Homecoming

Homecoming

I was raised in a small rural town with traditional values. The town was famous for its carrots, not because they were anything special but because there were so many of them. There was a big carrot processing factory smack in the centre of the high street, with its huge rust coloured corrugated iron shed and messy yard, and because of this the town never bothered to enter the local prettiest town contest, but we also never had to buy carrots. If you needed carrots, you foraged for them in the street gutters where they fell from the old flatbed trucks. The supermarket didn’t even bother to stock them anymore.

The other main industries were agriculture, by that I mean mainly carrot farming, working in the antiquated local shops and pubs or planting up assorted flowering baskets in the other local factory. This factory had new brick buildings and a gift shop at the front that did a roaring trade for Mother’s Day. Most people left school at 16 years old to work in the factories, and their families had lived here for generations. You soon learned not to talk about people behind their backs because the person you were talking to was most likely one of their cousins.

My mother had higher aspirations for her children. My father was a local town councillor and owed his own business, so apparently, we had to set an example. My brother and I weren’t allowed to wear jeans or trainers in case people mistakenly thought we lived on the council estate. This meant we both had an unfortunate amount of corduroy clothes as well as being the only children who wore duffle coats to school. On picture day I had to try and sleep in curlers the night before and got sent into school looking like a middle-aged woman. One year the embarrassment got too much, and I combed my hair flat with water from the girl’s bathroom. When she saw the pictures my mother called my father home early from work and beat me while we waited for him. I thought the pictures looked good for once, they didn’t. They still bought them but didn’t get any framed and put out on top of the piano that year.

Without fail several times a week, as we sat at the kitchen table doing our homework, my mother would tell us if we didn’t work hard enough, we would end up going to a comprehensive school and having to work in one of the factories. For years I would watch my friend’s parents and be confused because they didn’t seem lazy.

My mother also said, “if you want something bad enough and believe in yourself you can be anything you want to be.” It turned out that didn’t include being a lesbian.

When the local doctor reported to my parents, and as it happens the rest of town, that he had seen me being “inappropriate” with another girl while swimming at the local pits. It was hard to tell straight off how angry my mother was. She stood there silently for once with a red face, but it was that real hot summer that people still talked about decades later.

My father was much paler and keep pleading with me to tell him where they had gone wrong as parents before moving on to my general ingratitude for everything they had done for me, and how I was a wilful spiteful child. This was the same speech he gave every time I did something wrong but with an added level of despair and he was smoking a lot more than usual.

For the record “inappropriate” was lying next to another girl on a giant beach towel, drying off after swimming. She lay with her head nestled in my arms as we talked and laughed unaware of the scandal we were causing. That was the last time I was ever able to be oblivious to the reactions of people around me to public displays of affection.

When my mother finally spoke, it was very loud and through a clenched jaw. Mainly it was about how I had shamed the family and how could she be expected to go out shopping with everyone knowing what I was. She called me names I didn’t understand back then but I guessed from her tone they weren’t complimentary. I also guessed I wouldn’t be getting any supper.

The conversation, if you could call it that, continued for several hours. I sat looking contrite staring at the new shag pile carpet that had just been fitted. I nodded occasionally to show I acknowledged the seriousness of the situation, while my parents discussed what sort of professional help I needed. By the time mastermind started on TV it was decided I was to be packed off to school, and I finally got to escape to my room.

For the rest of the summer my mother took time off work to “look after me,” she gave me a long list of chores to do each day with the time allocated for each chore written next to it. By the time the holidays had ended the whole house smelled of bleach. My parents were quieter than usual, more subdued. My father came straight home from work in the evening and my mother cancelled the dinner party she had arranged to show off the new carpet.

Eventually I got to start at my new school, a girls school, which seemed to me to be a strange choice even at the time given the circumstances. It was over three hours away. It wasn’t a famous school where the staff had to be nice to you because mummy and daddy were rich, but a means-tested austere cruel place, where the girls banded together in solidarity and for comfort. During the holidays I mainly stayed with my aunt because she lived closer to the school, but my mother sent cards and birthday parcels and wrote each week on letterheaded paper, telling me all her news and each Sunday morning after chapel we had to sit quietly for an hour and write home. My letters home were rather short but polite.

