My route away from the job club, and into a job, seemed in no way assured. First I was on my own, filling in the application form. Then there were ten of us completing a written intelligence test. To this day I am unsure about the role that written tests play in helping employers decide who to accept, and who to decline to employ. Maybe part of what we were tested for was that we had no sensitivity to being put in dingy rooms, because I had passed that test with how well I had endured the job club room. In the moments I half wondered why I was in that room I focused on the half dead cactus on the window sill that was neither thrown out or watered, but soldiered on without nurture. I often thought to myself 'Is that plant meant to be a metaphor for our place in the jobs market?'.
But I passed the intelligence test. Maybe all ten of us present did because it was dummy test where, whatever the questions on the paper were, what we were really being tested for was how sincere we were prepared to be as uniformed dummies. I accepted applying for the job for five reasons. The first was that it was temporary. I simply could not get my head around being happily accepted by any employer long term being to any clear mutual advantage. This job had a natural, mutually agreed, cut off point. The second reason was that it in no way affected my housing benefit, which made me feel more assured. The third reason was that the hours were part time, albeit starting at 5 am six days a week. The fourth reason was that I would be on my own delivering the post and my distance from the management when on the job made me feel better about doing it. My fifth reason was the free 'airwear' shoes that they issued as standard. These shoes had been my favourite for every day wear for over a decade. If I'd have known what the job was like before I started there could have been a sixth reason. I was not a natural fit for it, but I got to quite like being part of the team, the lack of pretension amongst us was appealing.
On my first day at work I still had my half fares unemployed person's bus pass. In my postman's uniform I dared to use it to get a bus home. The bus driver gave me the ticket for the bus and later queried it with the ticket inspector who got on the bus part way through my journey. The inspector did not approach me. But if he had I would have said 'I am working a week in hand, so technically I am still on benefits.'. I was not working a week in hand, but the urge to thrift that I had made me try that minor ruse to save a frankly petty amount of money was rather strong with me. Maybe my using the card was also a sign of how little I thought had changed for me. Thereafter I paid the full fare.
For six days a week for the next three months my day started at about 4.00 am, I put on my slightly ill-fitting postman's uniform and walked to the depot, thirty mins brisk walk from where I lived. In work we had seventy five minutes to sort through all our post by putting every item into one of the cubby holes labelled with all the different roads on our patch. Then we put elastic bands around the contents of each cubby hole, and more elastic bands around mail for closely grouped addresses, and then put all the bundles in our shoulder bag. I was often slower than the other, more experienced, postmen in my team. They helped me sort my mail faster when I was slow/time was running tight. At 6.15 all six of us were meant to get in the back of the postal van and be taken from the depot and dropped off on the area where we had to deliver our post. Mine was Plumtree, a village five miles south east of central Nottingham. I was usually dropped off at the roundabout just short of the village itself. Soon after I started I was loaned the use of a works bike which I took on the van that carried us all every day. It helped me deliver my post faster and made going home easier.
Of the other five men on the team, four of them were married with young children. One was an older man, of about fifty, who was slim, bald and had a neat white goatee beard and moustache. He lived with his mother, It was clear to all that he was gay, the rest were un- interested in this. But I was curious about the positive impression that he gave out about his living with his elderly mother where they were an unashamed and positive support to each other. He had a quite camp sense of humour which stopped short of being laden with innuendo, but with my encouragement he leaned further that way. The ten minutes in the van with him each morning became a treat for me. That was the time where he and I could trade comments and humour whilst the other four were somewhere between perky and subdued. I would have liked to have met him socially outside of work, but I knew better than to ask for that. That would be pushing it.
I was expected to complete my round by 11 am. I often took until until 11.30 before the round was completed. However long I took to get the round done, my treat to myself was always to sit outside the newsagents and have a pint of milk and a mars bar before going home on the bike. At the time it seemed to be a fine way to enjoy the summer weather.
