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 all the local news there was that was fit to share, he said he had called because he was on the way to the swimming pool. He invited me 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 bi...

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, taking the last of the perishable food in her shopping trolley with her. Later I walked a few doors up the street and said 'Goodbye' to Sue Hethershaw at her house.    Her husband, Nick, was about so she was distant but  cheerful about my putting the town behind me. As she put it 'You are   not going a way forever. The place will still be here. You will simply return to it as a different person. You being allowed to change is what matters.'. At home I checked the boxes that I had filled and repacked them, 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 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 make seem small, the less I could avoid wondering 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. The books 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. 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 character. As I mulle...

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. How to find my way around West Bridgford and in central Nottingham. I needed the time to find out where the different banks were, where the doctor's surgery was, and West Bridgford Council offices were. I had to get the application form for my housing benefit from there. They were the big three at the top of a much longer list. But the first place to find was the bus stop for 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 but undemanding. It made the lay out of the building clear, where the staff changed for work, and instru...

Getting to actually see Richard, the young man who last October had suggested I join the ACE scheme to get me out of Gainsborough, proved difficult at first. When we had met by chance three months earlier it had been easy to for him to avoid sharing with me details of where he lived in Nottingham. I did not even have the job that would assist my escape. Now I had escaped, he seemed to be escaping me. But he was the only person I knew in the city, even if I only knew him slightly. C ontacting him to arrange to meet up with him in Nottingham meant first calling into the office in work where he was based to get his address from him and arrange a time to see him at his place because my lodgings were not a place of welcome. That took more time to arrange than I expected. When we met he said he liked music. I don't know whether he actually liked music, or whether that was an easy  shorthand or shortcut away from himself to lead me down that he knew I could respond to, that left him able ...