I got to visit my parents and brother once or twice a year. Usually, I would catch the train to a nearby town and my father would collect me. The journey back to the house was always ten minutes of painful small talk about how much I had grown or my new hairstyle until I learnt to switch subjects to his latest new car, a topic he was more comfortable with. My mother was much more welcoming but still didn’t like me to linger on the doorstep too long. My brother would make hurtful comments and then claim he was joking, but he never was. I would stay for supper and lunch the next day before my father drove me back to the station. I slept in my old room which had been redecorated and was now called the guest bedroom. My mother liked that I had lost my thick rural accent and now pronounced my letter T’s and H’s, and always took the opportunity in the evening I stayed to ensure I remembered the importance of working hard at my lessons. Over time my pictures on the piano were replaced by new ones of my brother and the family dog.

Later I spent more time with friends during the holidays, they didn’t live in small towns, but big cities and I met musicians, poets and intellectuals. I smoked coloured cigarettes and wore jeans, I had walk on parts in movies and photographs of me at parties were published in trendy magazines. Fortunately, the magazines were not the sort to be stocked in my parent’s local newsagent and I left any details of enjoying myself out of my letters home. I did study though. I was the first in my family to go to university where according to my father I developed extremist left wing views. I also met my Rachael.

Rachael and I moved to the capital together when we graduated, she wrote for a feminist magazine, and I worked for a women’s charity. I had made it out of the small town into the real world, we were happy, fighting against the injustice of the world in our own ways.

Then it happened, two apartments, one town house, four new jobs, one commitment ceremony, one adorable son, too many protests and pickets to count, four committees, and one OBE later, I got the letter. I had been invited by the Chairman of the Town Council (My father) to switch on the town’s Christmas lights. The town now had a gay vicar who the ladies adored, and my parents had decided being a gay person was somehow fashionable now, and after all I was the first person in the town to have met the Queen and advised the Prime Minister. So here we were after persuasion from Rachael driving up from the city.

Bertie had eventually fallen asleep in his car seat, so Rachael had turned off the CD of nursery songs and was fiddling with the radio. We had both had busy days at work that day and it was the end of a full week. We had chatted some and sung songs with Bertie for the first half of the journey, but both fell silent the nearer we got to the town. My parents had never met Rachael or Bertie who was nearly two years old now, and despite of their apparent acceptance of my sexuality still called Rachael my friend and not my partner. Rachael had said she was excited for Bertie to finally meet his grandparents, but when I glanced over to her any trace of that excitement was gone and she looked anxious, so I gently squeezed her hand.

Once we regularly drove this journey after visiting my grandparents, on the way home my parents would fold down the back seats and make up a bed for my brother and me. We were meant to go to sleep but the bed was a sleeping bag on top of bare metal flooring so each time the car turned we slid into each other and the sides of the car. At first it was always funny, but it quickly became quite painful, and we spent a lot of the journey asking if we were nearly home, to which the answer always was “It won’t be long now.” We only knew we were nearly there when we reached the edge of town. There was a long pot-holed road lined with trees, so the shadows flickered quickly followed but the green lights of the plant factory that lit up the sky.

The plant factory had brick walls with windows at the very top of them where no one could see out. At night when the factory closed they turned on green lighting for the plants, and as children we would pretend that monsters lived in there. As I looked at my Rachael and then Bertie in the same green light I realised how right I once was. This town was full of monsters and the sad thing was they thought they were human.

I had brought a formal trouser suit to wear for the ceremony tomorrow and was going to wear it with my favourite LGBT Christmas jumper, after that we were meant to stay for another night and then if we could arrange it return in two months for a whole week to spend Christmas with my parents, but I had decided now to stay home at Christmas with family.