see him, almost beside myself. ‘Everyone needs to sleep – especially children.’
‘But George doesn’t.’
The doctor looked at me with a slight smile. ‘I think you must have fallen asleep yourself, Julia, so you didn’t realise that George had as well.’
I knew I hadn’t, but I was learning to keep quiet, and although I still took George to the doctor when something new happened, because I wanted to make sure there wasn’t an obvious health problem, I didn’t keep asking questions when I was told he was fine. I’d been brought up to trust doctors, after all, and everyone kept telling me his behaviour was down to me.
That’s why I was doing everything I could to make a better life for us and had signed up to do the Knowledge, the exams that license people to become London cab drivers. I wanted to go back to work and provide for George, so I’d been studying every spare moment for the past eighteen months, with Dad encouraging me. ‘Driving a cab would be the perfect job for you, Ju,’ he’d tell me. ‘You can study for the Knowledge at home and then go to work when it suits you, just like I did.’
But, like a lot of things in life, learning the Knowledge was easier said than done. Driving for a living might sound simple, but if you want to pick up passengers in central London you have to memorise all the streets within a 6-mile radius of Charing Cross station near Trafalgar Square – and there are 25,000 of them. Training for the Knowledge is so hard it’s been proved to make your brain grow, and it doesn’t just end at learning the streets one by one. You also have to know the ‘runs’. These are set routes that get you from any A to any B – lists of streets so long that they fill entire books. I wasn’t sure my brain could fit all that in, and the other big problem was that I hated driving in central London.
‘Faster, Ju, faster,’ Dad would shout when I took him up the Great West Road in his old silver Mustang.
But as soon as I pressed my foot on the accelerator and felt the massive old car almost take off, I’d slow down again in fright. I was too slow for central London, so I decided to study for a suburban licence, which would allow me to pick up passengers in the suburb that included Hounslow. It would still mean memorising thousands of streets, though, so after having an interview and being accepted to train for the Knowledge, I began studying for it at home with George. Putting him in a bouncy chair, I’d sit down surrounded by maps and stare at them as I tried to memorise the roads and runs while he cried fit to burst.
‘New Brentford cemetery to Hounslow railway station,’ I’d chant to myself. ‘Left Sutton Lane, forward Wellington Road, left Staines Road, right Hibernia Road, left Hanworth Road, right Heath Road, right Whitton Road, pull up on the left on Station Road. You are now at your destination.’
That was an easy one, mind; there were up to 50 streets in some of the runs. But in a strange way having something else to concentrate on made it easier to cope with George. I’d check that his nappy was dry, he was warm and his tummy was full, and he would still scream; but as I looked at his tiny red face, I’d tell myself that the Knowledge was going to get us out of this life. When I passed it and started working, I would earn enough money to get us a better one. Somehow I had to give that to George, because as he got older, his behaviour had got even more unusual: if someone arrived unexpectedly at the flat, he’d curl up into a ball and rock; when we were out he’d bang his head against the sides of the pushchair so hard that I had to cover the bars with soft blankets which he’d pull over his face to hide. I’d even started supermarket shopping at night because there were fewer people around then to upset him.
You don’t know what lengths you’ll go to though, until you’re tested. All I knew was that things had to be a very specific way for George to be anything close to happy, so I gave him what he needed, just as any mother would. Otherwise his emotions were like a boiling kettle he couldn’t control and I had to protect him from them or else he would hurt himself – biting his arm until he drew blood, pulling his hair until his scalp was raw. Even when George was a toddler, I still carried him a lot, because it took only a few seconds for him to hurt himself.
Some days it felt as though we were both drowning, and the moments I held on to were when I curled myself around George’s small sleeping body after he’d finally fallen asleep and we lay together – the calm after the storm. It was the closest I got to touching him, and as I gently twisted a small curl of hair on his forehead, I’d look at George, so peaceful, and wish I could find a way to make him feel like that when he was awake. He seemed almost tormented by life, and that’s any mother’s worst fear, isn’t it?
Now I watched as Lewis walked back into the room, trailing the long tube that still fed him oxygen from two prongs underneath his nose. They had slipped out of place and as Lewis sat down to play, George kneeled down and gently pushed them back into position. It was something he did with Lewis a lot and whenever I saw him do so, I knew there was love inside George.
‘He’s going to need a nappy change before we go,’ I said to Mum as I got up off the sofa.
I walked over to George and took a deep breath before picking him up, knowing I had a split second before his screams started. As I carried him to the changing mat I’d spread out on the floor, he started twisting and turning in my arms. Kicking and biting, he roared with rage as I laid him down with one arm across his chest and used my free hand to take off his nappy. George’s face was bright red with anger, but I didn’t look at him or try to make him laugh with words and smiles. It would only make things worse if I did, because George hated making eye contact with anyone. It was just one of the things I had had to learn: no one could comfort him with a kind look – not even me.
One year on the estate turned into two and I carried on studying for the Knowledge. Now don’t go thinking because it took so long that I’m daft. I might not have been top of the class at school, but most people need at least a couple of years to pass the Knowledge and I was no different. Dad had managed to borrow for me an old cab to practise in, instead of going out on a moped as most people do, so a couple of times a week I’d go out and drive the runs, trying to drum the routes into my head.
All that practice had to be tested, and for that I had to make what’s known as appearances at the public carriage office in Penton Street, north London. Think of it as what White Hart Lane is to Tottenham fans – the place where everything really important happens. Licensed drivers go there to have their cabs checked or for paperwork to be done, while trainee ones go there to be tested on their runs.
You could have cut the tension in the air with a knife as we all waited in a grey room to be called in one by one by two middle-aged men in suits, who asked us to recite runs before grading us on them from A to D. It’s known as calling over a run, and you always knew how well you were doing by the marks you got and how quickly you were called back for another appearance. If it was 14 days you were getting better; if it was more than a couple of months you still had a long way to go. The worst bit, though, was that there was no definite end to it all, no set list of grades you had to get to pass the Knowledge. Instead, you just got called back again and again until one of the men in suits decided you were ready. It was like running a marathon with no idea of where the finishing line was.
I went up to London about every month to be tested and it terrified me. If the men in suits had shone a light in my face and told me I had to sleep on a bed of nails, I wouldn’t have been surprised. They really knew how to lay down the law and they wanted to see a good attitude, nice manners and confidence: if you hesitated or got in a muddle as you called over a run, they’d give you a D grade without blinking; if someone’s tie wasn’t straight, they’d tell them to come back another day; and one bloke who swore in the middle of being tested got sent away in disgrace. We were all scared stiff of them, and you could hear a pin drop whenever one of the testers walked into the room where we all had to wait. Some women drive London cabs but
