Coat Hooks Revisited

I've been looking back at old stuff to add to the blog.  I was looking for 'Solitary Spaces' and found this little bit of prose from the end of October 2010.  I read it and thought, actually it is quite interesting and relevant.  I've changed the names to Absent Father, DN1, and DN2.  I remember buying the coats hooks and they still look great, and I am pleased with how the room turned out.  But then I could always make a home.



Coat Hooks


Which way are the words coming out today? That’s the trouble with finding relief in writing, in time it becomes a self-conscious process and thus more difficult. The audience is arrayed, their faces drawn in lines of tolerant boredom. Am I really a ‘writer’ or just someone who needs to tell everyone my life? Am I part of the ‘now’ generation that tweets and writes blogs without the sophistication to do just that. Or is it that the main person I wrote for, my father, is now dead in my mind as well as reality, just a scar I try and hold when the pain throbs, part of me rather than an outside force for good, a parent who held my hand in so many ways.

This mourning process is a tricky one. Actually I think I’d quite fancy being an orthodox Jew for the mourning. Apparently from the little I read, there is a timetable, a structure, an acknowledgement that if you were a child of the deceased then your removal from society had a fixed time. Of course in our laissez faire world this would be frowned on, a specific time to mourn, surely everyone is different? But are we? Is my loss just normal life, a parent dying in their 70s, a life left in good order. Making too much of it really is being indulgent. But it hurts, and so much more than the soupy love songs played all day every day in a variety of forms from the radio. I suppose that’s why Shakespeare’s tragedies are so much more powerful than his comedies; the language, the strength, the solid weight of life when things go wrong, people die, will move and effect much more than ‘happy ever after, hah, hah’. But still I crave the easy life, the happy life, I want to be the one on whom life smiles. And yet I have much to smile about, much to be thankful for. Why this tendency to the glum?

Homebase was looking seedier than I remember, smaller too. For all those years of my life the red brick unit has sat on that awkward little plot by the first double mini roundabout. I think I can remember it opening, when Homebase was such more upmarket than the other DIY shops. And it had the Laura Ashley franchise, such glamour and luxury. After the house fire in 1996 I was given that opportunity we dream of, to spend other people’s money. It was what insurance was for, and my name had come out of the hat. The house fire wasn’t actually a fire, I had plugged in the electric blanket I insisted on, by mistake, instead of the teasmade, another thing I insisted on. The smoke was carcinogenous, the house cost fifty thousand pounds to put right. But it wasn’t really a fire, no flames.

My life was run on systems and structures that were meant to control the chaos in my mind. I was getting the teaching qualification because I had failed coming out of university to have any sort of ‘proper’ job. I had no training, I was told in a number of interviews my degree was largely worthless, and I internalised that statement and generalised to my whole being; I was worthless. When the Absent Father acceded to my wish to be married I was thrilled. No longer was my identity mine alone, I was ‘someones’. Like a child in a playhouse I went about setting up home, safe in the knowledge that this is what I was meant to do, build a home. In time the eggs did their rattling and DN1, then DN2 appeared on the scene. Add to that a Labrador, an estate car and an aga, and I was complete, the mother in her steady, stable home. Of course, it wasn’t really like that, the insecurities and complexities of my being were always there, you can’t paint over, you have to do the preparation work, the sanding down and filling in, and I didn’t, just applied more and more gloss. My now departed, but sadly still breathing, husband was similarly top coated, and from all appearances still lives that life of shine and cracks, perhaps realising that the rot he cut out was not the source of the fissures as more toxic spores eat at the soft and feeble tissue left round the wounds he inflicted on himself.

But I could not be content as ‘just a housewife’ and the reasons were practical as much as emotional. With the financial crash of 1987 it became clear that the Absent Father might not have a safe and secure job for life. His success at broking was amazing, but not phenomenal. On all previous scales he seemed a high achiever, but as the rule books were re-written it became clear that he was a follower not a leader. His lack of belief in himself was something I understood but didn’t accept. I thought he was marvellous and given the right opportunity, could have been brilliant. Why it hasn’t happened is a normal story of our times: the City is a rough place and maybe his face just didn’t fit at the right time, maybe he just didn’t push forwards, maybe he just wasn’t that driven by the money. Money was good, we were comfortable, he was more interested in things outside his work than really being a player. Never did he learn golf, although he enjoyed watching rugby certainly latterly, but somehow the toadying which seems to correlate with success, so typified by Margo and Jerry in The Good Life, was not our thing.

The Absent Father's redundancy when DN1 was four came at the end of a long and agonising year when the pressure built and built. In a way it was something of a relief, but coming after the staff party he had to go to at the Polish Club and four days before Christmas, the timing wasn’t brilliant. I was prepared to support, and had three or so years before, taken to college lecturing in that much maligned degree subject of mine, psychology. I really rather enjoyed the teaching, and it was a long way from my mother’s experience, so no way could I be called a ‘teacher’, something I vowed never to be. The years of part time work (I couldn’t leave the dog) were rewarding both personally and financially and I found myself an identity and a vocation. I could see it would provide us with the safety net we needed when the City career ended finally. From the moment of the 87 crash my life was never secure again. That thing I craved more than anything else had been taken from me, safety.

