If the blackouts in work that made me go to the doctor were the start of my change in direction, then in themselves they seemed like inauspicious material for recognising that change was due. I was literally more disappointed than I could say at not being selected for the no-fault exit from Windrush Nursing Home that autumn. Matron only called all of us into a management meeting if the situation was severe. So we knew the situation was severe when matron insisted on talking to us all, together. The way she chaired and scripted the meeting meant that we were there to listen and obey, matron was there to talk. If as a team we were good children, she was the adult defining our goodness. But by calling a meeting she exposed this quasi-family structure to the work, where before I had felt that structure but had been hidden. The meeting both exposed how much we were collectively caught by the team work in support of the patients and how much matron sought to deny this, lest we think and act for ourselves. The meeting also exposed how much matron both scripted and relied upon our lack of time for informed reflection. Given chance several more of us would quite happily have taken our no-fault exit from the job, either collectively at that meeting or individually later, were we able to think through the consequences of leaving fast enough to take advantage of the choices in front of us. 16
From the comfort of my rented bedsit I admired the church people who opened homes they owned for meetings of more than half a dozen people once a week. Such meetings were quite a commitment, and the bedrock of the satellite structure of the church. I liked those meetings but they were not places where anyone could admit to deep personal needs. It would be wrong to describe the meetings that went on in people's homes as 'fair weather churchmanship'. It would be fairer to write that where some attendees of the Sunday mornings saw the church as a place to find friendship, that friendship was best facilitated in people's homes. That such friendships excluded individuals from sharing the most personal details of their lives became a given. That those most personal details had to find some shared expression was also a given. But that was where single people in the church were caught between several unyielding places. 27
Midweek house group meetings partially recharged me, socially. Though with work being as hard as it was the charge usually drained away quite fast. At the end of one mid-week study and prayer session one elegantly dressed old lady who liked to be part of things, but often avoided the complicated questions and answers, spoke at the end of prayers. She asked to be hugged. Because I worked with the elderly and because my work was by definition one of the most tactile jobs on the jobs market, albeit one more built on patient need than informed consent, I spontaneously gave her the hug she asked for. Her name was Celia and the obvious reason I found her easy to hug on request was her accent. She spoke in a broad Sheffield accent that made people listen. There was a song in her speaking voice, and her choice of a more basic vocabulary cut through the estuary English and social worker speak that some in the meetings all too easily reverted to, which rather distanced our discussions from some of the earthier points about life that The Bible expressed more aptly than modern life permitted. 39
It is obvious to me now, but I was utterly blind to it at the time, that meeting Celia was like meeting my gran as I would like to have done but was never allowed to do when I was young and gran was a healthy pensioner. When I was young my family replaced giving each other time, individual attention, and active listening, with constant family action and group behaviour where we all partially ignored each other when together, until we saw the green light from other family members to use them to show boat and utterly demand other family members attention, Gran was never seen without her husband, Bert, and had to overtly limit how her daughters, Mother and Alice, vied for her attention and favour. Gran also had to control the flow of who knew what about whom, and when they knew it, to contain and disguise the negative effects of the family motto 'Where there is a Will, there are Relatives'.49
Just in herself Celia was a modest matriarch, with none of the emotional family baggage that made other matriarchs, like my gran, matriarchs. But Celia did have a difficult back story, where at the age of sixteen she had become pregnant and been locked in a mental hospital for it. The child was taken from her and she remained locked in the mental hospital for decades, which multiplied the limits of her schooling to make her seem much more 'backward' than she was. She was one of the people who the government of M. Thatcher spent a lot of money on, to get her to recover her sense of citizenship of, in order to close down the mental hospitals that took her sense of adult citizenship away. She lived in a shared house run by two long tern foster parents who cared for limited ability adults in an adoptive family set up financed by social services. There was an ancient phrase that was probably from Yorkshire that described Celia well. 'She may have dropped out of school, but she still knows how many beans made five.'. Celia always knew how many beans made five, but lived in a society that discredited her with such knowledge. 62
Some time after the hug she asked for somebody to visit her and pray with her for an hour a week. I became the obvious candidate and accepted the role. With my shift work I tried to always keep Friday evenings free to spend an hour with her. I would visit her in the foster home, she would make a drink of tea for both of us and we had the use of her bedroom as a place to talk, just the two of us. I would get her to talk through who she wanted to pray for and what they were like, and then we would say the prayers together. I never thought of it as being therapeutic in any particular sense. But I can see now that all personal attention we offer each other on a one to one basis is therapeutic with a small t, I saw the times with her as me giving somebody else the space and careful attention that I would want to be given, and I was in the NHS queue for, myself. 71
The arrangement could not last. I was due some personal changes, and her long term foster parents would eventually move house with the assistance of social services. And towards the end Celia had, well, romantic female designs on me that could only be filed under 'fantasy; do not act on this idea.'. But I was quite proud of me being the object of her having ideas that could not be acted on. The fantasies were material for her to learn through and we all need such material to mature ourselves through. That year to fifteen months of giving Celia an hour of my time each week when nobody else would now seems exceptional in so many ways that it is hard to explain the value of it in the brief space I have here.79
It was the opposite of the church weekend, where as a satellite church we booked a large house for a weekend for a time of more continuous study and sharing, including meals, than Sunday morning meetings allowed for. I enjoyed that first weekend. But it played havoc with my sense of fantasy vs mature reality. If Celia later harboured ideas about me that were unrealisable then my imagination was much wilder. One of the Lady Bay leaders, David, openly admitted to being gay with the insurance cover/catchphrase of always saying he was 'gay and celibate' to shut down any enquiry about before it might start. I knew enough about what 'camp' was and how humour in gay circles was much more abrasive than heterosexual humour. David was mildly obese. There was a 'cabaret' at the end of the weekend. To this day I have no clue as to where I got the notion of me and David and A. N. Other, another male, on the weekend presenting ourselves wearing shimmering evening dresses, dressed as The Supremes, swishing to the beat of the music and miming the words to 'Stop! In The Name Of Love', with us all doing the traffic control hand signals that went with the chorus of the song in the television performances of it that we knew of in spite of not having seen the clip of it. 95
To this day, the incomprehension of the would be audience to such a performance, and yet what the performance would embody, is both what makes the image deliciously funny to me and a reminder of how institutions become institutions through how they mis-account for people's lives. Anyone who forgivingly enquired about Celia's past would find the proof of that. 99
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