In Ian’s own words:
I have, I think, become a dinosaur with a great future behind me.
Born in what used to be, sixty and more years ago, the deep-sea fishing town of Grimsby, in England, home was a two-up two-down terrace. On the approach of the government’s deliberate destruction of the fishing industry my father made a dramatic career change, and when I was six months old we decamped to Hong Kong, just in time for the tail-end of what was called the “colonial era”. Flying there took three days on a Bristol Britannia turbo-prop airliner (no night-flying). Returning to England some years later took three weeks on the SS Oriana via the Suez Canal, this being the days of still-elegant ocean liners. I began life speaking only Cantonese and a little pidgin English.
We lived for a time on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Home there was for the most part a croft in the middle of nowhere (which is often the best place to be). The local village school had twenty pupils of all ages, one classroom, one teacher, and lunch arrived each day in warm tin containers in a blue Morris Minor van. Often it was salt herring and boiled potatoes. Summers meant twelve glorious weeks off school, winters meant snow that could drift as high as the windows. We painted our front door bright orange in order to have something to aim for in poor weather. We dug and stacked peat for winter fuel – being the only Sassenachs about we didn’t want to let the side down for England.
At age ten years home was back in England again but this time inside a friend’s open-to-the-public zoo while a house while being built for us – a delightfully ramshackle shack between the brown bears and the howler monkeys. The public used to peer in through the windows at us. I was allowed to run free the year, learning far more in the zoo than I ever would have at the little local village school. My days were spent roaming in the deer woods, or watching the penguins, or running – on the outside of the enclosure – with the wolves. My instructions were to be home by dusk each day and without serious bite-marks.
In adult life I reduced the range and frequency of the home moves, bouncing only between Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Norfolk and Cheshire, all in England. I’ve worked for the British Civil Service, for some very large computer companies with very short acronyms, and entirely for myself in several disparate guises. I was so incredibly successful at running my own businesses that I joined the entire globe in 2008 in going personally bankrupt, appearing in County Court and about a week later watching my car and valuables being driven away by the Official Receiver’s men dressed in their neat brown warehouse-coats. It was an interesting experience, and I’ve eschewed the rat-race and working “for the man” ever since. We’re obviously not meant to be together. Home after that for some years was a lovely caravan buried deep in a busy hedgerow in darkest Lincolnshire.
By dint of budgeting the like of which has not been seen since they buried Mr Scrooge I live now on my beloved 57’ narrowboat, chugging along on England’s canal network, enjoying rural life, taking long early-morning walks and oft being chased by hungry wildlife. Where else could a chap come face to face with a stampeding badger at three in the morning, or wake up to belligerent sheep peering in the windows, spoiling for a fight?
I knew from age ten years that I was entirely, unequivocally homosexual. At twelve I woke up completely, and decided that no-one else need know – until I was safely earning my own money. Age twelve for me was just five years beyond partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, and the age of consent was to remain punitive for another three decades. We homosexuals were not allowed (openly) in the Armed Forces or in many other careers, and we “enjoyed” the vibrant presence of Mary Whitehouse, The Sun “newspaper” and a judiciary still rooted in terms of our somehow scaring the horses and stopping the hens from laying.
At age eighteen when I told my parents the happy news they both cried, left the house for a while, then recovered themselves and told me that on no account were the neighbours or my aged Aunt to find out, and that the matter was not to be mentioned ever again. With one exception – my mother telling me to not bring my partner to a family event – just two words, one of them negative – it never was mentioned again. My non-heterosexuality was something that my parents, products of a very much earlier generation, could not understand. Happily I think that I managed to make friends and “de-offend” them, just before their deaths twenty and twenty-five years ago, albeit still only with a very anodyne expression of my character. I still miss both of them terribly.
I am currently single but haven’t been so for more than half of my adult life. As lovers and even just friends go, I am confident that I was in almost all respects quite utterly awful. This may likely be due to some innate emotional incompetence on my part, but it surely won’t have been helped any by growing up constantly on the move and then continuing that pattern in adult life. My sincere apologies go to all of the gorgeous folk to whom I’ve been a puzzling (or perhaps not so puzzling) total disappointment!
As an adult I’ve been out and in plain view, and folk could like it or they could jog on. I have been very lucky with my circumstances and with the reactions in that regard. Speaking only of England, after decades of hard work by many, homosexuality has become a very ordinary thing. “Gay” though has become something almost unrecognisable to me, oddly demanding and strangely constricting. There is no plain, old-fashioned, simple ‘H’ in ‘LGBTQQIP2SAA+’
Where once you could freely be anything you wanted and still be part of the “Us and Them” dichotomy, now you may only be “non-mainstream” under the strict aegis of the very vocal, self-elected, media-recognised but nebulous “Gay HQ” overlords. Fit in with the new rules or be “cancelled”. I seriously doubt that I am alone in intensely disliking the “rainbow flag” and the heavily-laden, long, long gravy-train thundering behind it. Certainly I don’t feel much included in the modern hullabaloo, quite the opposite.
Did we fight – in England at least; I am no expert in other people’s local circumstances – to neuter one relatively simple tyranny during the nineteen-seventies, eighties and nineties only to exchange it for another, far more complicated?
Huge numbers in the world are, of course, still fighting for those very basic rights that we in England, for the moment at least, take for granted – which is why I said I’ve been very lucky in my circumstances, and speak only for my privileged little puddle of life here. It’s important that we all tell our story; in my experience heterosexual people still, generally, find it difficult to even conceive of the difficulties that a life lived in a society built entirely for the convenience of heterosexual inclinations can present.
Maybe this makes me sound like a real old grouch, but honestly I’m not. Even we dinosaurs can be happily and contentedly outré, at least so on our own territory…
This is just my opinion, my story. Other opinions, other stories are available. 🙂