Unfortunately our lives cannot be lived in isolation. My need for individual security was found in college lecturing, but the government of the day had a need to cut costs, cut out waste, see the system streamlined and so pushed through a change in contracts for college lecturers that did away with school holidays. I had by this time acquired a rare and much valued part time permanent contract. I had holiday pay and knew what I was doing from one year to the next. The new holiday-less contracts hadn’t been implemented when I jumped ship, and I jumped in a direction I never thought I would, I went to work in a school. Not a teacher in the first instance, teachers are very protective of their status. No, despite my expertise I was an instructor, and thus paid less, but it was an enormously difficult jump into teaching and one I was prepared do to bring the security.

The school I worked in had both good and bad points, they all do. Depending on your mood or need, you can emphasize one or the other, and although it was hard work, it was not an impossible job. The management were tough and insensitive as they needed to be, but looking back, their professional development was good. One of the senior management team found PGCE course I could do whilst I worked, get paid for so I could become a teacher. I did nothing except say I’d like to be a teacher and it was presented to me. I had to work, had to be committed, but I was. Bringing up two children and holding down a job in commonplace, but I found it exhausting. Always stretching for more, and never really believing in myself. It is hard to extract the truths from the memories of that time, but the Absent Father was not exactly a hands-on father, his life revolved around his things. He did his bit, but never joyously, just he did his bit. Maybe that is just him and the mid life crisis of such epic proportions we are surviving is his attempt to find joy without ever finding peace.

So to try and balance everything I pushed myself harder and harder. Glossing, maybe, stretching for that safe place when I could relax. The unpleasant practical price of this marvellous opportunity that Sue, the senior manager, found for me, was a weekly trip to Middlesex University near Potters Bar. A return trip in rush hour on a Monday on the M25. I did it, of course, when most of my girlfriends wouldn’t have contemplated such a thing. But then I had no choice, the safety net had gone, and I looked at my beautiful daughters and wanted to make it alright for them, wanted them to feel safe and strong as I never could. I cracked of course, leaving that blanket on to shatter their safety. Eighty bin bags of rubbish taken out of the house after the fire. Nearly four months in a guest house, and our lives spinning into a different axis. My mind degraded into a pool of jelly with floating lumps of pain. My memory stopped functioning, sleep largely vanished as all the time the lists of jobs ran endlessly through those throbbing synapses. Dr Barker prescribed prozac and on the whole it worked. I functioned. It was as if a glass bell jar had been placed over that the soup that was my mind, all that was feeding the pain couldn’t get in, and so I operated as people would want me to, but underneath without the oxygen of thought, the healing couldn’t happen. Why I did what I did was never dealt with, I was in too much pain of guilt of it being ‘my fault’ and nobody could agree with me about that. Why should they, it wasn’t my fault, it was an accident, even the insurers accepted that, eventually. So in time I internalised what was so alien to me, it wasn’t my fault, and I was to relish the chance to refurbish my tatty home in colours and fabrics to my taste. No more a repository for family leftovers, this was my taste, our taste. I remember at the time thinking how marvellous it was that the Absent Father and I agreed so much on the tone and frame of the décor. We liked the same things, built a home that brought us both comfort. It’s one of those thoughts that fruitlessly fills time when I wonder what his next home will be like. Will I discover that ‘our’ taste was mine and he was just not really bothered enough to disagree, or too weak to argue. I’ll just have to brace myself for that slight, that pain. It will come.

And so yesterday I found myself in Homebase looking for coat hooks. For the house I bought without him, and is now being worked on by men he does not know, but furnished with things we chose together, or at least agreed upon. It is a dissonance that gives me recurrent pain. The fact I have no-one to bounce ideas off is hard, well I do, but I mustn’t do that. If I am ever to properly consign my adult life to the past, I cannot go back. To have a new future I have to leave the systems of my past. But Homebase is still there, with it’s Laura Ashley franchise I bought the sheets in after the fire; with the doorknob and handles aisle still offering the large mahogany knobs I put on the doors of the kitchen units after the fire that so pleased me every day until I left The Boat House and the small garden centre where I bought my first terracotta pots to turn my bit of gravel outside the back door into something more. This is a place where my aspirations of a safe future have been met in little bits of things that add the gloss. But it was seedy and the floor gritty. It seemed smaller and just a large shed that offered paints and pots, plants and plaster. At first I was disorientated, oddly. The memories starting from the car park with it’s peculiar system of traffic maintenance, through the doors and then the ghosts of my dreams floated by as I looked and walked up and down. I found the coat hooks, and let my mind open to the future as to what I wanted. Of course I know he’ll like them, but does that matter? Not really. I have a home to create, a bathroom to tile, colours to choose. And now he’s gone, he can’t take it from me, as he did Shamrock. Maybe that’s the problem. So much love and aspiration had gone into my last home, founded in my utter trust in him, I find it hard to really enjoy this process.

Sue died you know. Breast cancer. She was in her early forties. She was an excellent teacher, a hard manager but a good woman. And she gave me the means to be free. The coat hooks are cream, and will go very well with the brickwork, and the paint I think I want. But first we need to prepare the area, cut out the rot, fill in the cracks. It takes time, this priming and undercoating, but goodness what a shine when the gloss goes on.