Chapter 4

‘School’

Perhaps you are wondering why I slipped the word ‘school’ between inverted commas? Those of you with PDA may know why I did that, but for those of you who don’t then allow me to relieve you of your confusion as best I can.

School, for me, was an inane and almost pointless process. Something that I could have, quite simply, done without. I suppose I am what people would call an ‘autodidact’, a self-taught person. Granted, many autodidacts I’m sure would find school somewhat useful as a kind of ‘supplement’, but for me I quickly found that I fared much better without it altogether.

You see, we are all born curious. We all have, to some degree, an innate desire to know about the world around us and how it works. This is evident in toddlers during their sensory exploration stage when they wander around, pick things up and put them in their mouths, pull the tails of cats and dogs, pull their mother’s hair to get a reaction, and so on. This curiosity is somewhat diminished in a lot of people as they mature, which is unfortunate because that curiosity only needs to be sublimated from hair- and tail-pulling into something a little more fruitful, but for me (and the same goes for many others I’m sure) that childlike thirst for knowledge, be it psychological or not, feels as though it never really left my being, apart from when I was forced to attend school of course where it was thoroughly impeded. But what most of my teachers didn’t know was that while I was busy repudiating and deflecting most of what they tried to instill in me during school hours, I was working furiously to educate myself at home.

So, the very word ‘school’ really is a meaningless term to me, as I feel that’s exactly what all of life is: a fleeting foray into existence whereby we are all free to develop and hone and perfect our skills and whereby one need only avail themselves to the myriad lessons that reside within every experience. I often tell people that I didn’t really feel like I was at school until I left school, and to my delight, after further inquiry, I found that I hadn’t only begun my quest for knowledge and truth subsequent to turning my back on the education system, but I had been engaged in it since being disgorged from my mother’s uterus. ‘School’ was only ever this big, cumbersome and distracting chunk of my life that got in the way.

Some lessons, also, just can’t be taught in ‘school’. School can’t really teach us how to be wise, for example, as wisdom is something that can only really be acquired experientially over a long period of time and is fuelled by rumination and perhaps making, and learning from, a few mistakes here and there. Ironically, attending ‘school’ gave me more wisdom to take away than anything else, as I soon learnt that being spoon-fed information I was expected to regurgitate on demand was not part of a path I was willing to take. I didn’t know what my alternatives were for a long time, but I certainly knew from a very early age that ‘school’ was in no way a place for me.

Funnily enough, I did actually enjoy it at times. Okay, perhaps quite a lot, but this was of course for all the wrong reasons. Mucking around, winding up the other students, commandeering a class and being a general nuisance was always exhilarating despite the unpleasant repercussions I incurred. And of course I did, at times, make some great pals.

I’m not about to make a case that ‘all schools are terrible’, because that would be demonstrably untrue. Oodles of people benefit from the current education system in place and I wouldn’t want to deprive anyone of the opportunity of going to school if that is what’s required for them to boost their chances of succeeding in life. School just happened to be the wrong thing for me, and I was lucky enough that I came across the right people at the right time who helped steer me towards a purposeful and meaningful life. Some people, however, are not so lucky. They get lost in a system that doesn’t speak to them and endure many torrid years believing that they’re stupid and worthless. They may end up severely depressed and turn to drugs and a life of crime which may lead to imprisonment, or (and possibly worse) suicide. These are the people I wish to reach out to and help over the course of this chapter by demonstrating that just because you don’t belong in school, doesn’t mean you don’t belong in the world.

Please join me as I share with you my own ‘school’ experience.

***

Now, I can do this in two ways. I can begin by capturing the spirit of my first few days at nursery school, but in doing so I’d have to omit an awful lot. So I should probably start by limning my first true educational experiences which incidentally took place before I was ever made to attend all of the institutions I was forever slipping out of like a bar of soap through the clumsy hands of a toddler.

Prior to discovering the charms of the written word, television was the only means by which I could attain an education, albeit of a rudimentary sort. I was into a wide range of TV shows and films and retained whatever information I absorbed from classics like ‘Rosie and Jim’, ‘Fireman Sam’, ‘Noddy’ and ‘Postman Pat’, all of which I’m sure other British children born in the early nineties would’ve watched with similar zeal.

I learned, not only the words to the songs, but the entire scripts to many of the Disney movies. My mother can recall me sitting in my high chair opposite the TV singing along, perfectly in tune, and then mirroring the dialogues between characters.

