Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Six - An Unsettling Settling In

Getting to actually see Richard, the young man who last October had suggested I join the ACE scheme to get me out of Gainsborough, proved difficult at first. When we had met by chance three months earlier it had been easy to for him to avoid sharing with me details of where he lived in Nottingham. I did not even have the job that would assist my escape. Now I had escaped, he seemed to be escaping me. But he was the only person I knew in the city, even if I only knew him slightly. Contacting him to arrange to meet up with him in Nottingham meant first calling into the office in work where he was based to get his address from him and arrange a time to see him at his place because my lodgings were not a place of welcome. That took more time to arrange than I expected. When we met he said he liked music. I don't know whether he actually liked music, or whether that was an easy  shorthand or shortcut away from himself to lead me down that he knew I could respond to, that left him able to hide what he most wanted to keep private.

I took him at face value. I saw him two or three times, the talk about music eased the space between us. Eased it enough that when I talked about having made compilation tapes of different artists, with some enthusiasm about the process of making them he asked me if he could borrow some of them. If I were in a better situation I would have copied the compilation tapes he asked for and given him a copy. My digs being what they were, copying my tapes was not an option. I took a certain pride in the sequencing of them. I agreed to lend him the tapes he asked for. I lent him the tapes and directly arranged for us to meet again. I knew that even as I lent him the tapes, that the record collections I had compiled them from were no longer available to me. I expected to see him again. I did see him again. Two or three times I called by to his digs, but each time he was evasive about whether he had copied the tapes and where the originals were. I was disappointed but forgiving. But not as disappointed as the last time I called when the landlord, a distant relative of his, said he was not there. The landlord did not indicate whether he was merely out that day, or he had changed address/moved house. If he had moved then the bigger evasion all along was him declining to tell me that he would soon be moving. This experience did make seeking friendship in Nottingham look more like looking for a needle in a haystack than I expected it to.

It was only after reflecting on Richard's landlord closing the door on me that I realised how one sided my attempt at friendship with Richard had been all along. Who knows what Richard recognised. He could well have seen me as a needy but closeted gay man where he hid from me because he had recoiled from recognising the sexual element in the description I give here. If I was genuine and sincere in my underlying need for friendship then what was he when he presented himself as disorganised to me when I even politely raised the matter of returning the tapes and he said he could not find them was that his way of giving himself room. If that his way of avoiding my directness then okay. If politeness meant a distance so great that I was not meant to  know where and how he lived, then I could wonder, and did, who was most secretive and misinformed about who they were between us. We can't take out what we don't put in.

There were other places and routines in which to try to feel less like a lost needle in a haystack, but still sail close to feeling like that. One place that seemed promising from the outside of the building was the local Church of England church that was fifteen minutes walk for my new lodgings. I thought to myself 'There at least I will know when the stand up sit down, and what to say and when to say it. And the more informal times, where the sharing seems more spontaneous I can at least listen for when to join in. But when I joined the Bible Study Group that I found it easier to donate  home made shortbread to The Bible study meeting than to get to know people by name. Like many women in church do, I hide behind the teas, coffees, and biscuits as the dominant men dominated the discussion of The Bible, nearly much as the dominant men in The Bible made themselves central to the narratives it had to share.

For every attempted engagement with the city via adapting with new schedules and routines there was the temptation to look back on the old, easy to manage, small town life I had left behind. What value was there in going from being a medium sized fish in a small pond to becoming a minnow in a much bigger body of water? In my old life buses were unreliable, trains anywhere were few and slow, and a lot of my life had been an exercise in thrift and avoidance. I walked most places in the town, even when carrying things that it would have been easier to transport by bus or car.

In the past I had normalised walking two miles to my hitching point to get out of Gainsborough. It worked too, or at least until in her third term Margaret Thatcher had given the County Road Services money to widen the roads along my most used hitching roads. After the road widening scheme when I put my thumb out the question became 'Which roundabout in Lincoln do you want to be dropped off at?' I would tell them 'The roundabout that leads to the city centre' and the car driver would be turning in at an earlier roundabout. Also wider roads made for faster traffic, and a reduced chance to stop for folks like me. In the world of hitching lifts I always gave myself plenty of time. In Nottingham I still walked a fair amount, but my travels were informed by the bus schedules where I discovered the joy of reading on the bus, over time I read all seven of the Narnia books on different buses.

My being caught in the accepted social evasions of the church social life were mirrored in how well I was fitting in as part the new shared house. With my working class origins and values I struggled to fit in around the urbane middle class manners Mike presented me with. I could feel how much I was not settling in. But I could not formulate why. Part of my difficulty was how much I had sorted through my packing he thought that I should have sorted through it more. But I did not have the space to open everything up and decide 'keep it or junk it? I had not the space in the house to clarify my uncertainty. Also after a week and half my claim for housing benefit should have been settled. But it wasn't. The money Mike was due should have been in his bank account. I did not know why it was not there. 

I can't remember now who I fell into conversation with. But I took note when I realised that they were better informed than I had expected them to be, and they listened to me very well. I told them how I had put the form in with the City Hall Housing Benefit Department in the centre of Nottingham. They told me that I had not got the benefit yet because I should have put the forms in with the same department in West Bridgford Council buildings for them to process.

I was prompt in recovering my mistake, and filling the right forms in again, and getting them to the right place. Prompt too in backdating the new forms to the date I had sent forms to the wrong office. West Bridgford paid me promptly from the date I got my forms into them. But they sent the back-claim into their appeals system, where I might or might not get the rent money. It all depended on whether the board sided with the council or with me. The landlord seemed relieved at first when I told him. But as soon as the rent issue was regularised he gave my a fortnight's notice to leave anyway. He did not say it but he could not accept the unopened boxes. My sorting out the minor Housing Benefit fiasco was good will enough for him to politely give me enough notice to comfortably find more apt lodgings. I was glad he took the initiative. Somebody had to be clear. It was his house, better he was clear about it than anyone else.

This came not long before another announcement. This time it was about my job. The government paid me to work part time for a year for The Leonard Cheshire Home, now the government were going to end the ACE scheme on which I had got my contract of work. The initial effect was that The Leonard Cheshire Home was going to make an early exit from it's government work contracts and I was going to work out the roughly ten months of my contract doing some other care work for another employer.

Finally my family wrote at my first address to ask me to contact them urgently. The did not have a landline but gave me a phone number of somebody who did. There the massage that my gran was comfortable, but in hospital. Mother was visiting her there. For Gran to submit to going to hospital was sign enough that the end was near. At the age of 88, with cancer and severe curvature of her spine she was more than tired. Nobody said it, but it was clear that there was going to be a funeral fairly soon. My phrasing, not theirs. I had to keep in touch for updates every other day. I had more means of keeping in touch with family than they were minded to keep in touch with me.

Please left click here for Chapter Seven.