the tools to reassemble the parts he was looking for. I liked his room both because it was away from the school and it got me near a subject I admired, half understood, but I felt scared about. The second room that I deeply admired was Graham's R's music room. With its large speakers suspended from the ceiling, its side lamps, settees and depths of music and tapes of BBC audio like the full series of 'Lord of The Rings' and every radio episode of 'Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy' to listen to, it was a palace to me.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Other friends who were partnered to each other shared their own front doors, and their houses and flats were Council rental properties. I had no clue as to how they got offered the properties they lived in. An informed conversation around how to rent a council property would have been instructive to me, but it never happened. My friendships did not embrace conversations about such basic but vital issues. Their houses were nice and I was always made welcome when I called, but because the house was a family house then they never had anything like Graham's room which had a very special atmosphere.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">There was no other way of saying it; I had hi-fi envy of Graham R. His speaker set up, record player and tape deck separates system was one key part of what made that room special, even though the way everybody could spread themselves out whilst listening to the sounds coming out of the speakers was also so part of the package that room represented. I was never going to see, find, or make for myself, a room that would be laid out quite so comfortably and be so music oriented as Graham R's music room. I would never knew to ask him when, how, and how long it took for him to create that room. What I knew most was that the music room reflected who he was and it was a big factor in making Graham a popular figure with many people, and part of how he was uniquely generous towards me. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">If Graham's music room was not within my gift because I was a very different character to him then I could look for a hi-fi like his. His hi fi was the one element of the room that was commercially available that I could copy in my own way.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Without discussing the matter with anyone, On Friday 8th January 1982 I took enough money out of my bank account to pay a deposit on some expensive hi-fi. Since the town was too poor to support a specialist hi-fi shop I took a single fare for the train to the nearest city and walked the twenty mins from the station to the only specialist hi-fi shop I knew of, which I felt was a good shop to browse. I had browsed the shop before, quite a few times in the four years that I had been coming to the city for any serious shopping that I could not do in my home town. I had admired the hi-fi's in the brochures sufficient to become familiar with how they were described. I went through the routine of asking the sales staff what the shop had, what units fitted with what other units, what hi-fi was top range, medium and bottom. I spent most of four hours in the shop getting my head clear about what I could afford vs what I might want. This included where in 'my bedroom' which to any honest eye looked more a store room for surplus goods than a personalised space, I expected it all to fit. Having made my choices I gave them the £50 I'd brought with me and then delivered my fait-accompli. The remaining £450 they would get when they took the five boxes and me back to the town I came from, as if they were giving me a lift whilst delivering the goods. Talk about daring..... I explained that I would take the rest of the cash out of the bank and give it to them before they dropped my shiny new hi-fi off at the parental house. They said 'Yes, we'll do that'. It all happened as I had thought it should be organised. There was not even a slight sense of doubt in my mind as I got the five cardboard boxes through the front door of the parental house and then one by one up the stairs to the attic/box room that was 'my bedroom' and slowly unpacked them all. That evening I went to see Graham. I told him my good news including that I had not had the time to connect it all together yet and we listened to his tapes of 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy' which cheered us all up.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Over the weekend I was too consumed by how I was connecting the separate parts of the hi-fi together to notice how observant my parents were about this 'expensive new toy' that I had bought. There were comments. Mother worried about whether the electrical wiring to the room would support it. I knew it would. Dad said 'What about the flat you were saving for?'. Since he was walking away at the time he asked I was saved from having to give him an answer. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">What would I have said if he had not walked away, if he had stayed? The following is what my answer should have been. 'The dismal truth, dad, is that you and I had never talked about this flat when we could have, and we should have. I don't know how often you have wondered out loud to Mother why I was still in the house when you were expecting me to leave. I don't how often she would drop hints to you about the plan for the flat, without ever explaining in detail how the plan was meant to work. You knew that Mother knew all along that the plan for me to buy a flat would never work. Where we are now is what you, dad, and Mother have achieved between you.'.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Mother was right enough in wanting to put off what seemed to be the inevitable repeat of what happened to her twenty eight years earlier, when she was thrown out of her parents house with no notice. What Mother wanted more than anything else in the world was to avoid a repeat of that expulsion. But she was wrong in not having a workable plan, and I could not help her either. The way money and work worked against me was going to make sure that I was never going to get me on the property ladder. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">If dad had asked me why I spent the money I did on the hi-fi then there was a relatively fair and brief answer. 'I like music to be immersive and it could only be immersive if the hi-fi was expensive. Apologies for not running to the minor further cost of a pair of good quality headphones, so that those who did not want the sense of immersion in their ears did not have to have it.'. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Graham saw the hi-fi when it was fully set up the following week. He was impressed with the hi-fi itself, what he thought of the room it was in was surely on the 'charitable side'. It was rare for him to see me in my room. My working rule was that the closer the friend, the less inclined I was for them to see the room, partly because they had to go through the rest of the parental house to get there and the way the room was set out and decorated reflected was simply not me. The new hi-fi and the albums I had accumulated could have been an altar to an alien deity with spotlights above them, they were so different from what surrounded them.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I noticed a very brief slightly strange look on his face as he surveyed the room after seeing the hi-fi, as he was registering some sort of discomfort. I also noticed how quickly we left my place for his. But since good friends can recognise and accept the signals between them there was no slight intended or taken when I went with him back to his place for more from the BBC Radio 4 drama department on tape, this time Lord of The Rings. Sometimes fictional worlds seemed safer than our own for how much more fully they were worked out. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I was beyond words in appreciating how much I enjoyed my new sense of immersion in music. It was as if I had been given new ears, when I never realised how much the old ears had slowly shrunken my appreciation of the music I could hear. But any sense of immersion I had in the music that I could now fully enjoy also brought me closer to the opening up of the argument that I should leave the parental house in some haste.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Within days of me buying the hi-fi. I knew <i>why</i> I had to leave the parental house. Television and food were basic rituals that tied the household together. If dad controlled the choice of television channel, Mother controlled the choice of what we ate. If there was anything left outside of food and television that was loose and needed to be ritually controlled then one parent or the other would rule and create a behaviour around it. My appreciation of music via the new hi-fi signalled to my parents that I had given myself a place where I need not respond to the call to observe family rituals. If they wanted to shut down my appreciation of music given how I used it, then it was surely too late, given that the money on the hi-fi was spent it was surely too late to attempt it.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I never recorded when and how the discussion that led to me leaving the house started. But I remember it well enough. I was sitting alone with Mother in the living room. She probably quietly turned the television off when a programme we had enjoyed watching ended. Then she started to speak in subdued tones. She said 'This conversation is for these four walls only, you are not to tell anyone else. There is not going to be any buying of a flat by you now. Dad wants you out of the house as soon as possible. He was upset at you spending all that money on yourself. It is far more that he or we have spent on the house together for years. You can't stay here much longer. I have the address of a landlord. You are to write to him to ask if he has a room going. Remember we are not to talk about this again, not with each other or anyone else.'.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">It was not the first conversation she had had with me that was more for the walls than the living people in the room. There would be similar 'confidential communications of the obvious' in the future. I was surprised by how creepily she spoke when her usual turn of phrase was more matter of fact. It was the change in tone that made me listen. I knew before she said anything that there was never going to be any flat ownership. She sounded disappointed when she talked about the end of the idea that I should buy a flat. I knew well before she said anything that employers, estate agents, and mortgage companies, all worked in their own interest. I had no stake in how they worked. In the way Mother talked was a measure of deflection form her lack of realism, via blaming me for my own lack of future. I got the address of the new landlord from her, wrote the letter to Mr Lloyd and within days he wrote back. If she had shared that address with me when she got it three months earlier then who knows what disguised family tensions could have been quietly disbursed before they built up, as they had never existed? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">One Saturday, ten days later, I saw the house and the landlord at the time he wrote and suggested that I be there. I was disappointed with both the house and the landlord. The house was shabbily half-furnished with a mustard brown leatherette settee as the highlight of the living room. There was a baby bell gas cooker in a makeshift kitchen and a standard sort-of clean sort-of grotty bathroom. The landlord personified fake sincerity, itself. I got the box room with the vilest 70's wallpaper anyone could imagine. It was big orange and brown square flowers against a off-white background. The room was cheap because of the wallpaper. The landlord would not let me have a rent book, the rent would have to come out of my dole money. I was relieved that Mother had not been with me, if she disliked it enough for me to suggest that I refuse it, then neither of us had any plan B to enact. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Moving into the new address was piecemeal and odd. Anyone with a better sense of organisation and the money to match would have filled a large taxi with everything they had and gone with the taxi to the new address, several times if there was that much to transport. I moved a lot of what I had, including the expensive hi-fi in a shopping trolley the full two miles, completely moving everything by taking as many journeys with the shopping trolley as I needed. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I started this chapter by writing that I wanted to make my going to Glastonbury a life changing experience. The time there, for the brief three days that it was, was the most exhilarating sustained positive experience I could imagine myself having. In picking me to be there it was what Lynne wanted for me. Suddenly I had no parents for a short while, and I had none of the personal history that went with having the parents I did. Now, whatever the Glastonbury spirit had released in me had done it's work over eight months. I had pushed my parents to agree to let go of me half-agreeably. I had also pushed them to let go of all the putative plans they had ever had for me, and they had let go, reluctantly but definitely.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Soon after I had completed the move, one Saturday in early February 1982 Graham and I agreed to go record shopping for the day the farthest I had ever been, Sheffield. He had been there once or twice before. In Virgin Records in Sheffield we spent around £20 apiece on albums we had never heard or seen by artists we trusted. The albums were mostly budget price too. The weirdest looking of the records, that we both bought a copy of, was 'Anthem of The Sun' By The Grateful Dead'. The album would have been worth it for the sleeve art alone. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">We met up again the following Tuesday when there was just me and him in his music room and he played side one of the album as loud as we felt comfortable, very loud. What we heard so astonished us that we did not have the energy to play music by any other band, or even side two of the record. What we heard were overlapping multiple versions of about four songs or jams, audibly it was hard to tell when a half formed jam became a fully formed song, that weaved in and out of each other and were recorded on top of each other. It was bewilderingly sometimes you could hear several versions of a song at the same time and it was difficult to pick out the different versions. When one song ended another multi-layered musical explosion would start. We felt wrecked. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Side one of 'Anthem of The Sun' was a sort of mobile Glastonbury on record for me, three day of music compressed onto two sides of vinyl, each of twenty mins duration. Both the three day event and the album captured a sense of joy that was an intense peak experience. And Graham's music room was what made that first listen to the album so complete, I would hear the album and other material by the band <i>thousands</i> of times over the following decades. Sometimes 'Anthem of The Sun' would appear in my head as a highly distracting ear worm when it is least opportune. But I would never regret that February visit to Sheffield with Graham when we first saw that very strange looking record cover and the budget price and both go for it.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Everyone else in my family had tin ears and did not care about audible distinctions in music. To this day I don't know why I was different to them in that way. What I half knew was that the indifference they had to me and music with their tin ears both became the motive and means of my escape from them. My family's collective tin ear both made my escape from them necessary, and provided the means of the escape. They were that unperceptive about music that they had not even the first clue about why I needed to escape from them.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">It would take my friends many years to get out of the town in one piece, and take their ambitions with them. The local resistance to joining up with the rest of the world was that strong, and decades more for anyone who left the place to get the place out of their head after. But all that would follow for me, eventually.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 19 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-19-alien-struggles-to-find-his.html">here</a>.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-45111966302954164832022-09-22T03:16:00.004-07:002022-09-22T09:36:48.507-07:00Chapter 19 - The Alien Struggles To Find His Feet<div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When I moved house for the first time I had no idea of the size of the grey economy locally, or to what degree it would underwrite my life for the next half dozen years. Mr Charles Lloyd, my first landlord, was a lean dapper dressed sixty something single man with a full head of grey/white hair and a strange manner. He presented himself as if he was some more knowing character out of a Dickens novel. He was a minor Dickensian rogue with overly gentleman-like affectations. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When I was his tenant I did what was required of me but I kept my distance from him, not least because I thought his obscure 'ladies man' humour was deeply weird and totally unfunny. I could trust him to not throw me out when I paid the rent but I found humouring his affectations after a short while. If there was male that I could have compared Mr Lloyd with, then that person would have been dad. I found both figures to be deceptive and vain, both bolstered themselves by falsely flattering themselves for different reasons. Whatever living in this new place was going to cost me, personally and financially, it neatly put into long term storage some parental emotional baggage that I was glad to have a limited distance from.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The difference between dad and Mr Lloyd was a difference in emotional baggage. With Mr Lloyd I had none, what dad had given me to carry, because he did not want to carry it, was bulky enough for me to spend several lifetimes slowly throwing it out. And <i>still</i> I would find that dad had left a few loose emotional threads that showed even more of his old failure to explain himself. I rarely saw Mr Lloyd and the less I saw of him the lighter I felt.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The rent was £8 a week and we had to put 50 pence pieces in the ancient looking gas meter, but the rates and electricity bill were both in his name, and included in the rent. He did not allow me a rent book because he 'feared the taxman would find out about him'. But what the taxman might find out about him was anyone's guess. The rent money was paid two ways. The first was to pay the rates and electricity bill in lieu of rent. The second was that we put money into his bank account. I would much rather have had a rent book but he wanted me to live with no rent book. I had qualms about paying the rent out of my dole money but I had no other option. Rentable properties were few and he was the first landlord who had accepted me.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">He usually arrived at the house every Friday fortnight to check in with me and the other tenant. He said he had another house on the other side of town which was where he went to stay the night. Sometimes he would come back the following day if there was further unsorted business. In final partings he often 'joked' about 'Now I am going off to be entertained by a rich widow'. We said nothing. He left us nothing to add. I slept on a low single bed in a grotty box room, with a mismatching wardrobe and chest of draws that oozed neglect. The less said about the flooring the better. It was definitely a cheap deal in which I felt cornered.