And this brings us right back to The Servant. (Remember him?)

Family life, parenting, was so new and unfamiliar that I had no opinion on it at all. It was so far beyond my experience that I didn’t even know I had no opinion. It was an honour that I thought not of[1]. Jo blazed a trail, reading the parenting books and websites, discussing the issues with other young mothers, and I just drifted along in her wake, agreeing to her decisions, although I often had to (cack-handedly) enact these decisions, because Jo was at work.

Somewhere in my befuddled brain, I recognised the importance and the responsibility of the job before us. I knew I’d have to throw myself into the parenting of these precious, vulnerable, impressionable little creatures, but I saw this entirely in terms of externalised activity. I thought if I demonstrated love and care, if I expressed love and care and undertook the activities of love and care, love and care would be what the children experienced. Or I didn’t think. I vaguely assumed. My inner self existed, crouched, hidden, in a locked room, thinking and feeling nothing. I assumed this was the same for everyone.

I didn’t realise that the self is permeable. It doesn’t exist as a hard, unchanging nugget; sloughing off the rest of the world the way your waterproof skin does rain: water off a duck’s back. The self is spongy; it absorbs its environment. You are partly formed of the opinions of those around you: their values, their view of who you are, how you fit in or don’t: call a dog a bad name…

Humans[2] are so sensitive to the subtlest cues and signals, subconsciously, so empathetic to others – their sense of self, their experience – that they are almost telepathic. And they do this automatically. Starvation makes you lose it. That’s when you realise what miracles you used to perform. Every day. Even the most selfish of us.

“Such are the strange acoustics of the life of the spirit, such it’s strange spatial arrangement.”[3]

So, I think, somewhere in the backs of their minds, the children knew. They can tell a charlatan when they see one, a quack, a false prophet, a replicant, a simulacrum, an automaton, a hollow man.

It’s stored up, somewhere in their messed-up heads, waiting for the litigious therapist to unlock it. Then I’ll get my comeuppance. I wait in dread.

Footnotes

[1] Come on, you know where this is from! You did it at school!

[2] I rarely count myself among them.

[3] Soren Kierkegaard, The sickness Unto Death, 2008, London: Penguin, p.142. I don’t understand most of Kierkegaard. He’s talking about people’s relationship to God, or something; I am not. I’ve repurposed his words.

Anyway, back to my main subject:

To recap: Jo had rescued me from Moloch[1], from the toad work[2], for the price of a sense of vocation. She, a woman born to nurture, was forced out of the home, her natural domain, to earn money. Her response was to single-handedly turn management into one of the caring professions.

I, with no particular inclination for its practicalities, found myself doing a lot more of the parenting, at least the mechanical parts of getting the children up and dressed, picking them up from playgroup and school, feeding them.

I felt (and feel) it was a price worth paying: better a drifting existence than one of intolerable pressure. Life, with all its variety, contains enough diversion to keep you going, most of the time, even if you wander aimlessly through it. If aimlessness seems too much to bear, you can go to bed. You’ll probably find something to distract you tomorrow, and if you don’t, well, life is short – not much longer to go.

The advantage of such down-sizing seems obvious. Somebody wrote to Mariella Frostrup’s advice column in The Observer because she didn’t relish the idea of returning to work after the lock down. That didn’t strike me as a subject worthy of writing to the papers. Isn’t it the human condition? Surely you experience this every Monday morning.

But work is terribly important to a sense of identity and for relationships. It is, apparently, where people conduct most of their significant, non-family relationships. We met a colleague and friend of Jo’s in the park on our daily walk (for once taken together.) She was a little shy and reserved at first, until a work problem came up. Then she visibly brightened, became authoritative, articulate, humorous. Conversation flowed easily.

Another of Jo’s closest work friends had a relationship with her entirely based on, and structured by, work discussions. Late at night, in drink, she’d move on to problems in her private life, but until then, the friendship was conducted through the language and the pre-occupations of business management. Now that she’s moved on to another job, the friendship has dwindled.

