The following is the second of several complete chapters of my next memoir, with more chapters less fully realised which will arrive in their own time. So please enjoy this chapter on it's own and be patient with the slowness of the arrival of later chapters...
A friend a bit younger than me called Richard, who I had not seen for a long while called by at the flat. Having chatted for a while he suggested that we go swimming in the local baths, thirty minutes walk away. I admitted to him that I could not swim but found my trunks and towel and we went anyway. A walk is a good excuse for a more open conversation. He told me in more detail how much he enjoyed working in Nottingham. I replied by talking in clear enough words that I once wanted to be a nurse but now knew I could not train for it. We both knew that all the local nursing assistant jobs were not just non-unionised but effectively a single gender closed shop for women workers, by order of the employers.
He suggested I join a government work programme in another place, where I would be paid as an unqualified part time care assistant/nurse and have a year's contract. He gave me the contact details of the government scheme where he worked as a junior administrator, a Leonard Cheshire nursing home in the Lady Bay area of Nottingham.
In November I went for an interview and explained that part of why I wanted the job was to help me get around the question of sequencing how to get a job and move to do the job when I was on the dole and money was tight. My interviewer knew about this problem, I did not have to ask her 'What comes first? The new address or the new job? Or do I get both sorted in the same time frame?' I must have interviewed well. They took me at face value and accepted me for the post of nursing assistant in the Lady Bay area of Nottingham on the condition that I would sort out where I would be living and contact them to start. I knew nothing about Nottingham but returned for a day trip by train one mid November Friday. I got a local paper and a city map including bus routes, and I scoured the small ads at the back of the paper to look for a place to live. I wanted to get an affirmative response that same day so that I could tell the nursing home that I had found somewhere to live, and I could start as soon as they wanted me. My expecting to be able to do this in one day tells you how green I was.
Nearly all of the landlords who were advertising flats and shared accommodation who had advertised in the paper that day proved unavailable on the phone, and when they answered and they were in enough for me to visit their premises, their premises were unattractive. The usual excuse that I could not refute, but to varying degrees was a bare faced lie, was that they'd had several rooms and only the worst one was left. Early in that Friday evening one landlord, a man who was younger than me who was clearly out to make money out of the property he now had a mortgage on made a firm commitment for me to rent a room. The house was rather new and posh but the room of my own in the shared house was affordable and housing benefit friendly. If I was as green as people could see, I was also very lucky.
I was now set up to move and take up my new job in early January. The local jobcentre were surprised when I presented them with the code for the government programme job in Nottingham, which was part of the important paperwork to be completed. Their response was 'We've never seen anything like that before'. But they processed it, and I gave my notice to leave Spring Gardens for January 1988.
Knowing that this was my last Christmas of living so physically close to my family did not bring me any closer to them emotionally, but knowing that I was leaving made 'the season of good will' seem more transient. if as family we were more distant than we pretended to be, the pretence seemed easier, to me at least. In the past the new year always brought with it a sense of a lull in activity as if the new year was slow to start up. There was far less of the sense of lull with New Year 1987. I had a date by which to leave, on Friday the 8th Jan I was away, and nothing was going to stop me.
Since my first attendance there I had always been the oldest member of my local Ecumenical Christian youth group. I had not left because nothing had given me cause to leave, a romantic attachment leading to other commitments might have moved me on. But with me being closeted and gay that was impossible. A serious local job might have occupied my time more fully, but no such job had found me. When I shared that I had got this job and I was moving they were all pleased for me. Those last meetings had an odd edge to them. To 'see me off' constructively and be helpful the leader of the Christian youth group, Graham, volunteered to drive me and all I was going to take with me, my clothes, my large collection of LPs, my tapes (including plenty of Grateful Dead live tapes) and my hi-fi and speakers, to the new address on the last Friday of the old tenancy/first night at the Nottingham address. As 'a gift' to the fully furnished address at Spring Gardens I left behind a colour television and video set up which I was happy to leave behind.
The unexpected happened to me on my last night I was in Spring Gardens. That day I had packed and boxed up as much I could, to prepare to leave the following day. I got a surprise late night visitor, a gentleman caller known as Manchester Al. I should have called him 'Mr Unreliable' on the quiet but people pleasers like I was back then found the wit, and cynicism in being perceptive, when they needed it most. He was a rather handsome but unsettled ex-soldier who I had first met giving blood when I was eighteen, eight years earlier. I could never work him out or be a proper friend to him for two reasons. Each reason was linked to the other. He had a drink problem and either he was gay and closeted, or he was bisexual and simply too lazy to work out who he was. Either way the net result was that he would only come and see me when he was slightly drunk and/or when he simply wanted sex. But part of his act was that he always wanted me to be the one raise/discover the subject of sex. Any sex that happened had to happen because he had made me want it, made me responsible for it, and because neither of us was gay.
Manchester Al was actually from Liverpool. Every time he had visited had been hobbled by his hints to cover his denial, and me resisting having sex with him because I did not want him to be quite so passive as to make me responsible for both of us. This time, because he was drunk and I was leaving tomorrow, I took the lead. He was stiff in all the right place and pleasantly pliable, going as far kisses. I had always thought him handsome and was thankful for how he made my last night of living in Gainsborough such a positive, if somewhat vague, memory. I took him to my bed and where if we lacked coordination with what we did, we were at least forgiving and consensual about it. I would have liked us to have kissed more. But what we did was gentle and it felt good to be held in a pair of strong arms. He left in the morning, he did not even want breakfast. He had somebody, presumably who he lived with normally, to go meet and give his apologies to. Fair enough.
I was as pleased with him visiting me as I was with my not telling him that I would not be there the next time he called. I knew I'd had enough of propping Mother up in recent years, whilst my dad drank and disbelieved it had any deleterious effect on him. I did not want to start a secretive more-off-than-on 'affair' with a man who had a better relationship with alcohol than he did with sober, half well organised, human beings.
To be directed to Chapter Three please left click here.
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