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Technically the house was furnished, but the furniture was minimal and came with the least amount of taste and coordination humanly possible. If an art student had created an installation and called it 'the ugly rooms' this house would have effortlessly outdone the student's efforts. If the furnishings had legs and a voice they would have asked anyone passing slowly enough to hear them 'Can you direct me to the local council tip? We will walk there if that is okay with you.'. There was no heater or heating system in the house. The cooking space was an illegally built extension that covered part of the already small backyard. Given it's insecure construction it was natural for the kitchen space to attract dampness. But the house had one room that the parental house never had, a bathroom with a bath in it. That the bathroom took up half the space in the back half of the upstairs and I slept in the box room next door was interesting. I went from the box room in the parental house to the box room in this new house because another student had claimed the front bedroom. Grotty as it was, it was still an upgrade for me. Had Mother given me the address when she first got it, I would have paid more rent but I might have had the bigger bedroom.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I was no stranger to the 'doing the double' lifestyle, where habitually appearances both deceived and misdirected the unobservant. Mother had quietly worked cash in hand in a second hand shop for years. She regarded the work as valid work even as she said less about the dislocation between the cash economy she worked for and the official government way money should be accounted for. Without doubt Charles Lloyd 'did the double' in some way where the point became that what he was doing and why resisted explanation. He had his houses and peripatetic lifestyle and never stayed in any one place for long. He kept moving. Keeping moving was not the point of that life, though he made it appear that way, he used the idea of keeping moving to deflect people from what he was actually doing. Deflection was the point, but from what? It was clearly financial, but I never knew what it was, which proves how well the deflection worked. Whoever his latest limited audience for deflection was, the next audience was the one that mattered.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I understood 'Doing the double' to be three things, either claiming benefits and working cash-in-hand (Mother, though technically dad claimed for her as part of his benefits, she did not claim benefits independently of him), or owning properties that are misregistered in some way and were undeclared to the apt authorities (Charles Lloyd), or it meant keeping different sets of accounts that selectively obscured money and profit from the financial authorities when they came to examine the books (Wilsons Carpets surely did this, though at the time I was 'being trained' my attention span and pay grade was so low that I would never have even thought to wonder about that). With all three levels of doing the double, those that did it would do their best Uriah Heep impressions and protested until they bored their audience beyond belief that they were 'honest citizens doing their best in straitened times'. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The 'doing the double' that I knew to trust and felt had the least amount of humbug attached to it, and was much lower scale than all the above, was practically invisible. Because it was practically invisible it might well have been much more widespread than the money based scams were. Some CND members 'dealt in marijuana'. That is, they got the marijuana from the secret regional distribution point somewhere in the next county or further away, they packaged it up in small packages and sold the packets to friends they knew who wanted it. Even as I never bought any dope I never saw the distribution of it as a criminal activity, the scale that I knew the consumption of dope to exist on made it much nearer moderate self medication, a sort of travelling invisible health food shop, where when what doctors might have offered anyone was less likely to be helpful whilst it gave the doctor high social status through the patients deference to them. It went without question that generally people who smoked dope had a much healthier relationship with their dealer than many patients had with their doctors. Many who smoked dope were on the dole and unemployed and a toot a day made the way time and money were worked at odds against each other made their life seem more bearable.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">This was the economic backdrop against which I lived. But where other people could keep the equivalent multiple books of accounts and multiple accounts of their lives in their heads, and trot the right story out to the right audience, I could not do that. I was limited to either being silently annoyed at the elements of fraud in the systems that supported me, All fraud required deflection and when deflection was required of me I proved to be no good at it. I got tongue tied and simply could not give the evasive explanation to the audience who were meant to be most receptive of it. Or others would use me in their fraud, for the most flat footed of official schemes for either social or work based support, where I did not realise that those who could avoid these schemes scorned them, but were happy to see people misused effectively for no profit to anyone to give their own more shady deals better cover. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My move improved everything. In the new house I could 'treat the place like a hotel' when I wanted to, I was the proprietor of my own time and space. I was not going to complain to myself. I set my own house rules and change them as I thought fit. If I had left a house that was better decorated, much better run, and was much more welcoming, for somewhere that was threadbare or charmless then the threadbare house was still the better deal. For me there was a claustrophobia about the parental presentation and house rules that I did not realise before I left the parental house, that it actually was claustrophobia. The two miles distance between the parental house and my new address was positively medicinal in themselves, that Mother would rarely appear on my doorstep was another bonus.<br /><br />The new arrangements were that I was meant to present myself twice a week at the parental house, the first visit was for dropping the laundry off every Wednesday, prior to wash day and being sociable. The second visit was when I was meant to take my laundry away, and it was usually on a Friday. This agreeably eased me out of their Saturday routine which I found to be such a grizzly time that it diplomacy itself for me to avoid being there then. I ate with the Mother because that was another part of the contract. If dad absented himself for those meals then I did not mind him 'treating the house like a hotel', he was the owner, and owners of hotels were meant to have their own quarters away from the place. What he was now stopped from doing, by agreements that he had to abide by, was to treat the house like it was a pub. What happened in the pub stayed in the pub. He could drink himself silly with his mates in the pub as much as he wanted. The walk back to the parental house existed to sober him up enough to aggrieve less those waiting for him at home who never drank much and had near-no comprehension of why he needed to be so drunk so often.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">At Beaufort St, my new address, the social pressure was very much reduced, however threadbare a dwelling it was. B St was a long way from both the parental house and the public toilets that previously I had spent long periods haunting the toilets as if I were a ghost because I felt like I was even more a ghost in the parental house. In the parental house the more I had grown and changed, the closer I felt the walls close in, such that I could not endure it and at the time did not know how to leave the place. With the pressures much reduced I remained resolutely the sexual fantasist I was, and did not know what to do about being, but my willy waving mostly fell away. Alas it still wanted to lay claim to me. I was walking to B St from the parental house with my clean laundry one Friday night, not long after the new arrangements were 'bedding in' when I was unaware that I was being followed. The following Friday night I was alone in the threadbare house and the other student had gone back to some more sumptuous dwelling. There was a late knock at the front door. I went down in my dressing gown and opened the door. Standing there was one of the less attractive willy wavers from the toilets who was the person who had followed me, unawares of me, the previous week..</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I had no warning that he would call then. I did not know his name because when I was a ghost in the toilets none of us who were there used names. For the rest of this story I shall call him Mr Aftershave for a reason that will become comically and horribly clear later. I was unprepared for his knock, which was part of his plan, to fake my consent to sex with him through his presentation of secrecy/surprise. In a cold voice he said 'Can I come in?' when what he did not say was how much more he wanted after the front door had closed and he was in the house. On Friday nights, intermittently, until I moved three years later Mr Aftershave would visit for anonymous sex in the discomfort of a half furnished house rather than seek sex in the higher level of discomfort in the public toilets. He always visited after being in the pub. Friday night was the night of the week that he drank most and probably the time when the memory of the time he lost to the toilets haunted him most. I called him 'Mr Aftershave', he was like a teenager when he applied it. One night that he visited he showed me his newly shaved genitals, which were as small and ordinary looking as his pale and hairless dumpy shaped body was big. To complete the effect, that night he had dowsed his genitals in aftershave. he must have been a masochist who got off on the discomfort of aftershave on his newly sensitised genitalia. He must have thought I was a sexual masochist too the sex literally left a uniquely memorable and bad taste in my mouth as I began to sexually relieve him as he urgently as he insisted I should.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I had no idea how to process <i>any</i> of this. I could have pondered on the secretive nature of unspoken experiences that the alcohol culture produced, when drunken men communicated how drunk they were to other drunken men. That might have allowed me to reflect on some of the acts that dad might have performed apparently willingly when he was more sober and he might have thought more carefully before doing them. I could have wondered more how Mr Aftershave used my secrecy as a sexual ghost in the toilets to blackmail me into more ghostly and secretive sex with him. I got no more out of the weekly sex than I had in the 'quiet times' in the backroom of Wilsons Carpets. I could have pondered on the distance between the official version of sex, on how 'It was designed for marriage' and how all I knew had been revealed to me through the boarding school which itself I could not describe why I went there, much less describe the strangeness of the view it gave me of sex. I could have reflected on how the sex in toilets and the visits from Mr Aftershave did for sex what 'doing the double' did for people's money problems. Both the willie waving and 'doing the double' were clearly firmly established as part of a grey or black economy, where the sense of imminent debt required unorthodox evasive actions. I had fallen deeply into one was of 'doing the double', secretive sex, and could not 'read' with any surety the other way of 'doing the double', via finance. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I did not contemplate any of the above. If I had even begun to probe any of the above I would have needed far more support than I could be assured of getting, through which to recover after exploring it. The nearest to such support that was local to me was a mature Quaker who had troubles enough of his own but who nonetheless received me graciously and understood that I was troubled, and that I felt trapped. He gave me time enough compose myself better for the public commitments that I had committed myself to, like passing a Computer Studies 'O' level and being the business secretary of CND, but he showed quite gently but clearly that I was not to try to explore how I had unknowingly developed a secretive life through, or with, him. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I did not know how people created multiple versions of themselves to account for who they were and how they got money without having to be too honest about it. The most consistent way that I made friends and openly engaged with others was through the politics of CND, my wavering commitment to Christianity, and the sharing of popular music. All of them required money to work, but money was not the point of them. The versions of each other my family had were communicated through the channel that the television was tuned to, which obviously took money to run, and displays of wealth were more integral to what the television showed. Dad was surely at his happiest when the channel was set to the greatest display of conspicuous consumption among the three channels. I often felt least comfortable with this showing off via television, because I had less and disliked it being rubbed in how little I had, which in turn dictated how much I was dictated to in the name of entertainment.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When I first had a television of my own to watch in my own space, away from the parental house I would swear at the politicians in the news and found the adverts for conspicuous consumption offended me to the point where I avoided them. My sense of thrift meant that I could not watch promotions for things I could not afford. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Once Mr Aftershave knocked on the door on a Friday night when a friend from the Christian Youth Fellowship was staying over. He had nowhere else to stay, his parents were divorcing. The family house had been vacated, ready for it to be sold, and he had lodgings at University that he could go to soon, but not yet. Phil answered the door and the fact that it was somebody else who put Mr Aftershave off quite easily surprised me. But Phil was confused and surely sensed something was amiss with me. We did not discuss it. There was a weirdness about the encounter that I accepted as secretive-but-normal for me that neither Phil nor I had the shared language, and experience of, with which we could make sense of it. Phrases like 'cognitive dissonance' were not part of our friendship. Our friendship ended where a cognitive dissonance between us set in, and stopped all explanation.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When I lived in the parental house Phil saw odd sides to me where nobody knew what to say. A few times I asked him and Keith, his best friend, to tie my hands to the rails at one end of the bed and my feet to the rails at the other end, and then untie me. They did it without question or comment until some more inclusive amusement seemed to be a better thing to do. There was no obvious sexual agenda there, just being tied up and untied after. I assume that I wanted a safe personal experience of being helpless as compared with the less safe wider helplessness that living in the parental house gave me. Exploring that helplessness verbally would have raised more questions than we could answer. If the exploration had been sexual, then it would have broken taboo and ended the friendship. So I chose well from within the small circle of friends I had to choose from. I have no idea what Keith and Phil thought of me asking them to do what I clearly could not do for myself. When Phil left for Bolton to study for a degree his life took on a different and hopefully better course. His experiences of small town life would have shrunk rapidly compared with his new efforts at standing on his own two feet in a university in a fair sized city.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Aside from the grubby dealing with Mr Aftershave where I pretended I was not there, there were at least two other ways in which I 'did the double', and both seemed benign by comparison with what others hid, but made a show of hiding. The first was that I was glad of the state benefits I was on and glad for the independence they gave me, but where 'promised to look for work' I did not take the promise at all seriously. I was a cynic about paid work, that said I doubt I was anywhere near as jaded, knowing, and cynical about paid work as the town's employers were. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The law at that time was that if an employee worked for two years continuously for the same employer then they could demand a work contract from the employer. Many jobs were that unattractive that wanting a contract to do something so unattractive and be so poorly paid that wanting a contract to do the job seemed counter-intuitive, to say the least. But some employees persevered because they also wanted a mortgage and to own their own property. There was a story of one employee who was in work for nearly two years, had the mortgage and property he wanted lined up and agreed, even though the work was unpleasant. When the employer heard about this he waited and one week shy of the two years where the employee could demand a work contract the employer legally dismissed the employee. Employers feared that employees who had contracts were the thin end of the wedge, where at the thick end there were unions and closed shops. No legal lack of ethics was too low for employers to use to keep their place of work union-free and as cheap as possible.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">The best way I had of 'doing the double' was hitching lifts. In that process I used spare space in people's vehicles, I got to places I wanted to be and I escaped grim stories like the above where people got themselves horribly trapped by their natural urge to conform. I had many interesting conversations and learned to be briefly entertaining and good humoured. If I did not remember the conversation afterwards then my forgetfulness did not matter, what I had said honoured the moment perfectly and that was the most important principle in my life.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 20 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-20-cnd-alien-parties-and-any.