Family And How To Escape Them - Chapter Eleven - Life On Hangman's Row

I was not the only person I knew who had been the move. My longest standing friend, Graham T, was organising his second escape from the English midlands to and lead the life that he had wanted wanted to live in Cornwall. He first went to Penzance when unemployed on the early 80's, when there plenty of rooms to rent until in the mid 1980's the council changed the rates of housing benefit for those who were on benefits and unemployed to half the full rent when the state benefits were meagre at best and local jobs were few. He was one of many young men forced out of Penzance for trying to live on benefits when even living frugally there ate through the savings of those on the dole forced them to leave.

It was a concerted attempt by the council to cut the number of unemployed young men resident in the town. I had seen Graham when he was back in the midlands in the autumn of 1987, I used to hitch to where he lived. It was one of several local journeys that I was adept with. He, more than I, hatched a plan for us both to hitch to Cornwall together, he really wanted to reconnect with friends there. Amazingly we hitched together and we actually did it in one day. Setting out as early as possible we hitched from the East Midlands to Bristol. Over about three lifts, including being warned by the police to not hitch on slip roads to motorways, where the last lift dropped us walking distance from Bristol train station. There we got on the train for Penzance. We never saw a ticket inspector but if we were asked for our tickets I had just enough cash to pay for tickets for both of us. I had my walkman cassette player and I was playing The Grateful Dead Live at Rockpalaste 1981, something Graham had copied for me in 1981. As we crossed the county border from Devon to Cornwall over a rail bridge Jerry Garcia hit a particular affecting note in the solo of the song on the tape. It could have been pure coincidence, but the timing was a sign to me. But that was how being a deadhead affected many people.

Proving that we could get there did not assure us both of the welcome we might have hoped for. I friend I had fallen out with just a couple of years earlier was at the party that Graham had designed the lift for us to attend. The now ex-friend looked at me like I was something he would like to wipe off his shoe, but Graham found his good side. There was almost a grace in being a bygone and having a past that even when it was wrong, and not meant to happen the way it did, would not return as if it was indigestion. We stayed for only a few days, I was glad of the change of scenery. Graham was more purposeful than I was, he renewed some old connections and looked up contacts for new lodgings and a new job whilst we were there.

Come the Spring and Graham's gift to me, since he was going to Penzance for good, was his portable monochrome television. I was surprised, but I knew he meant to go on to a better life, so I felt okay about it. Because of the downstairs television I did not have to buy a license for it. The communal colour television was rarely watched communally, when it was on it was mostly there as background noise to whoever wanted to stay in the kitchen and turned off before they left. The one programme I remember being shared when all of us were there was, you guessed it, the Friday night American wrestling. Where its mixed signals of machismo and circus skills left all present with nothing to say about it, and nothing else to say.

I did not have to buy a license. The landlord's license covered my viewing habits. But what to watch on my own? With the image being the size of a medium size of computer screen but square, in black and white, with much less clarity, poor sound, and four channels of television the choices were limited.

With the portable television sat on my bedside table and I would watch it from the warmth of my single bed. This felt quite luxurious to me, more luxurious for my being in bed than the larger monochrome 405 line set that dad had put in the attic late on, when I was teenager. It was a marker of either how unmemorable most television programmes were when I watched alone, or how unmemorable my life when I was alone was, or a sign of how divided I often felt that the television that I remember responding to most was the mixed social signals of 'The World's Strongest Man 1988' where the slow motion repeats of large men making certain moves were the broadcasting equivalent of the broadcaster explicitly encouraging the viewer to a soft porn habit they did not have to recognise for what it was.

If a soft porn habit can be formed from watching televised sport is the consequence of an unrecognised narcissism loop, then who, when tempted by such a viewing behaviour loop could resist? Who could say where and how the loop actually started? With the athletes training in private to be better than every other athlete when they openly competed? Or the television broadcasters who focus on images of the physiques of the athletes, whilst providing a commentary and soundtrack where the overall excellence of those performing mattered less than the nationality of the winning athlete? Who would care enough to choose to resist being put in such a loop, from the start of where it affects them, after it was so self perpetuating before they found it and it had become a fixture in the commercial television schedules?

