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 translate idioms. So when a teacher said, ‘We can’t go out into the playground this 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