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-41636163481431981572022-09-22T03:13:00.004-07:002022-09-22T09:37:23.310-07:00Chapter 20 - CND, Alien Parties, And Any Other Business<div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I had been secretary of CND for most of two years when I moved to B Street. For having started my stint as secretary at a very green eighteen yrs old I knew I had struggled, but I thought that I had done okay given that nobody else wanted the post and given how most of the time I had been secretary I had lived in the parental house. I'd done what I could to hold the organisation together, even though, partly because of me we were slow starters. Prior to the late Spring AGM that we had planned for we decided that we should have a whole five days of meetings and events around the town, one after another, to raise our profile and to attract new people to join at the next AGM. in April. The work started in February when we booked a stall every week on the Saturday market. We all took our turn in getting down to the market place first thing to get our place. At the stall we made a presentation of the leaflets and information to promote the cause, and tried to show friendly to whoever passed, curious as to why a stall was there that was selling nothing that was for obvious and immediate use. At the beginning of March I researched and booked public rooms around the town for over four nights. I faced refusals from some organisations who owned halls that said they refused 'political' bookings because they were 'apolitical' religious societies. No matter that historically the faith of the Rechabites had impinged on politics because historically they were non-conformists. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Lynne booked a room in a local hotel for the fifth night which was a disco to raise funds to pay for the week and show how we were normal folk really. I was committed to booking the film that we were going to show in the town hall. In mid-March we designed our own posters and distributed them to shops to promote 4th to the 10th April and distributed self printed leaflets. I will never forget the smell of spirit that came off a hot Roneo mimeograph machine. It was something that imprinted itself on us as we printed our leaflets. Lynne held a party before the week of meetings and that was a great success. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">We had four public meetings in four days, Monday to Thursday, each presentation was on different aspects of peace and The Bomb. The most popular meeting, mostly because it required less unrehearsed audience engagement, was the showing of a 1965 film called 'The War Game' made by Peter Watkins for the BBC. After being made and before it was shown it was banned from broadcast, but shown in British cinemas instead. The film won awards for the docudrama style of presentation it employed, which made viewing it a more intense experience than people were used to. The film was about the effects that the dropping of a nuclear bomb would have on English civil life. It was a highly graphic presentation. Watkins did not spare the audience from the horrors of the breakdown of all social norms and values. I could see why Harold Wilson's government made the BBC sit on the film originally-what point could there be in promoting the idea of England as a property owning democracy where the Englishman male bought his home to pretend it was his castle when what fell from the skies would obliterate the pretend castle, the keeper of it and those kept in said pretend castle? Why would anyone take out a mortgage on a house that was going to be bombed until it was uninhabitable after they had set up the bank arrangements? If Wilson wanted anyone to be afraid then he wanted the Russian military to be afraid of using their Bomb. This film would not do that. But then as CND members we mistrusted any idea of safety via 'Mutually Assured Destruction' anyway.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The disco went wonderfully well, and it recouped us most of the costs on hall bookings that we had spent on the week. Lynne was now officially our 'entertainments secretary' and there was more entertainment to come, but not locally.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Lynne's party organising skills were what encouraged me to believe I could organise a housewarming party mostly by myself in the new but strangely under decorated house. I arranged it with the house mate. He invited his friends and we invited a few of the closer neighbours to make sure that they could not complain about the party because they were at it. Friends I'd made from out of town through my links with other CND groups came too. Mother was most offended when she found out after the party that she had not been invited, but with her I had reached the stage where I was damned for what I did and damned for what I didn't do. She might have fitted in okay amongst the many alternative types. But I had this fear of her somehow taking the joy I felt with having all my friends in one place and for one night, and me having invited them there. <br /><br />The big April push did it's work and drew in many new volunteers who were keen to be organised at the CND AGM at which I felt less inclined to organise them. I wanted to stand down as CND secretary but the old story repeated itself, now I was in office nobody wanted to take my place. I stayed on but I warned them all that somebody would have to volunteer before the next year was out, the sooner the next secretary volunteered the better they would understand the work involved. Sometimes being a secretary felt like a continuous part time job. Between that and preparing for my Computer Studies exams I was tired. Though the social aspect of being in CND more than refreshed me, particularly when the prospect of going to Glastonbury came round again, with nearly the same group as last year. This time we travelled by car since Lynne had inherited a vehicle from her family. We were better organised, this time we took our banner with us to mark out where our tents were. I had never owned a camera before and borrowed Graham's little 110 cartridge camera for the occasion.<br /><br />There were 27,000 of us there that weekend, up half as many again as last year. But it was still a modest affair. The following are some of the memories I have of the week combined with the entries in my diary for the week away, only slightly amended for grammar and continuity.<br /><br /><b>Tuesday 15th June.</b> Gave Mother £14, my laundry and my cat, Clare, to look after for the week. Went to Tiff and Lynne's for the evening and helped them to pack the car.<br /><br /><b>Wednesday 16th June.</b> Set off at 7 am in the car with everything packed. Rob had brought his portable cassette player and we listened to his tape of a Radio 3 production of Shelagh Delaney's 'A Taste Of Honey'. 2 hours of sparky repartee that improved on our chat. We got to Shepton Mallet at 2 pm, spent ninety minutes looking around and shopping. I found a book shop where I bought 'Brave New World'-Aldous Huxley-30p, 'Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost'-35p. Spent 13p groceries. Got to the campsite at 4 pm. We set up camp in the same place we set up camp last year. After many complaints we were promptly moved to behind the orange tape, which we had never noticed in the first place. At Lynne's prompting I set up the stove and cooked for five of us because there were no food vans anywhere. Afterwards we relaxed beside a log fire that somebody else lit. To sleep at 11pm.<br /><br /><b>Thursday 16th June.</b> Did nothing much during the day, the right thing to do. In the early evening I bought myself Pizza and chips, 60p. The film tent opened. On my own, not with my group, I watched the double bill of Peter Sellers 'Being There' and 'Dr Strangelove'. I particularly liked the dark humour of the latter.<br /><br /><b>Friday 17th June.</b> It rained most of the day. I got soaked, but I was not going to let the rain make me stay in my tent even though it was the worst single day of rain for decades. Found the record stall, bought 'Secret Treaties'-Blue Oyster Cult £3, 'Lord of The Rings'-Bo Hanson £3, also bought a gallon of gut-rot cider. Set off on my own. The evening started well with John Cooper Clarke who on some tracks had backing tapes to accompany his rants. The highlight of the day was the last act of the evening, Randy California. By the time he was into some of the early peaks of his set. I'd had 2/3 of a gallon of the cider that I'd bought earlier which contributed greatly to how good I thought Randy California sounded. He was the nearest I'd ever get to seeing Jimi Hendrix. I was sick twice in the very muddy foreground before the stage which absorbed what I threw up admirably well. 45 mins after the second time of being sick I realised that I had vomited my false tooth/plate up too because it took that long for the numbness of my mouth to wear off. The plate/false tooth was somewhere in the field, having got there in the dark. Nothing I could do to find it now. To bed in my tent at 00.45 am.<br /><br /><b>Saturday 17th June.</b> A slow day time, and rightly so after last night. I started reading 'Brave New World'. Back at the record stall, I bought 'Wasa Wasa'-Edgar Broughton Band. 65p food. Roy Harper played a mid afternoon set, in the heat of the sun it was hard to pay attention to his new material. I fell asleep to Van Morrison, very strange dreams. Aswad were better. I gave The Blues Band and Sad Cafe a miss. David Rappaport was quite good in the comedy tent.<br /><br /><b>Sunday 18th June.</b> Spent £4.50 Grateful Dead T-shirt (duck egg blue with Europe '72 design on the front) bought 'Blues For Allah'-Grateful Dead and 'Strictly Personal'-Captain Beefheart. 70p pizza and chips. The Chieftains were rather good, as was Jackson Browne because the sun was out for them and they showed some sense of urgency. I sat down in front of the stage for both. I could have done without the male nudist who stood and watched the Jackson Browne set next to our blanket. With him standing quite so close he did rather unintentionally disturb my eye line as I looked round. Later the rain rather drowned Ritchie Havens' afternoon acoustic set, but it could not dampen his enthusiasm. Judie Tzuke returned. She was no better at being a headliner than last time.<br /><br /><b>Monday 19th June.</b> In the morning we were packed and were in the queue to leave at 11 am. It took two hours to get off the campsite. We dropped John and Carol off at Stoke on Trent and then went 'home'. How depressing it was to return to where we started. Went straight to bed.<br /><br />However much I tried to be the singular person I wanted to be, and limit my 'doing the double' to where it left no lasting damage and no horrible lies were told I could still be caught up and blindsided. After the highs of Glastonbury came the downer. Alan from the carpet shop found out where I lived. It happened because I had forgotten how double minded he could be where he made sure that any viewer not in the know would not spot it. When he learned that I was living away from my parents he wanted the address. I should not have given it, but I answered him. He started to visit me spontaneously at odd times during the day with no warning. If he caught me in and had no obvious plans for going out hastily he expected me to give him sex on demand. I obliged him, he had this way of being a bully where he was not seen to be a bully, to which I was vulnerable because from the first interview with him through to the back room activities in the carpet shop were a shared memory for both of us. What he had no clue about, or interest in, was how little I enjoyed the sex then and how little I wanted to see him in any sort of sexual role. I did not know whether to feel bad because I felt coerced or feel bad because of what I was coerced into doing was gay sex. Both were more than solid enough reasons to feel bad as far as I could reason. Because I had lived partly-independently for so short a time I was slow to recognise the 'goldfish bowl' effect of life in a small town where once a person see you as a place to park their vices then telling them to go park them somewhere else takes an anger that the put upon have learned is not theirs to express. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />Between Alan 'shag pile' Wison for whom shagging was his main interest whatever his business was, the mysterious Mr Aftershave, and the imminence of my twenty-first birthday when Mother was going to publicly run my life for me, my sense of dread increased to unbearable levels. The more I wanted to see my Quaker friend for some sense of life away from the pressure without appearing to him as if I was a lost and cringing dog who was in need of comfort. I did my best to stay away, I knew that the appearance of being a cringing dog was something I should deal with some other way and there was nothing my Quaker friend could do to stop my family reclaiming me because of my twenty first birthday. There was nothing he could do to limit Mother reframing the event as me having what she had never had, a twenty-first birthday party, and by proxy making it her party more than mine.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #222222; text-align: left;">It is probably for the best that </span>the words that Mother and I said to each other about her plans for my twenty-first birthday are lost to history. I know I wanted a neutral venue where if it had to be paid for then we behave better and it would be money well spent. Mother thought that idea 'too posh'. Cheapness won that argument via a cousin who loaned us her large house for the day. Then there was the after party going out. I had to go for a drink with my family in a local working men's club. I did not know how to say to Mother 'These places weird me out, I find them stressful', I knew her reply would be 'But it is your birthday why do you want to be stressed on your birthday?', as if how I might have felt was voluntary and I should be more obliging to family for being so kind as to taken me out somewhere they liked. Finally there was how uncomfortably I was dressed and I looked. I looked <i>awful </i>but to be fair I was probably having serial panic attacks. Anyone with any sensitivity and awareness would have spent their own time and money and given me a day of pampering where with my agreement and in their good company I got my hair trimmed and beard tidied up in a way I felt at ease with, and I was bought clothes for the day that I could wear after that minimised the anxieties I felt. But Mother seemed to have no awareness of my anxiety levels, if she did have any awareness of my unease then she hid the fact and used my unease against me. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The nearest I got to thoughtfulness from others about my appearance was a prompt replacement false tooth/plate after Glastonbury and that was from the dentist, not my family, though the attempt by the relative who made the food at making tasty and agreeable vegetarian food, as large part of the party food, was appreciated by me.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the end, whatever the celebrations looked like to others I felt like I was the central character in a Harold Pinter play, the sort of play where the ordinary phrase gets invested with menace as the characters become uncertain. Where the characters leave each other feeling isolated. Every surprise that was meant to be positive and jolly when it was shared with everyone disguised some queasy aftermath that I thought was meant just for me. The event may only have been one day but it felt like it went on and on and on. I tried to mentally retreat from the endless minor unpleasantness of it all, but I could only do that in my head. I could never retreat openly. All I wanted to do was hide in a corner behind a George Orwell book and forget everybody around me. Reading about Winston Smith being tortured by O'Brien was far easier than experiencing the torture of normality via my family.<br /><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The summer bumped along more quietly after the events from April to July were out of the way. In August I was relieved of being CND secretary when secretary no 2 volunteered and took over from me. By the time the new secretary arrived I needed the break from CND. I also wanted my successor to make their own mark in the post so I did not attend meetings for a while, and anyway I liked the principle of being an officer in voluntary work for three years at most. That principle would follow me into future voluntary work. Lynne took a break too, though I think she was disappointed that my retirement ended our teamwork.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I passed my retake of Computer Studies 'O' level. If I had a plan when I started then it had been blown well off course by now and I did not know what to do next. I had taken so long to get the four 'O' levels that I first set out to get, that by the time I had the four passes the game plan was beyond being rewritten. I had not lost my sense of humour about paid work. One brief dialogue I had with one of the job centre staff ran thus<br /><br />me; 'There are very few jobs on the boards this week.'.<br /><br />staff; 'Oh, but we have government targets now.'.<br /><br />me; 'I thought targets were for armies.'.<br /><br /></span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">My flippancy was brittle and immature. I had underestimated the job centre staff. I did not foresee how when more government money arrived then Councillor Bob Rainsforth and his friends would return and find more ways of using younger people's time for his personal remuneration than those youths had reckoned on.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 21 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-21-alien-listens-for-how-it.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-55420409480578823232022-09-22T03:09:00.005-07:002022-09-22T09:38:20.188-07:00Chapter 21 - The Alien Listens For How It Feels To Be Free<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Mental health was one of the subjects which could only be approached by the most indirect of means, via some passing comment whilst more directly discussing some other subject. The Quakers were the people I knew who had the clearest understanding of it. One Quaker had lost his wife to actual insanity where the only way he could prove faithful to her as a husband was to visit her in the asylum she lived in, a two hour drive each way once a fortnight. Another Quaker I knew had endured near-homelessness and rural isolation for several years after a difficult divorce. It was not as if the Quakers said 'Join us to experience being driven mad by God'. It was much more that the Quakers put into practice a radical egalitarianism which could incorporate the strange and upsetting events that happened around them much more than other churches could allow for. The events that happened happened to them were describable, the facts and sequences of events could be outlined in detail. There was no explanation as to why these events happened to them, but nothing could remove the sense of grit the Quakers had to have when life was hard for them, as if their grit were the grace that made their surviving unfortunate events possible.</span></span></p><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I wanted to understand the process of this grit/grace because I felt that in some way such an understanding would help me understand how I survived the boarding school/care home experience. But of course the Quakers who had gained their grit through grace found talk about the process beyond them. At least I felt their sense of empathy towards me as I asked, but the answer I wanted to hear could not be given, and they understood how I had been tested in a way that could not be explained in easy words. </span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The nearest I got to any regular informed discussion about mental health was my repeatedly listening to the lyrics of 'Dark Side of The Moon' by Pink Floyd, which I had taped so that I could play the tape on my Walkman and walk in open spaces and have the music in my ears. Oh how I felt it every time I heard the lyric 'And when the band you're starts playing different tunes'.... On the other side of the tape I recorded 'Tubular Bells' by Mike Oldfield. I could flip the tape from one side to the other and back again whilst walking through greenery on my own as if the decade since both of those recordings were released had simply disappeared. I liked how music could create liminal spaces for the listener. I needed the spaces the music created, and those two recordings did that par excellence.