Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Ten - Clearing Out The Past

When any tenant seeks to rent a room in a city there are different questions to be answered. What is the character of the area of the new address like? Does the rent seem reasonable for what is on offer? Does the landlord accept housing benefit? How good is the room? Does the address include access to a garden? How close is the address to the nearest convenience shop? How near are the bus routes and roads useful for getting into town or work? And last, and far from least, do you and the landlord get on well with each other? With these questions, particularly the last, I had been hasty first time around. But my haste had been necessary to get me started on my placement. Unlike the many students moving away from home for the first time, I did not have a supportive family covering my back as I chose where to live.

Pierrepoint Rd was one of the less positive sounding addresses that I could imagine myself living at. Why live on a road named after the last hangman in England? Albert Pierrepoint was also known for being distinctly disgruntled, for the lack of work from the mid 1950's, towards the end of his career, which formally ended in 1965. That was when Parliament voted to end the death sentence for murder.

I must have wondered in my quietest moments how Pierrepoint would have compared with my new landlord, Brian, at my new address. Brian was a divorced middle aged man who earlier in his life had been in a childless marriage and had been the manager of a pub. The house Brian now lived in, converted to rooms he rented out to others, was his main financial asset after what had surely been a difficult divorce settlement. It represented a major downsizing of his ambitions. Even when he was at his most everyday cheerful there was an obvious melancholy about him. How much of his ache was due to the shock of the divorce and it consequences, and how much was due to other matters was hard to tell. His wife seemed to have won custody of his cheerfulness, which included any stories about pub life in brighter times that I half expected him to have.

Maybe Brian's melancholy was part of what I was looking for, to recognise in others more clearly than what I recognised less well in my family. When I lived with my parents Stan, the widower next door neighbour, would call round and have five minutes chat with dad every night, making his invitation to talk the daily swap of the tabloid newspaper. I have no idea what dad thought about this. Like as not since it did not involve alcohol it bored him, but it provided good cover for his interest in alcohol. From my impression of their conversations there was a competition between them as to who could talk in the most generic and general terms, where whoever did that had forced the other to be more specific and became the loser. Stan and dad were two men whose lives had stalled in their forties. Stan was older than dad by twenty years, his life had stalled when the German wife he had married after WW2 had died in the mid 1950's, some years before my parents bought the house next door to him in 1960. As of 1988, when I moved to Pierrepoint Rd, my mother was still going shopping for him, as if shopping was 'women's work', and he knew too little about it. Dad had his job taken from him in a wave of redundancies aged forty four, just ten years before I moved to this new address. He never adjusted to the idea that after over twenty years of doing different jobs in the same factory he would never get paid work again.

The length of time from packing everything I thought it was practical to take from Gainsborough when leaving the flat there, to being settled enough to unpack it all at Pierrepoint Rd could have been a month. It was more likely to have been six busy weeks. My own sense of melancholy, and sense of direction coming to a big pause, came to me when I finally unpacked everything that I had brought with me. Some young adults leave their parents with the good things their parents has saved on 'a bottom draw' created when they were a child for when they became adults and set up a home of their own. In much earlier times the gift of a mother to a daughter when the daughter married was quality bedding that had been saved for the occasion as a parting gift. Young men were expected to make their own way through the world. I had a sense of continuity with what I had, but it all looked rather sad when I examined what there was there.

From aged seven I had slept in a characterless box room in the attic of the house. The bed I slept in was a hospital bed Alice, mothers sister had given to mother, where the gift of it to mother was how high the bed was which made it ideal for storing food that she could not store closer to where it would be opened and used, underneath. The box room experience became mothers gift to me later when I had to live in the grotty surroundings of my first shared house, until a better address came along. Beyond it being a base to move on from, I would not commend the box room experience of living on any child. 

The records, tapes and hi fi in my room were of an obvious pride to me, and the first things to set up in an orderly way. The clothing I had to store away seemed okay. Where it wasn't I had myself to look to, to make the choice to buy better and throw out what I didn't like. I was always the last owner of the clothing I wore, anyway. Previous owners had always go the best wear and social status there was in it before I got it.

One item that I had used for storage and moving that I had brought with me was a tired looking blue and black check shopping trolley that I found in Gainsborough. I gone shopping with it when I lived there, and I had lined the sides of it with cardboard to extend its useful life. If I lacked pride that much in Gainsborough then scales of my former lack of pride fell from my eyes in how I saw it in it's new place. It looked like something a bag lady would look at with severe condescension.

As I unpacked the shopping trolley it got worse. I was made aware afresh of the evidence of my own adoption of the avoidance and poor judgement that linked me to my parents. The shopping trolley had preserved in it, in newspaper, the  painted glass front of a radiogramme, the 1950s equivalent of a music centre. As a piece of glass it showed the different radio stations that when the radiogramme worked and the tuning knob was turned, the tuning knob moved an indicator that passed behind the glass, lit from below, to show the frequency and station the set was tuned to. Why did I still have this piece of glass, when what it was part of was thrown away eighteen years earlier? My mother's sentimentality is the short answer. She had kept it for me.

The longer answer is that at mother's bidding the glass had been in the attic from 1970 to 1985. In 1985 the box room became a bathroom, and a bath was plumbed in. She saw that radio front as symbolising her relationship with me. She had saved it. If I felt different about the item, then I knew to not say so. Still, I was surprised at seeing the glass wrapped in local newspaper in Spring 1988, well away from where I had first seen it, and surprised at both how it symbolised so much history and yet was rubbish all along.

Both the radio station glass and the shopping trolley went into the bin. I kept one item from the former life in the attic that both showed how well I hid my interest in art at the time. It was a six inch square piece of painted glass, which may have been why mother kept the radio station glass. This square was painted mostly black with a blue tits hovering over a birds nest in different colours in the middle, where the colours that were other than the black were backed with silver foil. As you can see I still have it.

Please left click here for Chapter Eleven.