So, one feeling that carried over, for me, into the new phase of my work life was a sense of ineffectiveness and of helplessness. I’d gone from feeling inadequate to feeling unnecessary and insignificant. More than ever, I didn’t fit the traditional male role of provider. (Not surprising, given that I’d never even imagined having it.)

But to this was added a sense of guilt that, undeservedly, I’d been allowed this luxurious licence. Especially as I’d claimed it through failure.

Footnotes

[1] Apparently a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice (according to wiki). I’m referring, of course, to the scene in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927).

[2] “Why should I let the toad work/ squat on my life?” – Larkin, “Toads” from The Less Deceived, 1955.

I finished this yesterday. Not sure what to do with it.

Just after the 75^th anniversary of VE, I’ll be the millionth person to link the 2^nd world war to the Corona crisis, and I’m sorry. It was a coincidence that I’ve been reading J.B. Priestley’s morale-boosting Postscript talks, which he gave on BBC radio during that war.

His constant refrain was that the British people couldn’t be called upon to make enormous sacrifices just to re-establish the same rotten old order. The war effort was an opportunity to remake Britain in a better, fairer form. That was something worth fighting for.

Priestley’s supporters credit him with being instrumental in the push towards a more egalitarian society that lead to Labour’s 1945 election victory, then the establishment of the welfare state, and, most importantly now, of the NHS, whose heroes we applaud.

Today, awaiting an easing of Lockdown, I’m feeling similarly optimistic about our chances of dealing with a future invasion by a corona or flu virus. I’m still frazzled and falling over with the struggle and the stress of it, but it’s a sunny morning and I’ve remembered to take my thyroid and happy pills (mother’s little helpers), which always makes me feel better.

I think we’ve learnt lessons about how to manage this sort of attack. We need easy and constant communication between nations, sharing information and using the WHO and other pan-national organisations to provide us with an early warning. We need to act in concert to develop tests so we can contact-trace the spread of the disease and attempt to quarantine it. In Britain, we’ll need to identify, isolate and support the most vulnerable. We’ll have to develop the structures and technologies to do this, and hold them in readiness to respond swiftly to new variants, with new infection profiles, so we can develop and mass-produce new vaccines. We also need to think about how to soften the impact on the economy, because, yes, it’ll cost.

We were warned about this, as we have been, repeatedly, about that other monstrous, bastard child of consumerism, climate change. In both cases, we knew and acknowledged the scale and impact of the problem, but refused to think about it or do anything. We left it to our future selves, because the market demands that costs be deferred to maximise profits and we have invested so much in the hope of those profits. Preparing for future problems would incur unacceptable costs, now, for no immediate benefit.

But all debts defraud our future selves, or our children. We have increasingly allowed the primitive principles of capitalist exchange to govern all aspects of civic life. Everything has been given a monetary value. The state has been shrunk and most of its functions have been sold to the private sector. The purpose of government has become merely to facilitate business. It serves the market rather than maintaining it for the country’s use. Administrations point to resurgent economies as proof of success, ignoring the fact that governments’ remits are far wider than that.

The coronavirus has shown us that we can no longer live in this manner. The childish idea that all we need to do is allow unfettered trade and that will magically solve all our problems is now palpably false. One day soon a new, even more virulent pandemic will emerge; One day soon, we will be overwhelmed by such extreme weather conditions that food production will catastrophically fail. And we will be wholly unprepared.

No part of the fragmented private business system will have the ability or the will to steer and organise the global effort required. It will need governments, over-arching organisations which, with the consent of the people, have the scope and capacity to co-ordinate so many aspects of society, from medical responses, to healthcare, to security, to food distribution, to financial aid packages.

I’m not advocating revolution: all revolutionaries are closet fascists, but It will need people of vision, determination and administrative control who will not be intimidated by the asset-stripping profiteers of big business. Because all this will need money, which means tax and probably deep-rooted financial reform. Governments must get over their crises of confidence, their fear of upsetting those who threaten to take themselves elsewhere. They should be offered stable, nurturing, and well-funded governments that they, too, must support. Government is everyone’s insurance against catastrophe.

