Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty One - Please Mr Postman

My route from the job club into a job seemed in no way assured. First I was on my own, filling in the application form. Then there were ten of us completing a written intelligence test. To this day I am unsure about the role that test played in helping The Post Office decide who to accept and who to decline to employ. If what we were being tested for was our lack of sensitivity to being put in dingy rooms, that I stayed there for as long as I was asked to was all the proof they needed. But I could have proven that by sharing my attendance of the job club with the Post Office overseer.

I was surprised when I was told that I had passed the Post Office intelligence test. I wondered if all ten of those present passed because it was dummy test meant to flatter us. I will never know. 

The real intelligence test for me started in the job club. It was me working out by myself what work I was comfortable doing, and recognising work that would make me uncomfortable well before being pushed anywhere close to it. In this respect I had to re-educate my teenage self who had grown up with living hand to mouth and with clothes being as second hand as they could be whilst still having wear in them where I was told about work 'Get a job, any job' as if all jobs were the same. Many jobs were similar but what I was dealing with was the snobbish fear of being on the dole when those snobs expected somebody else to be on the dole, for them to have the jobs they thought would last. Far fewer jobs lasted very long, and many jobs payed worse then they did before so being rational mattered. All the arguments I heard spread fear and irrationality.    

I accepted applying for the postman job for five reasons. The first was that it was temporary - a three month contract. I could not imagine being accepted by any employer with whom I had a clearly understood long term mutual advantage. The second reason was that the job maintained my housing benefit. The third reason was that the hours were part time, albeit starting at 5 am six days a week. The fourth reason was that I would be on my own delivering post where my distance from the management made me feel safe doing that. My fifth reason was the free 'airwear' shoes that they issued as standard. These shoes had been my favourite footwear for over a decade. If I'd have known what the job was like before I started there could have been a sixth reason. I was not a natural fit for it, but I liked being part of the team I was in. The lack of pretension or machismo amongst us charmed me.

On my first day at work I still had my half fares unemployed person's bus pass. In my postman's uniform I dared to use it to get a bus home. The bus driver gave me the ticket for the bus and later queried it with the ticket inspector who got on the bus part way through my journey. The inspector did nothing. If he had approached me I would have said 'I am working a week in hand, so technically I am still on benefits.'. I was not working a week in hand, but the urge to thrift was that inbred in me it made me be prepared to try even that minor ruse to save a frankly petty amount of money. Maybe my using the card was also a sign of how little I thought had changed for me. Thereafter I paid the full fare.

For six days a week for the next three months my day started at about 4.00 am, I put on my slightly ill-fitting postman's uniform and walked to the sorting office, thirty mins brisk walk from where I lived. In work we had seventy five minutes to sort through all our post by putting every item into one of the cubby holes labelled with all the different roads on our patch. Then we put elastic bands around the contents of each cubby hole, and more elastic bands around mail for closely grouped addresses. Then we put our bundles in our shoulder bag. I was always slower than the more experienced postmen in my team. They helped me sort my mail faster when time ran tight. At 6.15 all six had to be in the back of the postal van and be taken from the depot and dropped off on the area where we had to deliver our post. Mine was Plumtree, a village five miles south east of central Nottingham. I was usually dropped off at the roundabout just short of the village. Soon after I started I was loaned the use of a works bike which I took on the van that carried us all every day. It helped me deliver my post faster and made going home easier.

Of the other five men on the team, four of them were married with young children. One was an older man, of about fifty, who was slim, bald and had a neat white goatee beard and moustache. He lived with his mother, It was clear to all that he was gay, the rest were uninterested in this. But I was curious about the positive impression that he gave out about his living with his elderly mother where they were an unashamed and positive support to each other. He had a quite camp sense of humour which stopped short of being laden with innuendo, but with my encouragement he leaned further that way. The ten minutes in the van with him each morning became a treat for me. That was the time where he and I could trade comments and humour whilst the other four were somewhere between perky and subdued. I would have liked to have met him socially outside of work. I knew better than to ask for that, and did not ask.

