Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twelve - The Near And The Far Away

I had no complaints with being a peripatetic care assistant who got up early to help people who were disabled or elderly start the days in their own flats. The job felt like a useful way of being kept busy. From week to week, the change in work schedules refreshed my view of how work should work. But such a job was bound to not last with me doing it. My employers saw the job as more gendered, and the gender was 'female'. I could understand it when some clients preferred a female care assistant to help them wash and get up. In my reduced idealism I might well have questioned the idea of gendered jobs when I wanted a world less divided by gender, but clients preferences were to be respected.

By May of 1988 I was moved to my third and last post under transferred Manpower Services Commission contract. I became a care worker, a sort of assistant social worker on a run down working class estate very much the far side of Nottingham from where I lived. My morning buses to work were standardised to two long journeys via the city centre, with several variations for my choice of journey back. For years I had been 'a bag person', that is I always had a carrier bag with me taking the items the day required of me in one direction and finding different items to take back. In Nottingham my upgrade was to a medium sized frameless rucksack, bought at a charity shop in West Bridgford. I have never lived on take-aways and always cooked from scratch for myself, often simple meals, so the rucksack got a lot of use carrying my packed lunch and a book to read on the bus between stops.

From May to December I applied myself diligently to the task of being one of a team of three misfit male care workers. Our manager was a young graduate called Pete, and we all worked from a large fixed portacabin sited on a piece of spare ground in the middle of a large estate. The working class estate was bereft of all community buildings, and no community organisations ventured to cover the estates citizens close up. There was not a church building, a social services, a school, or any other sort community or civic building within a four mile radius of the portacabin. It seemed that when the houses were put up in the 1940s, or earlier, as municipal housing, working class locals worked and they were used to walking to where the pubs and other civic amenities were. The more the work dried up the higher the local unemployment rate became and the further away the pubs and other social amenities and meeting places became. The more the remains of those who lived locally felt left behind, abandoned, by both Thatcherism and local government, long before they could work out how it had happened: what used to be there and when it went.

None of us used the phrase 'sink estate', to describe where we were. But we could see what the term meant when we looked out of the portacabin window. We were there to make local government seem closer and more relevant to the local residents than it had become since nobody-could-remember-when. I wrote 'misfit' earlier. Our job was a way the last way for Nottingham City Council found to constructively use up the time on our Manpower Services Commission contracts. We were paid to visit local residents and be their better informed, less dis-spirited, neighbour, who could promote council services to increase the uptake of them among people who had forgotten how to ask for what they could have. Being useful leftovers of a closing scheme to people who showed signs of being drained of a sense of purpose for much longer was less than flattering. But a contract was a contract, and many employees of private employers never go near a contract. We counted our short term luck out carefully and tried to be glad of it. Employees of private employers who worked without a contract knew much better than we did that they were expendable.

Of the three of us Arthur was the oldest. He was in his early fifties. He had an interest in the Citizens Advice side of the work we did, and came at his work from a leftist/journalist's union perspective. He was married and he managed a drink problem. He said that his wife suspected him of adultery, not realising his commitment was to alcohol, rather than another female. When he changed his choice of alcoholic drink to one that he was happier having less of, both of drink and marriage problems were solved in one change. When I went on a visit and returned to the office with some further possible choice of action on behalf of the client I had just visited Arthur was the person who saw far clearer than I did what sort of help the householder really wanted out of what help was available, or whether the householder was merely bored and was making up needs they did not want met.

My sexuality could be described as gay-but-closeted. It was natural for me to keep it well outside of office politics. But in one area of office life I did react. Michael, the youngest of the three of us was often obnoxiously loud and camp in the portacabin. I avoided any sexual label that might aptly describe him, to keep my sexuality private. But his camp acting out became a goad to my anger. Arthur thought him immature too. Worse Arthur thought Michael frivolous and careless about the job. All this ended when Michael revealed that he had a weekend job that paid better, he was going to work for HMV. Were he not so camp and cavalier about the job we would have been much more generous in wishing him well in future.

Looking at myself I would have been the last to think that my family background and hidden sexuality was useful in the job. But it was. With many of the visits we made we were chatting with women who were heads of households who were on benefits. Their sons who had moved away whom they missed. I knew that it was easy for some of them to see me as being similar to their sons. I knew to be wary about temporary attempts to relate to others with an age/gender gap like that. I tried to keep my visits formal but friendly. That said, I'd level with the women I visited when it felt we were both safe doing that.

Outside of making council services like meals-on-wheels more amenable to the residents, one of the more useful questions we were licensed to ask was with respect to state benefits. We were sent out to ask people 'What benefits are you on?' and 'Are you getting all the benefits you are entitled to?'. Quite a few local residents had built up debts with catalogue companies. But debts that had to be repaid with interest were often difficult to repay whilst on benefits. One of the more useful parts of the welfare state was being able to apply for loans from the Department of Social Security as a recipient of benefits. The DSS would pay off the debt to the catalogue company, which had been taken out with interest, and the claimant would repay the DSS loan out of their benefits at a slower rate where no interest was being charged. We were good at helping local people fill out benefit forms, partly because we were only one job title away from filling in forms to go on the dole ourselves.

I liked our manager, Pete. He was the young university educated team leader who kept us all motivated in the face of the indifference around us. He was advancing his career by training as a therapist. I liked him partly because he had a beard. I would have liked any man who seemed personable and had a beard. That said, any attraction I had towards him was strained through my being gay-but-closeted, which always raised more questions with me than I dared ask myself.

One day Pete and I got sat talking alone. Arthur was out on a call. I was lingering over some minor file updating that could be done anytime. By some sort of conversational accident he began talking about his training as a therapist. As far as I could tell my 'being gay' was something others could decode in me if they wanted to. But if they did, then I felt wary around any open language in which the decoding could be expressed. But as Pete talked about his training as therapist I was persuaded to reveal one of the earliest unfortunate episodes around my father and his relationship with alcohol, which had been a weight I carried around for years. 

Pete very easily regressed me right back to being into being in the living room in which I became an utterly scared five year old whose father had no awareness of the anger in his own behaviour. Pete and I were both frightened at how easily he had done it, and both nervous about what to do next to bring me back to a more composed adult state. Surprisingly, I found the solution, and gave my five year old self an exit that it never had the first time. This saves us both from further anxiety. If how Pete and I had improvised this therapy was dangerous in any setting, it seemed particularly risky in that makeshift private space.

Scary as it was, I was more glad of that free therapy session than I expected to be at the next works summer Friday night at the pub. At these occasions I joined in because I felt I had to, but I felt I had a lot to be modest about. From the unofficial therapy session onward I felt more confident amid those sometimes disjointed Friday night conversations. 114

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