although George wasn’t getting on at school, I knew he was intelligent. He showed that he picked up on everything that went on around him by the things he did. When Mum mentioned in front of him one day that my nan used to throw salt over her shoulder out of superstition, he started doing the same; and when something interested George, whether it was Windsor Castle, trees and birds or water and fishes, he couldn’t get enough of it.
But all his teachers seemed to see was a little boy who wouldn’t do as he was told and was disruptive, not interested in learning and sometimes aggressive. In a class of about 40 children, they just didn’t have the time to spend on him and I was worried sick that George would never get any help. That’s why I agreed to see two counsellors when I was asked to go back to the clinic where George had had his hearing tests, because the second set had also come back normal and someone somewhere had obviously decided that George’s problems were down to me.
For the first few sessions with the counsellors, George came with me and would hide behind my chair as they talked.
‘What do you do when George lies on the floor and won’t get up, Julia?’ the women asked, all soft voices and knowing looks.
What did they think I did? Drag him up by his hair? ‘Do you tell him “No” when he smashes a toy?’ I was asked.
Did they think I was afraid to say a word when he bashed up Buzz Lightyear?
‘Why do you think he doesn’t eat with a spoon?’
‘How is George’s relationship with his father?’
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
There was one word for those women and it’s this: patronising. All they saw was a single mum with an out-of-control child, and it didn’t matter what I said to try to tell them any different.
‘Why don’t you talk to the school?’ I’d ask again and again. ‘They can tell you more about George and all his odd behaviours. This isn’t about discipline. I know there’s something more.’
The answer was always the same. ‘George is still very young, Julia. This is an assessment and it takes time.’
So I’d go into the school and ask them why they couldn’t do something more for George.
‘You’re being assessed, Julia. It takes time.’
I wanted to bang all their heads together, because the longer this went on the worse it was getting, and I felt even more frustrated when I was sent to a group for parents whose children had behavioural problems. It was the first time that I thought I might go to the top of the class because the advice was so basic.
When your child’s been put in the box marked ‘naughty’, it’s hard to get anyone to see past it, and sometimes I wished the school could just let George be a bit. For instance, he was still very specific about what he would and wouldn’t eat, and while he didn’t tell me in words, I realised over time that he couldn’t eat food that touched: he liked eggs, he liked baked beans, but if they were together on a plate he would just stare at them. It was as though George had the Berlin Wall of food inside his head because things always had to be divided. So I started giving him everything in separate bowls when I realised that it was the only way he’d eat.
He also had food phases – first it was just crackers, then squeezy yoghurts and then custard creams – and I knew it wasn’t just fussy eating because George got really anxious sometimes as he stared at his plate and breathed deeply. So I gave him what he wanted to calm him down enough to eat. It was during his jam sandwich phase that I wished the teachers might let him alone a bit. George’s sandwiches had to be very particular because he wouldn’t eat them if there was butter peeping out of the side of the bread; and even when I made them right, he often ended up chewing the sandwich before spitting it into his lunchbox. The teachers didn’t like that at all, and although I explained that I’d seen a dietician who’d reassured me that George would be fine as long as he had milk, yoghurt and bread each day and that I would sort out his lunchbox when he got home, they wouldn’t listen. I felt drained by it all. Why did people keep asking questions? Why didn’t they just do something to help?
Part of me said I had to keep trusting the doctors, who told me that George was still too young to be diagnosed with anything if there was something wrong with his development, the counsellors, who told me to count to three, and the teachers, who kept saying that children learned at different speeds. Another part wanted to tell them all to just do something, anything, as one year at school turned into two and then three. After going on his first school trip, I was told George couldn’t go again because he wouldn’t sit on his coach seat; when he went swimming – something Howard had taught him to do that he loved and was really good at – the teachers said he didn’t listen and almost stopped him from going until I pleaded with them; and when I picked him up from school and was told he’d fallen asleep in class again because he’d hardly slept the night before, I’d see the questions in their eyes. George spent more and more time out of the class sitting in a long corridor at a small table with a teaching assistant by his side; it seemed as if it was a case of out of sight, out of mind.
I couldn’t be sure, of course, but I wondered if George was picking up on it all, because while he’d always hidden away from people, he seemed to feel more and more that they were actually against him.
‘He’s watching me,’ George would say as we walked past a man on the way to school.
‘No, he’s not, love,’ I’d tell him. ‘He’s just walking to work minding his own business.’
Or George would pull down his Pokémon baseball cap and tell me the sun was watching him or the clouds were following us. Getting him to the dentist was so hard that I had to take him to hospital for an anaesthetic when he needed teeth removed and he’d told me that the doctor had tried to kill him when he woke up.
I think that’s why I tried to give him as much love as I could when we were at home, so that he’d at least feel safe with me when the world frightened him so much. But however much I gave him, George never expressed any love back, and even though I had a child, at times it almost felt as if I didn’t. I’d find myself staring at other kids running out of school to give their mums a kiss and longing for George to want to hug me, but he never let me touch him or showed any emotion towards me. It was almost as if it was the first time he’d seen me when he woke up each morning and I struggled with it every day, sometimes even wishing I could meet someone and have another baby just to know how it felt to be a mother to a child who loved me back.
The only time George would let me touch him was when we rough played and he pretended to be a Power Ranger as we sat together in one of the tents I’d put up all over the flat because he liked them so much. I had even put one up on my bed, hoping he might sleep in it, because George could sit in a tent for hours on end. Most days I’d climb in with him for anything up to three hours at a time and that was when we’d play fight. As George climbed on to me, I would hold on to him for a few seconds as I felt the chubbiness in his legs or his skinny little chest. I loved those moments together because otherwise George didn’t let me touch him. He did not really speak to me either: he still only talked about very specific things like Power Rangers and Buzz Lightyear. Often he spoke just single words or would chant phrases over and over again.
‘Oh and the plane, oh and the plane,’ he’d cry a hundred times before moving on to something else.
I tried to distract him with puzzles or pots of paints but George would scream if he got anything wrong, which made it hard to play because everyone makes mistakes when they’re six. One of the few things he liked, though,
