Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Five - Finding My Way Around

I was thankful the Monday morning that I started work that my work was part time. What I lost in the money I might have earned more if the job were full time but I gained in having more time in which to patch myself into the different businesses and organisations that I was going to be dependent on, to greater or lesser degrees, in Nottingham. The bank, my new doctor, and West Bridgford Council, from whom I had to get the application form for my housing benefit. They were the big three at the top of the list.

Finding where these places were located with a city map took time, finding my way within them also took time. West Bridgford City Hall was not quite like the huge hospitals where new visitors would get lost for having lost their sense of direction, and being blinded by the signs. But like a hospital, so many of corridors looking similar to each other and the signage seeming wilfully obscure. But like many a visitor to a hospital I got a fair amount of  help when I looked slightly lost and there other people about. They spontaneously offered me directions.

With some of the tasks being less urgent than others I was apt to wander round a little, simply to get my bearings by sight. Joining West Bridgford Library was very low on the list of priorities, but the library building was much easier to find than many other buildings, and the process of joining was briefer to complete than for all the other tasks. The library building was a bigger version the library in Gainsborough. Both were fine Andrew Carnegie constructions from the 1920's. West Bridgford library proved to be not just a place for bookish entertainments, but with it's copies of phone books and business directories and other information it was a sign post for many of the places I thought I needed to go. It made many of the journeys I had to go on shorter. It was the second best place to go to. The Citizens Advice Bureau was the first place to go for advice but I did not find out where that was until later.

But the first place to find on the map and get to on the bus was my new employer, The Leonard Cheshire Nursing Home in Lady Bay, West Bridgford. If at some points over the weekend I had doubted the wisdom of moving to Nottingham then the employer was the person to dispel those doubts by putting me to work. The induction was demonstrative whilst being  undemanding. It was partly about becoming familiar with the lay out of the building, partly about how I understood my duties, at meal time towards the patients, and between meals but the most important part was being introduced to the residents out of courtesy to them. I was going to be working a pattern of different daytime shifts where I would be working most in the mornings, with some early afternoon shifts for variety.

This was not my first experience of nursing. If being a volunteer for St John Ambulance counted as nursing experience then that was my first. I was in that from the age of nine to nineteen or so, until I found friends my own age. But I discount that as nursing experience. It was much nearer a junior version of 'Dad's Army', pointless hierarchies and mild incompetence combined so as each disguised and justified the other. Then there was the year I spent as a volunteer of my own volition in Gainsborough's John Coupland hospital, as prelude to thinking I might get nurse training. There I was accepted by the ward nurses, but side lined and underused because I was uninsured. Here I was not only insured to work, but paid as well. Sorting out my banking arrangements for being paid with the head of the home was part of the induction.

This image was taken in 1990
two years after the Ace scheme
placement move, but it is close
enough to what I looked like in the
Leonard Cheshire Nursing Home.  

I liked the uniform but I was not particularly good as a nursing assistant at first. I was prone to impatience. But then this was the first time I was being paid to do something I thought I wanted to do. A lot of the work was slow routine support for people who due to their Parkinson's Disease were slow to act. The biggest part of the work was forcing myself to wait for them to give me their cues to allow me to be helpful, when I did not see and hear easily when I was going to be asked, due to their declining health. Mealtimes were when the cues and patience mattered most, that was when the residents most valued their autonomy. But every daytime activity that was led by the residents also required the same discipline. My impatience was a bad thing for people with Parkinson's disease. People who, depending on their age, health, and vitality, move at fractions of the pace they were once capable of when the Parkinson's was present in them but it not obvious in how they moved. But with practice I learned how to be more patient, within the work schedules that the nursing home ran to.    

Even now, I associate blandness with imminent discomfort. Many of my times that I had to myself in that first few weeks when I was not in work and I had no need to be in the bland house were spent on the buses, getting the lie of the city. I had been to Nottingham three times in the previous decade. Each visit was fleeting and I was a guest of others who was put in the back of a car. The first visit was with a friend to see one of their friends in my CND days. I could have fitted in better that evening than I did. The other two visits were both to the music venue Rock City, first to see Christian band After The Fire, and then to see Bruce Springsteen/Neil Young sides man and solo artist in his own right, Nils Lofgren, with a very different set of friends to CND friends I had. But I had never seen Nottingham during the day and on my own.

I don't know how often I caught different buses and en route took note of the different shops to investigate the next time I was on this route. But for that day I was going to places that I had seen and noted for the first time the last time I took this journey. Church buildings, record shops, second hand book shops and libraries were all of major interest. I was astonished at the floor space of the The Central Library, just off the city centre, it was spread over several floors, records and tapes to take out, as well as more books of interest to me than I could list, much less had the time to read. Library envy is not a feeling I expected to have at that stage of my life, but it was what I felt.

To be directed to Chapter Six please left click here.