Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Eighteen - Reversing Into The Future

In the Christmas of 1988 the best present I got came from the NHS. It was a six week course with a Gestalt therapist that started in the first week of December and ran three weeks into January 1989. But even before the therapy started I set up my biggest new year resolution of 1989 for myself, which was to change my address. Part of the setting up of this hoped for change include accepting beforehand that I would not know when it was going to happen.

One of the people from my mid week Bible study group who I got to know a little better via the church weekend was Adelaide, one of several social workers who were part of the event. To this day I don't know what the right collective noun for social workers is, a concern of social workers? In my darker moments on the weekend I reflected how far away I was from the care home, called a school during the time I was in it, over a dozen years earlier. There one member of staff in particular who let other boys know that I had a social worker, and that her name was Mrs Hunt. In one memorable morning assembly the sports teacher Mr Mahoney pronounced her sir name with a C rather than a H to cynical laughter all around. Part of what he was aiming at was both how inept I was at sport and my acceptance of a limited gay identity in the school, which is to say that aside from being weird I also gave selected boys, all older than me, oral sex on the quiet. At least here the social workers were an enlightened group, and my hidden past was not going to be used against me. 

Adelaide stood out among the social workers on the weekend because she was a senior social worker, and like Celia, her accent cut through the estuary English. She had a broad but clear Liverpool accent. After the Autumn church weekend I invited her to dinner in my bedsit room, which I thought seemed cosy. But given the light and space of the three storey house she lived in with lodgers, in Lady Bay she may well have seen my room as cluttered rather than homely. Whether she saw clutter or homeliness, one thing she did not see was the house bricks that I had retrieved from the garden to replace the collapsed leg on one corner of my single bed. I had undertaken improvisations like this so as to bother the landlord less. As she talked about her house, which she called 'Agape House', it became an obvious question on my part to ask her to consider me, or put me on her list, as a possible future tenant.

Soon after the sociably unromantic meal I got a letter from my doctor: my therapy placement had been arranged, and gave me a date, time and place for the first appointment. My previous experience of therapy was limited. I had read no books on the subject, though if I had been given a reading list I would have followed it. I had experienced something that was called therapy, but was neither therapy nor therapeutic. It was called 'directive therapy' and I had received a few sessions of it in Lincolnshire. I had been vaguely directed towards it by Christian/gay support network, True Freedom Trust.

In directive therapy the client gets to speak and say what they want to say about themselves. But the convention in it is that whatever the client says, what The Bible says about society, taboos and all, is always more right than the client's testimony. The authority of the church, all the churches, accounted for more than the experience of the individual. Sessions always ended with the affirmation of The Bible being quoted by the therapist, where The Bible over-rode what the client has said. In one such session I received the time ended with the therapist quoting Psalm 46 verse 10 'Be still, and know that I am God.' which I took to be a religious way of saying 'shut up'.

I had received four hours of continuous emergency therapy in one block at Christian arts festival, Greenbelt, in 1985. There I simply could not shut up or be stilled, I was bursting. The strength of my testimony of feeling lied to and ill done by over-rode what The Bible said, which was a respite for me. But the therapy was driven more by desperation and well used chance, than it was part of any any well planned and structured long term support. 

The first meeting was about being assessed. There the therapist quite smoothly got the overview of my life that she needed. From the beginning, she listened when I spoke about the serial conflicts that had become how I explained where I came from. It included the conflicts within the family and conflicts between life at home and life outside home, i.e. school. The consistent thread that she slowly unpicked was the evasive shorthand that my family used to explain away both what did happen and what did not happen, and the less bearable truth contained within it.

Her use of a cushion was simple genius. When we got caught in some scene in which I was child who was not going to be levelled with she put the cushion in from of me and told me to talk the cushion as if it were who was denying me the honesty. I had to be the judge of my own, more adult, honesty as I talked to who the cushion represented. Talking to my dad as the cushion was the hardest role play to do. Throughout my life he was always the most opaque of people. I found talking to the cushion as if it were a person strange at first. She did not tell me that what I was doing was called gestalt therapy. I learned that much, much later. I had to be on my own or somewhere very quiet for at least an hour after each therapy session, to slowly return to my normal life, partially changed as a person.

