Taking Care 1 (ii)

The home, Remus Lodge, was a large Victorian house on the corner of a road, just up from the lights at the main junction in the town.  It was five minutes walk from my new apartment, and the route took me past the small council estate where mum lived.  From the rear of the house, I could see across the gardens to the back of mum's bungalow.  It all felt reassuring and comforting in that way - a positive omen.  I could call in on her each evening on my way home, and know she was close by.  These were both important things for me.  Of all the helping hands I'd had over the years, hers were the ones that had been there the most.  Her own health hadn't been good, either.  Then in her late sixties, she was still active and independent.  But she'd had some rough times in recent years.  So, as she'd always been there for me, I could be around for her if needed.  It felt like some pieces finally falling into place at the right time with home and work, and life generally.

 

       When I got to the house, the door was opened by a young, blonde-haired lad with a very pronounced outward squint.

       "Hello," he said, then grinned and shook his head vigorously.

       "Hello."

       I wasn't sure what else to say.  Then a tall, gangly, crop-haired man loomed up behind him.  In his forties, I guessed.  He put his hand on the lad's shoulder and gave him a gentle pull.

       "Come on, Del.  Let this fellah in."

       I wasn't entirely sure if either of them were staff or residents.  The older man seemed a little twitchy, too.

       "Morning, I'm..."

       "It's alright, Will, I know who you are," the older man said, as the other disappeared back inside.  "Come for the interview."

       "Yes."  I held up my hand and he put his own inside it.  It wasn't quite a shake.  No pressure there or anything.  Dad had always told me to judge a man by the strength of his handshake.  This was more like squeezing a fish. I didn't pay any mind to it.

       "Come through," he said.

       He led me along the hallway towards a side door.  I noticed faces peeping out at me from an open door opposite, someone standing on the first floor landing looking down the stairs at me, figures lurking at the end of the hall (including Del who'd opened the door), from where kitchen sounds were coming: a radio, clattering cutlery, loud voices.  It was a bit unsettling.  I'd never much liked being looked at, or being the centre of attention that way.  It took me back to the playground at school.  But I realised I should have expected it.  I was the novelty for that day.  And I knew, too, that these people were always the ones being gawped at in public.  So perhaps it was good to get a reminder of how it felt.  The smell caught me, too - as it probably did to anyone who didn't smell it every day.  It made me think of every one of the various homes dad had been in during the final years of his life.  Cooked food. Laundered clothes. And a kind of mustiness or earthiness that wasn't entirely unpleasant: floors mopped with a trade-standard cleaner, perhaps, with just faint, underlying tinges of something else. Damp cloths, maybe.  Toilets.

       The room I was led into was brightly-lit, and every inch of the wall space was taken up with shelves of files and books, planners, cabinets.  In the middle,  commanding most of the floor space, were two large work stations pushed together to make a kind of clerical island, swamped with the usual flotsam and jetsam: heaps of papers, filing trays, computer paraphernalia, coffee mugs, sweet tins, nests of pens.  One obviously belonged to the man who'd let me in.  At the other was seated - moored might be a better way to put it: she seemed crammed into place, with no clear exit route - a large, grey-haired woman wearing heavy-framed bottle-bottom glasses and a crisp white blouse, over the front of which hung a gold crucifix the size of a hand.  That immediately caught my attention - for the wrong reason.  The last person I'd worked with who wore a crucifix of similar size and heft had been such an horrendous bully that I'd ended up going sick from the job and leaving: a real foot-stamping, shouty-voiced, ill-tempered harridan.  It almost made me think she used her religious beliefs (she was, actually, a Bible-quoting evangelical Christian) as some kind of exoneration for her behaviour. Maybe the experience had made me hyper-sensitive, though.  I needed to set those judgments aside. 

       Anyway, this woman turned and smiled at me, and a genuine-enough-seeming smile it was.

       "This is Andrea Whelan," said the man.  "She's the manager of the home."

       She shook my hand firmly, half-rising from her chair.  Promising again.

       "You've met Malcolm, then," she said.  There was no mistaking her strong Ulster accent. 

       I turned to the man again, my hand still out.  He took it again, chuckling.

       "We've already done this.  We're going to get people talking if we're not careful, all this hand-holding."

       They both laughed and sat down.  Andrea gestured to me to pull up a chair.

       "You might be many things," she said to Malcolm, grinning. 

       She left it there, so the blanks could be filled in.  It didn't take a lot, really.  I could see a folded copy of The Sun on his desk, and an orange puffer jacket hanging on the rack behind him with McLaren Formula 1 Team emblazoned across the back.  The tea mug on his mouse mat showed a snarling cartoon football player, with the caption  No helmet No pads Just balls.  He couldn't really advertise his alpha credentials more strongly if he tried.

