Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Seven - A Hasty Move

Having two weeks to find the place to move to where I thought I would want to stay, and get everything I owned there meant that I had more time to navigate my way around the old problem with new rooms than I had given myself the first time - one day. But the process remained the same: assessing the landlord and the room on the spot when I had ascertained that the place was housing benefit friendly.

The process started from the same place too -  the 'To Let' section in the back of of the day's afternoon local press every day. After a couple of days of exploring unhelpful adverts, where either the room was taken by time I rang, or when I saw the room, then between the room and the landlord I somehow felt that it was not the room for me, I had got the measure of  what to tactfully reject. On my next full day off I applied myself afresh to the hunt for the right bedsit and landlord. I hesitate to write it here, I did not see myself as 'a person who lands on their feet', but on that day I struck lucky.

My new bedsit was a first floor front bedroom that was the width of the terraced house it was part of, with houses either side on Peirrepoint Rd in Lady Bay. It was much better for bus routes into Central Nottingham and for getting to work, even though my time at the Leonard  Cheshire Home was coming to an end. So even as I moved my worldly goods from the shared house to the bedsit I had a grace period where I could settle with the old landlord and start better with the new landlord. Part of the grace of the grace period was winning my appeal for full housing benefit from the start, in spite getting the forms into the wrong Housing Benefit office for not knowing where to go.

My new lodgings would have been much nearer work but for the fact that the week the rent arrears were sorted out the manager of the Leonard Cheshire Home told me that the government were ending the scheme I was employed on when all the work contracts under it ended. They were withdrawing from the scheme early. Under contract I was going to be transferred to do care work for Nottingham City Council. So I had part time work that week, and outside of work hours I had enough to do moving what had been a car full of my worldly goods journey by journey over several days on the bus. Clothes, records, cassettes, hi-fi and books and everything else, all went from from uncomfortable lodgings no 1, to the more down at heel but more sustainable lodgings no 2. I was leaving lodgings no 1 tidy both financially and personally as I left lodgings no 1. When all my things were moved they were as unsorted as when they had arrived.

I had moved the last of things in good time when I ring the friend of mother to  get an update on Gran's health. I could not guess whether she would cling to life with determination, or whether the hospital would withdraw the life support that kept her body alive, and she might finally let go. The news about Gran was that she was 'slipping away'. A day later it was all confirmed. Since the home were ending their commitment to my employment anyway I was given more time off to attend the funeral than I needed. I left Nottingham at the short notice to stay a few days at the parental house in late January 1988, to attend Gran's funeral and be the dutiful son I was expected to be.

Dad was at the pub when I knocked and let myself into the parental house. The television was off. Mother offered me tea and I enjoyed the quiet whilst she busied herself with finding my old clear tea cup which reminded her to no put milk in the cup before pouring the tea because she knew that I had my tea black and without sugar. This gave her time to decide what to tell to tell me to update me on what had happened with Gran and say some of the other things that she habitually had to cover up about when dad was anywhere near, where the need to cover up was more important than what was covered up.

When I arrived at the parental house to be dutiful I could not work out what had changed. Everything looked sort-of-in-order, but the house seemed to be  somehow smaller. Whether the shrinkage was from some extra clutter in the house, from my parents shrinking from each other more, than usual, or whether mother had been seriously affected by Gran being in hospital so long, and dying there, was hard to separate. One new habit was that the table was no longer set up to eat at. meals  were now exclusively served on trays, whilst everyone sat on comfy chairs facing the television, with either the television on but with the sound down, or turned off if dad was not there. From the new meal set up my parents were clearly more divided and ruled by the television than they had been previously.

The following day she invited me to walk with her the mile and a half to the allotment. That was a signal for the more honest conversation she wanted to have which for it's honesty had to be confidential. When we had walked over half a mile from the house Mother begin to breathe more easily and explain some of the finer details of Gran's declining health in her last year. The account was one where because I was being told things for the first time I had to listen first and there would not be a second discussion where I might ask about why certain bit of the narrative did not fit well together. But mother told me about what Gran had tried to keep to herself, but had eventually shared with Alice, mother sister where Alice withheld the detail from Mother until it was too late for Mother to do anything ease Gran's life by herself. I did not need rehearsals of old arguments about claiming to care and the material gain of inheritance.

The way mother shared this past of recent competitive family secrecy on the way to the allotment apart from thinking 'Old ground? Allotments?' I preferred the lateral thinking to mother's tortured narratives. There I wondered where I had been in the last years. 'There all the time but kept out of the loop' was the short answer. I had seen Gran in the flat often enough to remember her. I can still picture the knots and swelling joints of her fingers, which were permanently at forty five degree angles to the palm of her hands due to the severity of her arthritis, and her head bent over her chest with the curvature of her spine. I can remember her being kept comfortable with supportive pillows. In her last years Gran could no longer swallow food but with her head supported she was able to drink a little warm tea when she was fed it from a saucer every time that Mother got a lift to visit Gran and Grandad from her best gardening friend, Ted Hepenstall, and insisted that I come too. Mother's weekly delivery of some food and return of clean laundry was the most and least she could do. Between Gran and Grandad it was hard to know who clung to who more. I was meant to not think to ask how long Gran could successfully resist going to hospital because she knew she would never return to the flat alive, and to never ask how much Grandad drew comfort from her presence, even though the chair she was made comfortable in was effectively a day time cot and she was in actual pain.

I also reflected on why women, well mother, explained their physical ailments to themselves and to others in such a convoluted terms that nobody, not even them, understood what the aliment was. But then again I'd only just had my first taste of modern health care in the Leonard Cheshire Nursing Home and brief as my taster for it was, that example of modern health care seemed generations away from how mother, Alice and Gran had explained their health to themselves, and others, in their world and their own times.

My first journey on my own out of the town was catch the bus to Gran's village. Seeing Gran's body in the chapel, in the coffin, the lid to one side, was the first time I had seen somebody who was dead. She was laid out in her coffin in the church for the traditional three days before the funeral, a rarity which showed the longevity of her relationship with the church and the village. Seeing the body was the opposite of traumatic. The body was not suffering, it was a body in which the spirit that once occupied it had long flown. What remained could not in conflict any longer. I saw Grandad that day too. I was introduced to one of the neighbours who were supporting him through the early public sense of loss. Seeing him, by turns I got the double image of an old man bearing up to the loss the world had offered him, and the sense of him being almost child-like in how he sought to be looked after.

Please left click here for Chapter Eight.