Chapter Five - Consider Yourself Part Of The Furniture.

When dad installed in the living room the large walnut sideboard with splayed feet which matched the table and chairs he had already bought he said to Mother 'I bought this for you'. He was half right. Mother had a new cupboard through which to exercise her hoarding instincts. Soon after it arrived it so full that retrieving anything safely from inside was difficult. For the two front doors to open out all the furniture in front of it had to be folded down or pushed out of the way. Then, when the doors opened the contents were bunged so tight that retrieving what you wanted was unsafe and took several times longer than you wanted. Between the taking what was in there out to find what they were looking for, and returning every thing the searcher had to go through, being that 'tidy' whilst having so much stuff seemed exhausting.

And then there was the number of pairs of shoes, which for having nowhere better for them to go, were pushed underneath the sideboard and became hard to find. I remember very well dad's panic when he had an early evening union meeting to attend where there was going to be an important vote, on a strike or a wage rise, and his shoes were deep underneath the sideboard and none of us knew how they got there or how to retrieve them. The image he presented of anxiety, anger and impotence was a picture to behold. He was close to swearing at us before he left. But he still got to his meeting on time. And more importantly for him he got to to the pub after.

One purpose for this large item of furniture was to help him show off his new wealth to his brothers and sisters. My sister and I rarely saw them. But we knew that they were arriving when the newspapers that were most recently acquired were hastily put under the seat cushions of armchairs, and other short term tidying up activities went on. Next thing we knew we would being bundled out of the house because dad wanted the house to himself. There was a proper place for newspapers, in the porch where when they reach a pile three foot high they were given to the local chip shop at the top of the street who used them to wrap the food they sold in. That was recycling 1960's style.

There was practical reason for keeping us apart from his relatives, with the new large items of furniture to show off with there was less space in the living room to invite people in to share his signs of wealth. The signs of wealth themselves took up much of the room. But as Mother herded herself, my sister, and I, out well before his relatives arrived we were usually went in the direction of the town where there was always something more for Mother to do. There was certainly nothing else we could do in the house when dad liked to keep his life rather like his relatives, separate from us.

The addition of the new furniture had an added personal effect on me. The more space that the new furniture took up in the living room, the smaller the amount of free space left. The sideboard fitted to right of the chimney breast, between the other end of the sideboard and the back wall there was a small bureau for the papers and accounts to run the house. The dinner table was nearly always set for four people. Dad's armchair was very close to both the sideboard and the high backed chairs which sat in around the table to eat. When all four of us ate I did not have a proper chair. I had to get in my place at the table first. To do this I had to go the table, pull out the two upright chairs from the table which backed onto dad's armchair, pull the chairs back in around me as I went forward, squeeze myself between the corner of the table and the sideboard, and go to sit on the piano stool which passed for a sowing box which backed up against the bureau. The main base that supported the table would be close against my knees. Then dad could get in second and sit on the high backed chair nearest me, my sister would get in third on a high back chair next to him. Mother served us all and served herself and sat down last. We used to say grace at meals but we said it by rote rather than conviction. Meal times were like both of the episodes in Alice In Wonderland where Alice changed her size due to what she had ingested at once. I was eating, I was definitely growing too small for the space I was  being squeezed into, but equally the furniture had grown even more, relative to me, than I had. Between the furniture and myself there was no more space, and I was still growing. The room was all furniture no room until in the end I felt absolutely small and trapped. And my family approved of this set up.

In spite of being hemmed in at the table I attempted some semblance of civility. One lunch time Mother had plated the food in the kitchen and mumbled a grace at the table as we all sat and ate. Without thinking through what might happen I asked dad a question I did not know the answer to and wanted to know what he thought. He was very good at being vague, but he was at the table now and unable to escape.