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In materials from the library that I had read, variable mental health was recognised and accepted to the point where there were multiple theories about it. Any theory of which could be totally or partly true, depending on how the author thought the theories fitted around each other. But these books were written and published far away from where I was reading them. They were non-fiction in the wider world. But in the language that explained local life they became nearer fantasy and fiction, they said nothing about the way local people worked or chose how to explain themselves to each other.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When I visited the parental house as a guest one of the spaces I was welcome to go to was the attic. From the time my parents first married it had always been a store room. On and off between 1967 and 1982 it had doubled as 'my bedroom'. Though the character and way the room was arranged remained pure 'mother' and pure store room. One the identity problems I struggled to define was to do with the hidden dual identity of the room, in which Mother's values always won, and she denied there was ever any conflict. The room <i>never</i> felt like it was mine. But 'feel' mattered little to Mother. With that room the word 'mine' always applied to her, never to me. I was banned from saying that, Now I no longer lived there the conflict seemed reduced. I had taken away everything that I thought had personal or practical use to me to B Street, including a black and white television. Inviting me to enjoy that space now, as Mother did, felt like a polite but oddly hollow gesture. </span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">But recognising how hollow a gesture it was would mean returning to old conflicts that my leaving had left moot. I should have resisted the repeat of the old emotional double-think. But I had was <i>born</i> into this emotional double think, such that recognising it, and resisting it before it pulled me in, was difficult to do.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Nonetheless I found ways of using the space well. The quiet was the best aspect of the room, so I used it as a reading room. I very much remember enjoying reading the 'The Hobbit' and the 'The Lord of The Rings' trilogy in that quiet, along with reading the book that had sold millions but which at the time defied categorisation, 'Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' by Robert M. Persig, another 1973 classic. I wish I knew what was in the zeitgeist that year that created this marked and perceptive otherness that so commented on this world, The book was part road movie narrative, part philosophical discussion, part motorbike mechanics manual, but most importantly the book discusses the extreme mental health issues of the main character, an ex teacher who rebels against the tight competitive and results based rules of the school he teachers in and he creates uproar. The twist in the story is that any near-normal narrative about rebellion in a school the pupil is the one to rebel, the teacher is meant to reinforce the rules, the rule(r)s remain, the rebellion works but the rules don't change. This book explored the question of what happens when those who are set up to reinforce the rules rebel and those who are used to being made to conform and compete with each, the pupils, are given an educational, and emotional space that they are not mature enough to know how to map or use. The further I got unto the book whilst lying on this single hospital bed the more I was saying 'Wow' repeatedly to nobody in particular as one astonishing dramatic episode and denouement led into another and another, such that I had no idea how the story would be resolved. It was the best book about a nervous breakdown that I could imagine myself reading. </span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Over the next ten years I read the book six times, to the the point where if anyone could quote the first part of the first sentence in the book I could quote the rest of that sentence from memory. I found the obscurity of the book to be deeply immersive, but then again I had been raised into obscurity, often alas an obscurity less engaging than Robert M. Persig wrote. Every so often Mother would engage me in 'a confidential word' where she did not mean 'confidential', what she meant 'secretive where I was not meant to know the secret.'. which was consistent with the parental double-think that soaked through the house.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">We would always be alone in the living room of the parental house when she started, and she expected we would be alone for a while. The television would be turned off when a programme we liked ended. The first phrase would be 'I need to have a confidential word with you', then she would explain, say, the ill health of Uncle Bill or Aunty Pat, which I knew about prior to her saying anything. But she needed to assume control the flow of information towards me so that the narrative I had was the version of events she approved of and that would keep me from asking anything. What I knew I knew because I had asked around. She would speak in muted but direct tones about, say, the relative who had cancer, and then embroider the subject sufficient to obscure the earlier more direct information. I was meant to never interrupt her as she spoke. What she said and she meant were always different, but I was never allowed to speak and summarise her words because my summary would expose that. Because I was barred from summarising what she said I rarely remembered it intact. Her closing phrase was 'This conversation goes no further than these four walls', which I found it easy to imagine mishearing as 'This conversation is more for these four walls than for your good or your moral improvement'. Not long after Mother's closing benediction and the silence after it I could feel the four walls taking back the words that she had shared with me, and taking them from my mind. Later it would seem as if I had never listened and she had never spoken, as if neither of us had ever been alone with the four walls.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Not surprisingly, given the above in which Mother's 'tin-ear' values reigned, I often felt myself to 'needy' among my 'hippy' friends when felt that I wanted to be listened to. But I had no need to feel that way with them. The way they dealt with speech and ideas was the same way that they dealt with music. Listen directly and give it time. Listening to each other was a standard part of the friendship that we gave each other, whatever the different levels of concentration each of us had, just as it was standard to not knowingly waste each other's time when another person gave us personal space. Whilst we knew that listening and taking our turn to speak was what mattered. None of us knew of any therapist. So we did not know what they knew about listening that we did not know, and we did not know what they didn't know either. For us, listening was about talk and trust.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Talk of depression between us was not taboo, but it usually proved intractable and so after the subject had been aired enough, we changed the conversation. I must have been the one talk about depression. The reason that the conversation moved on was usually because the discussion around it had not raised even a limited solution to the depression. We could no more identify a solution to one person's depression than we could identify the source of the depression from the way the depression's owner spoke. We did not let dead ends in conversations become bigger or more permanent blockages between us. Being younger than my friends by a few years I was junior in all this and 'playing catch up' more than I wanted to. But they allowed that role.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Some of my friends were followers of Guru Maharaj Ji. They could talk and listen with the greatest concentration and conviction that I had ever seen in anyone up to that point. If they had converted that energy into a sales pitch they would be wealthy people. I preferred the Quakers in spite of how they appeared to have far less energy than any of the followers of Guru Maharaj Ji had. Putting an energy into silence, listening, and good deeds done with the least amount of fuss or flummery was a very different modus operandi to the the charismatic example of the followers of Guru Maraj Ji, but I thought that the Quakers were ultimately more useful in how they behaved. I also liked the Quakers because they accepted people who were depressed at face value, however unknown the source of the depression. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The followers of Guru Maharaj Ji had their personal rituals, which they used to get themselves into a particular place, mentally. Then they would talk about most subjects with this strange but natural intensity where at their most passionate they would talk about how well their guru would replace all government and fix the whole wide world. They made it easy to imagine the original fervour and ambition that early Christians might have had. Such intensity was rare. I admired the verbal intimacy of it enough to record as being remarkable. In my old diaries the phrase 'Had intense conversation with.... ' was repeated where if the conversation were a therapy session it would have been wonderful, but seemingly their rituals and talk could not address why I felt depressed. I never recorded the details of what was so intense to me at the time, in that respect my listening was like listening to the confidential words with Mother, what we talked about evaporated after the conversations ended. Maybe trying to capture the mechanism behind the intensity would have been to dilute it, but if it could have given me greater self belief I would have liked that. Most likely I was too tired to think clearly when later I was writing down the content of my days. I admired the followers of Guru Maharaj Ji as friends but I had my own faith, underdeveloped and internally inconsistent as it was. Their words reflected a deep immersion in what they felt, which was something I saw as lacking in myself, except when I spoke about music and read about it. There was no limit to the depth of my admiration for the writings in The New Musical Express, which mixed seriousness with humour in a way I read nowhere else.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The NME were very much supporters of CND, which I found to be a good reason to like it as a magazine. When I resigned from my local CND as secretary it was a rest to read about CND via the NME and not have to worry about what the local CND were up against. My resignation from CND was partly to help me deal more singularly with the depression that I felt. I was more relieved than I could say when they found a new secretary, but whatever rest I got from resigning, the fuller relief that I sought was still hidden from me. For having a more agreeable life outside of the agenda set by parental house I was more able to explore ideas that my parents dismissed then previously.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I had a series of appointments with a junior social worker in social services, I forget their name. They listened well enough that how they listened had a surface similarity to what some Quakers had done for me in the recent past. In the short term this made me feel a lot better, particularly when they set me up doing voluntary work that was within my means and abilities.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Looking back I felt deceived. I had expected Social Services to be less opaque than they were. My listener and Social Services knew a lot more about me than they let on. They withheld from me the knowledge that at the time I approached them they still had old, only recently inactive, files on me that would have explained a lot about the origins of my depression to both the social worker and me. It would have been painful for me to absorb the contents of those files, but ultimately it would have been a relief to know why my education was shaped the way it was. I can only conclude now that the files would have mentioned too many people who at the time were still living and wanted to remain unmentioned. The content of the files would have explicitly revealed the poor choices and character behind their actions. </span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">But an interesting 'what if' lingered over my head which I was blind to. By the time I my depression had lifter such that I could think clearly enough to ask Social Service for my files they said that they had routinely destroyed the files since all files were routinely destroyed seven years since the last entry. If the last entry was when I was sixteen then the files were still there when I was twenty one and I sought social services listening skills, and to volunteer. The files were gone by the time I was twenty five, the age at which I had the clarity of thought I needed to ask to see them. What the files once contained remains moot, a mystery as does how much the way the information in the files was written was in such a way that it only ever served the Social Services, and what it said about me or any other person was not that perceptive and rather secondary. </span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">What was slightly creepy and retrospectively may have added to my depression was The secrecy of the Social Services with their filing system, which I learned about only after the files had been, with a similar secrecy, destroyed. But back to when I was twenty one and struggling with living alone, then I found my most honest refuge when I frequently visited a Quaker friend, Keith, who was an older male in whom I surely hoped would be the kinder father figure I had never experienced in real life. </span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">And so it turned out. He was patient and transparent with my disquiet in such a way as left me more quiet. Where I spoke and could not hear myself he got through to me in a way that nobody else had. What he taught me with his few words and huge patience was where to not look for respite because it was not to be found there. He also as honest as the father figure I wanted to be when he slowly made me realise that he was in need of the same respite, He too lacked answers for his own questions. After seeing him for a short while I saw him less and only in mixed company rather than in private. We both knew he had been more of a help to me than I ever could be to him. What he achieved was to get me more engaged with Christianity generally, rather than get fixed on particular Christians as if they had better answers than I had access to; he taught me that I was the equal of whoever I talked to, and whoever talked to me, if I made the right efforts. His confidence in me bore fruit. Over the next eight years I sought to find in both my reading and my Christianity a more grounded defence against depression. But it was slow work and it was all worked through the most unlikely of ways.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Between reading people or reading books, reading books was definitely the preferred choice. That says nothing about whether I chose informative and uninformative books, or about how easily I might be distracted by television, music I liked, or BBC Radio 1. But I had to teach myself as to what read, I had no guide to help me. I had been unguided from my being eleven years old where the boarding school/care home checked that I <i>could</i> read, but never had a reading programme for me to follow. Getting books out of the library helped. It is lost to history what conversations I attempted with the staff of the school and the public library to help me decide what to read. There may have been some discussions, there may have been none. What I am sure of was that a pupil who enjoyed reading in the barding school/care home was the exception that proved the norm; 'boys dislike reading'. </span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">At the age of twenty I had to guess what to read and why to read it. The foundation my family gave me for reading was inadequate. It was limited to the red top press and the problem pages of women's magazines, where female biology and decision making processes were rendered tastefully opaque. My favourite columnist in the red top press was Keith Waterhouse who appeared in The Daily Mirror twice a week, he made Socialism seem inclusive and funny, he was the wise and funny uncle that I did not know that I never had. His columns were similar in style to some of writing in the NME, playful discursions around a given subject that even when the writing 'went off topic' were still on topic. After Keith Waterhouse left The Daily Mirror my new favourite column in that paper was the poetry column. It was there because the new owner, Robert Maxwell, also owned the publishing houses that published the poetry which I thought it was great. I liked the poetry column that much I cut that section out of the paper every day and kept the cuttings to read again later. I wish now that I had known to cut out and kept as many of the Waterhouse columns when they were there, read cumulatively they would have made a good read and been the guide to the party politics of Waterhouse's times that my parents could never have offered me.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When Keith the Quaker encouraging me towards a general Christianity, rather than to fix upon particular male adult Christians who I unknowingly thought I might find the father figure that I never realised I wanted so badly in, one of the better side effects of his advice was that he encouraged me towards the world of Christian books. After six years of my own random reading programme of secular literature, where themes in it ranged from socialist, the collected works of George Orwell being 'the cannon' for me, to the utopian/dystopian themes of modern sci-fi writing, which was a sideways way of dealing with Party Politics with many side avenues in between, </span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I found Christian literature hard to map. 'Buzz' the Christian lifestyle magazine helped me to discover which Christian authors were good for learning from, because they showed the grit and insight of my secular reading and which authors were bland. I appreciated it hugely when I found Christian authors who wrote coherently and in depth about mental health issues, and made the language around mental health work well around the language of faith, when elsewhere the two ideas were mostly kept apart. These authors were often American Christian psychiatrists and therapists and there was a level of syncretism, a melding of Christianity with some other belief system that was par for the course with such writing which increased in me the capacity to forgive.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I never found any book where a Christian had the humility to dialogue with a sensible and calm homosexual in an informed way, but at least the books I learned from systematically mapped feelings of isolation, and being lonely, in a way that reduced the isolation.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 22 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-22-alien-and-theological-cul-de.html">here</a>.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #757575; font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html" style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">here</a><span style="color: #757575; font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">.