LITMIR.BIZ

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to shout at me – but there always seemed to be at least one angry face glaring at me, or someone sniggering and sneering at something stupid I had said or done. That was why I was always hiding – behind the bookshelves in the library, in the wings on the stage, or in the avenue of trees, picking up stones where all the other kids playing in the playground couldn’t see me.

      I know now, after studying child development at college, that there are two types of socialisation: primary, which children are taught at home by their parents and other members of their family, and secondary, which is what they learn at school. Apparently, if a child hasn’t learned the first type, you can’t expect them to understand the second. I had a huge handicap already, due to the Asperger’s, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that no one had ever attempted to teach me to share or take turns with other people.

      When we lived in Cora’s flat, Mum and her friends talked, of course, but there were no conversations, and no one ever said please or thank you. If I wanted something, I simply tugged repeatedly on someone’s shirt or head-butted them until they gave it to me. But although they didn’t teach me anything that would have been useful to know before I was thrown into a classroom with a lot of other kids, they didn’t shout at me either, like everyone at school seemed to do.

      It was the shouting that really frightened me. And when I was frightened, I panicked. As a result, I spent quite a lot of my time sitting on a wooden chair in the corridor outside the head teacher’s office. Sometimes, I was in trouble because I had kicked off; more often, as I got a bit older, it was because I had walked out of the classroom with the intention of going home. I was always stopped by a teacher on those occasions, but I did escape several times when I waited until playtime and asked one of the older boys to give me a leg-up over the playground wall. When I got home, Mum would make me a sandwich and take me with her to the pub.

      I was always running away, from home as well as from school. On one occasion, when I was seven and Gavin’s family had moved to a house outside town, I cycled all the way there on my bike and told his parents that Mum had dropped me off at the corner of the street. Gavin’s grandad was a friend of Mum’s and he had driven me to Gavin’s new house a couple of times and then taken me home again afterwards, which is how I knew the way. Having an almost photographic memory is one of the more useful aspects of the Asperger syndrome, and I had memorised the route without even realising I was doing it. What I wasn’t so good at was understanding cause and effect or imagining how other people might react in particular situations, so I was more surprised than I should have been when Mum tracked me down and shouted at me.

      Although Mum was angry with me for cycling to Gavin’s house, she didn’t seem to mind when I ran away from school. What she did object to were all the phone calls asking her to go in to discuss what could be done about my unauthorised absences. Apparently, that was why she didn’t ever have a job: ‘It was your fault,’ she told me later. ‘How could I get a job when you didn’t ever stay in school for more than five minutes at a time?’

      When I was eight, we moved out of the house with the muddy bathroom and into a council house in the countryside. It was a nice house, with two bedrooms and a little garden with fields behind it – a palace compared with the place we had lived in before. But it was too far out of town for me to be able to travel to my old school. So I went to a new one, on a rundown council estate where the teachers were far better equipped to deal with kids with problems, like me. In fact, a lot of the kids at my new school were far worse off than I was, in one way or another. I was still ‘different’ though, and I still found it difficult to fit in.

      Although our house was owned by the council, it was on an estate of houses that were mostly privately owned. Our new neighbours weren’t friendly towards Mum and me, and although I did make some friends, they all lived on the council estate, where the school was, several streets away. When we lived in town, Mum’s friends used to drop in all the time, but they didn’t have cars or money for transport. So she was very lonely at the new house too. I think we both felt very isolated, just the two of us living on our own in the middle of nowhere. Things hadn’t been great before, with all the problems I had had at my previous school. After we moved to the countryside, they began to get a lot worse.

      It was probably the stress – of starting at a new school for me, and of the loneliness for Mum – that caused our arguments to intensify after we moved. Loneliness was almost certainly the reason why Mum’s excessive house cleaning became a full-blown obsession. She was constantly scrubbing, sweeping, vacuuming and decorating, touching up barely visible scratches on skirting boards or sanding down and repainting door frames whenever I knocked off even a flake of paint. Eventually, I became so paranoid about touching anything that I hated being in the house at all.

      Because I was unnerved and distressed by change of any kind and because I wanted to spend as little time as possible at home, I was even more anxious than I had always been to have a friend. That probably explains why I started to spend time with a rather unpleasant and unhappy boy called Kieran, who lived down the road. After a slow start, I was good at reading by the time I was eight. I was certainly much better than Kieran was and I used to go round to his house to read him stories. We always sat side by side in his bedroom when I was reading to him, and I would have my hand inside his trousers, touching him the way he told me to. I didn’t mind doing it; it seemed a small price to pay to have a friend, even one who wasn’t particularly nice to me.

      Although I was miserable in the new house, I did quite like my new school. There was another primary school that was closer to our house on the private estate, but my previous school had given me such a bad report that it wouldn’t take me. So I ended up at the one a bit further away, on the council estate, which actually turned out to be a good thing, because the teachers were nice and didn’t shout or push the kids around and I started to do quite well academically.

      I think that, for me, part of the problem at my last school had been the fact that a lot of the other kids were well behaved and academically able. A substantial proportion of them were the children of Asian parents who took education very seriously. After I had been assessed and diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, the teachers there expected me to take the tablets I had been prescribed, then do as I was told and behave myself. When that didn’t happen and I continued to be one of only very few badly behaved children, no one really knew what to do with me. At my new school, however, there were lots of kids with learning difficulties and some with severe autism. So my problems seemed fairly minimal by comparison.

      It may sound like an odd thing to say, but one of the good things about my new school was that the hallways were carpeted. Just that simple fact made a huge difference to me, because it made the whole environment less noisy and therefore more manageable. The teachers seemed to understand that the cacophony of chaos can have a bad effect on a child with autism. They used to let me stay in the classroom for five minutes while all the other kids went to lunch, so that, by the time I followed them into the dining room, the corridors were empty and quiet again.

      As well as having my fears taken seriously, another new experience for me was feeling that my teachers liked me, perhaps because it was apparent to them that I really did want to learn. When they had worked out what teaching method suited me best, I began to flourish. Within the space of a few weeks, I had gone from being one of the most disruptive children in my class at the old school to being what almost amounted to teacher’s pet at the new one. More importantly, I no longer wanted to climb over the playground wall and run home, because school had become a refuge for me and somewhere I wanted to be.

      I have a type of Asperger syndrome that impacts on my social skills rather than on my ability to learn. In fact, I have always found that I can absorb information quite easily and that I’m good at focusing my attention on things, although that means I sometimes get a bit fixated on subjects that particularly interest me. What I do find difficult is trying to decipher meaning and innuendo. As a child, I thought people meant exactly what they said, so I didn’t understand jokes or sarcasm. I am a bit better at it now, but it’s still a problem for me. What it all meant when I was at school was that unless the learning process was specifically tailored to my disabilities, so that it didn’t rely on social cues, I often didn’t understand what the teacher was saying.

      For example, I couldn’t

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