The distance that I lived from my parents worked well for me that summer of 1988. I had a job, something my family approved of. I had found a secure address the right distance from my family where I was part of a distantly adoptive family of male adults who give each other space and were helpful to each other on request. I liked the room I lived and ate in. From the time I first saw it I thought that it must be the best in the house. I liked the sense of privacy that I found with the closing of the door. Whilst I had to walk a fair distance along the landing and down the stairs, past the stair cupboard, to the kitchen I found it to be good exercise. There was a rota of duties that we all roughly adhered to for the cleaning of the shared spaces, and there was rarely a queue for the use of the the automatic washing machine for washing our clothes. There was also a communal vacuum cleaner for everyone's use, including cleaning our own rooms. Though the task of emptying the dust bag always fell selectively on the person who discovered that it was full before they wanted to use it.12
With my sister now married and a young working mother who lived in Bodmin, Cornwall, and me temporarily settled in my job and at the address I lived at, my parents now had just each other to see and live around daily. Both my sister and I had escaped. Given how recent our escapes were-her escape started three years before mine, and was somewhat angry and hasty-it remained to be seen how permanent we could make our escapes. I was happy to take the train for the weekend and visit the parental house in Gainsborough. Mother seemed pleased to see me, but I said nothing when I felt an air of neglect about the place-old packets of muesli with weevils crawling through it that should surely have been thrown out a long time ago. I could remember the classic line of argument I'd experienced as a teenager 'Don't you dare treat this house like it is a hotel.'. With things like the live muesli what came to me was how it looked like they both wanted to co-exist in the house in a way that their avoidance pushed the other partner into being observant, and doing more tidying up. And with his place of worship and friendship being the pub, dad was much better at avoidance than Mother was. I was thankful that I could check out of the parental house and return to my own life. 26
If dad's place of worship and friendship was the pub then my place of worship and friends remained the church. Visiting the family and houses of Christians I knew on my visits from Nottingham I realised that houses and families existed between two extreme models. Some houses and families made space in the house for the young people having friends their own age and gave the young people a sense of privacy, sharing what they all had. Others, like mine, made me leave the house as a child and a youth to find friends. My parents let very few people in, even keeping adult relatives at bay where ever possible. Part of how the parental house conditioned me was that from an early age I was always more to be received as a guest by other people than I was to be receiving friends as a host. 35
But sometimes my new situation came up trumps. On one Autumn weekend visit to friends in the Christian Youth Fellowship in Gainsborough I told them that Hawkwind were playing Rock City in Nottingham and that same afternoon a car load both said they wanted to see the band and agreed to collect me in Nottingham on the way. I had seen the band live before, but at Glastonbury when they were some distance from the audience. There the lasers impressed me but the sound was not loud enough for seeing them to be immersive. The December that the members of the youth group came to my room before the gig they were my first guests, even if I was as much their guest in the car. The gig was brilliant, my ears were ringing for three days afterwards, and the playing and projections achieved a deeply immersive and transporting effect. Seeing the band and being that close to the speakers made all the difference. That said the moment that had most impact on me came to me when mid way through the gig when I was standing away from the crush for a rest. I found myself watching a young man struggle to put a LP record in a carrier bag not much bigger than the record. This brought out the care worker in me. Amid the noise I stood close enough to him and I held the bag open so he could get the record in more easily. Who he was did not matter, with his need he humanised that gig for me.50
Not that my sense of altruism always won me appreciation. When Brian, my landlord, talked in downtrodden tones about how that week his house was worth ten thousand pounds less than it was worth the week before, not thinking through what to say I replied to him that houses were for living in. His instant response was to call me 'A Socialist' as if such a term was the height of wit whilst it was mildly abusive. I know what a market is, and that they come in different definitions of who they favour. But I no more understand buying and selling in the abstract and for their own sake now than I did thirty five years ago. I am happy to not understand that aspect of life. 57
Six months into the contract as a care worker, and well into the Autumn, I wanted to do the job for as long as I could. Everyone was happy when Michael left early, HMV could have him. It left more work for Arthur and me to maintain. But we both knew that the set up we were working from was going to end when our contracts ended. Peter, the manager, was encouraging us to apply for jobs and leave sooner. The first jobs we were encouraged to apply for were filing and care type posts with Nottingham Council via their in house bulletin where such vacancies were listed. But to zero effect. Anything we m applied for that was within our experience quickly attracted too many applicants for us to believe we had even half a chance, even when Peter was our referee, were we to get that far with the post.
The great moving on came to Arthur and me in late November. We were both sent off to a training unit to update our skills in applying for jobs and hone our interview technique. So that if we got that far then we might get further than the other applicants. Frankly however I tried to dress up my work experience over the previous decade or so, the jobs I'd done all looked like filler more than jobs that could amounted to anything to a notionally serious employer. But at least I learned to leave my secondary non-education in a care home for the maladjusted off the CV and I did have five 'O' levels which was more than many young working age men had. Though how much they were part of the qualifications inflation process and how much getting them was about beating such inflation was debatable. 74
As a care worker I had learned something about presentation. So, even as I would have looked awkward and felt uncomfortable in an office -style white shirt, suit, and dark tie, I looked okay with my idea of being smart, a suit jacket over a fisherman's jumper and dark not-quite-matching trousers. What mattered to me more in a presentation was that I spoke in whole sentences where I sounded like I knew where the sentence was going and would end before I started the sentence. I got this idea for how to speak from the radio, from the way that Alistair Cook spoke on Radio 4's 'Letter From America', which I listened to in awe of the longevity of the programme. Forty years and sounding strong.82
The novelty of the training was that not only would we be given a mock job interview, based on a mock application form, but our performance were be video taped and the interviewer, my boss Peter, would through the video of our performances, for pointers for us to improve upon. I was never media trained, but the video of my interview was quite flattering. The only question the video left unanswered was whether I would have interviewed as well if I did not know my interviewer, and my interviewer did not know me.
With the last few weeks in the job specifically including daily time off from completing care visits to check in with the job centre the pace of change was apparent to me. With Christmas so close and ten days left on my contract the staff at job centre got in touch with a nursing home who needed staff, fast. I was interviewed the same day I found out about the job. For them it was Hobson's choice. Their choice was me or nobody. Because nobody else had enquired. The matron said nothing about how she overlooked my lack of experience and suitability, and how they would have preferred that I was female. I will let others decide whether they took me on mostly because I did not know what the job involved. 96
The job was not flattering. It was helping elderly and infirm women residents get up in the morning, wash, dress, and get their breakfast, and repeat the same process to rinse, for every meal until bed time when the residents had to be tucked up. Not knowing what to say about such work, or what such a life might be like I accepted the job on the spot. It gave me a reason to not see my parents over Christmas and New Year, which I knew would be an emotionally flat time anyway. 101
To be directed to Chapter Thirteen please left click here.
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