"My name is Martin Nicolson. I am 33 years old, I teach English at St Thomasâ, the same school I went to in Surbiton as a boy, to years 7-Upper Sixth. I started to suspect that I was gay towards the end of sixth form; Iâd had crushes on boys in my year but hadnât really broached the topic with anybody except Mr. Walton, a chemistry teacher and also a student support councillor. It wasnât the best environment at my high school for a gay boy. It wasnât until university that I met others who were comfortable identifying as gay that I started to feel more comfortable in my skin. It was the LGBT poetry nights that fired me up and made me a bit more proud, as well as giving me the impetus to call my parents and tell them, who were actually a good deal more supportive and nonchalant about the whole thing than I expected. I enjoyed some of the protest poetry but never really went in for the proper campaigning: it felt like something private that I didnât need to keep shouting once Iâd grown comfortable enough to say it to myself. I met James when doing my Teach First course, and he dropped out of it. Heâd done a journalism degree at the LSE and had drifted into teaching when he couldnât find writing work, but once he got his lucky break he went into journalism full time for the FT. We went for drinks a few times with the other would-be teachers and he was the life and soul of the party. He asked me if I wanted to go for drinks just us not long afterwards and we got together. smile emoticon
James ended up convincing me to rent this tiny place in Hackney with him which was nominally his but which we lived together in most of the week, with me commuting back out on London, the opposite way from everyone else, to teach at St Thomas'. That was a little financially and transportationally backwards, but we made it work. I thought weâd be able to take holidays up the Cotswolds when it wasnât term time but we really only made it out of London a couple of times together because his job didnât really allow for much of a break. We took a trip to Majorca together once though, that was lovely. Plenty of beach time.
The stress of Jamesâ job mounted after weâd been together just over a year, as well as the financial and commuting situation, and he decided we needed to take a break. I moved back to my parents' house in Surbiton, and even felt a little guilty that it was so much more convenient and close to work. Iâd already been staying there alone in the evenings sometimes because I was tired after work or because he was in a bad mood.
I was very shocked when he turned up in Surbiton one Saturday morning and said he wanted to talk to me. I asked him to come back that afternoon, and we had coffee in the cafĂŠ down the road and talked it over. He said that although he was stressed he did really appreciate having me around, and that he loved me and didnât want his work to be the reason we didnât work out. I agreed, but on the condition that we try to find somewhere to live that split the difference between our commutes as a solution to the transport problem.
Not long after that James started to get more and more sluggish and snappy, particularly when I left for work. Heâd cry and whine, and I began to feel like things were slipping back to how they were before we broke up, with him being too demanding on my time and resources. Eventually he got to the doctorâs, and they diagnosed him with depression. There was a lot of reading to be done after that I remember, to research it and find out how it could be treated. It is perfectly treatable, and we resolved to do our best with it, but it did kaput the flat hunt that we had going because I felt I didn't want to overload him. We ended up back in that quite dysfunctional situation as before, only now I couldnât back out of it, and I didnât feel like I could talk to him about it because he was the problem, or at least he was part of it. I wished I had Mr. Walton to talk to again. I won't say that caring for someone who is ill like that isn't hard: he was in a vulnerable place though, and I wasn't going to leave him in the lurch.
When I came home one Thursday night he wasnât there, and his downstairs neighbour Jenny told me sheâd heard a crash that afternoon and knocked to see if he was alright. When he wouldnât answer the door but she could hear the TV was still on she fetched the building manager who found him and called an ambulance. I went to the hospital but they refused to tell me what had happened except that they had him, because Iâm a Nicolson and his surname is Woodard. I felt really shitty and angry that that receptionist nurse wouldnât tell me - I had to call his parents and ask them to come down from two hours away by train. I was humiliated and upset because all they would tell me was âcritical conditionâ but they couldnât explain what that meant. That wait in the hospital made me feel really helpless. When his parents arrived the staff almost wouldnât let me in to see the doctor until they vouched for me, and then they took us into a side room and told us he was dead. Heâd had a heart attack and made it to the hospital but died sometime while I was in the waiting room. He wasnât especially unhealthy, I thought it was his smoking, but apparently it was genetic. John and Nancy stayed in the flat with me that night, I was on the sofa.
The next morning I went to work, though it was hardly a normal day of course. I put in my application for leave to the head.
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