Families And How To Escape Them

My 1987 escape plan went that smoothly that what I planned did not feel like the intent to escape that it actually was. For  twenty six years I had lived on unreliable footings, always waiting for some firmer path but always unable to catch sight of where the sure footed path started. I wanted reliability without knowing how to recognise it if I saw it. From the different addresses I lived at in Lincolnshire, from my education and jobs I had done, and the serial failed attempts at making personal commitments, my 1980s had been a long series of false starts, each of which prepared me for, and led to, the next. The later attempts at starting again were improvements in the earlier attempts at work and friendships. But I needed something with clarity and energy behind it, to give me the same. To wind back to what I was plotting my escape from, in the autumn of 1985 I was living in Gainsborough in North Lincolnshire and I was helped to move to a new modern flat by my new best ...

With little money time can hang heavily on the unemployed. I was pleased in mid October 1987 when a friend, Richard, who was younger than me called by at random at the flat, and chose his time well. I had not seen him for what seemed like ages. Having caught up with whatever local news there was that was fit to share, he said he had called because he was on the way to the swimming pool. Did I want to go with him? Just as being unemployed makes for a weaker structured life, so friendliness among the unemployed lacks structure. I could not swim but collected my trunks and towel in a bag and decided that the walk alone would be rewarding. He told me in detail how he enjoying working in Nottingham. I talked about how my ideas about nurse training had stalled and my diminishing belief in the idea of paid work when employers seemed so opaque, and there were so many applicants with so little experience because the jobs were so few. We agreed too, about the unspoken gender and anti-union bia...

It was predictable that the Friday I left Gainsborough was packed and sociable. Waking up with Alan was a first I was glad that I was no going to repeat. Mid-morning Mother came and went, with her shopping trolley, taking away any perishable food I had left. Later I walked a few doors up the street and said 'Goodbye' to Sue Hethershaw at her house. She was cheerful about it, as if my leaving the town for good was nearly normal. Her husband, Nick, was about so she was distant, but still pleasant to me. As she put it 'You are   not going a way forever. The place will still be here. You will return as a different person.'. At home I checked the boxes I had filled again, and packed them again, tighter this time.  Before I had part filled the boxes and stored them out of sight. Now when I finished packing I put them in the yard, since the sun was out, for Graham to pack just as tightly in his car. I was at ready when Graham arrived. I have always admired the sense of team wo...

Over the weekend I stayed in the house, trying to compact and reduce the amount of space that my worldly goods took up, to appease my new landlord. The more that I looked around the house, beyond what I had to tidy, the less I could avoid wanting to ask myself how a house could be a house without plants or books in it. Even the parental house, the family house I had left behind, had books and plants in it. And the books there were read and changed every so often as well. The sterile anonymity of this new house remained a mystery to me. But if the house was that tidy that it was for owning but not living in, then it took me a long while to think back to last November and recognise that in seeing and rejecting the flea pit lodgings, with flea pit landlords, where the pitch for renting the rooms clearly mis-represented and mis-sold the rooms. In my haste of avoiding the mistake of renting one of those dodgy rooms for rent I had made a different mistake, which was equally to do with chara...

I was thankful the Monday morning that I started work that my work was part time. Whatever money I lost with the job being part time I gained in having the time to work out where to be, and what to do and find, both in West Bridgford and in central Nottingham. I needed the time to find out where the  different banks were, where my new doctor, and West Bridgford Council, from whom I had to get the application form for my housing benefit, were. They were the big three at the top of the list. But the first place to find on the bus was my new employer, The Leonard Cheshire Nursing Home in Lady Bay, West Bridgford. If at some points over the weekend I had doubted the wisdom of moving to Nottingham because of my landlord, then the employer was the person to dispel those doubts by putting me to work. The induction was demonstrative whilst being undemanding. It made the lay out of the building clear, where the staff changed for work, and instructed me about my duties, at meal time towards ...

Getting to actually see Richard, the young man who last October had suggested I join the ACE scheme away from home, to get me out of Gainsborough, proved difficult at first. When we had first met three months earlier we had both been agreeably evasive when the discussion came to him giving me details of precisely where he worked and lived in Nottingham. he made the details seem unimportant at the time. C ontacting him to arrange to meet up in Nottingham meant calling at his digs after I had started. That took more time to arrange than I expected. When we met he said he liked music. I don't know whether he actually did like music, or he merely said he liked music because it was an easy cover or shorthand that he saw I responded to, which left him able to hide what he wanted to keep hidden. But I took him at face value. I saw him two or three times, the music eased the space between us. Eased it enough that when he asked me if he could borrow some of the compilation tapes that I had ...