And it will need co-operation and compromise not jingoism. All around the globe, nationalist demagogues have risen to power on the hot air of baseless indignation and xenophobic resentment, helped along, of course, by lies and disruption. These aren’t the skill sets we need, right now. The countries most likely to develop, manufacture, or acquire life-saving medical equipment and medicines are those most able to share expertise, information and technology, who can most easily collaborate and pool resources; the countries most able to weather the coming economic storm are those with the strongest links of mutually beneficial trade and co-ordinated economic relief.

And here we are, about to hit a Covid-19 recession, amplified by a Brexit recession. Isn’t it time we re-thought our exit from the EU? And before you tell me how humiliating it would be to creep back, cap in hand, just remember that sometimes you may have to swallow your pride to save your country. Our great national humiliation came when we revealed what mean-spirited, ungrateful and blindly arrogant little xenophobes we truly were. Now’s our chance to rise to the challenge, as Priestley would no doubt have said, and do something positive for our country!

 

Sunrise early May

All flame and palest duck egg

Clouds of lilac grey

 

Just before sunrise

A muted bloom of russet

On the chilly ground

 

Above the skyline

Blazing – the risen sun

like a young god

 

Tree trunks east facing

Receive the early sunlight

Like benediction

 

First timid sunlight

on fissured bark: fingertips

Trace a well-known face.

Meanwhile, the weight I was placing on Jo’s shoulders, by needing her help, was almost intolerable. She never had enough time to work WITH me: that would slow her down. She had to do the work FOR me: an extra burden, but quicker. When she is locked into her work-mode, she needs to drive through like a snow-plough, without looking up, just pulling the next pile of data towards her. She’d say, “I’ll type for you”, and then, instead of letting me dictate, she’d speed up, get ahead, and then just end up writing the thing herself so she could get back to her own work.

I hated becoming dependent on Jo, partly out of concern for her, partly from pride, and partly (selfishly) because I’d be at the mercy of her decisions: she’d help me when she had time, and I’d have to wait, dancing with impatience, until that time.  My class worksheets were her ideas, written in her idiom (and with her strange syntax!) But I felt there was nothing else I could do. Not only would it be monstrously ungrateful, I’d completely collapse, ruin my students’ chances of succeeding, and be ignominiously sacked. .

And, at the same time, it was a relief, because I knew the work would get done, would no longer be hanging over me, and would be good. I’m a bit useless. I’m scatter-brained, lazy, and often find myself at a loss, yet I was praised for my lesson plans.[1]

I came to rely on that relief: I couldn’t face going back to my previous state of anxiety when I had to make things up for myself, without the ratification of somebody I trusted, when it felt like I was making wild guesses and inventing baseless comments, then feeding them to my students as gospel truth, when I was a charlatan and my teaching was chicanery.

At work, my good reputation relied on the devil’s magic bullets of Jo’s help; at home, I didn’t feel I had the right to impose my wishes on others, especially as I hadn’t earned the money that would be spent. If we disagreed over the best way to parent, I tended to accept Jo’s point of view. She was the one with the sense of vocation and she’d read the parenting handbooks. She was the one who’d been sensitively brought up[2]: she tended to be right.

Ok, I gained some ability to acquiesce with good humour to less important choices, but I lost the ability to make key decisions. My decision-making muscles wasted away. I became unused to responsibility and so started to fear the consequences of any decision I made, to fear the very idea of consequence, which is a fear of any change or any future.

And the more dependent I became, the more of a nag I became. To get what I wanted, or needed, I had to influence higher powers, who’d decide, and do it, for me. I did this by complaining: a situation was not as I would have liked and I needed to explain that to somebody else. That’s called complaining and people get bored of it, especially if there’s an implied criticism of their decisions. So people had a tendency to resist or dismiss my complaints. After a while, I stopped expecting anyone to listen to me. I was just expressing myself in the language of grievance, and I’d have been horrified if anyone had actually responded and tried to sort it out. That would have given me responsibility for what happened and I didn’t want that! I’d have got it all wrong! My identity had become “Her indoors”, the bitter, unappreciated grumbler, and I’d become comfortable with that.

