I’ve been thinking, all this past weekend. Walking up to the top of the hill at Everton on Saturday, always a favourite thinking place. Then down to the river, another favourite, on Sunday. Thinking about why I’m now saying that the housing job I’d started in 1976 was a mistake, for me. In a good place, full of good people and doing good things though it was, in its early days at least. But for me, I would never really find my place there. So a mistake, I’d say. Certainly to stay there so long and then turn those early days into a story of perfection. A myth, on reflection, that I dutifully retold only last week, in the first published version of the previous chapter to this one. Until I went back in and changed the chapter itself. Because I’ve been thinking.
Thinking about why I needed to change that myth now, after all this time.
And it’s because of that re-creating of memories thought in the Jeanette Winterson quote I used a couple of chapters ago:
“Memory is not a filing system, or even a reconstruction; it is a re-creation. We remember the same things differently at different times not because we are unreliable but because the past is not fixed. Even a simple memory is a cluster of experiences where some things are vivid and some things obscured. As we develop and change so do our memories.” Jeanette Winterson
Because I’m writing “Seventy: A Life” now, I’m re-creating the memories in it by the light of the kinds of judgements I can make now, with all the years, experience and opinions I have in me now, but didn’t have back in the 1970s. None of which is intended to create pointless regrets about the past. But rather to recognise tendencies in myself, like the one of staying too long at things, that I can then avoid repeating in such time as I have left. As well, I’m not wanting to leave old stories like the one about perfection lying around behind me after I’ve gone. It matters to me to clear up in these later days. So that old stories like “He really liked it there” can be laid to rest before I am.
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Walking around at the weekend, then, I thought of all the places I’ve left in recent years, when my work at them was finished, like Granby 4 Streets. Left happily and still friends. Or say the university, just because I wanted to and hadn’t liked it very much at all. But both left reasonably easily because I’m better at leaving now. Whereas back in the 1970s I wasn’t, not yet. Only 20-something after all and so not yet possessing the get up and go I’d later have. So I’d stayed stuck, as we’ll see in the story once I continue it, in a job that was increasingly wrong for me from close to its beginning. Stuck and as a direct consequence depressed, like there was nothing I could do. When I could have just left, but didn’t for years. Forever thinking things might yet get better, as you’ll see.
Ok? So here’s the story of my 1970s becoming the early 80s. With the perfect job myth deleted. And some new acknowledging inserted along the way, in this and the following chapters, of where I might have left and perhaps saved myself from much of the depression that then followed me around until I’d at last leave the housing job in the mid-1990s.
Anyway and to get on with things, since we were last in the story Diana and I have got married.
When I paused, two chapters ago, we’d split up and I was living on my own in that flat in Greenbank Drive. Well gradually we’d drifted back together, during the autumn of 1976, and the following spring had got married. Quietly, no families, up at Brougham Terrace, the Liverpool Registry Office back then. In my memory I was keener on both the getting back together and us getting married than Diana had been. Though that might just be my memory. Anyway, we got married and before too long, moved out of our flat in Walton to a new house we bought off Aigburth Road in the south end of the city. A three-bed semi on a new kind of council estate that was partly for sale as well as for rent. Close to Sefton Park, close to Otterspool by the river, and with all the feeling of a new start for both of us. Which sadly didn’t last.
By 1979, I can remember us having a conversation about splitting up again, but agreeing to give ourselves at least until we’ve had the holiday we’d already booked. Which was a bleak and separate story in itself, of Romania in the late days of the Ceausescus. But by the time we got home, we somehow carried on together. Albeit with our separate social lives, groups of friends who never mixed, and our mostly separate bank accounts. Like maybe we never entirely trusted each other. But we continued.
And actually we could always talk, perhaps that’s how come we continued. Possibly because we were so different, politically, as well as in what we wanted out of life, we could always have interesting conversations. Before years later, we grew too different and ran out of our time. But after the Romania holiday we’d still last another 10 years. And during that time we’d have our lovely baby, Clare. So just as well.
Meanwhile and still in 1979, in May of that year the disaster of Margaret Thatcher being elected has happened. And I remember in the day-job a group of us doing no work all day as we sat around with the radio on, listening to the terrible results coming through. Rightly, as it’s turned out ever since, fearing for the future.
At the same time, also in the day-job, I’m in the process of my first major piece of getting stuck. I’ve managed to move on from the boring form filling I’d started with, to a job closer to the actual housing work I’d come to LHT to find. So now I’m a Housing Management Researcher. Which sounds good, except the first thing I’ve researched is a computer. And though I’ve enjoyed the finding out about what’s now possible and what we might need, I’m about to make my major error of these early LHT years, and agree to get stuck with running the thing, rather than just say no.
Which I’ll say more about as the day-job reaches the 1980s. And some more about the depression that followed.
But I’d like to finish here, and explain the chapter’s title, by mentioning my songwriting. As well as working in housing, being a songwriter was the other thing I wanted to do. And I’d be sending off demo-tapes well into the 1980s. Without success. Except it was a sort of success, looking back, but of a different kind. It was how I began writing, for one thing. And so has led directly to the writing I’m doing here and now. But also, in being written down and recorded, the few of the songs I’ve kept from those days are now a kind of evidence, for me, that I knew the day-job was the wrong job for me at the time.
“Days In Public” being one of them. And here it is. From me in the late 1970s. Sorry about the slow, minute-long start. I think I was being atmospheric.
The strain of public-facing days, little of my own time, full of too many people and
“Living off the dreams of others,
Being bought and sold.”
Doesn’t sound like a job I was in love with does it?
Read all chapters of “A Life” so far:
A Beginning: “Do You Like Soul Music?”
1, 1954: Being Born, Walton
2, 1955/58: To Maghull, via Bootle
3, 1958/69: The 1960s, When We Were Boys
4, Still 1969: The Other Songs On The Wireless
5, An interlude: Maybe We Could Organise Hope?
6, In the early 1970s: Up The Hill
7, The Middle 1970s: Decisions
8, An interruption: About My Heart
9, A Reconsideration 1976: About Liverpool Housing Trust
10, Days In Public 1979: Dreaming Dreams In Stolen Moments
Next time will be the 1980s, a decade in a chapter. The decade when Clare gets born.
Note for subscribers
It was while I was preparing this chapter, and thinking forward to the next ones, I thought through my time at Liverpool Housing Trust. And realised I needed to change the story I no longer thought true, about loving my first ten years there, or I’d be forever pushing against it in each new chapter. So I edited the chapter I’d sent you down to the shorter version of it you can see here.
Ronnie