I was expected to complete my round by 11 am. I often took until until 11.30 before the round was completed. However long I took to get the round done, my treat to myself was always to sit outside the newsagents and have a pint of milk and a mars bar before going home on the bike. At the time it seemed to be a fine way to enjoy the summer weather.

I found that I adapted much better with shift work where the shift did not change, than when the shifts did change. But still rested in the afternoons. My best (in)activity during my time off was reading, even with the household was mostly centred around the television. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in the February of 1990 we were all gripped by the images of him on his first walk free, and the commentary that went with it. But I was the one in the house who took out of the library one of several biographies the ANC leader that had been published. It was a brick of a book to read and I read it all. But I had followed the anti-apartheid movement from the distance of my television in Lincolnshire half a decade earlier, when BBC 2 had depicted the escape from South Africa of white newspaper editor, journalist, and ANC supporter, Donald Woods, and his family. Woods had been a champion of the writings of Steven Biko. Even knowing that I was a long way from the events that the BBC depicted, they still seemed personal to me. 

That summer made me feel that positive change was possible for me. I was now living in a place with the communal use of a phone for the first time. This was an advance to be treasured. But I remained unsure of how much positive change was irreversible. Once again I found myself having odd periods of feeling uncomfortably sad for no obvious cause. The best I could do was put the timing of these odd feelings down to how far it had been since the end of my therapy and ask myself 'Am I due for a top up?' There was melancholy aplenty in the over 150 LPs and large amount of cassettes I had, with which to console myself with.

Perhaps my unease came from the films that BBC2 was showing every Saturday Afternoon that summer. A whole series of films starring Joan Crawford which I found to be unexpectedly engrossing. It did not matter how many times Joan played the self made woman, the heiress who falls for the wrong man, and all the other variations on not recognising being wronged until it was too late to change role. She always gave her whole energy to breathe life into those 'victim' figures. My favourite was 'Humeresque' (1946) where she was the wealthy but tainted heiress who supported the talented but emotionally volatile violinist, played by John Garfield, who as he reached for world fame eventually rejected the support of the tainted heiress who had supported him. The film had to end with him on stage playing soaring Wagnerian violin solo intercut with her walking into the sea and drowning to the sound of his violin. Repeat with interesting male variations of fickle behaviour in 'Sudden Fear' (1952) the western 'Johnny Guitar' (1954) and 'Queen Bee' (1956). and others in the 'woman in fear' genre.

To be immersed once a week in the films of an actress with a known gay following did put me in touch with different parts of myself I rarely considered, in unexpected ways. But with no obvious way of giving myself an exit from them I rather overdosed on the melodrama and victimology of Crawford's roles.

This usually returned me to the standard catch-22 dialogue between the church, mental health and homosexuality which ran....

Church 'Nobody can be gay, or depressed when they are a truly a Christian. When anyone is a Christian, Christ is their cause for cheer.'.

Me 'I might be a lot less depressed if I could admit my homosexuality to myself.'.

Church 'If you admit your homosexuality to yourself then you will want to admit it to somebody else. Somebody who we say has to deny it themselves. That is aside from you breaking ancient taboos that have to be upheld. Deny yourself even though heterosexuals don't have to deny themselves.'. 

Me 'But with regard to my homosexuality. Can the model of a mentally healthy and balanced selflessness in Jesus in a gay man be made more like it might be for heterosexuals? The two models are different. If the two models were more alike then they might both be more supportive.'.

Church 'Nobody has ever asked us that before. Still, you can't be gay, Christian and depressed. Christ would only want you to be happy.'.

In the sleight of word in the argument, the church ignores the mental health aspect of the  dialogue. Repeat to fade, or boredom with listening. Which ever comes first.  

There was space away from the  church dialogue outlined above, which for me was also a way out for me from making popular entertainment work as my short term therapy. Adelaide and I both attended a Saturday one day study event that I am sure she discovered, where the subject was the Matthew Fox book 'Original Blessing; A Primer in Creation Spirituality', in which we both came away from the day's study brimming with new ideas about gender, sexuality, spirituality, and most vitally choice.

Please left click here for Chapter Twenty Two.