There is, of course, another way to look at all this (and I often did.) I could have seen myself as cosily ensconced at the heart of a loving and mutually supportive family, capable of robust exchanges, interruptions, even ignoring each other, secure in the knowledge that everyone loved everyone else.

I could have remembered that we’re a collective and we communicate and make collective decisions for our mutual benefit. Each member plays their part, no matter how unobtrusive, in the well-being of the whole. Psychologically, people benefit from supporting, as much as they benefit from being supported, maybe more so: it makes them feel like valued parts of a community. Being in need performs a public service. From each according to [their] ability; to each according to [their] needs.[3]

Humans are social animals and work best by collaborating towards mutually beneficial goals. To deny or resist this is to be an individualist misanthrope, a patsy who has bought into the capitalist idea that the highest good is self-development, a concept dreamt up to keep you consuming and thus spending, to maintain the market in coloured water, sold as bottled self-fulfilment by snake-oil salesmen: seminars in how to overcome “Imposter Syndrome”.

I am that patsy. My desire for independence in thought, identity and achievement springs from the same sources as my need to be solitary and secret. I’m selfish. I’m hoarding myself away in the hope that, somehow, I alone can profit, existentially. It shows no generosity of spirit at all. It’s shameful.

In the days of my deep anorexia, I’d now say, “And, you know what? If you don’t like what I have to offer, fuck you all! I’ll just wander off, somewhere, AND DIE!”

But those days are gone.

Footnotes

[1] It’s strange how you can take pride from praise, even if you know it’s undeserved!

[2] My parents, though loving and nurturing, were a bit shouty and a bit smacky. It was all, “You’ll do what you’re damn well told, because I said so, or you’ll get the back of me hand!” Not very modern. They wanted the best for us, and that’s how they thought you got it.

[3] Karl Marx, 1875, Critique of the Gotha Programme

I went for a run around the back park, at 5am, as the eastern clouds turned red, silhouetting the trees, young in leaf. It’s strange how, after that first brilliance has dulled, but before the sun has appeared, the ground takes on a faint russet flush. How is that possible? Is it seeping out of the ground?

I startled a man in the slob-wear of someone who thinks, at this hour, he can nip out and walk his lappy rat-dog without being seen: ill-fitting trackie-bottoms, Cuprinol-stained fleece, old woolly hat, ancient, unlaced caterpillar boots. “I thought I’d be the first one in here!” he called after me with mock-cheeriness, but I heard the undertone of resentment.

Surely, though, runners are less annoying than the other great hazard of the Lock-Down Daily Walk: blokes wearing sunglasses and headphones, entirely absorbed in ham-fisted, clumsy-thumbed texting, thuddering blindly towards you, down the middle of the path, wildly vectoring their infections in all directions. Bastards.

How fastidious we’ve all become!

And was the sense of defeat inherited or learnt? My mother also gave up teaching, which she wasn’t coping with, to become a professional home-maker. I think Dad, staggering home from work every day, envied her, so perhaps this wasn’t what they’d been planning when they got married.

I don’t think my unusually progressive grandfather brought his daughter up with housewifery as an aspiration. Looking back, mum always seemed self-taught. She was proficient at cleaning, and a good cook, but without the special flourishes, the time-honoured and secret techniques, passed down from mother to daughter in the patriarchal societies of the past. You know, cleaning surfaces with lemon juice or scrubbing them with baking soda; vinegar for glassware; granny’s special sauce…  And she never seemed to be personally invested in it. Sure, she took pride in her skills, but they didn’t define her. Was this role, for her also, a resignation?

Like me, she often felt over-whelmed by things. When pressed, by immanent guests, say, she used to rush around whimpering, “I can’t cope. I can’t cope…” over and over. Was this a recognition of disempowerment, or disenfranchisement, or dependency? Because I think the sense of helplessness grows in you.

And did I learn it from her?

All this felt like a defeat. It felt like I’d been forced into some sort of retreat. Of course, I continued battling against The Immediate, but news was trickling in of some sort of disaster that had befallen our forces somewhere in an obscure and distant land. Nobody could work out exactly what had happened or what the significance was, or what the repercussions would be. Does that make sense? In other words, it was a feeling, not a thought, one I wasn’t properly aware of for years.