I am often asked by parents how they can get their (PDA) children to either 1) attend school or 2) learn something. These types of requests, as innocent as they seem, happen to make me feel as though someone has used a Stanley knife to slowly cut open my abdomen to vigorously scrub my spleen with a scouring pad. Apologies for the graphic and horrific image, but I have to stress to you in some way how it is I naturally respond when I am met with something I don’t like, or rather, to use a word which will hereafter be making regular appearances in this book, ‘triggered’. The reason this triggers me so much is because I am immediately brought back to those times in my childhood where I was under such an enormous amount of pressure to conform. Now I am approaching a quarter of a century, I can revise my entire life and comprehend what worked and what failed to work from my hellish school years to my embarrassing attempts as an adolescent to hold down ‘normal’ jobs like a ‘normal’ person. At the time I wouldn’t have been privy to this insight, for if I had been then so much bulls*** could have been avoided. But this of course is how we become wiser, so I am, as it happens, very grateful for every single experience I’ve had no matter how unpleasant some of them may have been at the time. I had to go through it all in order to learn, and I was, of course, under the care and supervision of my mother, who was also none the wiser, but she was willing to try her absolute hardest to find what worked for her unusual child, and this is how she ended up learning so much as well.

I can only talk for myself. It would not be intellectually honest of me if I were to assert that every single child with PDA experiences life in the same way. Fundamentally the triggers may induce the same physiological effects, but what actually causes the triggers themselves will differ from person to person. One thing I do know, however, is that children with PDA can only function if they are granted total freedom over their own lives. Now, I don’t mean they should be granted total independence, as that would be abnormally irresponsible for me to suggest as one may construe this as something like: ‘If upon deciding to go food shopping your four-year-old insists on driving the car to the supermarket, then by all means let her as this is exactly what is required to prevent a meltdown’ or ‘if your ten-year-old wakes up one day and decides that the exciting prospects of living alone are far more appetising than the comforting bosom of home life with Ma and Pa, then allow him to leave! He’s clearly a man if he says he is so let him get on with it!’ Oh perish the thought! By freedom I mean we, PDAers, require maximum freedom as children within our family spheres. We will learn inexorably insofar as we have the freedom to learn about whatever we want, be it the laws of thermodynamics, how to juggle with frogs, or how to make soap. The almighty urge to delve into something that captures our hearts and imagination is so strong that we find ourselves completely consumed by it. When this happens, it is essential that we are permitted to indulge as we please, because this is exactly how we learn. As we swan through life we will come across certain concepts that will inspire and enthral us in such a way that the urge to pursue such concepts further will prove irresistible. We are spurred towards whichever subject we wish to educate ourselves on, and will not rest until we know absolutely everything there is to know about that subject.

Once we are sufficiently nourished, then we move on to the next thing. It’s like an inbuilt curriculum we follow, that is more often than not out of sync with the curriculum at school. But they do occasionally intersect, which can be especially confusing for teachers who suddenly find that their most disruptive student becomes the most attentive following a gentle segue from mathematics, which the student has no time for or interest in, to astronomy which happens to currently dominate the life of the student and enraptures their every cell. It really isn’t too complicated as to how we learn, it only becomes complicated when we are overwhelmed with the constant duress from the outside world. So, I feel I can confidently say that a trademark of all PDAers is that, in order to learn, it is paramount that our freedom is not trampled on. At school this happens an awful lot, where teachers are constantly trying to make us learn things, not because we ask for it but because they say so. It’s not that we aren’t academically inclined, it’s that we are only inclined to learn something when we feel that the time is right. (You wouldn’t cleave a chrysalis and remove the caterpillar before it metamorphoses into a butterfly, would you?)

Having said that, when I first went to school, I didn’t ’alf love it! Nursery school basically consisted of reading, light creative exercises and play. All of which I felt very much in alignment with and ready to learn about, especially reading, and because of this I soared to the top of class where I remained throughout nursery school and into primary school. It was the ability to read I was so tenaciously trying to master. I didn’t care much for the content. I just wanted to read everything and anything, but once I had attained a certain degree of competence in this area, I felt it was time to specialise, but unfortunately by the age of about five or six when I decided that the animal kingdom would be the first ever subject I would devote all my time and energy to, I found that school wanted to impart to me matters I couldn’t frankly give a s*** about.