</span></div>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-31741433910294069512022-09-22T03:01:00.006-07:002022-09-22T09:39:17.800-07:00Chapter 22 - The Alien And The Theological Cul-De-Sac <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I had been attending the Christian Youth Fellowship for over two years by the time I was twenty one. All the other members of the youth group were at least four years younger and had Christian parents to reinforce their faith. The nearest I had to such reinforcement were the holidays I'd had as a child at my Gran's, where she was a staunch church goer and I went with her. I remained surprised at the ease with which I was accepted in the fellowship, given my lack of Christian reinforcement from my family. What I did not realise was that my acceptance was built on my being seen as a stray, but then one way or another my family saw me as a stray to be hemmed in. The fellowship was less defensive than my family was. I was made to feel welcome by that reduced defensiveness.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">As Keith, my Quaker friend had advised me, I had to choose a church to go to on my own to get nearer being the adult Christian I needed to be, in addition to the Sunday evenings with the Youth Fellowship. I did not know how to choose a church or denomination. I would like to have chosen Keith's denomination, but choosing that would have looked too much like I was following him. Also his church were The Quakers, who I admired for their values which included accepting all comers at face value, but for any long term commitment with them a maturity greater than I could stump up was a basic requirement. To become more mature I had to 'sow my spiritual oats' and get through the changes that were mine to make, to get those changes out of my system, and grow through, before I was fit for the Quakers. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The Churches in the town were like the local Labour Party, a sometimes active minority culture full of odd rituals that were riven by perplexing divisions. Unlike the local Labour Party the divisions and variations in rituals between the churches were near universally accepted within those churches as being historic variations on the same idea. The denomination who owned the oldest building was the Church of England, the second oldest church building was owned by the Quakers. The church that claimed to be the oldest was the small local Roman Catholic congregation, but also with a history long enough to be misremembered there was the Methodist church, the United Reformed Church, and The Jehovah's Witnesses. That said the newest church, The Pentecostal Church saw themselves as the exception to all life around them, whether the life was in different churches or outside all the churches put together.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Perhaps the newest kid on the block automatically thinks he is the best and thinks other kids are not worth knowing. As well as being the newest church in the town the Pentecostal Church were the church who were the most overtly authoritarian, and the least able to support their weaker members who they attracted because the leadership projected 'security'. The church did not strengthen their 'new converts' from the inside out because it did not realise that the converts were so weak. With the selective authoritarianism in my family background I was strongly drawn to them. If I even half-saw how joining the Pentecostal Church was a folly from the beginning, and how Keith would have warned me it was a bad idea, then on my own I still did not know how to resist the idea. I did not know how to stop putting myself through what was to become a spiritual masochism. At the time I reasoned that if I was going to learn from a mistake then a big mistake was easier to learn from than a small one, the size of the mistake should be easier to recognise sooner. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The Pentecostal church leader had a love/hate relationship with every other church leader. Pastor Paul said that they 'were not Christians'-his quote. Lay members of the Pente church, as it was commonly known, mixed well with the lay members of the other churches. At the lay level there was nearly no one-up-churchmanship. But in their own services the Pentes behaved as if only they were Heaven Bound and the other churches were spiritual slackers. I started by saying that the churches were like the local Labour Party, riven by division and sects with it's outlying fanatics, the above behaviour is the perfect example of this.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">One of the better stories about the Pentecostal minister was how he told his church that it was a miracle when at his door was left a Christmas hamper and on other occasion he had been left generous sums of money, all anonymously. He also told his congregation that the other churches 'did not believe in miracles'. I was told in private that the hamper was a gift to him from the members of the council of churches who found that giving to him anonymously was the only way they had of giving to him without causing offence.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">It took a while before I fell for the Pentes. My journey started with my regular attendance at All Saints, the local high Anglican church. It was a barn of a building where every week there was a choir, the organ sounded beautiful. The place was elegantly stuffed with the trappings of wealth, as bestowed upon it since the fourteenth century when the site was first built upon. At first the trappings overwhelmed me. I did not know where to look in the building or what to listen for most. Since I half-knew some of the people present I always used my greeting them as my settling point. At first I assessed the service by what I thought was the most spontaneous moment each week that I attended. The part of the service that varied the most was usually the sermon. But even it was strictly limited to being under seven minutes long. The longer I attended the harder I found it to fathom what anyone could say that might vary and strike the mind afresh in under seven minutes. Every other part of the service moved like clockwork and did the same motions every week. There was definitely a skill in performance there, and the different creeds we sang always worked for me. But however aesthetically impressive and grand the service was, the chat and connection with people outside church were where faith started to mean something. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The interrupter that slowed the worship machine down a little and caused increased discussion was the new prayer book. The old prayer book was first written in the reign of Henry VIII, revised in the reign of Charles II, and had its last major revision in 1927. With each revision it was trying to reaffirm the majesty of God through the majesty of the English language, which it did very well. As a newbie I did not know how deeply attached long standing church members were to the words that had been handed down for nearly 450 years, that were repeated every week. I did not know the history of the prayer book so I did not know why church members struggled so much with the anodyne words of it's 1980's replacement. language, and were apt with that change to look for other changes in their church/faith life. Since I did not know the history of The Book of Common Prayer I was happier to content myself with my own much smaller and more recent struggles towards a sense of majesty in life and language.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I had a real faith coupled with a nearly non existent understanding of church history. In the youth group I was never out of my depth, we made up what we did as we went along. No history lesson or knowledge of church history required. In the Youth Fellowship they did not even compare notes on confirmation, with them all coming from different churches and being confirmed. What they did confirm was that as a youth group they were a holding place for young church members who had left Sunday School after their confirmation who had yet to find their place in adult congregations. Like them I had sought my place as an adult in an adult congregation, but I had to do it with much less advice and support.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When I did not understand the character of Anglican church that did not make me give up. Often the people around me spoke to each other, including me, with a sophistication and a shared understanding that I openly failed to observe the refinement of. When that happened the nearest I could get to being honest and apologetic about being out of my depth with the company I was in was for me to say 'I am hanging on to shirt tails of Christianity' as if such a simile explained how my hopes were founded in aspiration rather than experience.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My drift from misunderstanding high Anglicanism towards wondering what I was doing at The Pentes was slow but sure. At All Saints C of E church the evening prayer service became the first victim of the new prayer book. The numbers attending the evening service dropped off in droves, and with the way that lay members of different congregations mixed, the Anglicans who were still loyal to the morning service looked to the lay members of other churches for finding what was the right place to go on a Sunday evening. The Pentes were the first beneficiary of this now deserted church service, where the increased evening service numbers there were called 'a renewal' and the desertion of the C of E service was left unmentioned, or became the cause of some prickly and negative comment. The second beneficiary was a church in a nearby city with a charismatic leader whose charisma seemed to be a human charisma as well being spiritual. John Shelbourne was a genial charismatic who was known for being solid on doctrine without being doctrinaire. He had an inclusive sense of humour too. He was a big bear of a man who wore well fitting three piece suits in bright colours and his voice had a smile in it. I was one of many who found him easy to like. It was a shock when he unexpectedly died young, in his fifties, of a heart attack. That was maybe the first time I became aware of how easy it was to see reasons for belief in the personality of the preacher rather than find reason and belief in myself or through the whole of the service or the culture of the denomination.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Based upon the way other churches worked, the Anglicans who had left the bland new evening service also started an Anglican based house group meeting once a week, which I was invited to attend, and not just to bump up the numbers, but reinforce what was best about what remained of the Anglican church. Once again I wanted to give, misread the company rather badly at times, but accepted that I was there to receive more than give, even though in the more adult company that felt more unequal than when the same principle was in operation in the youth group.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I was a keen reader, but mostly secular reading matters. Early on in attending church I had not read The Bible on my own very much or read any academic book that showed me how it came to be written, why what was written was believed, and who originally believed it. One of the many errors I kept making was that my memories of watching television kept interrupting my concentration when I was in group Bible studies. My mistake was having the wrong foundational background, which I could only correct through trial and error. That others had gone through my trials and errors with me to get me out of them was a process I did not know how to limit. Each time I conflated the section of The Bible we were studying with some Hollywood film that paraphrased it, the leader who had prepared the questions for that week had to tell me that The Bible is The Bible, and what Hollywood did was entertainment that was fairly and squarely made for profit. Nobody knew what first century Palestinians looked like but they did not look like Charlton Heston or Tony Curtis. This is an edited version of what the leaders said, but the patience of the leaders of Bible study groups in which I was consistently unprepared is something I remain thankful for.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When I started my religious/historical reading it took me down some strange routes, none of which cost me the price of what I believed, but they did make me wonder. I thought that the BBC television adaptations of 'I Claudius' and 'Claudius the God' were brilliant. Each time they were repeated, at least twice, they went up in my estimation. But reading the books by Robert Graves was even better. Where it got strange was reading 'King Jesus' by the same author where the author wrote about life in Palestine in the first century but purely from the perspective of the Roman Empire, where Christianity was all but invisible, and where it was recognised then it was ridiculed. The divine origins of Christianity were reduced to a demeaning rumour. Reading that was a shock. But for all that I saw the book as worthwhile fiction because it was a skilled recreation of a world that once did exist. That such a world could never be properly recreated was as good a reason for reading The New Testaments as reading later fictions like 'King Jesus', we have to try if we want to get closer to those times.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The more interest I took in the Pente church the more interest Pastor Paul took in me. I was honest when he asked me about what I read. I told him that I not only went to church but I also read these challenging books and I saw no contradiction there. You can guess how much he wanted to 'put me right', he told me that these books were Unchristian and unnecessary. Much later he said that the writings of Sigmund Freud and the idea of 'the unconscious' was 'of the occult'. I was glad he had nothing to do with the public library service, there would be few books that would have survived his Biblical criticism.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I read more orthodox books on the history of Christianity too, I particularly liked the Bamber Gasgoine history of Christianity which also became a thirteen hour long Granada television documentary series, but then I had always been impressed by his calm as the quiz master on 'University Challenge'. He was always on cue with his supplementary facts. These books explained human history in Christian terms rather than being 'Christian history', I saw the Christian figures Bamber Gasgoine described as part of the history of the world, a world I wanted to feel that I was part of in my own small way. I enjoyed the welcome I received locally. I liked part of the society around me, but where it seemed overly parochial it made me think that I might leave if I knew how to. Reading about far off places and times was the nearest I was going to get in lieu of preparing to leave. Later I appreciated books from the fourth century, St Augustine, 'Confessions', to the nineteenth, the many works by Soren Kierkagaard with theological works from the centuries in between. They were hard to read and that was where the good in them came from. They rewarded struggle with insight, and they were stepping stones to other insights. These books were, literally, worlds away from all that I had previously known and all that was in front of me.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Through my non-Biblical reading I learned that the world was a violent place and Christianity was a part of that world, however much it saw itself as set apart from the world. I was okay with that, partly because reading about violence is different to experiencing it directly. Where everything got more difficult with me was that I had not reckoned on how much the middle classes locally conflated the privilege in their social class with Christianity, as if their being middle class by default made them all Christian. I came from a secular working class background where the slightest of nods went to Christianity, from me being baptised as a child, and hearing Mother say grace before we ate as child, but to be an adult was to be godless. I wanted a different way of being an adult whilst being true to social class. Grace stopped being said at the meal table after I reached fourteen years old, and the older I got after that the more cursory nods like that became excuses to diverge from any expression of religion/faith, and more towards dad more directly ruling us through how he controlled the television. My dad stopped any talk of religion in the house. He even banned talk of why he banned all talk of religion. Because his ban was so complete it is hard for me to say why he banned it. At the simplest level he disliked any criticism of the right to be drunk, which he saw a duty to his mates and no doubt they believed the same. He knew that appearing to be clean living was important for keeping a family, as an example to them, but he also wanted his own personal opt out from the requirement from clean living whatever the consequences of that might be. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The middle classes who thought they were Christian by default also wanted their own opt outs but for different reasons. They privately disliked any Christian church that was dedicated and mission minded, because it would stand against them wanting to own and run everything in the town, including the churches and all the political parties, according to their financial self interest. When CND had their big push in the town, in one public debate a Tory supporter of nuclear weapons debated with a Quaker who was anti-nuclear weapons where the argument was less around anything to do with nuclear weapons and settled more around the character of Jesus Christ. It was sort of a socially conservative vs radical left debate about 'what would Jesus do about nuclear weapons'. For the Tory, Jesus would always support the holding of them but would always stop a nuclear war because he was 'never violent' in the gospels. And since the property owning middle classes were 'never violent' that was why they were Christians in spite of the fact that they had no interest in either the Old or the New Testament, and rarely attended church. The Quaker shot that argument down with one simple example, the turning over of the tables of the moneylenders at the temple. The Tory replied 'But that is the only overt violence attributed to Jesus might well have been backed up by many quotes over the three years Jesus spoke as a teacher where he advocated civil unrest in the terms of his day. What dad and the middle classes had in common was that they viewed Jesus as being passive-aggressive because they were passive-aggressive. They saw non-violence as a license that continuously threaten others when they felt threatened, and further thought about passively threatening others when their sense of mistrust was aroused.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">For anyone accused by them this non violent passive aggression presented them with a problem. Any action or words that combined both a calm response and effectively averting the accusation was difficult. If the accused remained calm it implied that they accepted the accusation. If they got wound up and angry, well their anger just proved their accuser's point. I sensed this at the time, but back then I was not the lucid thinker, and equal to other people, that Keith the Quaker believed I could be. I have struggled with passive aggression ever since then, Back then, newly escaped from the parental house, I had spent too many years enveloped in the parental doublethink to know how to resist passive aggression without my fight against it being seen as aggression.