Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Thirteen - Progress Is Relative

With the estate work and the bedsit that I had found I was well set up. For possibly the first ever in my nearly thirty years, and with the third Manpower Services Commission,  work, home, and finances had coalesced together in a way where all three worked for me. No matter that my part time job was temporary. Even the slow part of life, the time spent on buses I made work well for me. They were good times to read where I did not mind going a few stops past the stop I meant to get off at when I book was that engrossing. I liked the distance that I lived from my parents, I had their approval with my job, and I could tell them that I liked where I lived. There was nothing I could tell them for which they could not have said to me 'You should have done better', where in addition they could also withhold  from me the explanation as to how I should have done better.

When young Michael left to join HMV records my job improved. The team work became more agreeable. Though with fewer distractions Arthur, Pete, and I felt more exposed to the greater sense of hopelessness that Nottingham City Council paid us to work against. I felt positive when I made arrangements to see my parents. The bedsit room I lived and ate in was the most spacious room in the house.17

, like my sister's bedroom, now the guest room, in the parental house. From the time I first saw my bedsit I thought that it must be the best room in the house. The distance my room was from the kitchen made for good exercise. The nearest thing I had found to a downside was that whilst we all took turns to vacuum shared areas of the house and our own private spaces as scheduled on the rota, I was always the one who had to start by emptying the hoover bag of the dust left there by previous users, often several previous users. 

With my sister no living in Bodmin, I was the one who lived closer to our parents. Though she was the one who was had access to a  car and was learning to drive free. Seeing mother made me both happy and sad. Happy that she was keeping busy and getting on with life so well. Sad at the signs of neglect about the house that did not so much linger as take over from where there had previously been a better sense of order. But still I said nothing when I saw old packets of muesli with weevils crawling through it that should surely have been thrown out a long time ago. When I saw the weevils I thought of the argument they would have with mother before she threw them out where she said 'And don't you dare treat the place like a hotel' where the weevils replied 'Why not? That is what you and dad do. That is why we are not living anywhere better.'. With things like the live muesli what came to me was how it looked like they both wanted to co-exist in the house in a way that their avoidance pushed the other partner into being observant, and did more tidying up. And with his place of worship and friendship being the pub, dad was much better at avoidance than Mother was. I was thankful that I could check out of this parental hotel and return to my own life. 

There the landlord had his own brand of melancholy that autumn house prices took a tumble. Brian talked in downtrodden tones about how that week his house was worth ten thousand pounds less than it was worth the week before. Not thinking through what to say I replied to him that houses were for living in. His instantly call me 'A Socialist' as if that were wit. I knew what a market was, and that they come in different definitions of who they favour. But I was no more understand buying and selling things for their own sake, in the abstract than I was going to fly to Mars. I was happy to not understand that aspect of life.

Then there were the up times. On one Autumn weekend visit to family I saw friends in the Christian Youth Fellowship in Gainsborough and I told them that Hawkwind were playing Rock City in Nottingham soon.  That same evening it was arranged that two carloads of people wanted to see the band and they would collect me in Nottingham on the way. I had seen the band live before, but at Glastonbury when they were some distance from the audience. The November the youth group came up to my room before the gig. They were my first guests, even as I was their guest in the car. The gig was brilliant, my ears were rang for three days afterwards. The playing and visual projections achieved  a deeply immersive, and transporting, effect. Seeing the band and being that close to the speakers made such a difference.

That said the moment that had most impact on me came to me when mid way through the gig when I was standing away from the crush for a rest. I watched a young man struggle to put a LP record in a carrier bag not much bigger than the record. This brought out the care worker in me. Amid the noise I stood close enough to him and I held the bag open so he could get the record in more easily. Who he was did not matter. He humanised that gig for me. 

Ten months into the whole contract, five months into working on the estate as a care worker, and well into the Autumn, I wanted to do the job for as long as I could. Michael had left early. HMV could have him. His departure left more work for Arthur and me to maintain, where the job made small bot constructive changes in the lives of those we visited. But we both knew that the set up we were working from was going to be wound up when our contracts ended. By order from above our manager, was encouraging us to apply for jobs and leave sooner. The first jobs that he encouraged us to apply for were filing and care type posts with Nottingham Council listed in-house bulletin. But to zero effect. We could guess that any position we applied for that was within our proven experience quickly attracted too many more experienced applicants for us to believe we had even a ghost of a chance, even with Pete being our referee, were we to get as far as an interview for the post.

The great moving on came to Arthur and me in late November. We were both sent off to a training unit to update our skills in applying for jobs and hone our interview technique. So that if we got that far, then we might get further than previously had. However I tried to dress up my work experience over the previous decade or so, the jobs I'd done all looked like filler more than jobs that could said to have amounted to anything to a notionally serious employer would entertain.86

But at least I learned that I was now old enough that I could leave my secondary non-education in 'a special school' off the CV and I had five 'O' levels which was more than many working class work age young men had. Though how much they were part of the qualifications inflation process, and how much getting them was beat the inflation in qualifications was debatable. As was how much use they were when the expectation of employers was for applicants to get all the 'O' levels in one year.

As a care worker I had learned something about presentation. Even as I would have looked felt uncomfortable in an office-style white shirt, suit, and dark tie, I looked okay in my idea of 'smart', a suit jacket over a fisherman's jumper and dark nearly-matching trousers. What mattered more to me more than my clothing was that I spoke in whole sentences where I sounded like I knew where the sentence was going, and where it would end, before  I started the sentence. I got this idea for how to speak from the radio, from the way that Alistair Cook spoke on Radio 4's 'Letter From America'. I listened to him every Friday and Sunday in awe of the longevity of the programme. Forty years and sounding strong.

The novelty of the training was that not only would we be given a mock job interview, based on a mock application form, but our performances were be video taped and the interviewer, my boss Peter, would go through the video of our performances with us. I was never media trained. But the video of my interview was quite flattering. The only point the video avoided was whether I would have interviewed as well if I did not know my interviewer, and my interviewer did not know me.

With the last few weeks in the job specifically including taking time off from care visits daily to check in with the job centre the haste for change was clear to me. With Christmas so close and ten days left on my contract the staff at job centre got in touch with a nursing home who needed staff, fast. I was interviewed the same day I found out about the job. For them it was Hobson's choice. Their choice was me or nobody. Because nobody else had enquired. The matron said a little about how she overlooked my lack of experience and suitability, and how they would have preferred that I was female. I will let others decide whether I made a wrong decision because I was rushed into a job where I did not know what the job involved.

The job was unflattering. It was helping elderly and infirm women residents get up in the morning, wash, dress, and get their breakfast, and repeat the same process to rinse, for every meal until bed time when the residents had to be tucked up. Not knowing what to say about such work, or what such a life might be like I accepted the job on the spot. It gave me a reason to not see my parents over Christmas and New Year, which I knew would be an emotionally flat time anyway.

Please left click here for Chapter Fourteen.