       And I wondered what their first-sight assessment of me was.  Tall, thin, quietly-spoken, always self-consciously awkward in situations like this.  Maybe they thought I was one of the 'things' that Malcolm was so obviously not.  Not that it bothered me.  Did it matter? 

       Malcolm must have noticed the look on my face.

       "It's alright, Will.  We have a laugh and a joke here.  We don't stand on ceremony to political correctness, don't worry."

       Don't worry. 

       Hm.

       I'd spent several years working in a wholefood shop, where most of the staff were switched-on with that kind of thing.  It was a congenial environment.  Then, in my current job, I worked in the other extreme of anaerobic conservatism.  It was one of the reasons I wanted out.  But I still liked to try to get along with people, whoever they were, and aside from all that clutter.  Take away all the labels and assumptions: people were people.  It takes all sorts.  There's good and bad in all, and I was no spotless saint.  You have to find a common way.  So I went along with the flow of it.

       They both picked up copies of my application and glanced through it.

       "Well, thanks for applying and coming along," Andrea said at length.  "Your application is interesting, and you've obviously done a lot of things.  But no experience at all with care work."

       "No, not yet."

       "That's okay," she said.

       Malcolm pitched in.  "We prefer to have people like yourself, who've not done it before.  You don't bring old ideas in with you.  That means we don't have to get rid of those and can start you from scratch.  We can train you in the right way to do the job.  We've had too many people over the years who come in and want to change stuff.  But we run a tight ship here.  It all works.  So, like they say... if it ain't broke, why try to fix it?"

       "Yes," said Andrea.  "You'll get full on-the-job training.  We've got our own trainers who come down, and you'll have the opportunity to take an NVQ in due course.  But most of what you'll learn is on-the-job, working with experienced staff.  In the role you've applied for, you won't need to do in-house things like getting people up.  But you'll still need to learn about their conditions, medications, and so on.  And you'll need to do toileting stuff, like changing incontinence pads.  Will that be a problem for you?"

       "No." 

       It was daunting, if I was honest.  But I'd cross that bridge when it came. 

       "I'm happy to learn whatever I need to do."

       "Good."

       Malcolm then took over and gave me a brief introduction to the home and the company behind it.

       "The owner is a retired investment banker called Phillip Chapple.  Made his money and decided to start up Chapple-Windsor Care in 1995.  They've got around fifty homes now in southern England.  All adults with learning disabilities, so all ages from eighteen upwards.  We've got fourteen residents here.  Eleven men and three women.  The youngest is Derek, who you just met.  He's nineteen.  The oldest is a chap called Richard, who's in his fifties.  Quite a mixed group, then."

       Andrea cleared her throat.  "We've got a staff team of sixteen now, full and part-time, plus a domestic-stroke-cook, myself, and Malcolm who's the deputy.  Some of the residents do college courses, so we've got someone who comes in part-time to take them there.  The position you've applied for is unique because of the hours.  Thandie, who does it at the minute, has been with us for three years.  But she's returning to her home in Nigeria to care for her sick mother, so that's how the vacancy's come up.  Basically, you'll come in at nine every weekday and take six residents to our Skills Centre near Sittingbourne, which they share every day with staff and residents from two other homes in the group.  Their activities are all timetabled.  There's obviously a mix of abilities.  Some can do a lot for themselves, others will need more support.  A lot of it is quite basic stuff, really.  Daily living skills, like washing their hands, tying their shoelaces, tidying up.  They have trips out, too.  They go to crazy golf.  They go shopping.  All that kind of thing.  Then they get brought back here for about four-thirty, when you give staff a handover before finishing.  Okay with that?"

       "Yes," I said.

       There was a pause as they looked at my application again.  They could see, obviously, that I'd had a lot of jobs since leaving school.  Farm work, sales, clerical work, driving, shop work, manual labouring.  Over thirty already in total.  I was convinced that would go against me - that they'd see it as lack of staying-power or something.  I was waiting for that question about them all.  I looked at the expressions on their faces, waiting for one of them to shake their head or laugh or something.  I could feel the anxiety swelling like a balloon inside me.

       But then Andrea put my application to one side, as if it no longer interested her, and turned to look directly at me.

       "So... why do you want to work in care?" she asked.

 

       The interview took almost an hour - probably the longest job interview I'd ever had.  I hadn't really rehearsed any of my answers, and answered their questions as they came to me - honestly.  If I didn't know anything, I said so.  In the end, though, I think it was that first question that had been the most important, and the one that had taken the longest to answer.  Again, I just said what I wanted to say rather than what I thought they wanted to hear - though I hoped the two would match up.  Afterwards, Malcolm showed me out again.

     "We'll be in touch," he said, shutting the door behind me.

     It sounded disdainful, so I didn't expect to hear any more.

(continued) https://www.abctales.com/story/harryc/taking-care-2