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When I eventually fell for the Pentes I fell for them the way Pastor Paul wanted me to, heavily. It was the church membership equivalent of that unsuitable and intense teenage romance with the wrong person in which both parties were the last to know it was an unsuitable match, but everyone around them knew that both parties were too immature to sustain the relationship. Everyone but the couple could see that the breakup would be bruising. I will say this for the Pentes, they had patience with me, and I was never confused by any social class issues in that church. The members were mostly working class who had a tame curiosity about choice with how to live, and find the will to lead a good life. They saw The Bible as a book that was true where the truth of it had been proved through study. There the wisdom stopped, their reading of The Bible and the world was flat, and all they looked for/recognised were signs for the exit, the end of the world. This fundamentalist view was a view I knew in a softened, very dilute, form from other churches where the question became how the Christian was meant to live whilst we were waiting, and they were aware of previous generations waiting and still the world rolled on. The Pentes had not the patience of previous generations for comparison. They were too new, being rooted in a revival that started circa 1900. They had a chequered and oblique history compared with other denominations. I lasted there about eighteen months, until Pastor Paul made it clear that he wanted me to be something I could not be, and do something that was more suited to a more mature faith than mine would have difficulty achieving. If it was true, which I half knew, that I felt 'programmed' to look to older men to be father figures or mentors to me that they did not expect to be, then Pastor Paul was an interesting test of my lack of self knowledge. He disbelieved in self knowledge and thought all psychology and counselling, including empathetic listening, were 'of the Devil'. What price feeling listened to after that? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The point about Pastor Paul was that for lack of Pastoral training he set up contradictory expectations; he wanted people to be open and honest with him, much more so than other ministers did-which in theory was a good thing. But as a listener he also expected that when people revealed their failings then they would deeply and instantly repent, as if they were acting out scenes, verbatim, from the gospels. The gospel writers surely knew that what they recorded of Jesus' life was a fraction of what happened and a shorthand for how it happened and they left in what complexities they could for future generations to work out, with no prior knowledge of how they would work it all out. A lot of material never got written down because in the Roman empire life was nasty, brutish, and short. There was not the time.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Paul might have been nearer the healing figure for me than he could have known. What Paul attempted with me was an amateurish Biblical Directive Counselling, something which he was not trained to do. But I liked his appeal for honesty, where I could without help face how it hurt me. But I could not take him then diving straight for the gay bashing Bible verses, it was so crass. He could not stop wanting me to take The Bible as literally as possible. If I had one prayer back then above many others it would have been 'Dear God, save me from literalism through lack of nuance. Amen.'. What Paul attempted through honesty and being too literal about scripture my dad had previously attempted via an evasive emotional ventriloquism. With Paul I recognised <i>the process</i> of what my dad did. By allowing me the recognition of how my dad worked Paul started a process of change, but it was a process that took years, decades, to patiently pursue. Pastor Paul provided me with the example I needed, though he never stopped expecting to succeed with me on his own terms. My final take away here must be that we use the human tools for understanding that we are given. I hope Paul allowed himself to change as much as his example allowed me the same.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When I left Paul's church I felt too bruised to attend anything that was Christian. Two months later I returned to the youth group. About six months later the person who had started the youth group John Sargent invited me to attend the quieter, more working class C of E church, St George's. I attended that church and followed John around as my missing father figure until I left the town. Where the local church could not meet my sexual queries then I wrote on and off to True Freedom Trust. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The letter writing was good but frustrating. To me TFT mis-described the difficulties of being young, mis-described how 'self control' needed a lot more human support than many had access to, and whatever celibacy actually was, expecting it to be sustainable in a town with a strong alcohol culture that the churches had no impact on whatsoever was pissing in the wind. Without following anyone around I had to have a working model of Christian masculinity that seemed observably followable.. I had the masculinity of drunken men (dad), socialist men (Mother's best friend Ted H. and Uncle Terry) and many other examples and types of married men including ones who misused me, But where was male I could distantly emulate whilst 'being myself'? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The male I needed to meet, if only once if it was on mutually agreed terms, had to have all the time required to be able to show me the empathy I needed. The meeting where this would happen was closer in time than I knew. It was only three years away from when I was approaching being aged twenty two. It would happen where I did not expect it to, Greenbelt, and it would be prompted by an unexpected and forced honesty from family that I both needed to hear and found deeply mortifying. I have already described the epiphany of the meeting with the counsellor at Greenbelt in 1986 some time ago. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">But I want to underline how life changing that meeting was. It happened as a cumulative sequence of coincidences that were surely more than random good timing. Being counselled over four hours at Greenbelt was my way out of all the theological, family, work based, and emotional/sexual, cul-de-sacs combined that Keith the Quaker had first wanted me confront when he told me that I was the equal of any Christian company I was in when he encouraged me to seek an adult church and faith. He could not provide it himself. Like every other small town Christian male who tried to help, </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Keith had seen the need but his personal circumstances and lack of counselling skills pushed him past being able to make the time to meet me exactly where I was and unpick how I had got myself trapped.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 23 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-23-alien-work-and-alien-housing.html">here</a>.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span> </div><div></div></div><p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-72630384877683938942022-09-22T02:59:00.002-07:002022-09-22T09:40:26.632-07:00Chapter 23 - Alien Work And Alien Housing<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #757575;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Over the six years from when I was first unwillingly assisted to leave the parental house to when I left the county I lived at three different addresses. Mother played a large role in finding me the first two addresses. The details of the third address, a newly refurbished flat, were found for me through a close Quaker friend, Sue H. who nearer my mother's age and had seen me around the town long before I became a friend to her. We got to know each other more equally when she became the third CND secretary in 1984 after I had been the first secretary, 1980-82 and I had returned to the politics of CND after a break from them. My interest was partly renewed by Sue becoming secretary. When she found me that third flat it was a personal favour to me that set up a friendship for life even though I only lived in the flat for two short years.</span></span></p><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Through all three addresses Mother kept strong ties with me. Sometimes the relationship felt like her 'keeping tabs on me'. At other times it seemed more like an attempt at a co-equal friendship. A lot of the time the relationship had more to do with the practicalities of her doing my laundry, where resistance to her doing my laundry on my part was futile because it was impractical. My relationship with Mother was at it's most balanced in the third flat, because that third flat gave me most independence from her. I enjoyed making lunch for the two of us when she called round at the end of doing her shopping for five people, three of them pensioners. That was when it felt most like it was just the two of us and when we felt most at ease with each other. I made a mean scrambled eggs on toast for lunch in those days. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Between 1982 and 1984 I lived in a poorly furnished house on Beaumont St, two miles away from my family. The physical distance from the parental house was a respite for me, though it had unforeseen consequences. I was charged a rent of £7 a week, utility bills included, not that there was much in the house to run up electricity bills with, or a rent book. The electricity bills were in the landlord's name and gas for the cooker was on a pay meter that took fifty pence pieces. It was almost as if the landlord did not want a tenant. He wanted a paying house sitter who he could dispose of at short notice. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My two years and few months there neatly divided into three phases. For the first six months, up to Summer 1982, I shared the house with a student tenant who I rarely saw and who left no imprint of himself with me. He used the place more as a P.O. Box and storage space more than as a place to live. He left at the end of the academic year. In this phase I slept in the box room, next to the bathroom. Treating that box room as my own might have felt more grim, had I not left a house where for years I had lived in somebody else's box room and nobody would admit it that it was a box room. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My new box room was my own even if it was decorated with uniquely tasteless 1970's large pattern wallpaper which consisted of large overlapping oval shapes, attempted flowers, in brown and orange set against an off-white background. I covered the walls of this ten foot by six by eight foot high box room with the front covers and the adverts for new albums by artists, as taken from the three foot high pile of NME music papers that had been sitting in my bedroom/the store room in the parental house for a while before I left. I must have used between 100 and 200 of the covers/adverts. All those black and white images with no space between them including the collage that conflated a nuclear mushroom cloud with a skull and the body of a skeleton, and adverts for albums by The Clash and The Cure among others created a quite powerful gothic effect in a space that was that small that you would not have thought the effect possible. When the landlord saw it he must have mused about who he had let in as tenant. <br /><br />The landlord, Charles Lloyd, was evasive at best. He gave the vague impression of being ex-military, and further of having left the military in dishonourable circumstances. This made him a fugitive/con man who relied on living below the radar of officialdom for his income. This impression was reinforced when he invoked the idea of military secrecy about his financial operations. If what he said was some sort of cover, then only he knew what it was cover for and he made sure that nobody wanted to find out. Near-sight of him at the time was unhelpful at best. Whenever I asked him about 'doing the house up a bit', even slightly, he could not move away from the idea fast enough, Had I known how to play the benefits system better I might have suggested him that we 'play the system' together; if he gave me a rent book then in exchange for proof of where I lived and getting my rent paid the Department of Social Security would have given me money for better furniture and amenities in the house that he was unprepared to spend money on. I could not get my head around how he wanted to be Mr Invisible as far as officialdom went. He stuck to his line that my having a rent book might lead the inland revenue to look into his financial affairs. He owned three houses in the town, presumably all three of them in the same unfurnished and neglectfully decorated state. He 'joked' about hoping to be looked after by a rich widow, maybe a series of rich widows, where he would eventually inherit their money after being kept by them. That was his idea of a welfare state for one person, him. I curtailed further discussion of the matter, I was getting too close to wanting to know much less about him than he was telling me.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />In the second phase in Beaumont Street, I lived there alone, I moved into the front big bedroom, the rent remained pegged at £7. I made that bedroom as much of a friendly bedsit room as I could. I lost interest in the rest of the house. My old 405 line black and white television from the parental house sat on the chest of draws opposite the double bed. I put my hi-fi and records in the sort of arrangement that was common but unconscious for these things, as if the hi-fi were a shrine to the music as well as something to play the music upon.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Most of my friends had welcoming, if openly careworn, well furnished houses. They must have been mystified at how I survived in Beaumont St, where I was half aware of my mood swings. The more charitable and perceptive of them might have linked my moods to the neglected air of a house that I was apparently incapable of fixing. My depressions settled me on like the dust that had found it's home in the worn carpets.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Other people would dust the depression out of me every so often, but they had to be careful. It tended to stick to wherever it landed. Friends did not understand that I <i>had</i> to seek the company of others and their nice houses to avoid reflecting on the neglect at home, This was also why they had to be direct with me when the time for me to leave them came. They did not know that I was stuck in the cycle of lack of rent book/lack of money/lack of tenants rights which meant that I could not get the money that was available to others, to change the appearance of the house they lived in.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In this second phase the landlord appeared less and less. I wondered whether he had found his rich widow for the winter and was staying in her clean warm home over winter. He would have been right if he saw the ice that settled on the inside of my bedroom window. It appeared later that he had been busy at the estate agents.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">It was in the midst of this second phase, Summer 1982 to mid 1983 that I was called to work again, Well it called itself work. From Sept 1982 onward I had wasted too much of the school year to return to college and exhausted all my choices in education. I still felt that if I pushed myself with the right subject then I could pass an 'O' level in it but I had lost sight of what subjects I wanted to study or why to study it. In Feb 1983 the latest local government work scheme was being set up by, you guessed it, Bob Rainsforth and his faithful friend Reg Rose. There was not much in the local press about it before it started. It was like the YTS training scheme that preceded it, best kept quiet about.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I had to be pushed into applying for the (mis)use of my time in the scheme but that was normal. I filled in the application form honestly. I saw no reason to lie. Bob Rainsforth must have been pleased with the result. He himself interviewed me. I was civil but non-committal in my answers. At the end he said 'Congratulations Malcolm you have got the job'. I was appalled. I wondered what I had done wrong. I was familiar with applying for jobs for other people to get, where my failure to get the job made the process look like a fair competition. I had learned to wish for the best person to get the job knowing that I was never the best applicant. I could only begin to imagine what depth of indifference, what passive lack of commitment he expected from me in the post. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">What I wanted to keep my distance from was the growing local trend of comparing life in the 1980's to a rose tinted view of life in the 1950's, where the property owners etc in my parents generation compared the new and growing recession with 'the good old days of rationing' which was now 'led by the market', i.e. it worked through 'choice'. But the 1950's comparisons extended when the new work scheme was set up on the site in the town where over thirty years earlier National Service recruits between the ages of seventeen and twenty one went to register to serve their time in the army. The R.E.M.E camp (the acronym stood for Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) had been abandoned at the end of National Service in 1961. Now Bob Rainsforth was going to use the site as his base from which to organise local 'peace corps' work, as paid for by the government.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The youths who cajoled into applying for peace corps work were only slightly better off financially than if they were on the dole and not 'doing the double'. If the youths were secretly 'doing the double' then the scheme made them apply and flushed them out. It put an end to their initiatives by taking away from the youths the time which they were secretly putting to such good effect. Initiative had to be what the parents, wealthier businesses, and property owners of the town defined it as, not what those on benefits did to make their time and money go further than ever it could legally be expected to stretch to.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The scheme to reuse the camp arrived with two more overtly Orwellian government titles, the first title was 'The Manpower Services Commission'. They were the government department who oversaw the second title, 'The Community Programme', where young people who had never done well would do no better but they might make people who had done well in the recent past a little better off for a short while.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The new scheme worked against me like the lack of mentoring in primary school sports lessons had once worked against me. In both school sports and the scheme the plan became 1-pick out the most talented/highest already skilled workers. 2-Make them the fore-men for particular jobs, at no extra money. 3-Let the rabble loosely organise themselves around the team leader of their choice who because he is not being paid for it had no interest in delegation or structuring who worked under him or how well they work. The team leader expected Bob and his friends to do all that stuff, it was what they were paid to do.