When any tenant seeks to rent a room in a city there are different questions to be answered. What is the character of the area of the new address like? Does the rent seem reasonable for what is on offer? Does the landlord accepts housing benefit? How good is the room? Does the address have access to a garden? How close is the address to the nearest grocers shop? How near are the nearest bus routes and roads useful for getting into town or work? And last, but far from least, does the landlord seem amenable? With these questions, particularly the last, I had been hasty first time around. But hast was necessary for me to get my placement started, and unlike the average student moving away from home for the first time did not have a supportive family protecting my back, as I chose where to live.
The first tenancy was hastily and ill chosen, but even with the hindsight of just a few weeks in work I could not see how I could have chosen with more discernment. And that tenancy was supportive enough to be my first firm foothold on life in Nottingham. This included going through the process of finding the right council office to send my housing benefit forms to at the second attempt, as opposed to taking the forms to the wrong one for not knowing, and nobody in the department saying anything. When West Bridgford Council put in an appeal against me receiving housing benefit from when I first arrived in spite of having delivered the forms to the wrong council department, I won the appeal, they lost. I was paid in full. All of this prepared me better for when Mike gave me a fortnight's notice to move to another address. But finding my feet through making mistakes did make trying to settle feel like a close run thing, and this was without my work for the Leonard Cheshire Home coming to an end more abruptly that I could have imagined. But I had a work contract that had most of a year left to run.
Pierrepoint Rd was not the most positive sounding address I could imagine myself living on. Why live on a road named after the last hangman in England? Albert Pierrepoint was also known as a distinctly disgruntled chap, for lack of work towards the end of his career. Or so I was told. I might very well have wondered how he compared with my new landlord, on Pierrepoint Rd. Brian was a divorced middle aged man who earlier in his life had been in a childless marriage and had been the manager of a pub. The house Brian lived in, and rented rooms to others in, was his main financial asset after what must have been a difficult divorce settlement and downsizing. Even when he was at his most cheerful and everyday there was a clear melancholy about him. How much of his ache was due to the shock of the divorce and it consequences was hard to tell. He did not even have a store of anecdotes about cheery times in the pub he once ran.
Maybe Brian's melancholy was what I was looking for, and I did not realise it at the time. When I lived with my parents both dad and next door neighbour Stan were men whose lives had somehow stalled, all progress in their lives went on hold from when they were about forty onward. Stan had married a German woman some time after WW2. He had swiftly become resigned to being a widower/bachelor from the time his wife died in the 1950's, some time before my parents bought the house next door to him in 1960. As of 1988, when I moved to Pierrepoint Rd, my mother was going shopping for him as if shopping was 'women's work', and he knew too little about it. Dad had lost his job aged forty four, just ten years before I moved to this new address. He was uncomfortably adjusting to the idea that after over twenty years in the same job he might never get paid work again.
My own sense of melancholy came to the fore when I finally unpacked everything I owned as part of my settling into Pierrepoint Rd. Some young adults could take leave of their parents with good things 'from the bottom draw' that their parents had saved for the child to use to making a home that was entirely their own. I had no such family or privilege. From aged seven I had slept in the attic, surrounded by boxes of things where the boxes took up space that I might have valued. What blocked my future changed the older I got, from the lack of physical space to excuses as to why this that and the other that was normal for other folk 'was not for us'. Nonetheless I had done my best over the four changes of address over the last eight years to accumulate enough good for the place I wanted to live in.
As I looked at some of what I had brought with me, all my worldly goods, scales fell from my eyes in ways that I was unprepared for. For the first time I was confronted with my own adoption of the avoidance and poor judgement that I associated with my parents. Part of the storage I had kept things in was a shopping trolley. When I had lived in Gainsborough I had used it for putting my shopping in. In Gainsborough it seemed mildly worn but useable to me. In it's new place it looked like something a bag lady would look at with condescension. It went to the bin promptly, along with one other odd object that I could barely credit as to why I had kept it. It was the painted glass front of a radiogramme, the 1950s equivalent of a music centre, showing the different radio stations that when the tuning knob was turned an indicator passed behind the glass, lit from below, to show the frequency and station the set was tuned to. Why keep something so useless away from what it was originally part of?
My mother's sentimentality is the short answer. The longer answer is that the radiogramme the glass came from was once part of was one of the items of furniture my parents had been given when they first moved into the house dad bought when they married, in 1960. By 1965 it had stopped working and they care too little about it to get it repaired, and continue to listen to it. Instead dad reorganised the living room in 1968 and made the black and white television he started renting the focal point of the living room. Between dad never fully completing tasks and Mother being a hoarder, the radiogramme got as far as the back yard and stayed there, the cheap walnut veneer pealing slowly with the seasons. In 1971 when I had some sort of nervous breakdown I spent the summer of 1972 away from family in the back yard. I whiled away the hours imagining the voices that might have come from the radio. When I was eventually sent away the deal that my parents came to was that the radiogramme was to go to the dump, but the glass was to be retrieved and kept as a souvenir for me, to be kept in my boxed-in attic room until in 1985. That year was when the attic room had a bath put in it. If installing a bath in the attic seems to be a strange arrangement then that strangeness was mild compared with the awkward compromises and explanations for compromises that my parents had cooked up between them over the decades, with Mother doing most of the cooking, since I was born.
At mother's bidding I had kept the glass from 1985 onward. She thought that it was part of my relationship with her. If I felt different then I knew to not say so. Still, I was surprised at seeing the glass wrapped in local newspaper in February 1988, and surprised at how what looked now like a piece of junk had once had so much feeling invested in it. With my third change of address since the glass left the parental house, the glass, and much more besides, was put in the bin.
To be directed to Chapter Ten please left click here.
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