Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Nine - How To Live By Not Keeping A Diary

The longer I stayed at my new address, Pierrepoint Road, the more comfortable I felt about the new distance set it between me and the parental house. That distance, and Gran's funeral, changed the meaning of the word 'family' for me whilst leaving my parents decide for themselves what they thought 'family' and 'marriage' should mean to them. Both my younger sister and I were now living away from our parents.

My sister had left the town we grew up in three years earlier. In haste she had moved 300 miles away to Cornwall. She was now married and newly a parent there. As children our parents had always leant on us in different ways since we were children, passing the pressure off as friendship. With having just each other to lean on and prove anything to it was now up to my parents to create success or failure out of living in a house with the two of them.

At Pierrepoint Road there was a family-like structure that supported me in a way that I liked. The landlord was the nominal head of the household, the rest of us could connect, or not, as long as we were patient with each other in the shared space of the kitchen. That sense of choice informed by patience felt much more positive for it being clearer how voluntary it was than any of the forced coherence and pressured 'positivity' of the parental household that I had known. Not least because as tenants on Pierrepoint Rd there was no expectation for us to 'trade up' or seek to own property, I had known that expectation with my parents and many a time and it had left me feeling quite drained.

The landlord was a middle aged divorced bachelor who it would have been unfair to say seemed incomplete without a wife. He always sounded rueful and disappointed whenever he said anything about marriage. Anything of substance he said always included stories of him being financially 'taken to the cleaners'. It would have been true, but me damning my father with feint praise, to say that for the little that I knew little about the landlord he was still more readable and approachable as a middle aged male than my father was. If he seemed incomplete, and nondescript then he was trustworthy enough to run a run down house as a four bedsit households. How run down? I remember how when one of the legs of my single bed came off, rather than him promptly repair the bed with some adept joinery, the corner of the bed that was now without it's original support was propped up with spare bricks. I found the bricks by myself in outhouse which was in the scrappy back garden.

There was not even a hint of a female presence in the house. So if the household was some sort of improvised family, for us all sharing the use of the same resources, then it was a strangely lopsided family where as men we had to do for ourselves what in a more balanced situation we would like to have left it to the women to do. Washing up, use the washing  machine for washing clothing, using the communal vacuum cleaner and emptying the bag after, we did all those things with varying degrees of accomplishment and confidence. In a world that was socially bent into strange shapes this 'lopsided' sense of communal duty was the new honesty. That said some of us were absent minded, when one tenant put his bacon on the eye level grill to cook and forgot about it, I was the one to take the tray away and soak a tea towel to put over the burning fat of the bacon. If the default position was that in that household every male had to be heterosexual, then I did not kick against that. But more I saw my homosexuality as male heterosexuality with a feminine side.

In the parental house one of the difficulties had always been that sharing any opinion became an exercise in flat footed contrariness, as if one of us was quoting from a red top newspaper and saying that we believed what that paper said. That was what dad wanted, to dismiss other for being contrary. Whatever dad wanted, mother knew better than to contradict. My sister knew more about how much he covered with his brooding silences than others would ever know. To have a thoughtful opinion on any subject required keeping it so far from dad that the opinion might as well not exist. It was in 1982, in that atmosphere, that I first kept a diary. I kept my dairies with me on Pierrepoint Rd. If the point of a dairy is to record what there was to record then I was an effective diarist. But over was the five years that I had kept the diary it would be difficult to recognise who I was from what I wrote. But if what I recorded was a sense  a consensus so strangled that whatever was written it would have read as 'I don't want to be where I am or who I am with' 100 times. The lines I did write were honest enough in themselves, but shied well away from forming opinions based on observations of what was around me. The writing in those diaries observed how stuck I was: to have a perspective that made where I  was seem bearable that perspective would have to start from well outside where I lived. In life in Lady Bay I finally had that new perspective but the newness of it was made me think 'I don't know what to write that it seems worthwhile to write. The bare outlines of daily were too bare and whilst I met new people I was no adept judge of who they were and what they were like on the limited terms I knew them. Rather than write some more from a place of relative openness, but absence, I decided to not keep a diary. It did not seem worth it.

Feeble and opaque as they were, I still felt possessive of the words in my 1982-87 diaries. But even a record of mental absence is a record of some sort. And what a mental absence it was. When friends visited I wrote down their first names, and that I enjoyed their presence but I wrote nothing down about what ideas we discussed. Nor did I note their surnames. So later when living totally elsewhere even the first names became strangers to me. I had not thought far enough ahead as I wrote to imagine that I would need their sir names to help me remember them better in future. But if I left with my parents six years worth of notes that I had made at college to pass five 'O' levels, and pass other exams, then I kept my incomplete records of an incomplete life: the page after page filled with the details of what it was socially acceptable to record, along with the occasional coded details of joyless and secretive sexual encounters where in writing the effort went into disguising what happened and where it happened, more than any open celebration of skin on skin. If they were accurately recorded, the frequency of these furtive and joyless sexual encounters could have been a measure of how depressed I was-the more frequent the secretive sex the more depressed that proved I was. The only problem being that in real life when I depressed I might have the anonymous sex but it would leave me too depressed to record the event. Perhaps closeted gay sex was closer to avant garde theatre than it first appeared. The most quotable review of 'Waiting for Godot' was succinct. It describes the play, as one where 'Nothing happens - twice.'. I could honestly say that 'nothing' happened to me quite often when I looked for gay sex. A lot more often than the twice of the play. Whoever I met I could not say who they were. But I could say that they were not Godot.

Both my being gay and being depressed were subjects that my parents kept on the list of 'subjects to be Denied with a capital 'D'. To this day I can hear my dad wilfully misunderstanding any rational argument about homosexuality that I might have put up, with the evasive put-down/pun 'You can't be depressed if you are gay', as if I could not be neither. If my diaries from January 1982 to December 1987 were the only record of my 1980s I was allowed then they was mine to own, and improve on. I was right to mistrust any notion of storing anything personal to me in the parental house.

I was not the only person to fall into an uneasy about feeling that isolated. The churches I had worshipped in weekly since 1980 were full of such people. There, the Quakers apart, we collectively strove to make tuneful theologically based noises together in our different denominations to get closer to feeling that we were bound to each other in a way we comfortable with being unable to explain. The Quakers were the exception for reflecting in relative silence, whilst waited on God for what he wanted said in the space of that meeting house. 

But even in their silence they must have felt their own sense individual isolation and incompleteness. 

Please left click here for Chapter ten.