Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Four - Scratch Connections

Over the weekend I stayed in the house, trying to compact and reduce the amount of space that my worldly goods took up, to appease my new landlord. The more that I looked around the house, beyond what I had to make seem small, the less I could avoid wondering how a house could be a house without plants or books in it. Even the parental house, the family house I had left behind, had books and plants in it. The books were read and changed every so often as well. The sterile anonymity of this new house remained a mystery to me. But if the house was that tidy that it was for owning but not living in. It took me a long while to think back to last November and recognise that in seeing and rejecting the flea pit lodgings, with flea pit landlords, where the pitch for renting the rooms clearly mis-represented and mis-sold the rooms. In my haste of avoiding the mistake of renting one of those dodgy rooms for rent I had made a different mistake, which was equally to do with character. As I mulled this over, I felt that the lodgings were what got me the job, and character with lodgings took time to process. Even with my first day in work due on Monday, the job was still the right move. But the mistake I had to work with was to do with my choice of landlord and house.

The neater the way my worldly goods looked, the sadder what I had brought with me seemed to me. The more I wondered how long term a tenancy this was going to be. Still with everything safe where it was I felt safe. But I sensed that my next move might be sooner than I expected it to be. That weekend felt very odd. Mike was never rude to me but made it clear that if I stayed out of his way he stay out of mine. I could not even say that he was offhand. But if I was a misfit then it was not the first time I had been somewhere I did not fit in. Where my parents lived had often been a place of discomfort. But it was the first time that I had put myself in a place where I did not fit in, where it was clearly up to me to recognise early on that I might have to take action around it.

But if the tenant/landlord relationship felt as new as the show house in which it had starting then it had to be tested out first. The last time I had been in a place that had achieved a degree of lack of character like this was in the years spent in the boarding school, fifteen years earlier. There even when what kept the place moving seemed to be obscure, there was a sense of change and process. Here the only mover that was going to made change was going to be money, which seemed to be beyond bland.

I had often distantly known that I was poor, but for all my relative poverty, for all the make do and mend, I thought I had been enriched by the connections that I had sustained. Nobody of my age had openly looked down on me like the landlord did. But then none of them had been as wealthy as Mike was. But in the shiny light of the wealth and modernity that now surrounded me, my make do and mend life, as seen from what I had brought with me seemed worn out and dog eared. Everything that I once thought of as a material reflection of a gradually accumulated patchwork of a life now seemed to be weak at the seams. Repairing patchwork repairs was as near as I got to paid work.

One connection that I missed straight away was with Richard. The young man who had suggested I move to Nottingham via getting on a government scheme there had left me no contact phone number for him. I wished that I had connected with him more consistently since last October so he could have been a familiar support now. But when I had met him in Gainsborough we had connected the Gainsborough way, with no firm support structure beyond 'Easy come, easy go.' where the more details anyone shared about others, the less willingly people shared of themselves. The less to be give other people a firm footing with which to be latch onto, whilst making friendship seem easy.

With high levels of youth unemployment young men had more time on their hands than they ever they had money. With the excess of time it was easy to make flimsy connections with other young men using first names only and knowing where each other lived by sight, rather than sir name and the number of the street each lived on. As single people we found it natural to avoid sharing our family background. Our families were the first to think that we had turned out wrong, for us not being married off, for us not having the full time well paid jobs they expected us to have, and for us not having a mortgage and our own house to live in, the better to keep other people out, to be like them.

With my only company being Mike, who made passing comments as he was coming and going, my weekend felt more like a weak end. He was polite but distant towards me. He made it clear that for him the distance he kept was the point. In his absence I could see what I could not see when he was there; that in late November Mike took me at face value when he saw me because as a landlord he was much nearer being a student than a property owner. I had realised when I did it that I had door-stepped him. When he left to join his family for Sunday lunch I felt relieved more than guilty at how the start of the connection with him indicated what was to come later. Even as he had only recently changed from being a student into a property owner, his idea of being a student informed him far more than his recent change of role to landlord. 

Each time he looked past the pile of my stuff outside my room, slowly filling my room, Mike would pass comments when he was about. His most perceptive comment was 'Sometimes our first thoughts are not are not our best thoughts', said in a tone between humour and recognition. Overall though his indifference was clear, as was how rarely he had ever met anyone who had built their life out of enduring long term unemployment, or living on low pay when the were working. He was right about first thought. Though. I could say nothing yet about how I could not get my head around how I was now having to learn to relate to somebody nearly the same age as me, but whose main interest in life was his work and it was a job that paid him enough to make him detached sufficient so as to bar him from having anything that resembled personal enthusiasm for learning how I got the way I did.

I had got myself into being the tenant in a shared house with a landlord whose main enthusiasm was making enough money to live in impersonal financially secure comfort. If I could work out what and who he was, beyond all the oversold rooms I had refused to imagine living in, I could not work why I had chosen to co-habit in such a situation. I don't know exactly when in my unpacking and tidying I became aware that my new choice of abode was a mistake. Nor do I know when it became clear to me that my past life was much more of a mess than the lives of the people I met in Nottingham. An early clue came to me when I looked at Mike and I got the sense that he looked and walked like a man who did not just wore a suit to work, the suit wore him. His body language spoke of open discomfort even when he was not wearing a suit, his casuals at weekends were a white shirt, clean jeans and smart shoes, which he wore as if they were a suit.

Whereas if there was a dominant theme of my clothing was 'army surplus chic', assuming such a phrase existed. I had one suit that I kept for the 'made in Scunthorpe' label at the inside back of the neck more than for wearing it. For daywear I had  a leather jacket on which the central back panel had survived being painted with white gloss paint which made it quite distinctive, a great coat for which the weather was much too warm nearly all year round which I kept because I liked the look of it. I never wore denim jackets, but wore a light army jacket with lots of pockets, and to go with it I had a small canvas army shoulder bag. If the bag itself was small then it was a good place in which to put carrier bags when I shopped for food. My choice of shirts was ex-German Democratic Republic army shirts with the flag of the GDR at the top of the arm where from top to bottom the three stripes were black red and yellow, where the message the colours conveyed was the phrase 'through the night and the blood comes the light'. Finally there were several pairs of second hand air wear shoes, each worn to varying degrees. They were charity shop purchases which had been donated there by postmen who had worked short term as postmen, when the Post Office issued the shoes to employees free of charge.

I had one pair of plain green army trousers with the extra side pockets in them to my name. My favoured everyday trousers were ordinary jeans, which I bought in charity shops, where if a got less wear out of them than if I'd bought new they still 'paid for themselves'. The jeans were usually topped off with the thick leather belt with the movable Fascist Spain belt buckle.

In the middle class West Bridgford that I had landed in, and did not want leave, I was slow to understand the logic of detachment where charity shops were for giving to, not buying from. Army surplus stores were for poor single men. In the trouser department my prize possession was a pair of wide flared jeans that had been only just past being the height of fashion for me, when I first got them ten years earlier, Where they had become worn they had been patched, several times. The method of the patching being to cover the patch I was going to apply with copydex rubber glue, slap it flat over where the cloth of the jeans had thinned, and putting paper over the jeans in case of leaks, iron them both sides where the patch was applied, to heat the glue to make it adhere better. 

As I looked at these jeans I had no idea what was going to make me adhere to the life that was available to me in West Bridgford,

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