Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Thirty Five - Journey Into The Past

Getting the train from Nottingham to Lincoln, and the train from Lincoln to Gainsborough, could have been a time for reflection. I could have rehearsed what I wanted to say to my family, but mostly my journey felt marking time. Maybe that was my rehearsal-for marking more time and avoiding more issues with family. Time between connections on that tired looking train platform in the late afternoon presented me with little food for thought beyond 'This is a duty: none of the family really wants to be present at this event.'.

As the train for Gainsborough train chugged out of Lincoln station the view out of the window became one of sequential industrial railway yards where serial inactivity was the order of the day. The inactivity was sign I was getting closer to home. I was the only one to get off at the Gainsborough platform. The sense of stepping back in time that had started in Lincoln could have made me choose to not see family at all. But no, I was going to to see family and I was taking with me the changes I had made in the last four years. I was not going to disown who I had become. I was going to own who I now was with old friends who would be glad of the change, glad of seeing me less weighed down by who my family had once made me to be.

But with the parental household I was going to a place where people did not change how they related to each other. My parents could not even agree to change the lay out of the living room, or buy a new a carpet without disagreement and poor compromises with the result, where one parent blamed the other either because the change cost too much, or the right goods at the right price were unavailable. Mother had been used to taking blame for compromises, even when external forces were to blame. In the absence of a clear explanation for who decided what, and when the most consistent impression I had was of dad blaming mother for the wrong decision and poor compromises, and made him further lean into the the detachment of the drink and his mates.

But then again mother had often been on the losing side of behaviour and arguments with her older sister, Alice, long before dad's pattern of mistrust. There was form there, and it was hard to know whose form it was most. And that week Alice would be part of the reasons for my visiting. I had quite a lot of empathy for mother, she was a trier who did not give up, even as she rarely won. Equally that she won so  rarely made the defeats she had to recount when listening to her closely an exercise in patience with defeatism.

When I arrived at the parental house the television was on some local evening news programme, my sister, mother, and dad were all intent on watching at his behest. I was silently nodded in and knew to wait for the advert break for the television to be turned down and for somebody to talk to me. They did better than talk to me, mother put the kettle on and offered me some tea. My usual clear glass cup that reminded mother that I took my tea without milk or sugar. If my greeting on arrival was the expected 'welcome to the fridge' level of warmth, then the house warmed up when dad announced that he was going out. Whether he was going out because he knew that there had to be conversation where mother would talk about the details of the funeral, and ask me how I was, or whether the television programmes he wanted everyone to watch were over, and he felt to pull of the pub and his mates was hard to tell. 

With two bedrooms, four adults and one child the sleeping arrangements divided into me sleeping on the settee, my sister and her daughter taking her bedroom and my parents occupying the back bedroom that they had always slept in. The arrangement would last for about four days, including the night after the funeral. One reason open conversation was so difficult was in front of us, it was hard to avoid wanting to ask 'how can a house this small be so consistently and uncomfortably over full?' but that was one of many questions that silently clogged the air between my parents in the house, where mother felt too uncomfortable to talk openly within a half mile radius of the house. I could have satirised the way the house seemed so full with us all there as musical chairs, where the television was the music, which with dad around the was television was always on, so we all had to find the space for as silently as observed discomfort as best we could.

 

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 for the first time made feel different about myself.

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 made 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 items of far less of value later, though I enjoyed the catch up with my old CND friend Sue Hethershaw. She was as much the adopted aunt/mother replacement that she had been before and was glad of my new found personal sense of security. The rest of the time was taken up with family duties in which the main person to gain from my presence was mother when I made her weekly shopping and gardening routines a little easier that week. It was the not quite the nearest to being useful I could be, but on the way to the allotment she spoke about Grandad's fall, and some of what happened in hospital, which she described in terms that normalised the mildly gruesome and painful via detachment that was what was expected. In that the detachment was a form of relief for the career more than the patient. But I had been where mother described, with the thirteen months work in the care home I had done.  

The funeral service was held in West Stockwith, where Grandad had lived all his life. It was less well attended than his wife's funeral had been, four years earlier, where recounting her past contributions to village life had been a highlight of the funeral. Somehow his long term membership of The Grand Order of Buffaloes seemed to be lesser achievement than her membership of the Mother's Union. Both had joined when they were young, and their membership spoke to the history of The British Empire, which was strong when they were young which was barely understandable as a social force in society now.

Two details of the day remained with me. The first was how lost, and beyond being comforted his neighbour the youthful Michaila was. She was barely in her twenties when she had started renting the flat she lived in, and Grandad had become a friend as well as a neighbour when he was missing his wife. Michaila seemed crushed on the day. 

The funeral was over by mid afternoon. I don't remember how we all disbursed beyond how after being dutiful enough to arrive at the event with family by car, I accepted the suggestion that I return by bus. I felt better alone anyway. Looking across the nearby narrow road bridge I saw Alice with mother. Alice was obese, but she had always been obese. Mother was no beanpole. But seeing them walk together away from the church and over the narrow road bridge to Grandad's flat, my first thought was 'Laurel and Hardy!', particularly when I remembered the comedy routines, where the punchline was literally the fat one hitting the thin one for false or no cause without warning, as if hitting another person was inherently funny.  

I don't know whose choice it was when we met, or when the choice was made, but as a family we met so few times that every time we met the news had to be bad. But it still had to be shared. I still had to shoehorn into an agreeable moment a conversation with my family that I was intent on 'coming out as gay'.

In the parental house the evening after the funeral was quiet. The television was off: dad was at the pub. Mother was ironing. There was a lull between my sister, mother and I in which we were as near to being reflective after the day's activities as we would ever be. I chose that moment as my opening. The conversation that followed was surely blocked out in it's set positions of sister and mother well before any of us spoke. After I made my declaration my sister spoke first. 'Well, we knew that you were gay all along.' which made me wonder with some bitterness why I got so little help 'coming out' earlier. Mother was the answer why, 'You are not to tell your dad that you are going off to be gay', as if he, or she might privately have thought that my being gay came from him, or my declaration became another thing for him to blame her for, where she was not to blame. The decision was about me taking more responsibility for myself.

Not wanting mention of dad to divert the conversation from me with his absence I said 'Do you think he does not know already?' To save them having to ask further. The old defensiveness flared again when mother spoke of me not bringing any boyfriend to see them because it would be provocative. At that moment the idea of me wanting to invite anyone into this passively hostile environment seemed absurd. I'd lose whoever witnessed the lack of welcome.

I packed my luggage that night. There was nothing more to say. In the morning I said a polite but detached 'Goodbye' to mother, who was on her own, as if the night had erased our conversation. Later, on the train, I reflected on the timing of the deaths of my grandparents: Gran's death had bookended the start of my moving to Nottingham and away from my family. Grandad's death bookended the changes that I had reached with finding Russell and losing my fear of the loneliness that other people projected onto 'being gay', that I was hoping I had dropped, myself, with my journal and waiting for therapy.

Pulling away from Gainsborough, I sensed that I had observed generational change that week. The future had to be brighter than the past.

Please left click here for The Afterword.