I can remember some moments when defeat was undeniable. I can remember being literally on my knees before Lulu, clinging to her skirt, begging for forgiveness, while an incredulous friend looked on. (We were all drunk.) That was humiliating!

A more subtle image of defeat stands out in my relationship with Jo. It is the moment when, teaching English, I realised that I just couldn’t get all my work done. I had to ask Jo to help me. I was mortified. I had never asked before, although she was aware I was struggling. She had been reluctant to help, because she didn’t have the time. She was far busier than me, and was already bringing in more money, so it should have been my job to support her. Yet I was so overwhelmed I had to throw myself on her mercy. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. It was a surrender. I was raising my hands in despair.

It was galling because I knew I could’ve managed my workload much better. I was disorganised and inefficient, as Jo often pointed out to me. At work, I couldn’t prioritise between the trivial but achievable and the truly vital, or perhaps I hid myself away, preoccupied by the trivial but achievable, to avoid the panic of confronting the truly vital.

This meant I had to bring home an impossible amount of work, each night, which left me too exhausted to work efficiently the next day. In therapies of various sorts, it has sometimes been suggested, in mitigation of my crapness, that perhaps I suffer from mild dyslexia and/or mild ADHD. Was this a symptom?

When Jo and I had been together for a while, I went back to Ireland to study for an M-Phil (an MA, in Britain). Jo felt this would be a significant test of our relationship. I didn’t realise she thought this, so didn’t question our commitment, didn’t sleep with anybody, and thus passed the test I didn’t know I was taking! (Luckily! Hey – no one was asking and, anyway, I was living with my parents!) We stayed together.

Despite paying minimal rent to the old pair – I insisted -, I had no money left when I returned to live with Jo, in her house. I went straight to the Job Centre to look for a job and to see about getting unemployment benefit.

One of the questions they asked me was about my relationship with my landlord. Jo and I had talked about this. She wanted me to be completely honest. I felt there was no need to complicate the issue, as I wasn’t applying for housing benefit. It would be dishonest to say that it was a casual relationship, but we had not yet made any long-term promises, and there was no knowing what might happen in future. More importantly, I had always been financially independent. We split the bills, even weekly food bills.

But I trust Jo’s judgement, so I dutifully admitted that I was in a relationship with the owner of my lodgings.

It was immediately clear my request would be denied. The bloke seemed almost incredulous, as if he thought I was making a fraudulent claim. I tried to explain the circumstances – that nothing about Jo’s behaviour suggested she had accepted financial responsibility for me – but it felt very awkward. Further explanation could be embarrassingly intimate, because presumably if our relationship was platonic, I’d still be eligible. It seemed I might have to explain what acts we indulged in and for whose gratification; who initiated.

I didn’t think this was any of his business. If you accept the principle of the state providing income support, surely the money should be shared out according to need. You shouldn’t be allowed to deny claims because you disapprove of people’s (non-financial) living arrangements.

I had explained to him that I was self-supporting, but he wanted to know who I was sleeping with. Suddenly we were dealing with the subtleties of attitudes and assumptions about sex. Would he look on my claim differently if I could convince him that the sex was casual or that I didn’t feel emotionally invested in it, or if I felt exploited and degraded?

Relationships are personal and individual: are matters of opinion not objective truth, and are all different. What if you occasionally got drunk and shagged your landlady? What if you were sleeping with someone but they were polyamorous or simply not in love with you, or unsure they wanted to stay in the relationship or just unwilling to pay for you, or psychologically abusive and trying to imprison you by taking control of your money?

But I felt unable to say any of this, and so the British Government pimped me out, because they were openly saying, “if she’s sleeping with you, then she has to pay for you”!

I know I sound like an unrepentant and entitled scrounger and I understand the state’s point of view. It can’t be expected to underwrite every delicate scruple held by every couple in the opening stages of their relationships. It doesn’t want to discover that it’s been financing the hidden gambling habits of billionaires’ partners. It doesn’t want to facilitate benefit fraud but, to be fair, it can’t make its decisions about who is lying and who isn’t based on hunches. Better to treat everyone equally by denying ALL claims where the appealer is foolish enough to mention their personal life.

