Getting the train from Nottingham to Lincoln, and then getting the connecting train from Lincoln to Gainsborough, could have been a time for reflection and planning. Most of the time it felt like it was merely waiting time. Though waiting in that tired looking Lincoln platform that in the late afternoon presented itself as time enough to pause and ponder what I was about to step into with my family, as a way of not seeing the grime around me.
As the Gainsborough train sluggishly moved out of Lincoln station, and the view out of the window was of industrial railways and yards where serial inactivity seemed to be the order of the day, the inactivity seemed to be sign I was getting closer to home. Alighting the platform in Gainsborough with my hand luggage the sense of stepping back in time could have made me want to leave. But no, with the change in the four years away I lived in a different present than the stillness presented here, where change, and displacement, were positive and something to adapt with. And anyway I had friends, Sue Hethershaw, and John Sargent from St Georges church to see. I had kept in touch with them as best I could from Nottingham, where the story of my improved lodgings with each of the three address changes was proof enough of how I had been renewed by Nottingham, in my own way.
But here I was going somewhere where renewal just did not happen. My parents could not even agree to a change of living room carpet or three piece suite without them disagreeing, and the process going wrong. There it was hard to say where the error started between them. Dad usually blamed mother for agreeing to his choice of what to buy or not buy, as if she existed to take the blame for his errors. There he thought the point of the marriage as being there to cover everything that he did not want to have to admit to. This funeral being for my mother's father, whom she had done her best to support at a distance in the four years since her mother had died, my father was kept out of the proceedings. He always had an urgent appointment at the pub at the least opportunity anyway. My sister was heavily involved though, and she had a way of being right about others where they wished she had sounded less bitter and disappointed with her being so right about them. Mothers sister was also involved and she too had this disposition where when other people were right it seemed an unfortunate accident to Alice.
I got the usual 'welcome to the fridge' level of warmth and greeting when I arrived at the parental house. The television being on, I was briefly acknowledged before they all went back to their programme. I was offered tea during the first advert break, and I was addressed as if I was there at the end of the television programme I had interrupted the family viewing of. One of the points that was more promptly addressed was where I would sleep. My sister got her bedroom, and I was to sleep downstairs on the settee. What had once been 'my bedroom', a room that for years had also doubled as an attic box room, had now been converted into a bathroom in an act of maladaptive local planning permission that had been passed, and pressed dad to put his D.I.Y. and painting and decorating skills to the fore about seven years earlier. This was the last major change in the house that he oversaw.
On my own in the town the next day, the first thing that I did was buy myself my first check shirt as a gay man from the Army and Navy Store. It was not a high quality item, but wearing it made feel different about myself.
When I want to see John Sargent not long after he noted that I had changed. I was more confident. But his small town Christian his faith mad him hover between the subdued decency the town stood for and faith in what the church stood for. He both resisted and affirmed my enthusiasm for being a different person. I did not press the matter that much. He was still a friend who when I saw him we both knew he was giving me some space away from my family and he had been doing that from when I first met him as Christian youth group leader. We had the shared interest in music to divert each other with anyway, and he busied himself copying various CDs by Roy Harper and other 70s figures for me to take back to Ireland and enjoy.
The rest of the visit gave me far less to take away and value later, though I enjoyed the catch up with my old CND friend Sue Hethershaw. The rest of the time was taken up with family duties in which the main gainer mother with her keeping her routines and her knowing how well they used other peoples time up.
The funeral service was held in the village Grandad had lived all his life. It was less well attended than his wife's funeral, four years earlier, where aside for the detail of her staunch commitment to the church, she had been a member of the biggest volunteer community in Britain, The Mothers Union for 75 years, since she was 13. Grandad's long standing membership was of another voluntary sector club from the era of The British Empire, the nineteenth century organisation known as The Royal Order of Buffaloes, which volunteered for Britain during WW1. For both Gran and Grandad this was their youth and commitment in action.
Two details of the day remained with me. The first was how lost, and beyond being comforted his neighbour Michaila was. She was barely in her twenties when Grandad had become a friend as well as a neighbour, when he was missing his wife. She lived on the ground floor of the converted council house Grandad's flat was part of. Michaila seemed crushed on the day, and people like mother and Aunt Alice claiming their place as Grandads family and heirs, and the people who had to sort out his remains to clear the flat must have made Michaila's sense of even loss sharper. Mother was relatively thin, fit from all her gardening, Alice was, well, obese - not that anyone dare use such a term within earshot of her. She was known to be very quick to take offence. I saw the two of them, leaving the church and going across the nearby single traffic road bridge, to go to Grandad's flat just the other side. My first thought when I saw the width Alice's bulk take up so much of the narrowest point of the bridge was 'Laurel and Hardy!', particularly when in the comedy routines the fat one was more likely to hit on the thin one for false or no cause without warning.
The funeral was over by mid afternoon. I don't remember the order of events after the crowds disbursed. After being dutiful enough to arrive at the event with family by car, I have the impression that I wanted time alone and I found the easiest way to get that was suggesting that I go home by bus. By mutual agreement I did that. I still had to shoehorn into an agreeable moment a conversation within family that I was 'coming out as gay'.
My family were the masters of silently putting off the moment. That evening in the parental house was quiet because the television was off: dad was at the pub. There was a lull between my sister, mother and I in which they were as near to being reflective after Grandad's funeral as my sisters young children would let us be. Since I was not going to be offered a better opening to speak I chose that moment. The conversation that followed must have been blocked out in peoples heads well before it was spoken out loud. My sister's spoke first. Her comment was vinegary and non-comital 'Well, we knew that all along.' which made me wonder why the subject had never been raised with me. The answer came from mother, 'You are not to tell your dad that you are going off to be gay', as if he might privately have thought that my being gay came from him, when and would not want to be told that. I could have said 'My being in the closet came from him. How do you tell a man who blanks parts of himself and blanks parts of other people's lives, when he does not want to know about them?' I thought that but did not say it. I did not want dad diverting the conversation from me with his absence. I chose to say 'Do you think he does not know already?' To save them having to ask further. The old defensiveness flared again when mother spoke of not bringing any boyfriend to see them because it would be provocative. At that moment the idea of me wanting to survey this hostile environment seemed absurd. I'd lose any friend who witnessed my family between the telly watching and illogical arguments the instant they saw them.
In the morning I had my breakfast, packed my bag, said a mechanical, detached, 'Goodbye' to mother, who was on her own in the house, and then left as if nothing had been said. There was nothing more to say. Much later, when I reflected on the deaths of my grandparents, I realised how much Gran's death bookended the start of my moving to Nottingham and away from my family and Grandad's death bookended the changes that I had reached with finding Russell and losing my fear of loneliness attached with me being gay. The change was generational.
