6.5 Work etc

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more, see right.

In spite of Sam’s words, I felt that whatever strength I had arose from Sam’s kindness to me, from her holding her hand out to me on the night I first met her. She’d shown me that I’d not so much lost Frog as gained a friend.
    All through her relationship with Frog she’d only wanted to help. I knew that both from what I saw of her and from what Frog had said.
    ‘I didn’t have anyone else to talk to,’ he said. ‘I knew we needed help and I didn’t know where else to find it.’
    I supposed that was a problem for men. They didn’t have friends they could talk to about emotional problems. They turned to women for that.
    What’s more, Sam had an AIDS test before she and Frog started having sex together. That meant a lot to me because I knew how difficult and frightening it must have been.
    Nor had either of them told anybody about their relationship before Frog told me.
    And once he did tell me, he was kind to me – more so than he had been before.
    So my strength – such as it was - came from him too.

In some ways, Sam was uncertain of her sexual identity. She’d had a fling with another woman at some time in her past but hadn’t pursued it. As a child she’d shadowed her father rather than her mother, learning practical jobs from him. She and Frog, for instance, had worked on her car together. She didn’t model herself on the female role, such as the one I’d been brought up on – where your life was centred on being beautiful for men and being a ‘wife’.
    Sam’s way of being was a revelation to me and I saw how much of a doormat I’d been. I resolved never to be a doormat again.

As well as being academic, Sam was creative - she painted and she wrote – and this awoke creativity in me. The Bohemian life had always held such attraction for me – it was so romantic - and secretly, deep down, I’d always wanted to be an artist of some kind myself. That was another of the parts of me that I’d buried because I knew it was unacceptable to my conventional parents. I now started to un-bury it.
    I followed up my small book on the folklore of Dartmoor with a bigger book on macabre stories from Devon as a whole. I was to take the photographs for the book as well as writing the copy, and I had a wonderful time travelling all over the county in my little Mini, researching the stories with my camera and notebook.

I was learning to love Devon. The people were kind – kinder than they were in London and the Home Counties – and their lives didn’t revolve around careers and money. Barter was the order of the day, and communities were tight. I met many people when I was out walking with Brindle (our labrador/springer cross), both other walkers and people in cars. It was perfectly normal – indeed, expected - to stop your car and chat if you passed someone in the lanes whether they were walking or driving and whether you knew them or not, and you never passed a person on the footpaths with saying at least hello.
    Rural Devon at the time was a strange mixture of farmers and artists and I began to feel that I fitted right in, something I’d only ever done before in Australia.
    Lindeman Island in Australia had been my golden time and I still hankered after it.
    ‘It wasn’t real life,’ said Frog, ‘but it showed you what life could be like.’
    I thought that was a valid assessment.

Meanwhile, even bigger changes were happening in Frog’s life.
    He’d finally fallen out with the university. They’d always objected to his erratic timekeeping, his refusal to wear a technician's white coat and his general uncontrollability. He objected to the hierarchy – the old-fashioned distinction between academics and technicians - and the stuffy people.
    A new law that required every piece of electrical equipment to be tested every year was the final straw. The university decided – much against Frog’s wishes – that he was the person to carry out this task. It was mind-numbingly boring (I helped him with it once, but never again) and it took over from all the parts of the job he loved – coaxing aged equipment back to life, inventing new set-ups for experiments.
    Eventually, by more or less mutual agreement, he left.
    He was now self-employed, repairing instruments one day a week for a music shop in Exeter and combining this with other jobs both regular and one-off.
    To start with, he was completely lost, having been salaried almost without a break since leaving school twenty-five years earlier. Luckily, with my self-employed experience I was able to help him structure his days and list tasks and goals.
    That was to set a pattern. With his dyslexic brain he worked by instinct (or whim). He both appreciated my lists and sabotaged them by adding new items like ‘Smile’ or ‘Have fun’ - to my lists and well as the ones I'd drawn up for him.
    So it was good for me too!
    I never let him leave on errands without something written on a piece of paper even if he was only going out to do one thing as he was more than liable to forget it or be distracted. Sometimes he even forgot the piece of paper. Drat. Sometimes, I even sympathised with the uni. I called him ‘flibbertigibbet brain’. He called me ‘daft’.
    He did willingly consult me on spellings however, using me as a walking dictionary and often ringing me from work to find out how a word was spelt.
    The university tried to replace Frog but no one came close to his genius with ailing technology and his deep historical knowledge of the department’s equipment, and in the end they invited him back. He agreed to two days a week, freelance – an unheard-of concession at the university.

At DevonAir, the local independent radio station, he was now doing two programmes a week: a rock programme, and a ‘Frog Prog’ where he played whatever he wanted - pop, rock, classical, folk, country, jazz, words. I kept encouraging him to try and take the ‘Frog Prog’ further and apply to national radio, but he was afraid of being curtailed and he didn’t have the necessary killer instinct. He was ambitious about his life – he wanted to make the most of it – but he wasn’t ambitious in a conventional sense, in the sense of status, money and so on.
    DevonAir was taken over by London’s Capital Radio and one Saturday night the head of DevonAir was entertaining the head of Capital.
    ‘You must listen to this,’ he said, turning on a ‘Frog Prog’. ‘No one else is doing anything like it.’
    Frog was playing some particularly obscure and gruesome track – jazz, I think.
    ‘I’m not surprised,’ said the head of Capital.
    So Frog lost his jobs at DevonAir too.

He carried on doing the ‘Frog Prog’ on the university radio however, and also managed to persuade the university to pay him for all the technical work he did for the student station. Previously, when he was working full time in the science department, this had been done in the university’s time and was another of their bones of contention with him.
   It was ironic that he now had life his way in both areas.
   He was lucky like that.

With two of us working from home, we needed more space. I needed a study and Frog needed a music room, somewhere to store his enormous and ever-growing collections of vintage hi-fi and records, not to mention his tools and machines.
    We began to think about expanding – in more ways than one.

To be continued . . .