I would have needed more than the therapist with her cushion to get to the truth about the nature of written and signed contracts between employers and employees in the late 1980s/1990s. What employers thought about written contracts with employees, where the contract grants the employee legally airtight long term rights over the employer, remained unknown. What employees thought was more clearly optimistic, but far fewer employees ever got contracts with their employers than ever dreamt of such a document. And when employees did have rights they could claim against their employers, the employee needed a lot of stamina, and often a union who could afford a lawyer to legally back up those claiming such rights. And would the employee want to work for that employer given the lengths they had put the employer to, to get those rights? Rarely.

One of the unknowns in my life back then was how different it might have been had I met Richard and moved on the Manpower Services Scheme much earlier, and my contract had run autumn to autumn. If it had then the replacement work at the end would have had to start the next autumn. As it was I was coming up for a year of being in my second job a year after the first job, this time without a a contract that was about to expire, but simply tired. Christmas itself became the source of the conflict in work that stumped matron.

With Christmas approaching several of the care assistants tried to beat other employees to be the first to ask matron for either Christmas day off from work, Boxing day off, New Year's Eve day or New Year's day off. The sense of the year's work having been hard, and of increased entitlement to time off on those days was unavoidable. Particularly after the October meeting where it seemed the best reward Matron had to offer any of us was the free pass of a no-fault exit and she only had one to offer, to one person. There were no free passes like that left now. I made no claim to any particular day off. Everyone knew I had nobody that I wanted to spend any time with. 

My biggest commitment was to my therapy, and I did not know what the consequences of that might be. Matters came to a head when matron share the Christmas and New Year schedules she had arranged in a meeting with the staff, including the staff she requested to be present even when it was their day off. The foyer, where the residents could pass through, was the only meeting space. It seemed bizarre that the residents, forgetful and repetitive as they were, should be such a close backdrop to the meeting.

If Matron had a tight argument about the fairness in the schedule when she organised it, then that argument fell apart in her explanation of it. She lost her own argument because there were more of us then there was of her. From memory the full schedule she wrote contained one member of staff on nights, every night. Three members of staff 7am to 2 pm, One extra member of staff on a shorter day shift, noon 'til 4 pm. Two or three members of staff from 4 pm to 9 pm, the physically demanding bedtime shift. The three most assertive of the staff gave in their notice with immediate effect, considering it a bonus to not see the last of their wages if they did not have to enter the building again. Matron had not allowed for how our time off might be worth more to some of us given the poor pay.

Readers might note that I had been in this job around a year. This was my second Christmas/New Year working for Windrush Nursing home. But it was the first where I had been there throughout the cycle of a whole year. The Christmas was the first where I understood from the inside why matron were so keen to accept me with so few misgivings about my aptitude for the job last year.

Getting new staff to cover Christmas who would be up to standard, at that short a notice, was a non-starter. Matron got half the cover she wanted, and I ploughed on understaffed as we were. For three weeks, from the last week of December through the first two weeks of January I worked a fifty hour week week each week because matron did not have the staff. By the middle of the third week I was intermittently becoming a zombie. Matron could see it happening if she chose to. She chose not to. But the relative of a patient did, and her witness to my tiredness became matrons reason to 'let me go', with my holiday money as my 'reward'. Not a no fault exit. 

Before I started the last therapy session that I was due, I had been out of my job for nearly a week, and had slept better. I went onto full housing benefit, but half supplementary benefit rates for six weeks. From sheer exhaustion I had admitted to being sacked when I made my claim. My refusal to have a holiday earlier in the year meant I had a little more money than I expected to have whilst being on half rate supplementary benefit. With plenty of time to assess how to use it, the therapy gave a fresh start in life.

It took me two months of being unemployed, minimum, to recover from the care home job.  in the meanwhile I visited the job centre diligently to apply for jobs I was happy apply for because I did not have the slightest chance of getting them. My old friend, unemployment, renewed his acquaintance with me.

Please left click here for Chapter Nineteen.