I found that I could adapt much better with shift work where the shift did not change, than when the shifts did change. But still I tended towards resting in the afternoons. My best (in)activity during my time off was reading, even with the household was mostly centred around the television. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in the February of 1990 we were all gripped by the images of him on his first walk free, and the commentary that went with it. But I was the one in the house who took out of the library one of several biographies the ANC leader that had been published. It was a brick of a book to read and I read it all. But I had followed the anti-apartheid movement from the distance of my television in Lincolnshire half a decade earlier, when BBC 2 had depicted the escape from South Africa of white newspaper editor, journalist, and ANC supporter, Donald Woods, and his family. Woods had been a champion of the writings of Steven Biko. Even knowing that I was a long way from the events that the BBC depicted, they still seemed personal to me.
I enjoyed life over that summer. I now knew that positive change was possible for me, after all I was now living somewhere with the communal use of a phone-this was an advance to be treasured. But I remained unsure that once such change happened how much it was fixed, irreversible. Once again I found myself having odd periods of being uncomfortably sad for no obvious reason, and from no obvious cause. The best I could do was put the timing of these odd feelings down to how close it had been a year since I had seen my doctor and asked for the therapy that had ended nine months earlier. I found different ways of adapting around this ongoing sense of melancholy. Even though CDs were getting popular and grabbing the headlines as the way to sell music, my collection remained vinyl and tape based. My heavy metal and punk phases were long past, though I had the occasional foray into listening to The Stranglers and Led Zeppelin. There is was a lot of melancholy in the guitar based music I liked, where guitarists and song writers like Roy Harper, Jerry Garcia, Gram Parsons, Richard Thompson, Neil Young, Lowell George, Henry Kaiser, BB King and many others, much more that I would have estimated without going through them all. At a guess I had probably 150 albums, and relatively few of them were ones that I had either bought and not played yet, or played too few times for them to not give me a few ear worms of songs that came to me randomly when I was well away from playing the albums.
If they were not enough then there were books that thrived on mixed or unhappy endings to find in the library or buy in second hand book shops. Finally it was one of the recognitions of my homosexuality that was less obvious to me at the time came when BBC 2 put on a series of Saturday Afternoon matinee films starring Joan Crawford and I found them to be unexpectedly engrossing. It did not matter how many times Joan played the self made woman, or the heiress, who fails every time to recognise that her choice of male consort is untrustworthy or doomed, she always seemed to give her whole energy to refresh the role. I think my favourite was 'Humeresque' (1946) where she was the wealthy but tainted woman who supported a talented but emotionally volatile violinist John Garfield. The end of the film had to be him on stage playing soaring Wagnerian violin intercut with her walking into the sea and drowning to the sound of his violin. Repeat with interesting male variations in 'Sudden Fear' (1952) the western 'Johnny Guitar' (1954) and 'Queen Bee' (1956). and others in the 'woman in fear' genre.
The standard catch-22 dialogue and church, mental health and homosexuality ran
Church 'You can't be gay and you can't be depressed if you are a Christian. Christ is your cause for cheer.'.
Me 'I might be a lot less depressed if I could admit my homosexuality to myself.'.
Church 'If you admit your homosexuality to yourself then you will want to admit it to somebody else, somebody who we say has to deny it themselves, and that is aside from you breaking ancient taboos. No. Deny yourself even though heterosexuals don't have to deny themselves.'.
Me 'But with regard to homosexuality, can the model of a mentally healthy and happy selflessness in Jesus be made to more like it is for heterosexuality? The two models are very different. If the two models were more alike then they would both be more sharable.'.
Church 'Nobody has ever directly asked us that before. Still, you can't be gay, Christian and depressed. Christ would only want you to be happy.'. where in the sleight of argument the church ignores the mental health aspect of the dialogue. repeat to fade....
But there was a space to found away from the regular church dialogue outlined above, which was also the beginning of a way out for me from making popular entertainment work as my short term therapy that left wider questions unasked. Adelaide and I both attended a Saturday one day study event that I am sure she discovered, where the subject was an exposition of the Matthew Fox book 'Original Blessing; A Primer in Creation Spirituality', in which we both came away from the day's study brimming with new ideas we seemingly had both long felt about gender, sexuality, spirituality, and most vitally choice.
To be directed to Chapter Twenty One please left click here.
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