I had my fill of the camera lingering on the physiques of these larger athletes flickering in monochrome on the small screen, as the  smaller commentators asked the athletes inane questions, when the way the camera lingered on the athlete was the real answer. And yes, I was double minded about it all, where part of the point of being double minded was to ignore how double minded and confused in my motives could be so self justifying when I lived among adults where we were all on our own.

But to get more purposeful agreement, the formalities of settling into this new room proved a lot easier than I first expected them to be. The form filling for the housing benefit went smoothly because my employer was now Nottingham City Council whilst West Bridgford Council organised my housing benefit. When council spoke to council they agreed with each other a lot more promptly than when applicant spoke to council, and had to find the right department first.

I liked the room too. In the parental house my younger sister got the best room in the house. It was the only room that was full height and the width of the house. I was getting the equivalent room to my sisters at this new address, in the first floor and the house was wider as well. All the other renters were working class men of mixed ages, jobs and backgrounds who accepted that they were easiest in small doses, such as when they met each other in the kitchen whilst cooking a meal for themselves. A meal which they ate on their own in their bedsits. Nobody ate their meal in the kitchen even though it was meant to be a communal space. It was too indifferently furnished for anyone to want to stay  there too long. We carried our meals to our rooms even though it meant carrying our plate climbing one or two flights of stairs that were dimly lit from above.

I attempted the occasional attempted communal meal. One tenant who worked for a time in an abattoir brought home for free a whole pigs head, from which he removed all the edible meat. I was impressed with his expertise with sharp knives on the kitchen table of what was clearly head shaped. Watching him carve and separate slivers of met from the fat around it was quite a piece of theatre. When I made the big one pot pork and vegetable curry we all had our fill from the pot, but still we each ate in our rooms.  The idea worked once, the meal was cheap. But the experiment was not repeated.

I found a much better prepared communal life in people's homes through work. With my first job working directly for the council as a care assistant I was sent to different addresses across West Bridgford and nearby The Meadows to help the disabled and the elderly living alone, mostly men, start their days. I helped them to get them up and wash themselves, and I made their breakfast for them. It was all on a tight schedule, with me getting buses from place to place with much of the time the job took unpaid, and the bus journeys between clients being my break times. I was not issued with any sort of pass to reduce the prices of bus fares, but there was an expenses scheme to collect my work related bus tickets for. I liked working on my own, I was slow to realise that how I liked to work was a sign I disliked being closely managed. The feedback both I and the management of the scheme relied on was whatever the client would report back to the management if anything was amiss. Other than the expected client feedback to the management I was left to get on with the job. The work did not feel to me as if it was 'woman's work', nor did I see myself as an exception in my gender for doing the work that I did. Much less did I hanker after my former placement in the Leonard Cheshire Home, close as it was to where I now lived. That felt like a chapter that I was happy to see as closed.

One client was particularly notable. He was a young man who had been wheelchair bound since birth, but he was obviously intelligent, for all he was slow of speech. He saw himself as a Christian evangelist. I went to my first classical music concert as his attendant. It was a performance of the large scale choral piece by Edward Elgar, 'The Dream of Gerontius'. That it was live music-something I saw rarely-should have impressed me more than it did. The overall impression that I felt was one where the performance was the musical equivalent of a large piece of solid looking dark stained Victorian furniture.

He was not only a Christian but he had passed theological exams, and was part of a circuit of Methodist preachers. In the time I knew him he got himself booked to speak from the stage at Christian camping events. Seeing myself as a Christian, myself, I temporarily became his ideal choice of carer-for-his-travels. I attended several camping events with him, events where away from their home churches, Christians looked for renewal via spiritual insight and fresh thinking.

I got my share of that through showing the levels of practical charity involved in waking a disabled person up whilst in their sleeping bag in their tent, then sitting them up comfortably at the edge of their tent so that I could fit their catheter and start to fully dress them. Only then could I lift him into his wheelchair, which I had to steer slowly over rough ground for us to go off in search of breakfast. Whatever anyone might call the mix of a gentle attitude, physical strength, and a lack of squeamishness about the human body, I had enough of all of them for him, until he found somebody else with a similar aptitude.

Please left click here for Chapter Twelve.