My best Christmas present of Christmas 1988 came from the NHS, it was a six week course with a Gestalt therapist that started in the first week of December and ran three weeks into January 1989. But even before the therapy started I set up my biggest new year resolution of 1989 for myself, which was to change my address. Part of the setting up of this hoped for change include accepting beforehand that I would not know when it was going to happen.5
One of the people from my mid week Bible study group who I got to know a little better on the church weekend was Adelaide, one of several social workers who were part of the event. To this day I don't know what the right collective noun for social workers is, a concern of social workers? In my darker moments on the weekend I reflected how far away I was from the care home, called a school during the time I was in it, over a dozen years earlier. There one member of staff in particular who let other boys know that I had a social worker, and that her name was Mrs Hunt. In one memorable morning assembly the sports teacher Mr Mahoney pronounced her sir name with a C rather than a H to cynical laughter all around. Part of what he was aiming at was both how inept I was at sport and my acceptance of a limited gay identity in the school, which is to say that aside from being weird I also gave selected boys, all older than me, oral sex on the quiet. At least here the social workers were an enlightened group, and my hidden past was not going to be used against me. 17
Adelaide stood out among the social workers on the weekend because she was a senior social worker, and like Celia, her accent cut through the estuary English. She had a broad but clear Liverpool accent. After the Autumn church weekend I invited her to dinner in my bedsit room, which I thought seemed cosy. But given the light and space of the three storey house she lived in with lodgers, in Lady Bay she may well have seen my room as cluttered rather than homely. Whether she saw clutter or homeliness, one thing she did not see was the house bricks that I had retrieved from the garden to replace the collapsed leg on one corner of my single bed. It was improvisations like this that I had undertaken without saying anything to Mike the landlord that made me think about moving. As she talked about her house, which she called 'Agape House', it became an obvious question on my part to ask her to consider me, or put me on her list, as a possible future tenant. 28
Not long after the sociably unromantic meal I received a letter from my doctor that told me that my therapy placement had been arranged, and gave me a date and time for the first appointment, and an address to present myself at for the therapy to start. My experience of therapy was limited. I had read no books on the subject, though if I had been given a reading list I would have followed it. What I had experienced that was called therapy was mostly not therapy and was not therapeutic. It was called 'directive therapy' and I had received a few sessions of it in Lincolnshire, and I had been generally directed towards it by Christian/gay support network, True Freedom Trust. In directive therapy the client gets to speak and say enough that people who believe The Bible believe they should not say, and the session ends with the Bible being quoted by the therapist, and The Bible over-riding all that the patient or client has said. I had received four hours of emergency therapy in one block at Christian arts festival, Greenbelt in 1985, which undid quite a lot of the blockages the directive therapy had built up. But for all that I thought I had left a lot of pain behind after the four hours I got, when I was left the festival I still had to sort out the consequences of what I had shared with the Greenbelt counsellor back home, in Lincolnshire.43
The therapist opened me up quite easily. She got the overview of my life that she wanted with my initial assessment, which was itself a place and moment which felt therapeutic. From the beginning, taking on material sequentially, she listened when I spoke about the many conflicts that had become part of how I accounted for family life, and the conflicts I endured between home and school. In family and in school some behavioural shorthand always came into play, either a punishment or a change of scene without explanation, and because what had happened was complex, where I simply could not follow either what had happened or the dramatic change of situation that denied what had previously happened. She had me talking to a cushion as if the cushion was either my younger self or an adult member of my family. Talking to my dad as the cushion was the hardest role play, throughout my life he was always the most opaque of people. I found talking to the cushion as if it were a person strange at first. She did not tell me that what I was doing was part of the process called gestalt therapy. I learned that much, much, later. I had to be on my own or somewhere very quiet for at least an hour after each therapy session, to slowly come round to being back in normal life a partially changed person. 59
If anyone had ever said 'you are not a full employee of a place until you have worked there at least three years', I would have said 'That is absurd' thinking mostly of how so few employees ever stayed in some jobs long enough to get a contract because the job itself become difficult to settle with, and how unfair the limited availability of work contracts seemed to be. But thinking in terms of how work pressures can vary from soft and light, to quite severe, where the level of severity comes less from the work changing, and more from the season in which the work has to be completed in changing. Thus it was, with Christmas approaching. Several of the care assistants tried to gazump each other by asking Matron before others could ask for either Christmas day off from work, Boxing day off, or New Year's eve day or New Year's day off. The sense of the year's work having been hard, and of our entitlement to time off, was in the air. Particularly after the October meeting where it seemed the best reward Matron had to offer any of us was a no-fault exit and she only had one to offer, to one person.71
I made no claim to any particular day off. I had nobody that I wanted to spend any special time with if I was given the time off. Everyone knew I had no close family, nobody knew I was in therapy which was a commitment I wanted to keep going with. Matters came to a head when matron had set the Christmas and New Year schedules, and held a meeting with all the staff present, even if it was their day off, in the downstairs foyer, near the stairs, to set out with us all the schedule she had set. The foyer was the biggest open space where the residents could still be observed, as they had to be for those on duty in the meeting. It seemed bizarre that the residents, forgetful and repetitive with dementia as they were, formed such a close backdrop to the meeting.80
If Matron had a cohesive argument about fairness in the schedule when she wrote it down, then that argument fell apart in her explanation of it. She lost the argument with us. From memory the full schedule she wrote contained one member of staff on nights, every night. Three members of staff 7am to 2 pm, One extra member of staff on a shorter day shift, noon 'til 4 pm. Two or three members of staff from 4 pm to 9 pm. The three most assertive of the staff gave in their notice with immediate effect. It was worth losing the wages they were owed. They were going to have their time off whether they kept or lost their jobs. Given the poor pay that we were all on, the time off was more rewarding anyway.88
Attentive readers will realise that know that I had been in this job around a year. This was my second Christmas/New Year working for Windrush Nursing home. But it was the first where I had been there throughout the cycle of a whole year. The Christmas was the first where I understood from the inside why they were so keen to accept me with so few misgivings last year. 92
Getting new staff to cover Christmas who would be up to standard, at that short a notice was never really on. Matron got half the cover she wanted. For three weeks, over Christmas week, New Year's week and the week after I worked fifty hour weeks each week because matron did not have the staff. By the middle of the third week I was becoming a zombie. Matron could see it happening if she wanted to. She didn't. But somebody else did and her witness of my tiredness became my exit point from the job. That somebody else was a relative of one of the patients who witnessed my peculiar mix of my frustration and exhaustion with one particular resident, off whom it bounced with ease. 100
By the time of the closing last therapy session I had lost my job. But with the therapy I had got the tools for a new approach to life if I could figure out how to use them. And I was in the position of being on full housing benefit, but half supplementary benefit rates for six weeks because from sheer exhaustion I admitted to being sacked when I made my claim. My refusal to have a holiday earlier in the year meant I had a little more money than I expected to have whilst being on half rate supplementary benefit. 106
I had to visit the job centre and apply for jobs but was happy to apply for jobs I did not have the slightest chance of getting. My old friend, unemployment, renewed our acquaintance. 108
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