Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Seventeen - Celia And Other Stories

If the blackouts in work that made me go to the doctor were also the start of a clear change of direction, then they seemed inauspicious, to me, as signs that change was due. I was more disappointed than I could say at not being selected for the one no-fault exit from Windrush Nursing Home that autumn. The way matron chaired and scripted the meeting where she declared the need for one person the leave was laid out in a way where we had to listen and obey, matron was there to talk. If as a team we were good children, she was the adult defining our goodness. But by calling a meeting she laid bare how the imitation family structure within the nursing home was meant to work. So I learned something. But I learned it too late for the information to be useful. In all my time in the nursing home after that meeting I was caught between wanting to resign from the job and not knowing how to, and not having the wherewithal to seek and get a less demanding job that kept me debt free and in the bedsit I was attached to staying in.

I was not the only staff member looking for that no fault exit, but more on that later.

From the comfort of my rented bedsit I admired the church people who opened homes they owned for meetings of more than half a dozen people once a week. Such meetings were quite a commitment, and were the bedrock of the satellite structure of the church. I liked those meetings in spite of how they were places where few could admit to deep personal needs. It would be wrong to describe the house group meetings that went on in people's homes as 'fair weather churchmanship'. It would be fairer to write that where some attendees of the Sunday morning services saw the church as a place to find friendship, but for others friendship was better facilitated in people's homes. That such friendships limited individuals from sharing the most personal details of their lives became a given. But single people in the church were always caught between several unyielding places and expected to make the best of them.

Midweek house group meetings partially recharged me, socially. Though with work being as hard as it was, the charge usually drained away well before the next meeting. At the end of one mid-week Bible study and prayer session one elegantly dressed old lady who liked to be part of things, but often avoided the complicated questions and answers, and spoke at the end of prayers. She asked to be hugged. Because I worked with the elderly and because my work was by definition one of the most tactile jobs on the jobs market, albeit one more built on patient need than informed consent, I spontaneously gave her the hug she asked for. Her name was Celia and the obvious reason I found her easy to hug on request was her accent. She spoke in a broad Sheffield accent that made people listen. There was a song in her speaking voice, and her choice of a more basic vocabulary cut through the estuary English and social worker speak that some in the meetings all too easily reverted to, which rather distanced our discussions from some of the earthier points about life that The Bible expressed more aptly than modern life permitted.

It is obvious to me now, but being tired from work I was blind to it at the time, that meeting Celia was like meeting my gran as I would like to have done and having time with her to myself in a way that never happened when I was young and gran was a healthy and full of life. When Gran was a parent to her children, my mother and Alice, she was caught between the necessity of physical work in the face of absolute poverty and wanting to give her children attention, and leaving the children to look after themselves in the safe rural surroundings they lived in. The pattern was repeated with variations between me and Mother. But when I first stayed with Gran, away from my mother, she was retired and she had time for me that my mother never had. Gran having time for me, being attentive, and letting me sit near her when she shelled pods of peas for dinner felt special. But that period was quite short. Later Grandad was with Gran much more, and I was kept with mother, to lower my hopes and expectations.

Celia brought a unique background with her to the house group. She was now a pensioner but at the age of sixteen she had become pregnant and been locked in a mental hospital for it. The child was taken from her and she remained locked in the mental hospital for decades, which multiplied the limits of her schooling to make her seem much more 'backward' than she was. She was one of the people who the government of M. Thatcher spent a lot  of money on, to get her to recover her sense of citizenship of, in order to close down the mental hospitals that took her sense of adult citizenship away. She lived in a shared house run by two long tern foster parents who cared for limited ability adults in an adoptive family set up financed by social services. There was an ancient phrase that was probably from Yorkshire that described Celia well. 'She may have dropped out of school, but she still knows how many beans made five.'. Celia always knew how many beans made five, but lived in a society that discredited her with such knowledge.

Some time after the hug she asked for somebody to visit her and pray with her for an hour a week. I became the obvious candidate and accepted the role. With my shift work I tried to always keep Friday evenings free to spend an hour with her. It was a win-win situation for me that was there for the having. I would visit her in the foster home. She would make a drink of tea for both of us and we had the use of her bedroom as a place to talk, just the two of us. I would get her to talk through who she wanted to pray for and what they were like, and then we would say the prayers together. I never thought of it as being therapeutic in any particular sense. But I can see now that all personal attention we offer each other on a one to one basis is therapeutic with a small t. I saw the times with her as me giving somebody else the space and careful attention that I would want to be given, In which I was in the NHS queue for, myself.

The arrangement could not last. I was due some personal changes, and her long term foster parents would eventually move house with the assistance of social services. And towards the end Celia had, well, romantic female designs on me that could only be filed under 'fantasy; do not act on this idea.'. But I felt quite proud of me being the object of her having ideas that could not be acted on. The fantasies were material for her to learn through and we all need such material to mature ourselves through. That year to fifteen months of giving Celia an hour of my time each week, when nobody else would, now seems exceptional in so many ways that it is hard to explain the value of it in the brief space I have here.

Such time was the opposite of the church weekend that November. There, as a satellite church, twenty to thirty of us stayed in a large house together for a weekend for a time of more continuous study and sharing around meals. The time was meant to be more open than the weekly Sunday morning meetings allowed for. I sort of enjoyed the weekend. But I was tired from work and not thinking very straight during some of the more imaginative exercises, not that anyone commented or seemed to notice.

I found the humour in the cabaret incomprehensible. The highlight of the cabaret was two married couples, the wife sat at a right angle to their husbands, on the husbands knee. She was blindfolded and was meant to be feeding her husband Weetabix in milk. The twist being that he could not talk and eat at the same time, and she could not see. So the audience were divided in two and one half had to direct one wife, the other half directed the other wife, a little higher, lower, left or right etc with the spoon she was holding to feed the husband the Weetabix. The winners were the half of the audience who had most successfully guide the wife to feed her husband.

Everyone laughed at it. I laughed but more to show I was part of the weekend, than because I was enjoying it. Unstructured group behaviour often left me looking for a safe script to follow. If the humour was about detachment and/or co-reliance in teamwork then I got the but I had  my own sense of rather unfunny detachment to deal with. One burden I could not lay down was how I felt about work. How could I organise my exit from work on my own terms when it was making me too tired to organise myself? 

Please left click here for Chapter Eighteen.