different. And for someone as desperate as I was to have a friend, someone who ignored me was better than no one at all. So being allowed to tag along was more than I could possibly have hoped for.
For a while, I was more than happy to be someone’s tag-along. It was certainly preferable to what was happening at school.
On one day that I still remember quite clearly, Mum came into the school to complain because I had been physically restrained and had gone home with my arms covered in bruises. When I got really upset about something and the teachers tried to control me using physical force, I would fight back and sometimes even scratch them. I wasn’t being intentionally ‘bad’. Refusing to sit down or walking out of the classroom was an instinctive reaction to the sense of confusion I quickly learned would lead to a really frightening, overwhelming feeling of panic. I couldn’t have described it like that at the time. All I knew was that if someone tried to force me to do something they had explained to me but that I hadn’t understood, it would feel as though there was a ball of tangled, knotted wires moving around inside my head.
I thought I was just ‘difficult’, as Mum always said I was. And I continued to believe that, even after I was diagnosed with autism during my first year at primary school. I actually have something called Asperger syndrome, which explains why I struggled to interact and communicate with other people, and why I was unable to crack the code that would have allowed me to socialise.
People with Asperger syndrome find it difficult – or impossible – to tell other people how they feel and to interpret signs and signals like facial expressions, body language and tone of voice, which reflect someone else’s mood and indicate whether they are happy, sad or angry. As a result, we don’t respond appropriately and, for me, realising I’ve got things wrong or that I can’t make sense of them at all makes me confused and hyper-anxious. So while the other kids were listening to the teachers and learning to do as they were told, I felt as though I was surrounded by people speaking a foreign language and doing random, inexplicable things.
It was a shame no one took the time to explain at least some of that to me when I was six. Maybe they did and I’ve just forgotten, although, even at that young age, I tended not to forget important things if they were explained to me in clear, unidiomatic terms I could understand. Especially things that would have made me feel less guilty about all the trouble I was causing.
Going to school turned out to be the first really distressing experience of my life. To make matters worse, Mum used to threaten me with tales of a place with bars on the doors and windows where children were sent if they were taken away from their parents. ‘Only good children are allowed to stay with their mums,’ she used to tell me. ‘Bad children have to go to the care home.’
It wasn’t until quite recently that I realised what she was describing might have been a borstal, and maybe that’s where she actually spent time as a young teenager, after she was kicked out by my grandma. What Mum probably didn’t realise when I was six was that although I was afraid for my own sake of being sent to ‘the care home’, I was even more afraid for her, because I didn’t know how she would cope if I wasn’t there.
During my first couple of years at school, Mum was often called into meetings to discuss my behaviour. We always had terrible fights before those meetings. But as soon as we were in the presence of teachers or social workers, we would sit very close together and Mum would do all the talking, including answering most of the questions that were addressed specifically to me. In some ways, it might have been better if she had primed me beforehand by telling me exactly what to say and then letting me say it, because whenever I was forced to answer a question myself, I was terrified of saying the wrong thing. But although I have got Asperger syndrome and therefore find many aspects of social interaction very difficult to deal with, I am quite quick in other ways. So I soon learned to smile and babble away about the sort of things that might be of interest to an almost normal, reasonably happy, slightly nerdy child with an autism spectrum disorder.
Mum never actually told them about the fights that preceded those meetings. I think she preferred to communicate the information passively, by not attempting to hide the fresh scratch marks on her arms. I expect they admired her for standing by me and sympathised with her for having to try to cope with my wild behaviour. What they must have seen was a woman on her own struggling to control a physically violent six-year-old. What they didn’t see were the painful red patches on my scalp or the clumps of my hair that had come away in Mum’s hands when she pulled it so hard it brought tears to my eyes.
It seems that Mum was right about social workers though: as long as I was clean, fed and apparently not afraid to sit close to my mother during those meetings, they believed that everything must be all right. Which must have been a relief for them, because no one seemed to know what to do with us. I don’t think they were used to having to deal with kids like me, although Asperger’s tends to be at the less severe end of the autism spectrum, and I can’t have been the only autistic child in the entire county.
The main problem I had was that, because I couldn’t tell anyone what I felt or needed, I would fly off the handle whenever I was confused and frightened, which was quite a lot of the time when I was at school. Every time it happened, someone would phone Mum and ask her to come and pick me up, and I would be suspended for a couple of days.
Paradoxically, in view of the fact that the reason I was in trouble at school was always for displaying the kind of ‘difficult’ behaviour Mum often told me was ruining her life, she always took my side against the teachers. Instead of being angry with me on those occasions, she would smile at me as we walked out of the school, as though we were co-conspirators in some mischievous plot. Then we would run across the road to the park, where she would buy me an ice cream.
What probably made my continued ‘bad’ behaviour even more perplexing and frustrating for my teachers was the fact that the tablets that had been prescribed for me by the doctor when I was first diagnosed with Asperger’s didn’t seem to be doing any good. Maybe they would have helped calm me down a bit and made it all more manageable – for my teachers and for me – if I had been allowed to take them. But although Mum smoked weed, she didn’t believe in tablets, and as soon as we got home from the doctor’s surgery, she threw them all away. So I didn’t ever get the chance to find out what effect they might have had.
One of my greatest fears at that time was that if I didn’t learn to cope, I might actually be sent to a special school or, even worse, to one of the care homes Mum used to tell me about. And if that happened, I would be somewhere that sounded worse than school and Mum would be on her own. That was another reason for wanting to show my teachers I was clever, because then they might believe that everything was all right at home. The problem was I couldn’t read. While I was struggling to try to grasp even the basic concept of reading, some of the other kids in my class were moving on from the few words they had already learned at nursery school. In the end, I was so frustrated by not being able to understand the method the teachers used and so determined to catch up with the others that I taught myself.
I accepted Mum’s insistence that I was perfectly capable of being ‘normal’ if I just tried harder, as any six-year-old would do. But I hated it when she called me ‘a retard’, in a nasty, mocking voice, and when she found ways to make it clear to me that needing extra help at school was something to be ashamed of. Again, I think she hoped that if I was ashamed of my disabilities, I would at least learn to hide them and to present a ‘normal’ front to the world. So she tried – with some success – to make me afraid to be different and to learn to recognise what was ‘normal behaviour’, so that I could copy it.
What she didn’t realise was that I
