Social work saved me, but my questions didn’t disappear: Using creative writing to heal

It was the end of the 1970s, Thatcher stood on the cusp of her first term and the country was getting over the winter of discontent, widespread strikes having left bodies unburied and rubbish strewn on the streets. Unemployment was through the roof and you couldn’t buy a job, but I had a good summer – trotting down to the dole with my UB40; spending my days sunbathing in King George’s Park. I’d failed miserably in my exams, mainly because I’d wagged most of the previous 2 years, but, even so, I decided to go back and join sixth form. That lasted 4 weeks until I walked out after the deputy headmistress told me I still had to call her Miss. Sod that. They could stuff it, which is pretty much what I told them.

Next, a YOP scheme - six months slave labour on a state-sponsored programme designed to drag kids off the street. A wood yard with blokes mesmerised by page 3 of the Sun, playing cards; bragging about the number of fingers they’d lost in the sawmill – battle scars that frightened the life out of me. I wore an ankle-length donkey jacket, strutted around with a flip-out ruler, and froze my nuts off in the yard, hauling timber up a concrete ramp to satisfy the orders. It wasn’t good enough. I was better than that. Turns out I wasn’t. They let me go. Wished me all the best for the future; said I’d be an asset once I’d found my true vocation.

I went back on the dole, but it wasn’t the same. All my mates had jobs, and I had a girlfriend who needed me to have more money than Mum could spare out of her pay packets. I stuck in an application to join the police cadets – more to please Mum than anything – and I got an interview, passed the entrance exam and they offered me a place. ‘We’re going to take a chance on you.’ Mum nearly burst. Set for life; fast-track to officer grade; a good pension. Except, it wasn’t. 18 months later I walked out. Told them to stuff it – my new catch-phrase. The reason, they made me go back to cadet camp – four weeks away from my girlfriend, the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with; a month of sleeping on duckboards, Welsh rain soaking my skin, PTIs screaming at me from dawn until dusk. They drove me home in a Land Rover and tore my warrant card up in front of me. I don’t think Mum ever recovered. And the girl I couldn’t bear to spend a month away from, we broke up 2 years later and I haven’t seen her for over forty years.

This start to my adult life typifies the left or right turn choices I’ve faced, mostly making the wrong decision. Reflection has taught me what I should have done, but it’s a lesson learned too late. Or maybe not. I’ve discovered, through fiction writing, that stories can be rewritten, gaps filled, new endings drawn and new lives created. All of this was to come later, but back then I was sick of the dole. Decent jobs were rare and me being clueless about what I wanted didn’t help. A searching of my head hit a brick wall, so I walked into a job centre and looked at the vacancy cards. To this day, I don’t know why it jumped out at me. A part-time care assistant post in a local old-folks care home. It changed my life and, eventually, led to a thirty-year plus career as a social worker. More importantly, it forced me to look at who I was, what had made me the human I’d become – it bubbled the consequences of my childhood to the surface of my conscious mind, something I’d never really thought about.

I was seven when Dad died.

That’s a sentence repeated on a loop across my whole existence. I said it to a counsellor back in the 1990s and my voice crackled – the emotion drawn after twenty-five years of being jammed inside. Social work studies exploded it to the surface at a point when I was ready to face it. My memories of Dad are vague. A man in pyjamas, ill; singing songs to me while he rested in bed. Everything else, I’ve created from family folklore and my own imagination. His death defined my life and created a fractured existence. It shaped my relationship with Mum, my brother, and it happened at a time when I was developing an awareness of the world and my connection with it and other people. It erased lots of things, not just a dad – family disappeared along with a disconnected mum. I became Mum’s little crutch – her sole reason for continuing to exist. She loved me, but over loved me, giving me a skewed perception of my place and how others would relate to me. I was a bit of an oddball – talking to clouds, trying to find the answer to where he was. ‘He’s gone to Jesus’ meant nothing to me as a child, but it placed a life after death possibility in my head, a chance to see him again, leading to a lot of my stories being set in the afterlife with people searching for answers.

Social work saved me, but my questions didn’t disappear – the search for answers went inward and story writing gave my imagination an outlet. Looking for a perfect family, a mum, a dad; putting characters with fractures into plots and watching them live or die, even when society doesn’t really want to know or understand their back story - for example, a serial killer created by trauma and abuse. I look at vulnerability from every point of life and beyond - such as people living in care homes, trying to make sense of their final chapter, but frail and exposed to the cruelties of institutions. Where possible, I return a humanity taken away or that was never recognised, but I never shy from the grit of experience.

Writing fiction brings a cathartic release to the wedge inside that seven-year-old boy. I know nothing about Dad’s life so I have to make it up. Hence, the story of his time in the Merchant Navy, travelling the world - fit and healthy, his future stretching ahead of him; and the impact of his death on my brother, who was ten years older than me and expected to become the man of the house. My fiction revisits lives ended abruptly or that were never really lived. Loss of identity; loss of self; loss of family; loss of relationships. These all figure as headline acts in my stories, but I try to restore a sense of living - like my orphaned great grandmother who at sixteen jumped on a narrowboat and travelled across the country to face a new beginning.

In the end, the narrative always comes back to that seven-year-old boy who never quite moved on; never shifted away from his dream-world. Maybe I never will, and my search for answers will continue.