But I guess any blank denial or rejection puts your hackles up. If you suggest something and your interlocutor simply says, “Nope” you want to punch them on the nose, don’t you? I went away brooding.

Jo was perfectly willing to pay for everything, because she’s generous, but I was horrified. My financial independence was important to me. It was an attitude I’d picked up from Lulu, at university. All my adult life, I’d paid my way and that felt good. I never took anything from anybody, (apart from my parents!), and luckily I’d never needed to. Yet here I was suddenly beholden, subordinate, grateful, living off handouts, cap in hand, having to justify how and why I was spending money that was no longer mine, that I hadn’t earned.

This situation only lasted a few weeks. I got a job pretty much immediately, as I’d been intending to. I don’t mind doing whatever work is available, however lowly. I’ve never been overly proud in that respect, probably because all jobs have been stop-gaps for me, on the road to becoming a professional writer.

But it was the first example of a worrying trend. From then on, I’ve never recovered even my potential for economic independence. Jo pays the mortgage, the council tax, the utility bills. I contribute as I can. I buy most of the food, for example, but her salary is possibly as much as 4 or 5 times mine, before tax. (I don’t ask. It’s the last vestige of my pride) so she is single-handedly sustaining our shamefully comfortable lifestyle: if I died, the family circumstances wouldn’t alter much; if she died we’d be destitute.

I was dependent, cut down to size. How could I pay her back?

I started reading more modern poetry; I subscribed to Poetry Review. I went on poetry courses. I even (briefly) joined a poetry writing group[1]. None of it made any difference.

I started to suspect I was mildly dyslexic. Most modern verse repelled me. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Reading Poetry Review was torment. I found the poems ghastly – dry, joyless scraps of clever, indecipherable language experimentation. What made it worse was I felt I needed to treat it like work; I felt compelled to drive myself through the turgid crap, almost weeping with the misery of it, and then rack my brains for some lesson I might learn from it, something I might emulate, because this was obviously what was wanted.

So I worked at it: I struggled doggedly on for years and years, until my output dwindled to nothing, and each time I forced myself to sit down and read or write poetry, it would trigger a bleak, nasty bout of despair. I revised and revised the poems I did manage to produce until I’d pared them down to almost nothing and they’d completely lost the spontaneity and honesty that had been their only qualities. By this point, even the thought of reading or writing poetry filled me with horror. My tendency to procrastinate reached new heights. I’d do anything, anything to postpone confronting the awful anguish of it.

When the dust settled, there I stood, alone and naked, with nothing to show for it. All I had was the sense that I’d fucked it all up for myself, and that it was entirely my own fault. And the vague but urgent and persistent feeling that I needed to get on. That I needed to occupy myself, that I needed to resist my own indolence, because I’d produced nothing[2] [3] . That I needed to work.

I wasn’t a writer.

But if I wasn’t a writer, what the hell was I? Who?

Footnotes

[1] In one workshop I read the following poem about my daughter, based on Adrien Mitchell’s Beatty is Three:

Meggie is Nearly Three

You took the bannister and then my hand

and I was so intent on watching you,

I was the one who fell.

It didn’t hurt, but I’m an opportunist

and I took my chance.

At my request, you held my head

against the quick beat of your small

and careless heart.

One of the other members accused me, obliquely, of being a paedophile, just on the strength of this piece. I’d never met her before. It was difficult to muster much enthusiasm for the gatherings, after that.

[2] “[Because he feels incomplete,] the artist feels he is nothing, or worse than nothing, a kind of criminal, unless he is practising – and successfully practising his particular art.” J.B. Priestley (Let the People Sing, 1939) Sorry about the gendered pronouns, guys: it was a sexist age.

[3] “I’m not fit to live with unless I can do some work – even an hour a day keeps me civilised” (Barbara Hepworth, quoted in The Observer, 19/04/20)