Going back a bit: because I was generally quite interested in what nursery school and primary school had to offer me, many of my quirks went unnoticed. There were, however, a few (PDA) incidents I can recall, and one in particular I recall with grave horror. I must have been about three when this occurred, but I can still replay it in my mind as though it were yesterday. My nursery teacher, a strict disciplinarian, pulled me aside (not sure why it was me) and ordered me to draw a picture of one of my pet goldfish. Immediately I felt tremendous unease after being singled out. It was like this teacher was a farmer and all the children were turkeys in a pen and I was unfortunate enough to be the one chosen for her Christmas dinner. After we both sat down and she handed me a piece of paper and some coloured pencils, I froze. She tried to get me to draw the picture but I couldn’t move; I just stared at her blankly. So she tried again a few times, her tone becoming more irate by the second. I simply couldn’t. I was well and truly paralyzed by this point, apart from my heart which was pounding exponentially. I broke down and cried for my mum, and with that she lost it and slammed her hand down on the table very near to my face and bellowed: ‘STOP CRYING!’ I can remember the loud thud as her arm impacted the table which left me disoriented.

Another significant moment also stands out: on Christmas Day, 1996, I was given my first guitar. It was a miniature toy of a thing, but one could still wheedle a song or two from its strings. My dad caught this all on video. I was sitting in front of an audience which consisted of my parents, siblings and grandparents, and I gleefully sang to them many Christmas tunes accompanied by cacophonous guitar playing and, of course, a smile. At a couple of points at the end of the songs, after being duly congratulated, it is possible to hear someone say, ‘Okay, last one now,’ but I carried on playing nonetheless and then the camera cuts out during a marvellous rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’. Then it cuts to the next scene, the next day, in a similar setting of me playing my guitar to an audience. The first thing heard is Dad asking me to play ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’. The vital grin on my face is instantly erased and I began to whimper and thrash my legs in frustration.

‘Come on, Harry, give us a song!’ someone asks. I then proceed to angrily strike the strings once, or twice at most.

‘Oh, is that it?’ someone says. I nod my head churlishly. The family, most likely growing tired of me by this point, turn to my baby brother and start singing him a nursery rhyme which is almost immediately intercepted by me.

‘No! I don’t want to sing that one!’ I wail. Then I order everyone in the room to keep quiet while I make my mother sing a solo.

When an incident like this takes place, one ought to know that the crying and accumulating frustration doesn’t always come from not wanting to follow a task, but from the sheer pain of not being able to do it.

Something strange and disturbing my mother noticed a few months after starting nursery school was the way I used to frantically pace around the coffee table when I returned home. In retrospect, I can totally relate this to how I feel now when I am around other people for too long. Becoming drained, restless and agitated, needing to take myself away for a run or a walk in the woods to shake off any excess stress or anxiety I pick up during the day, mostly from other people. Perhaps other autistic people will understand what I mean when I use the phrase ‘to overdose on company’.

I can recall having frequent lapses of concentration which would be brought on by either boredom or distraction from the busy world around me. Every single day at school around lunchtime the teacher would dismiss us and we’d all do the same thing: sprint over to our lunch boxes and knee slide when within a couple of metres. Then came the day when the teacher decided to alter the routine a little bit. From then on, after being dismissed, every child would visit the lavatory before having their lunch. Not sure why this new rule was suddenly enforced, maybe it was due to the fact the bowels of some of the children still had minds of their own. Anyway, instead of acknowledging this new, and, in my opinion, ‘daft’, rule, I went ahead and followed the exact same procedure as I’d always done: sprint over to my lunch box, knee slide the last few metres, and tuck into my food. Of course, this time I was riding solo. Every other child gawked at me while the teacher groaned in annoyance. It was at that very moment that I first realised I was different.

***

The first institution I attended after nursery was an all-boys private school that I utterly loathed. The miasma was one of intense pressure and fierce competition, and conspicuously low in frivolity, colour and oestrogen. I felt as though it was never okay for the pupils to ‘be themselves’ as it were, as it was of utmost importance to personify the bearing of a typical British public schoolboy. Something that appeals to many, but to me this ideal was synonymous with having my heart and soul drilled out of me.

