Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Five - Finding My Way Around

I was thankful the Monday morning that I started work that my work was part time. Whatever money I lost with the job being part time I gained in having the time to work out where to be, and what to do. How to find my way around West Bridgford and in central Nottingham. I needed the time to find out where the different banks were, where the doctor's surgery was, and West Bridgford Council offices were. I had to get the application form for my housing benefit from there. They were the big three at the top of a much longer list.

But the first place to find was the bus stop for the bus was my new employer, The Leonard Cheshire Nursing Home in Lady Bay, West Bridgford. If at some points over the weekend I had doubted the wisdom of moving to Nottingham because of my landlord, then the employer was the person to dispel those doubts by putting me to work. The induction was demonstrative but undemanding. It made the lay out of the building clear, where the staff changed for work, and instructed me about my duties, at meal time towards the patients, and between meals. The most important part seemed to be being introduced to the residents, out of courtesy to them. I was going to be working a pattern of different daytime shifts. I would be working mostly in the mornings, with some early afternoon shifts for variety of experience.

This was not my first experience of nursing. If being a volunteer for St John's Ambulance counted as nursing experience then that was my first. But that was being SJAB childminding than anything else. My mother was a member. The teenage SJAB was much nearer some sort of junior nursing 'Dad's Army' than proving us practical and useful. The hierarchies were assisted by a mild incompetence where the incompetence disguised the hierarchy. Then there was the year I spent as a volunteer of my own volition in Gainsborough's John Coupland hospital, thinking it might be useful as prelude to me getting nurse training. I was accepted by the ward nurses whilst being side lined and underused because I was uninsured. Here I was not only insured to work, but paid as well. Sorting out my banking arrangements for being paid with the head of the home was part of the induction.

I liked the uniform but my inexperience soon showed. As a nursing assistant I was prone to impatience. But then this was the first time I was being paid to do something I had thought was my vocation. A lot of the work was about me finding the rhythm in the slow routines the residents kept, due their Parkinson's Disease. They were slow to act, and their slowness hid the cues they gave me, to help them them on their terms. I had only one relative who had Parkinson's disease. I knew little about how he adapted to the life around him. He had slowed down at the same wife, who was just as elderly, had. When he drank tea he drank it a little at a time from a saucer until the cup it was poured from was empty. They seemed quite self reliant.

Mealtimes were when me getting the Patient's cues and having patience mattered most. Those times were when the residents most valued their autonomy. Every daytime activity that was led by the residents also required the same slow leaving of cues for support. But getting experience of how to help the patients was what I was there for. I was getting the experience and getting nursing experience was like having Parkinson's disease, both moved slowly. With practice I learned how to be more patient within the pace of change of the nursing home.

Away from work, finding out where all these places were using a city map also took its own time. Finding my way within some of these building also took time. West Bridgford City Hall was not quite like those huge hospitals where new visitors would get lost for losing their sense of direction, and being confused by the different signs. But it was enough like a hospital, with it's many corridors that looked similar to each other where the signage seeming wilfully obscure. that visitors were like hospital visitors. Somebody new only had to look slightly lost to prove to others with experience of the lay out who was the guest was here. I got a fair amount of  help when I unconsciously looked lost, and there other people about. They spontaneously offered me directions.

With all the initial tasks dealt with, and with how sterile my lodgings were, and how far the house itself was from the nearest shops, I was apt to wander around Nottingham more than a little, simply to get my bearings by sight, my usual way of getting my bearings. Travelling on foot seemed much better to me than going places only by bus. Learning on foot where I was seemed to be most natural.

I had been to Nottingham three times in the previous decade. Each visit was at night and was fleeting. I was a guest of friends who put me in the back the back of their car, so I saw practically nothing. I was the teenage secretary of CND, and I was out of my depth with a friend who was there to see tow of their friends. Being out of my depth often ended badly, this was no exception.  The next two visits were both to the music venue Rock City. The first time was to see Christian band After The Fire. Then to see Nils Lofgren, each time with friends with whom I felt more equal than those I had known in CND. This was my first time I could regularly see Nottingham during the day and on my own, and know about the place more each time I went.

Joining West Bridgford Library was relatively unimportant. But the library building was easier to find than many other places that I needed to find. The process of joining was easier to complete than many of the other tasks were too. The library building was a bigger version the library in Gainsborough. Both were fine Andrew Carnegie constructions from the 1920's. West Bridgford library proved to be not just a place for bookish entertainments. But with it's copies of phone books and business directories and other information it was a sign post for many of the places I thought I might need to go. Time spent there first later made many of the journeys I had to go on later on shorter than they would otherwise have been. It was the second most useful place to go to. The Citizens Advice Bureau should have been the place to go first, but finding out where that was from the library was a good second best.

Anyone passing me would have known I was new to the city from how much I looked booklets of bus routes and the city map book. I stopped counting the number of different buses I took and different routes I went on, but that was the best way I had of finding out which Churches, record shops, second hand book shops, libraries and other places of interest were to be found. The Central Library, just off the city centre, impressed me no end. It was spread over several floors. It had records and tapes to take out, which was a first to me, and more books of interest to me than I could list, much less find the time to read. Library envy is not a feeling I expected to have at that stage of my life, but that was what I felt.

All this discovering where to be and what find was a long way from the public notice board I remember enjoying in Gainsborough. On the map of the town there were lights where the corresponding list of the places at the bottom has a button beside it. Press the button and the light lit up, 1950's style. That the board was might still be there, and the lights on the board probably still lit up, was a sign of the remove of distance I had created with moving to Nottingham where the vastness of the expanse of the place, that no board with lights was likely to cover even small parts of the place.

The more familiar with the city centre I became the more easily I navigated my way by my memory of the names of certain shops and other places. All without a map though the bus timetables always had their relevance. The points that pressed my buttons and lit me up like the old small town map were the record shops, the public library, and the small left wing book shop I found, and anywhere where I could comfortably browse much more than buy. I still have one book I bought there, a book of left wing/anarchist/feminist political cartoons 1977-82. Where what the cartoons were describing was well in the past, even when I bought it. But after a decade of Thatcherism I still remembered and cherished the life and politics that there was before Thatcherism and enjoyed the Steve Bell cartoons. 

They were part of who I had wanted to be, partly because I was too young to be consciously 'political' when many of the events and and characters the cartoons depicted were current. If the humour I liked seemed offhand, and the politics that I liked seemed scruffy, than I had the background and clothing to match them.

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