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> The scheme was like school in other ways too, we had to be taken to different work sites in the works minibuses the way children were bussed to school. The poor teamwork/bad groupthink started the moment we queued with our lunch knapsacks to get on the bus for today's site and we started to play out the film script 'Carry On Working' to a low key/low grade chaotic effect. If there was one thing that the local economy ran on, second only to the profits of the pubs, then it was inefficiency. Our scheme of part time work for the many was to lead the way in this new economy in unskilled ineptitude.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Our work was to paint and decorate as many of the privately/institutionally owned public places in the town and surrounding area who either could not, or would not, pay for professional painters who would have done a far more thorough job, much faster. But what they did not pay for they did not get. I was inexperienced in painting and decorating because in the parental house that was dad's job and he was uninterested in seeing me skilled up in it. Many of the country churches and village halls within a ten mile radius of the town got a visit from one of our teams. It was normal for the team to be too big for the work so that some of us were always left to twiddle our thumbs a fair amount of the time. Other times there was some covert sexual bullying from the one or two sporty secret willy wavers who were also on the scheme. One of the moral reasons that the scheme was created was that when single male youths were left to a cheap indolence then they would at some point think of sex. Because they were single their thoughts about sex <i>had</i> to be be immoral, therefore being paid to do a spot of painting and decorating was the modern secular equivalent of 'muscular Christianity' where the point was to enjoy being distracted by the game.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Writing of avoiding sex, some work teams formed themselves naturally, I was in one with another man called Graham. We got on well when we were paired. We got the work done. A shared interest in music and a thwarted education were what made work with him click for me. In October 1983 I remember us preparing and painting the ground level boards in front of the stands of the local lower Northern league football ground stand the usual white with Graham. We would both have rather been in a college classroom studying towards the next 'O' level but were now trapped in these menial tasks for menial money. He had brought his radio with him and it was tuned to Radio 1 the way you would expect given the times. It was the modern 'workers playtime', cheerful music to work to whilst not paying the radio that much attention. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">At 11.30 one October morning Richard Skinner, standing in for Simon Bates, announced the next record 'And now for 'Relax', the first single by a new band 'Frankie Goes To Hollywood'. A version of the song had appeared on 'The Tube', the frothy live C4 music programme, a year earlier. I was in the parental house, dad was asleep in his chair with nobody else about. I was watching 'The Tube'. Fred the house cat had claimed my knee as his cushion, when on came this short clip of a band who played a funk tune on mostly drum and bass that was not fully worked out with vaguely suggestive lyrics. They were dressed to the nines in leather and bondage gear, tight fitting shorts and the like. The women backing dancers looked like rather intimidating prostitutes with their blonde fright wigs and tight brief black outfits. What their dress sense might have left to any deluded viewer's imagination, the camera work did not. It was rather close and intimate. One of the band had a moustache that was similar to one of the members of the only other group who were known for being gay up to that point, The Village People. But The Village People were American, but America was a place of distant and safely packaged fantasy. This new band were British and presented the gay sensibility more directly and blatantly than ever before. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div></div></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">That October morning was the first time it had been played on daytime radio. Graham's instinct on hearing the start of the record was to want to keep the radio at a distance from him, until the song was over. I suggested we bring the radio a little closer, not that I was suggesting anything personal by that. Neither of us having discussed the subject matter and vibe of the song, his response vs mine was typical of how taboos were both maintained and kept being broken at the same time. His response was a prim 'I know what that song is about and I don't want to know about it, <i>thank you</i>.'. My attitude was one of trying to be both innocent and attentive whilst knowing more about the taboo subject from experience than other people were prepared to acknowledge. I did not mind knowing what I knew; denial was not going to work for me. But where Frankie Goes To Hollywood wrote and sang about gay sex in a stylised way, as if the activity was not just mutual, but also hyper-sensual and hyper <i>con</i>sensual, I knew that how they sang about sex was unlike any gay I had ever had. My encounters were secretive, one sided, and grubby. They said to me 'degrees of discomfort were the point'. The disconnect between the depiction of ecstatic theory and reality of grubby and secretive local practices was impossible to fathom.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">For decades after it was released 'Relax' had a <i>horrible</i> personal effect on me whenever I heard it. Given how many copies it sold and how often it was repackaged and remixed long after it ceased to be a banned novelty song. It was a very long time. When the song was banned by the BBC the band were the first band who had the BBC completely over a barrel with the banning of 'Relax'. Merely saying the title of the song became a trigger/reminder to the public as to what the song that could not be played was about and why they were not hearing it, which in turn made not being able to hear it seem pointless. Songs had been banned from BBC Radio and television before. But no song that had been banned before so tightly defined it's subject matter and mood through it's title. From soon after I first heard the song it was as if the band and 'Relax' reminded me of my ugly, guilty, little secrets which if they ever stopped being secrets would not stop being ugly and guilt-laden. This was my catch-22. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">But if I could be released from the secrecy, then the ugliness and guilt might become more manageable. The first place I could dare to be honest was in my personal diary-but even there putting into words the feelings and actions I felt became a different exercise in euphemisms. But they were a little nearer being explicit than my parents would have allowed me to use. The band themselves were not responsible for the small town ugliness and guilt that I had picked up from anonymous sex with so many married men. Their complete lack of guilt about their sexual fantasies 'merely' highlighted other people's guilt about sex to the nth degree. I was just another guilty listener triggered by the song by all the secrecy I had ever been taught to have about sex.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When I finished the year on The Community Programme I was relieved. Even before I left the scheme I felt quite deeply the irony of them being the biggest employer of young people in the town, by some distance. That first stint on the Community Programme set the trend for the rest of the decade. For the next ten years I was either in the Community Programme, in college studying, or happily unemployed and waiting to go back to one of the other two activities. One of the promises of the Community Programme that broke the fastest was that it was work experience that young people could say to private employers that proved they were fit for work. But any private employer who looked at an application form that included Community Programme work would reject or black list the applicant. They wanted their employee to have a better class of work experience than that. The one-upmanship of private employers kicked in straight away when The Community Programme was anything they were presented with.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">For most of the time I was on the Community Programme the biggest uplift in my life had come from entering the third the phase of living at B St. The house was sold with me as an unofficial sitting tenant in it to the Studley family who owned the chip shop the other side of the street from the house. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The upside was that I got a rent book, and got housing benefit for the first time whilst on the Community Programme. The Studley family were doing what Mother had wanted for me, and what dad had refused to have any part in. As parents they wanted a first house for their daughter which was close enough to them that they could see who came and went and she had her own front door.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The down side was that for living on B St for the length of time I now had, I found it hard to think about how to use the new rent agreement for improving the house with the Dept of Social Security. Even with the rent book improving my finances I felt I had lived there too long. Even with work keeping me sociable I went through unaccountable mood swings, which affected my friendships. I never went to the doctor to talk through the mood swings. I hoped that they would blow out of me of their own accord. I didn't know what the source of my uneven moods was. All I knew was that whatever positivity I tried to balance them out with was always short term respite only. Ultimately that address had become bad for my mental health.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">With the end of The Community Programme work I returned to having more of my time to myself. I returned to paying ritual lip service to the idea of 'seeking work' once a fortnight, whilst my experience of time vs money returned to what it was before The Bob Rainsforth Experience. I could catch up with friends better. Between the uplift of the changing seasons and a few days holiday in Penzance my moods slowly lifted. With more time to myself I was also closer to leaving the Beaumont St house than I first realised.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the late spring of 1984 Mother was excited. The details for the perfect flat for me had come into her possession. We both had to seize the moment together to correct the neglect that we had both covered up, together, for last two years or so. The flat she had found for me was perfect for her also. She thought the new flat met both our needs. It was on Trinity St, the main street off which came several rows of terraced houses and it was three terraces away from the parental house. Mother worked in the second hand shop on the ground floor. It was the upper two floors of a once grand corner house at the top of a street. It had a hearth, a box room and an attic bedroom that was roomy compared with the attic in the parental house. It also had a vast living room that was sixteen feet wide and thirty three foot long. It was clear to me that since Mother worked for the man who owned the shop, and the whole house, then she had made enquiries with him and this time her reward was much more than the usual pin money he paid her; it was to have her son as near back in the parental house as ever she would get. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The wait for the flat/serving notice on the B Street address was where the wheels of Mother's plans for me, and for the flat, hit their first wobble. But on the surface her/our plans were still fine. What Mother wanted for me was that I was to live alone in this huge flat. In her plan I would have had my church friends and known relatively few people my own age. She would be that best friend to me that she thought I needed. The quid pro quo was that she would have access to the flat anytime she wanted it. Given that there was so much space in the flat then it should be no skin off my nose to share that much with her. But there was another side to the quid pro quo that Mother was unprepared for. If I was allowed to somehow privately acknowledge that I was gay then Mother and I could have colluded in knowingly acknowledging, and denying, sex and sexual choice, We could have shared how we kept sex and sexual choice at a safe distance and played hide and seek with taboo. The friendship between a gay man and his mother, often a single parent, was known for how such arrangements 'felt safe' for both the parent and the young gay male. But by her nature Mother was married and her marriage became one of many reasons that I could not even test the handle and loosen my closet door.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Mother made sure she knew nothing about what I did for sex. She tried to make sure I knew nothing about it for myself too. But I was not prepared to unlearn what I did and what I had learned about with so little support, even as it had hurt and perplexed me. I saw what I had learned and experienced as the only way of my learning more, and proving whether what I had already learned was folly or wisdom.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The relationship Mother wanted, but very specifically did not want want labelled accurately, was that of a 'secret fag-hag'* relationship with me. Secret because no secret that is obvious enough to others stays secret forever, and any attempt I made at being open about my sexuality would have changed the balance of the 'fag hag' relationship. Eventually I would openly form relationships that were well beyond her comprehension. With their loose ways and casual greetings my heterosexual 'hippy' friends were already a big stretch for her to comprehend. They would come into the shop where she was in role, so everything worked. But if she was in the flat and my friends were there, there was much more of a sense for me of having to divide myself into several different people, some of whom appeared to not know each other, to make the situation work.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Finally, there was a pragmatic point about my renting the Trinity St address. In 1984 there was still a strong mystique around buying or selling houses where it was comparable with betting, both were done only by men with the money and rights to do it. To Mother and I the idea of buying a flat symbolised both male license and male absence, so renting a desirable flat was a strong substitute for what we both knew we were never going to have.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 24 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-24-alien-on-drugs-alcohol-and.html">here</a>.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></div><div style="color: #757575; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: justify;"></div>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2004127833796529371.post-58212636462367877512022-09-22T02:56:00.002-07:002022-09-22T09:41:13.893-07:00Chapter 24 - The Alien On Drugs, Alcohol, And The Unattainable <div class="Ar Au Ao" id=":tm"><div aria-controls=":174" aria-label="Message Body" aria-multiline="true" aria-owns=":174" class="Am Al editable LW-avf tS-tW tS-tY" g_editable="true" hidefocus="true" id=":tl" itacorner="6,7:1,1,0,0" role="textbox" spellcheck="false" style="direction: ltr; min-height: 259px;" tabindex="1"><div class="gmail_default"><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The first decade of peak prosperity in post-war Britain, 1957-1967 started the same year that my parents first met. They met at the most generous of time of that year, a Christmas party. They were friends until they started courting. What courting meant to both of them was both going out less and saving for the future, until two and half years since they first met they publicly shared the decision to marry and dad bought a house. I don't know what the push factors were when they went from friendship to courting/saving for a house. Like as not, whilst courting they both lived in relative discomfort at different addresses, where they hoped that the marital home would be more welcoming than where they both were. I doubt that they thought through what it would be like to share a front door and create a private world behind it. As fractions of the wealth of Britain filtered down into the small town in which they lived it surely carried them forward through every scrape and expectation, from before when they met through their courting years, through to their shared life in the house dad bought.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">What happened in 1967 to start the downturn? In November of that year the international money markets forced the British Labour government of the day, led by Harold Wilson, to devalue the British currency, the pound, by 14 % at a stroke. There was a cabinet reshuffle and Wilson rode out the crisis. After that episode Wilson became known as 'Mr Slippery', for his use of phrases like 'the pound in your pocket' which resisted describing to the public what they surely recognised with the crisis, which took months to go from small to large, and ended sharply with the devaluation. With this story the public were learning daily how when government money fluctuated and shrank in value then the fluctuations would affect their lives, one way or another. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the 1960's there were two types of married men, those who gave their pay packets to their wives and those that did not. My dad was in the latter group. Every week as he handed over the money he taught her to expect and with handing over the money he told Mother what he wanted, whether it was <i>actually</i> what he wanted or whether he was bored with domesticity and wanted to test her to prove to himself he was still alive. The bigger test was on her and it was constant. It was knowing that she never knew how much he earned. She was unable to even begin to guess how much he spent on drink with his mates over any given period. Well she might have asked 'Wither prosperity now?' as she performed the weekly uncredited miracle of making the household budget stretch to cover what it was expected to cover whilst he spent money as if there were big holes in his trouser pockets that he stopped her from repairing.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">For a married man in a small town there were three pillars in his life. One pillar was work which earned him money, which like his marriage gave him social status, the other two pillars were drink and home ownership. Of those latter two pillars one was the socially accepted reason for a married man working, the other was some sort of respite that it was common to rely on from well before the marriage to all through it. If the respite in drink seemed short term, then the fact of having your work mates sharing your respite with you seemed like respite in the longer term. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">With modern prosperity in small towns like the one I lived in, well paid work for men, property ownership by married men, and large scale alcohol consumption by married men became practically fused together into a role model by the gender involved in all three. But what happens when one of the pillars crumbles? In the 1970's pay did not keep up with bills, or the price of beer. Later, jobs that had once effortlessly given men social status with each other, much more than their lives with their wives and families had done, began to wither. Soon redundancies were whispered about, rumour became fact, factories closed. Those closures were sharp and brutal.