he liked me. So it was unkind of her to remark, as she dropped it back into my hands, that it would have cost him £1, at most. She was probably right though, because it broke a couple of days later when I was threading it through my fingers and admiring it for the hundredth time. I can still remember how disappointed I was and how foolish I felt for having been so proud of something that Mum had been able to identify immediately as just cheap tat.
I wasn’t ever abused or badly treated in any way by any of Mum’s friends when we lived in Cora’s flat. But I did see things that children shouldn’t see. For example, I have a very clear memory of sitting on the floor in the living room with my legs crossed and my hands in my lap, watching a couple bouncing around on top of each other on the sofa. I must have been three years old, and it was just another of the many mystifying incidents I didn’t even try to understand.
For the people who were Mum’s friends at that time, there weren’t any boundaries between things that were sexual and non-sexual, which meant that, when I went to school, I had to learn, incident by incident, what was okay and what wasn’t. So I wasn’t expecting my teacher’s furious reaction when she found me sitting in the classroom one day with my hand inside the trousers of the little boy next to me. What might have passed as innocent exploration at the age of three or four was viewed as something entirely more sinister at seven. In reality though, I was still very naive.
Gavin was the youngest in a family of several neglected children, most of whom were aggressive and quarrelsome. But Gavin was different, and because he was always nice to me and always stood up for me when someone teased or bullied me, he became my ‘boyfriend’. After that day, however, the teacher made us sit on opposite sides of the classroom. And I learned that, for some reason, putting your hand inside someone else’s trousers was not ‘acceptable behaviour’.
Most of my other memories I have of school are associated with feeling confused, overwhelmed and quite lonely. There was an avenue of trees in the school grounds where I often sat on my own, picking up small stones and putting them in my pocket. Mum used to say she could tell from how many I had collected what sort of day I had had. Just a couple of stones was a sign that I had played with Gavin and some of the other kids. A whole pocketful meant I had been alone during all the playground breaks.
I sometimes felt as though I was the only person in the world. I did have a few friends by the time I was seven, but Mum didn’t ever make friends with their parents. In fact, she didn’t have any relationships with women while I was growing up; just with guys. So there didn’t seem to be any connection between my life and the lives of anyone I knew, which meant that, in a way I can’t explain, I didn’t feel as though I was part of anything.
I can remember feeling as though there was a huge, sad sigh building up inside me – although I couldn’t have explained it that way at the time – and if I started to let it out, I wouldn’t ever stop sighing. The reason it was there was because I rarely understood why the teachers shouted at me and why the other kids laughed. I can’t pick out any individual voices – except for the voice of the male teacher who used 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