I asked dad how to deal with bullies in the school playground. His reply was short, 'Hit them before they hit you.'. I could not process what he said. I did not have a trigger mind and could not imagine the sort of foresight that recognised bullying before it gathered force and set me up as it's target. The only example I knew of dad hitting anybody was when he had attempted to strangle Mother not two feet from where we were sat, cramped around the table some time before the sideboard had arrived. If dad was right about being bullied and hitting out first then I could not see Mother as a bully, she had spoken, maybe shouted a little but he had hit her first as far as I remembered. Even if she he had hit him, then he had hit her much more violently back. So who was the bully? This was certainly a small and uncomfortable playground that I was trapped in. And I would have liked a teacher, even an ineffectual and weak teacher who could say something that was logical, and not arbitrary.  Whatever dad meant I would have got clearer answers from our red top paper of choice, 'The Daily Mirror'.

The clearest arguments that we ever presented to each other came though how we labelled each others' behaviour. When adults were angry their anger was not a sulk or a strop, simply because of they were grown ups. When children were angry their anger was wrong because they had no right to be angry; they were dependants. They were small people who should be grateful for being kept and not think for themselves because thinking was the job of the adult, particularly when it involved controlling or spending money. That said, my parents preferred for us to appear to be happier children for their own ease of mind. and to minimise the amount of work they had to do to keep a family together and under one roof, whilst sentimentally saying that we children were full of cupboard love.

When I felt angry I could not put it into words or actions. I might be angry at somebody my own age but my parents had taught me that I could never be angry with them and if I could not be angry with them, then I could not be angry with anyone else, except perhaps myself, either.  So my jaw and gums would tense up from the nerves and defensiveness that I felt when I felt anger. I still get this sensation as an adult, though less often. The anger seemed to freeze in my lower jaw and gums. It was normal for children when they felt angry and unable to express it any other way to stick their bottom lip out. It was also normal for many parents to say 'If you stick that lip out any further somebody will sit on it', thus both acknowledging and avoiding the anger simultaneously, in particular avoiding the cause of it and something was sitting on the lip-anger. 

There were two adult variations on the tense jaw/stuck out lip that I knew as a child. The first variant was shouting and it was done mostly by mother to us children when we were clearly in the wrong. The other response was domestic violence-one person hitting/bullying another and it went from straight from dad to Mother, never in the other direction. In both the feeling went from the brain, straight into the voice or hands and it froze the space around wherever it landed. When dad tried to strangle Mother she was shoulder height to him, this gave him a leverage over her. However strong she was, she would quickly submit. The domestic violence always happened seemingly with no preamble. After it had passed we never dared look back to discover how or why so much unhappiness had accumulated and exploded in front of us. And we had no idea how long the half-life/natural decay rate of the anger was after it was over, whilst in any polite proximity to each other. For me it was decades before I could undo the anger that I had ingested with witnessing what I did.

One reason it took decades for me to stop my parents going to war with each other in  my head was their insistence on outward politeness. As children my sister and I were taught to say 'Please' and 'Thank you' to everything the adults said we should say those words for, and to defer utterly to every adult we knew, to the point where the refusal of a thing, for even the best of reasons, became impossible. But our parents never said 'Please' or 'Thank you' to each other in our earshot, and open apologies were like hens teeth.

The mask of 'good manners at all times' was poisonous, but when I learnt something less poisonous and said 'I want... ' as if I might have a right to the thing asked for then the response was ''I want' never gets' which of course made me want more and be forced even more to say 'Please' and Thank you', because I was not allowed to not want either. Not wanting what adults wanted for me would be seen as sulking.  

Much later, as a teenager and well beyond I could observe how in matters of personal, sexual consent towards them many men seemed to take the word 'No' to mean 'Yes', and the word 'Yes' to mean 'Yes right now please', as if there was no possible refusal of them that they felt any duty to listen to and obey. 

I experienced this personally. Maybe it was the overfilled space of the parental house that we all lived in that first made the reasonable refusal of unsuitable gifts impossible. Maybe it was the custom of deference that made our lives seem full-but full of cheapness, but the more often that I said 'Please' and 'Thank you' as a child, and accepted the rules where I was meant to not think, nor to speak until spoken to, and then only say back what who had spoken to me implied I should say, therein lay the foundation for being further bullied in school and for a long term future passivity that very much left depressed, and well out of sync with those around me.  

Find Chapter 6 here 

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.