Joining the Dance

In tough times, isn’t it a comfort that there are loads of wise sayings out there to help me get through. No, it isn’t. Wise sayings are just one line fairytales designed to keep us from rebellion. I’m a woman on the edge – but wait – ‘What does not kill us makes us stronger’. Oh, that’s fine then.

In employment, in addition to company slogans that are wise sayings in disguise (see above), we are offered comfort from codes of behaviour. Elaborate dances to the tune of authority structures, customs, and values. Few of these are explicit, and a new team member is pretty much set up to trip over and get bruised. The jobs that I’ve lasted in have been the ones I’ve been able to pitch in quickly and prance about laughing until I’ve worked out what everyone else is up to and where I fit in. In those jobs I’ve enjoyed the rhythm, so not knowing the dance hasn’t mattered. I shared in my colleagues’ common joys and trials. This is the way I felt about my first job in Mr Leatherbrother’s (Mr Lee to staff) chippie when I was thirteen. I had a sixth sense about when the teapot was about to run dry, could squeeze between the summer crowds with a pile of crocks in one hand and a rag in the other. I loved the boss and he loved me, especially when I burned the meal of pigs’ trotters that his ex-wife had set on the boil in the back kitchen.  I loved washing up with the boss’s son to Dexy’s Midnight Runners. He was the only black child I knew in Cornwall that was as white as Princess Diana’s wedding dress in 1981, and the only adopted child too. We compared notes about life and disagreed in a good-natured way on everything bar Genome. Most of all, I loved the women who served in the shop, their humour, their hard work, their pragmatism, the way they made allowances for my age but not many and not for long. I loved their stories about their husbands, gossip about their children, their moral values, the liveliness and life in them. One day when I was away at college, Mr Lee did what he had always talked of doing and sold up to retire. I returned to find a clothes shop in place of the chippie over the road from the museum. It was as though I had come home to find that my family had been wiped out by the ravages of an earthquake. I grieved until I found them. The women had set up a refugee camp working at the bakery on the front street, Mr Lee had gone back to Yorkshire after his son had run away having robbed the old man by climbing in over the roof at night. It was a scandal over a saffron bun.

If I fitted in at Mr Lee’s, I did the opposite at the supermarket. Aged sixteen, I had been tempted by the better pay and hours (I was developing a cider-based social life). I was on the checkouts covering the breaks of the other girls. In the time before scanning checkouts, tills were a beige coated cast iron calculator. The task was to find the price label on the item then copy it into the machine by pressing the heavy square keys. After finishing the number it was necessary to depress a bar at the side of the keypad with the edge of the hand, making the till add up. It was all set up for right handed people, and this made me slower and clumsier than average. I never got to know anybody in the subsidised canteen where people chatted and smoked, looking at me with suspicion as I sat alone. Neither did I learn the numerous rules of conduct. I felt bullied by the supervisors who seemed to catch me out in the transgressions routinely overlooked in everyone else. The other checkout girls (the manager had his own policy of employing only pretty young girls, he told us so on our first day along with the fire drill was ‘wear make-up but not too much, tie your hear up nicely and smile’) were all a bit older than me, and wouldn’t let me adjust their seats while they were on their breaks so I was always uncomfortable and sore. I bit back the tears threatening to smudge my blue eyeshadow as the supers ostentatiously re-calculated the value of a trolley of shopping that I had put through, finding me 2p in the wrong. During afternoon tea-break on my sixth day, I walked out, telling no one that I wouldn’t be back, and leaving my overalls by the door of the personnel office. I never went back for my 98p per hour wages and no one ever called to check that I hadn’t been abducted by aliens.

When I fell into learning disability work, mostly by accident, I felt like I already knew the dance of the job. Falling out of it was more about tiredness and ill health than any disenchantment with the tune. Last year, I began mental health nursing with caution about how I would find it. It went well on the last placement, like coming home. It was imperfect, and there were trips and bruises, but I never wanted to walk away. They warn students every placement is different, and that some are difficult. Student nurses have to be exposed to a range of experience so the placements are allocated by a mysterious process to which I’m not privy. Given this, I was certain to be given at least one placement that I wouldn’t have selected. I’m all grown up now though, experienced in the ways of the staffroom, powerful in the way that I thought those middle aged women at Mr Lee’s to be. I ought to be able to join the dance anywhere. And yet, it’s the end of the first week and I have the same feelings of the sixteen year old who dumped the uniform and made a break for the fresh air.

Don’t get me wrong, it is as one of the nurses so aptly put it, a good-hearted place. Adequate or more than so in every respect. It turns out (and why would it not) that people with dementia act in the style of people with severe to profound learning disabilities with life limiting conditions. The staff are people of kindly and efficient nature, doing all they can for people with warmth and affection. There’s a good staffroom, rest breaks and tolerable hours. People have been pleasant to me. It should feel right but something is amiss in the dance between me and this place. I have the wrong shoes, the well worn trainers that encourage people to learn to do all they can, to battle their disabilities, find new pleasures, live to the full. The footwear to compliment this placement’s tune might be slippers in which to sleep out the long last afternoons. I came unprepared by my Nan, now one hundred and a half, who said this last week after telling me her age as she says every time ‘and I want to live’. She has moved into her living room now, unable to manage the stairs but otherwise unchanged. On my first day of placement, a member staff introduced the service by explaining that she thought of it as offering mainly terminal care. This was echoed by a service user who seemed cheerful as she said she was here waiting to die. She laughed at my shock and changed the topic for me. And so I learned a little more about kindness.

One week down, seven to go. There’s no Mr Lee to go back to, so I’m going to have to make it to the end of the tune all be it with bruises. After all, ‘what can’t be cured must be endured’. Oh.