Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Two - A Serendipitous Escape (Part 2)

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 bias of certain local employers. There employers chose only female employees because they were more pliant, more reliable, and more easily replaced when unreliable. When local equalled cheap then the cheapness would diminish both choice and reward for employees.

Women were said to accept this cheapness. Male breadwinners and home owners found that being both more pliant and less well paid as employees fitted poorly around them being heads of households, home owners. and having mortgages to pay off. The sort pliancy employers expected sat awkwardly with post WW2 traditional ideas about how the male headship of households was meant to work.

He suggested I join a government work programme in another place, as a way out of all that pressured local hierarchy in which I seemed to have no place. There I would be paid as an unqualified part time care assistant/nurse and have a year's contract. He gave me all the contact details of the government scheme where he worked as a junior administrator, in a Leonard Cheshire nursing home in the Lady Bay area of Nottingham.

In mid November I went for an interview and explained that part of why I wanted the job was to get me around the sequencing of how to get a job and organise the move to do the job, when dole money was so tight it made the sequencing awkward. My interviewer knew about this problem. So I did not have to go through questions about the sequencing in any detail. I must have interviewed well. They took me at face value and accepted me for the post of nursing assistant in the Lady Bay area of Nottingham on the condition that I would sort out where I would be living and contact them to set a start date. I knew I had to give a months notice on my flat. The only thing I knew about Nottingham was where the Leonard Cheshire Home was in Lady Bay. I did not even have a contact address, for Richard. I returned there by train for a day trip one Friday in late November. I got a local paper and a city map including bus routes, and I went through the 'for rent' ads at the back of the paper to look for the place to live. I wanted to get a verbal contract that seemed affirmative that same day, so that I could tell the nursing home that I had found somewhere to live, and I could give the months notice on the Gainsborough flat. My assuming that I could do this in one day, without prior networks or contracts tells you how green about it all I was.

Nearly all of the landlords who were advertising flats and shared accommodation on that day in the paper proved either unavailable on the phone or when they were in, and the room could be seen, their premises were les attractive than they said. The hook for advertising the unattractive room was usually that they'd had several rooms and that was the last room left, leaving out that it had been refused by prospective tenants many times before. Early that Friday evening one landlord, a man who was younger than me who was clearly out to make money out of the property he now had a mortgage on made a firm verbal commitment for me to rent a room. The house was rather new and posh but that was a relief after the oversold tawdry rooms I had seen that day. I had a fair to small room of my own in the shared house, and the rent was affordable and housing benefit friendly. If I was as green as people could see that I was, then I was also very lucky. 

I was now set up to move and take up my new job in early January. The local jobcentre were surprised when I presented them with the code for the government programme job in Nottingham, which was part of the paperwork to be completed. Their response was 'We've never seen anything like that before'. But they processed it, and I gave my notice to leave Spring Gardens for January 1987.

Knowing that this was my last Christmas of living in such proximity to my family did not make them seem kinder or more engaging. But knowing that I was leaving made any hollowness in 'the season of good will' seem more transient. If, as family, we were more distant than we pretended to be, then with knowing I was parting on my own terms made the pretence seemed easier. If in the past the new year always brought with it a sense of a lull in activity as if the new year was slow to start up, then my new year held new purpose. I had a date by which to leave, Friday the 8th January 1987.  Then I was away, and everything was well planned: I had made sure of that.  

Blame my 'late developer' script if you like, but since my first attendance of my local Ecumenical Christian youth group I was always the oldest member of it. I had remained because there was no next step to progress to. Where many left due to relationships or a university education taking them away, none of that was going to happen to me. And with my being closeted and gay, well, what next stage could come out of that? A serious long term local job might have occupied me better, but no such job had found me. When I shared that I had found this job, and I was moving away they were genuinely pleased for me. Those last meetings had an odd edge to them. To 'see me off' constructively and be helpful the leader of the Christian youth group, Graham, volunteered to drive me and all I was going to take with me, my clothes, my large collection of LPs, my tapes (including all my Grateful Dead live tapes) and my hi-fi and speakers, to the new address on the last Friday of the old tenancy/first night at the Nottingham address. As 'a gift' to the fully furnished address at Spring Gardens I left behind the colour television and video set up, which I was not going to take with me. 

The unexpected happened to me on my last night I was in Spring Gardens. That day I had packed and boxed up as much I could, to prepare to leave the following day. I got a surprise late night visitor, a gentleman caller known as Manchester Al. He was 'Mr Unreliable' on the quiet. But people pleasers like I had been moulded to be were always shy when cynicism might cut off potential reward, even when it was barely reward at all. He was a rather handsome, straight backed, but personally unsettled ex-soldier who I had first met giving blood when I was eighteen, eight years earlier. His unsettledness meant that I could never work him out. He always made sex the short cut away anything complex that required him to be more verbal about himself. His drink problem was unhelpful. Whatever label fitted him, he was evasive. But at least he was sexy whilst being evasive. That was a first for me. He would visit me either when he was slightly drunk or because he simply wanted sex. But part of his act was that he always made me initiate the sex. Any sex that happened had to happen because he made me responsible for it, and because 'neither of us was gay'.

For the first time he called me late in the evening that I was packing to leave the following day. Knowing that he would probably stay the night, because he would be tired from the drink, and knowing that he did not know that I was leaving tomorrow lunch time I took the lead. I took him to my bed. If we were clumsy, then we were at least forgiving and consensual about it. I would have liked us to have kissed more. But it felt good to be held in a pair of strong arms. He was stiff in all the right places and pleasantly pliable, going as far as kisses. I had always thought him handsome and was thankful for how he made my last night of living in Gainsborough such a positive, if somewhat vague, memory. He left in the morning, when he did not even want breakfast. I did not know where he lived, but he had someone somewhere to go back to. 

If mother could never shake off her supposed admirer, her husband, when he was drunk, because he owned where she lived, then I was shaking off my one handsome admirer on my terms. And with that I was also shaking off for now that so many married men drank that much they were more married to the drink than they were husbands to their wives or parents to their children, because only these drunks could own the properties they made their families live in. This made the forgiveness of drunkenness by my dependents a forced given, not a choice. The paradoxes that I hoped to not meet with my going to live and work in Nottingham were going to be different from the paradoxes of my past. 

Please left click here for Chapter Three.