Getting to actually see Richard, the young man who had initiated the idea of me joining the ACE scheme away from home, to facilitate more easily my moving out of Gainsborough, proved difficult at first. When we had first met three months earlier we had both been benignly evasive when the discussion came to him explaining precisely where he worked and lived in Nottingham. It seemed unimportant at the time. Contacting him to arrange to meet up at his digs after I had started the job took more time than I expected. When we met he said he liked music. I don't know whether he actually did like music, or he merely said he liked music because it was an easy shorthand which left covered what he wanted kept covered.
Since I was quite open about liking music it would have been an easy cover for him to claim and have me believe. When he asked me the lend of some of the compilation tapes I had made, the sequencing of which was unique to me and I took a certain small pride in them, I lent them to him and took it on trust I would see him again, and he would return them. I did not tell him that he could have copies of them next time we met, and directly arrange for us to meet again. I did not make copies of the tapes before parting with them. The latter is the way anyone else would have done it. I knew even as I lent him the tapes, that the record collections I had compiled them from were no longer available to me. I expected to see him again. I did see him again, two or three times, but each time he was evasive about whether he had copied the tapes and where they were when I asked. I was disappointed. But not as disappointed as the last time I called when the landlord said he was not there. Not indicating which it was, he was intentionally out that Sunday, or he had changed address/moved house. The bigger evasion all along was him not telling me that he would soon be moving. It did make life in Nottingham seem to make like a needle lost in the haystack of the city.
It was only after reflecting on that last call, when the landlord answered, that I realised how one sided the attempted friendship had been all along, that maybe what Richard recognised was a needy closeted gay man where he hid how he recoiled from recognising the sexual element in that description, however genuine the underlying need was. That was what was going on when I even faintly raised the matter came to returning the tapes and he said he could not find them whilst opaquely admitting that he was highly disorganised. If politeness meant a distance that great that I did not know where and how he lived, I did wonder who was most 'in the closet' about who he was and what he wanted out of life. We can't take out what we don't put in.
There were other places and routines in which to try to feel less like a missing needle in a haystack. One place that seemed promising from the outside of the building was the local Church of England church that was fifteen minutes walk for my new lodgings. I thought to myself 'There at least I will know when the stand up sit down, and what to say and when to say it. There will also be more informal times where the sharing seems more spontaneous.'. When I joined the Bible study group I fell at the first fence, I found it easier to be interested in donating home made shortbread to The Bible study meeting than to get to know people by name. Like many women in church do, I hide behind the teas, coffees, and biscuits as the dominant men dominated the discussion of The Bible, nearly much as the dominant men in The Bible made themselves central to the narratives it had to share.
For every attempted engagement with the city via the adaptation of new schedules and routines there was the temptation to look back on the old, easy to manage, small town life I had left behind. What value was there in going from being a medium sized fish in a small pond to becoming a minnow in a much bigger body of water? In my old life buses were unreliable, trains out of town were few and slow, and a lot of my life had been an exercise in thrift and avoidance. I walked most places in the town, even when carrying things that it would have been easier to transport by bus or car.
I normalised walking two miles to my hitching point to get out of Gainsborough. It worked too, or at least until in her third term Margaret Thatcher had given the County Road Services money to widen the roads into Lincoln and put in a grid of roundabouts around the city which slowed down how soon I got a lift because even when drivers stopped and wanted to offer me a lift the question became 'Which roundabout do you wat dropped off at?' I would say I could be left off at the roundabout for the City Centre and they would be going in at an earlier roundabout. Also wider roads made for faster traffic, and a reduced chance to stop for folks like me. In the world of hitching lifts I always gave myself plenty of time. In Nottingham I still walked a fair amount, but my travels were informed by the bus schedules where I discovered the joy of reading on the bus, over time I read all seven of the Narnia books on different buses.
My being caught in the accepted social evasions of the church social life were mirrored in how well I was fitting in as part the new shared house. With my working class origins and values I struggled to fit in around the urbane middle class manners Mike presented me with. I could see how I was not settling in, but I could not formulate why. Part of my difficulty was how I should have sorted through more of my packing, but I needed to be at ease to know what to discard. Things that were for future use were still in the boxes I had brought them in. My uncertainty about future unpacking annoyed the landlord. Also my claim for housing benefit should have been settled but wasn't. The money Mike was due should be in his bank account. It wasn't. City Hall Housing Benefit department seemed to be oddly slow in processing my claim. After over three weeks of waiting I had to visit them sometimes between work shifts.
I can't remember now who I fell into conversation with. But I took note when I realised that they were better informed than I expected them to be, and they listened well. I told them how I had put the form in with the City Hall Housing Benefit Department in the centre of Nottingham. They told me that I had not got the benefit yet because I should have put the forms in with the same department in West Bridgford Council buildings for processing.
I was prompt in recovering my mistake, and filling the right forms in again, and getting them to the right place. Prompt too in backdating the new forms to the date I had sent forms to the wrong office. West Bridgford paid me promptly from the date I got my forms into them. But they sent the back-claim into their appeals system, where I might or might not get the rent money. It all depended on whether the board sided with the council or with me. The landlord seemed relieved at first when I told him. But as soon as the rent issue was regularised he gave my a fortnight's notice to leave. He did not say it but he could not accept the unopened boxes, after sorting the Housing Benefit out I was glad he took the initiative. Somebody had to be clear. Since it was his house, better it was him than me.
This came not long before another announcement, this time about my job. The government paid me to work part time for a year for The Leonard Cheshire Home, now the government were going to end the ACE scheme on which I had got my contract of work. The initial effect was that The Leonard Cheshire Home was going to make an early exit from it's contracts for paid for government labour via the ACE scheme. I was going to work out the roughly ten months of my contract doing some other care work for another employer.
Finally my family wrote to ask me to contact them urgently. The did not have a landline but gave me a phone number of somebody who did. The message I got via the phone was that my gran was comfortable, but in hospital. Mother was visiting her there daily. But at the age of 88 she was very very tired. Nobody wanted to say it, but it was obvious that there was going to be a funeral at some point. My phrasing, not theirs. I was to keep in touch for updates every other day. I had more means of keeping in touch with family than they minded to keep in touch with me.
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