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Men kept their houses. But their houses ceased to be the social status raising asset that they had once been. Men hid their redundancy money from the government. Some of them drank through their redundancy money as slowly as they could, thinking a new job would arrive and put them back at the top of the local pile. The new jobs created by employers were specifically designed to not support marriage or home ownership because employers declined to be that supportive of their employees. But still the men who were young two decades ago were slow to recognise how modernisation was now spelt as s-h-r-i-n-k-a-g-e. The new jobs but they were insecure by design. The young men that got them could not compare what they did with the work their fathers had done.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">By the start of the 1980's two out of the three pillars that married men had once depended on, well paid unionised work and home ownership, were now in clear decline. A decline that there was a big resistance to recognising. I was too young to know what the best of times had been like for those married men, but I was old enough when the decline hit to know that the confidence that those married men once had was now in clear retreat. The more the shine came off their once higher status lives, the nearer I got to trying to make work what was left of the old hyper-masculinity. Through the YCAS, YTS, and the The Community Programme I was one of hundreds of extras who were organised by Councillor Bob Rainsforth to make his misconceived schemes come to life as he re-enacted the central role of Khlestakov in Gogol's 'A Government Inspector'*, in a town that both colluded with him and disbelieved in it's own collusion.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the 1970's the local 'hippies' and young men who grew their hair long had tried to find their public space in the town, alongside everyone else. But when they saw the 'hippies use the side entrance' signs outside the pubs, the sign <i>might</i> have been 'a joke' but it seemed seriously unfunny to them. If the hippies had attempted to take the openly non-conformist route away from patriarchal work, drinking and property ownership, then I for being at least two steps behind every time they stepped forward chose the less confrontational church route away from what the hippies also saw as an inheritance they did not want. If I ever had a high status job, like my father once had, and been married and owned the house I lived in, then I would hand my pay packet over to my wife for her to give some of it back. What was handed back to me would not be spent on habitually drinking to excess with mates who did the same.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The job/wife/drink/home ownership package passed over me as if I did not exist. I only needed to be a rebel with a very small r to avoid the property owning values package. I was gay and closeted, partly religious, and politically left wing/anti-establishment in outlook. I lived amid a popular drug culture amongst the people my age plus and minus five years in which when I fitted around them for being anti-establishment, but equally I did not for 'being religious'. If how I fitted around the drugs culture was only partly visible to me, then it was entirely invisible to Mother whose view of it was like the three wise monkeys rolled into one, 'Hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil' without her ever knowing what was good and what was evil. Behind Mother's ideas about the moral order of her generation lay a defensiveness and mid-level hysteria that was far more destructive than whatever it was a response to.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I remember my first joint. I shared in the passing round of a joint in Lynne's house where I was one of a small group of people, partying at home after an early CND meeting in the summer 1980. It was the first time I was invited and I did not know what to expect. I was the newbie to doobie that was passed around that night and everyone else there was an old hand with it all. I did not know how much was too little or too much to take, my guide was watching others. What I took hit quite hard but quite harmlessly. There was a non-malicious inclusive humour that rippled around the room when I had to lie down in the space that was least inconvenient to the others there because that was how the cannabis affected me. I don't know where my head went, but I ended up babbling and paraphrasing the Jim Morrison lyric 'Out here we are the stoned immaculate', in my version the lyric was 'the stoned immaculate is where I want to be'. By then I was quietly being taken no notice of and more or less left to sleep it off. In one simple test Lynne and her friends had got the measure of me in how I responded. I was 'in', accepted. I am not a natural for smoking drugs, I had a weak throat and did not smoke, but I trusted enough, and I fitted in when the occasion demanded it.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">That night was the first night of nearly a decade of minor skirmishes with cannabis and a few other drugs that never harmed me, though Mother feared I would be harmed. If I don't go into details here, date, location, quantity of drug ingested, etc, then that is because the memories of taking drugs tend to be benignly self-erasing. What does anyone say when other people's fears for them are worse than what the person with the fears is afraid of? I knew how Mother thought well enough to avoid the direct discussion where she told me that for me to be fully a man, my only way forward was to drink in order to network for the work, in order to get the better paid, higher social status, job that would reflect well on how she had brought me up, such that the job would pay for the drink, the marriage, and home ownership that should surely follow. There was no way of telling her that whilst that process had worked twenty five years ago for her when she was young and single, it was not going to work for the people in the town who were now the age that she was when she was single. They had three choices, worked for lower pay in insecure jobs, live on the dole whilst doing the double, or submit the government work schemes where their main purpose is to take the initiative out of people, and prove that they had no initiative to begin with.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">But there was another more disturbing reality in Mother's ideas in how drink, housing, work and social status had once meshed together so well that they seemed to be a virtuous circle. Now if once they were virtuous, they were no longer circular. The drink culture, housing, and work that raised social status no longer feed into each other in some sort of perpetual motion the way they once had. This was genuinely hard for even the most perceptive and open of people to get the measure of. The new local economy of the 1980's was like an M. C Escher drawing, it looked good on paper but projecting yourself into was a perplexing experience. Nothing ended where it should, or joined up where it was meant to. If drugs and alcohol were substances and both created networks of consumption and production. Then the difference between the alcohol networks of the 1950's and the drug cultures of the 1980's was that each led to different patterns of relationship and different expectations about property ownership. The alcohol consumed in the fifties in it's own way quickened and pushed drinkers towards marriage which automatically, with high status male employment, led toward property ownership. Some marriages and households were better for the children that ensued from the marriage than others were. But the alcohol culture was the progenitor and driver over all of it.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The drug taking in the 1980's may have led to long term relationships or it may not have, what was true about the new drug culture was that it was inherently less patriarchal than the old alcohol culture was, and it could not lead to high status jobs for men where they bought houses for their wives to clean and look after. Even without the drugs being present in society, those jobs were already gone. The marketplace for buying a house to support a family would never totally dry up, but it would drift to whoever had the money within a society that was altogether far less cohesive than past societies presented themselves as being. The ends and means that had once been circular and seen as virtuous when Mother was single had ceased to be the ends and means they once were, ceased to bind people and drive anything in the way they previously had.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My biggest hero all through the 1980's was the Grateful Dead guitarist and unofficial 'hippy' guru/teacher Jerry Garcia. By 1987, after twenty years of being on the run from dulling normality by any means open to him he spoke of 'Going from drug problems to real estate problems' as if what they had in common was that both needed money and both presented problems. At over forty years of age and after years of industrial scale drug use even he had a mid-life crisis. He had to start to learn how to spend his wealth on something material that he wanted to keep and live with. The generation I was part of did not have the 'wealth problems' he had but when buying houses was sold as being Patriarchal, we did not want to be Patriarchal. We mostly had enough money to buy the drugs or support the causes we thought we needed. If the money that was spent on drugs were converted into savings, through abstinence, then it was nowhere near enough to even look at buying a house. But even if the money were enough to buy a house, then we would have wanted to invest it differently. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">We would have wanted to do what the daughters of wealthy men, who had inherited their wealth and properties from their fathers, did in the nineteenth century. If these young women married, then everything they inherited became their husband's property as if it had never been theirs. If they remained single then they kept control of their property. As the last act of their control over what they owned, in their wills they bequeathed the properties they owned to the town for those properties to become semi-public spaces, halls for rent for public meetings and entertainments, all to be maintained by an appointed board of trustees. In my Gran's village there was the Gertrude Morris Hall, she must have been one such figure. In the town there were several Victorian buildings named after women where in the 1980's we did not know who they were, but if we had known we would have discovered a hidden and successful resistance to Patriarchal values.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When I was preparing to move to Trinity Street I did not know what I was stepping into. I knew what I was stepping away from with the change of address. It was something that I was going to be glad to lose, the sexual loose ends I had carelessly set up when I could not be advised properly in good time as to why to be more careful. I had let through the front door in the person of Mr Aftershave a habitual and secretive sexuality which I had solely on his terms. The sex was not 'the problem'. The problem was the secrecy with which he pretended that it was mutual and consensual. The secrecy made all the sex under duress, and denied me the courage to say 'Thanks for the offer of sex but no thanks-I don't need your secrecy. Now please leave.'. Though the more direct and cathartic 'Fuck off.' would have been more fun. I was too tired and worn down by the secrecy/anonymity of all of it to be either polite or angry. The secrecy made me too tired to think, never mind speak.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">My first hope for the place was that it would be a pleasant and positive place to settle in whilst I went through the future cycles of being unemployed/getting more 'O' levels/serving on the community programme. My second hope was that my leaving Beaumont St would of itself make me able to leave behind all the baggage that my secretive bad sex habits had created, as both baggage and habit might become as if they had never existed. My third hope was to use the flat to be the host I wanted to be. I had plenty of friends who I visited, if this place was good enough then they would want to visit me. Whether Mother would worry about drugs I would not, I knew enough to know that I had a certain public profile that 'not druggy' which would make good cover, and if a few friends brought something to smoke then they would be discreet about it.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">By the time the Trinity St flat became available I felt like I was several years away from my once quite intense engagement with CND, and even longer away from being interested in amateur theatre. It was under two years since I had resigned from CND as secretary, but both the changes I had attempted in myself, and the changes that I had been pushed through, had made their difference in me. And the politics of the bomb were changing too. I still knew Lynne and others in CND to talk to, but the heat had gone out the campaign for me, and the heat had gone out of the friendships through CND that had once seemed to make such a difference to me. I had my experiential badges of honour, 'I went to Glastonbury, twice' etc but they were mine to keep. The baton had been passed on, intact, to those who came after us for them to see where it got them. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">I was now meeting newer, younger, friends who with my keeping of the Beaumont St house I had an edge over. They were living with their parents and were being put through the education system. They were studying hard for their 'A' level exams. For studying so hard that they could not see how much they were working in an exam factory. But they could see that by passing the first set of exams they would get to the second exam factory, which would get them both nearer skilled work and further away from their parents in ways that minimise any conflict that inevitability of parting created between them and their families.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Sean** and Ralph both live five mins away from me, in different directions. I wonder now how much what Ralph and Sean saw in me was a spirit that was misguided but still 'free'. Their parent's houses seemed warm and welcoming to me but what did I know? And anyway they were looking for friends who would inspire them to a life away from family. I was both introduced to, and kept at a certain distance from, their families who seemed happy at the distance I was kept at from them. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">As teenagers Sean and Ralph were both curious about drugs and clever enough to recognise 'magic mushrooms', The law on magic mushrooms was ambiguous. If a person picked and ate it then that was legal but the effect was weak. The law said that processing magic mushrooms was illegal, but if a user wanted the effects then they would have to break the law and make an infusion with them, or put them in food, say in a small omelette. What good custom said about taking drugs, particularly for the first time, is that initiates be in a calm place. With psychedelics the phrase used was 'set and setting', where the 'set' was the mindset the user was in, and the 'setting' was their surroundings. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">They made an infusion of the mushrooms to drink in the house of one of their parents, surely the worst, most taboo bound, place to take even the mildest psychedelics. When they could not reassure each other, mid experiment, then they got scared and the parents 'had to be told'. The parents hushed it up partly because they were more scared of the drugs than their children were. Crisis averted that time. Later there was a bigger, less avoidable, scrape with the law for Sean, in which he was a defendant in a court case that required a minimum custodial sentence. There the punishment was less the being sent away for the shortest time possible and more how the timing of his being sent away seriously derailed both his exams schedule and his career plans. But even there, solutions were waiting to meet him, just around the next corner.</span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Back to my family, eighteen months after I left the parental house my sister left too. She did it in a more accomplished way than I was allowed. She got her first council flat aged eighteen. Only her name went on the rent book. But her boyfriend of nearly five years cohabited with her. They got a large rather masculine looking dog that I am sure was less scary than it looked, and decided to call it 'Satan'. Like their dog, they had their wild times in the privacy of the flat, but they seemed well enough controlled in public. Their flat was like Beaumont St was for me, more shabby than genteel, or careworn. The council flat was far enough away from the parental house for my sister to imagine she was free of the influence of her parents. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">'Bravo' I thought for my sister, not that I particularly engaged with her about it. She had a job too, which was partly the reason for the emotional distance. She worked in a factory that produced brass fittings for fire extinguishers. She worked in a noisy factory floor where machines threw out the fittings that were rough and had to be milled/washed smooth with smaller machines and packed in trays. The milling left lots of brass shavings on the factory floor which were too small to see through the industrial goggles the workers wore and when they were not swept they accumulated and embedded themselves in workers feet however sturdy the workers' footwear was. I remember seeing her soak her feet on weekends when I visited the parental house, the warm water was meant to draw out of her feet the minute brass shavings that they had attracted. That describes what work was like in the 1980's much more accurately than the glossy evasions that I regularly used to get sold. </span></div><div style="color: #757575; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />With the new Trinity St flat, so close to the parental house, being on the horizon for me, Mother surely felt that she was getting a son back after losing a daughter. With the new flat I did not know that I would be more involved in my sister's life than I ever had before. We had always been kept a bit apart. But so it proved. <br /><br />**Sean was not his name, but it is for the purpose of this memoir.<br /></span></div></div></div></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">*For more about Gogol's 'A Government Inspector' read </span><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Government_Inspector&source=gmail&ust=1663923751355000&usg=AOvVaw1mTEOR_mrKwcB6cMCLqN8Y" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Government_Inspector" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #2196f3; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Please find Chapter 25 <a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/chapter-25-alien-and-ignoble-experiment.html">here</a>.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #757575;">Please find the introduction and chapter guide </span><a href="https://lifeasanoddteenager.blogspot.com/2022/09/introduction-and-chapter-guide.html">here</a><span style="color: #757575;">.</span> </span></p>Bearzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11288030980271753436noreply@blogger.com0