LITMIR.BIZ

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morning because it’s raining cats and dogs’, I took it literally and looked out of the window expecting to be astonished. Then, when I saw that it was simply raining, I was baffled and bemused. I often felt lost and anxious in the classroom, because so much of teaching is about interaction, which is something I simply didn’t understand.

      It all became much less of a problem, though, when I started at my new school, where the teachers let me learn in my own way, using books I could work through at my own pace. Some of the teaching methods were a bit unconventional. For example, one of my teachers was dyslexic and used to have to spell everything out on a little hand-held computer. But that was just what the other kids and I needed – teachers who were prepared to mould our education to our needs, rather than trying to mould us to fit standard techniques that wouldn’t have worked for us and would have ended up making us feel even more stupid than we already believed we were.

      Suddenly, having been apparently hopeless at everything, I began to do really well, in the classroom and in all my exams at the end of the first year. I only had to read the textbook a couple of hours before I took an exam and I could remember every word and every diagram on every page I had read. The only questions I couldn’t answer were the ambiguously worded ones.

      Ten years ago, when I was at that school, disability legislation wasn’t the big news it is today. Kids like me, who had ‘problems’, were side-lined and simply contained and controlled as much as possible until they were old enough to leave full-time education. So I am still very grateful to those teachers for making me realise I wasn’t stupid after all.

      My best subject at school was English, particularly writing stories and poems. Not even the best of my teachers could have done anything about the fact that I am hopeless with numbers, and not very good at science either. Even today, I simply don’t get numbers. Although I can read and write down 2 + 2 + 3, the numbers are just shapes that don’t make any sense to me. So I forget them immediately. However, if I write the same sum as ‘two plus two plus three’, it makes perfect sense. I can understand the words because I can visualise and remember them, which I can’t do with numbers.

      What’s weird, according to all the special education people who eventually assessed me, is that despite not being able to make sense of numerals, I can read maps. Apparently, that meant I didn’t fit into any of their categories, which made them really annoyed with me because I messed up their tests by not doing what I was expected to do. Maybe they’ve found out more about Asperger syndrome since then and no longer expect everyone to fit neatly into at least one of the boxes that dictate, ‘If you have got this sort of learning disability, your brain will respond in this way to this stimulus’.

      The only thing that mattered to me at the time, though, was that at least I was happy at my new school, even if I was very unhappy at home. After we moved into our new house, I started comfort eating, which was something Mum seemed to encourage. Perhaps she was trying to compensate me for the constant arguments and rows we were having. But giving me two chocolate éclairs for breakfast every day simply created new problems without solving any of my existing ones.

      I was already a bit chubby, so it didn’t take long for me to become obese. And because I was very ashamed of the way I looked, I started hiding at school again – not to escape being shouted at by my teachers this time, but to avoid having to do PE and expose my overweight body to the ridicule of the other, much thinner, kids. In fact, many of the kids at my school were probably underfed and quite malnourished, although of course I didn’t realise that at the time.

      I think it was because I was overweight that I started my periods early, when I was ten. Mum didn’t ever explain what was happening, except to say ‘All women do it’, and I can remember feeling dirty and very embarrassed every time I bled. What made things even worse was that Mum would give me sanitary pads to take to school, which, for some reason, I had to hand over to my teacher, who put them in a cupboard in the classroom. But because I would have died rather than ask the teacher in front of the whole class if I could take one out before going to the toilet, I wore the same one all day. Inevitably, I started getting infections, which aggravated the terrible period pains I already suffered from and made me feel even more ashamed about the disgusting, inexplicable thing that was happening to my body.

      Eventually, the stress of it all got so bad I stopped going to school whenever I had my period. Then my schoolwork began to suffer and I gradually lost the prized, confidence-boosting academic position I had held near the top of the class.

      I was still coping though, most of the time. And then, in my last term, when I had just turned 11, my class paid a visit to the secondary school I would be moving on to after the summer holidays. My first impression was that there didn’t seem to be any proper school building, just a collection of pre-fabs with large windows and echoing hallways. But it was what was happening inside the buildings that made me anxious. There were about 60 kids in every classroom making a noise that seemed to reverberate off every solid surface. I knew within minutes of arriving at that school that I wasn’t going to be able to manage there.

      It was a sign of how comfortable I was with the teachers at my primary school that I talked to one of them after that visit and told her how I felt. As a result, it was decided that someone would try to find out whether there were any alternative arrangements that could be made for me. What I think it needed, too, was for Mum to push on my behalf. But she didn’t do things like that. I don’t know if anyone did try to make other arrangements for me. If they did, it never came to anything. And it didn’t really matter, as things turned out, because by the time the new term started, my childhood had been halted dead in its tracks and everything had changed.

      Once the last term ended, I didn’t see any of the kids from my primary school anymore. The area I lived in was very strongly class divided: the private-estate and council-estate kids didn’t go to the same schools and didn’t mix outside school either. So I didn’t know any of the kids who lived near me, and none of my friends from school ever came to the private estate where I lived. I suppose it was mutual segregation – the class barrier worked both ways.

      During term time, I used to go down to the council estate on my bike to see friends. But it wasn’t an area most people would have chosen to walk through, because there was a lot of tension due to the gang culture that existed there. Although I was too young to attract much attention, I had begun to feel a bit uncomfortable as an outsider, even before the summer holiday started. None of us kids had mobile phones, so I couldn’t simply phone a school friend and arrange to meet somewhere else. And as Mum hadn’t made friends with any of the other mums, there was nothing to help keep those relationships alive. So, at the end of the school year, I suddenly lost all my friends and had nothing to do except hang around at home, getting under Mum’s feet.

      It was one thing not really wanting me to go to school in case she needed company during the day, which she did a lot after we moved to the new house and she lost her social network. It was quite another having me there all the time, whether she wanted company or not, and during that summer holiday she seemed forever to be telling me to go away and leave her alone. I walked for miles that summer, on my own, through the tunnel that ran under a half-finished motorway and out across the fields into open countryside. I did it just to get out of the house. Then, one day, I made a friend, and suddenly I no longer felt as though I was the only person in the world.

      Evie lived with her boyfriend and two children in a flat in one of the few other council-owned houses on the private estate, just a few doors away from us. She had been badly abused as a child and had learning difficulties. So although she was 18 when I met her, she seemed younger, and certainly wasn’t capable of looking after her children on her own.

      Evie’s little girl, Zoe, was two years old, and the baby just a few months. I wasn’t very interested in the baby, although I did feel sorry for her having to lie for hours in a filthy nappy before Evie seemed to notice and bothered to do anything about it. But I did love Zoe, and often when I took her home with me. I would take her little sister too. Surprisingly, Mum would sometimes help me bath them and then look after the baby while I played with Zoe, which was a relief because the baby cried a lot. I think it was the fact that the children were dirty that triggered her mothering instincts, because, to

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