Something my teachers in primary school were forever picking up in me was how I always seemed to be in a daze whenever they were talking. An inconvenience for them as whatever drivel they were teaching me, or attempting to teach me, would obviously be going over, around, and any place other than in my head, but daydreaming has always been a very cherished pastime of mine, and has sometimes proven to be very useful. Some of my best ideas seem to come from those moments when I zone out and drool. For example, I can’t tell you how much I’ve been daydreaming since writing this book. I’ll type away for a good hour or so and then I’ll stop for a while and just stare into space. You know when you lose focus, your thoughts dissipate and everything goes all fuzzy and pixelated? I tend to let that go on for a while until I am fortuitously struck with inspiration and then carry on with writing. It’s so essential, like a revitalisation process or perhaps even a form of meditation? The teachers didn’t seem to see it as anything other than annoying or rude, and at this point my concentration was so poor in just about every discipline other than the one I was engrossed in.

The attention I once so steadfastly applied to school had now turned towards my new obsession, the natural world. I was enraptured by other creatures. At home we had this big, thick animal book that I read and read and read again. I took it everywhere with me, and not just in the house, but to other people’s houses too. It was within arm’s reach most of the time, and I wouldn’t think twice about handing it to my uncles and aunts and grandparents on family gatherings, telling them to pick a page at random and test me on my knowledge. Okay, so I was a bit of a show-off, but it was this drive to educate myself that convinced everyone that I was fine, when in fact things were starting to go wrong at school.

One very kind and perceptive teacher, who happened to be the only authority figure I ever properly liked during my time in primary school, called my mother in for a chat one day after school had finished.

‘Now, I am very fascinated with your son, Mrs Thompson, because unlike the other boys who boisterously run off to the green and play football every day at break time, Harry will always spend the first ten minutes on his own as if he’s thinking things over. Most interesting. It does make me wonder.’

I am very grateful that I fell into the hands of a person in the system with this level of gentleness and awareness, as the other staff members at that school all seemed to be rather callous and parochial.

Most of my contemporaries at primary school exhibited the same fundamental traits, as did their parents; materialistic, flash, perhaps a little facile, though still fine, personable emblems of the British middle-class who rested on a bedrock of sophistication and grace. To say I had no friends would be a lie, but to say I had found my tribe would be a gross exaggeration. It was among this milieu where I realised that I possessed an unusual ability to make people laugh, and I say unusual because at this age the laughter was more a byproduct of my outlandish behaviour as opposed to a response to my display of comedic flair. I learned that the goofier I behaved in public the more of a chance I had of getting a cheap laugh, and cheap laughs were always my favourite. However, I’d go to extreme lengths in order to get the reaction I valued most of all, which wasn’t peals of laughter as one might presume, but sheer gob-smacked awe or shock. When reality as we know it has been distorted, when things start happening that aren’t supposed to be happening, when the unthinkable and unexpected occurs, when people stare at me in bemusement after I do something shocking and go ‘Wow…’ Yes! I f***ing live for that s***!

Some of my childhood feats were: drinking out of pet bowls, dressing up in my mother’s clothing, p***ing myself on purpose, telling vulgar stories to my siblings and cousins late at night during sleepovers, and – a personal favourite of mine – asking my friends’ mothers to marry me.

Despite my obvious brilliance, my popularity with my peers fluctuated. Mostly I was regarded as a strange and unpredictable little boy: really loud one minute then mousey quiet the next; really polite to people one minute and then horrendously rude and unsubtle the next; and even though I was quite shy and felt somewhat reserved around my peers, I’d lose all inhibitions when presented with an opportunity to act up and be silly in class, or in any other situation overseen by an authority figure.

Where I was exceedingly introverted at school I was the complete opposite at home and around family friends like someone had cracked open a can of cola after violently shaking it. I was known by some as ‘the dare king’ as I was the only one stupid enough to volunteer to do the dangerous and disgusting things no one else would do. Although I was happy to provide the entertainment for the other children, I knew deep down that this probably came from some deeply rooted insecurity; a desperate need to be seen. I acted like this because I felt there wasn’t really much else I could offer apart from publicly making a complete nincompoop out of myself. The only other option would be to remain on the periphery and to not say a single word, because to be caught in the middle, as the one doing the laughing rather than the one doing the funnies, would be unheard of in my world. It didn’t only seem like a dull and unappealing role in a social context but the very thought of me assuming such a role made me feel ill. My inner Loki would always intervene if ever the limelight happened to move away from me. I’d be plagued and harassed by these urges to act antisocially and/or absurdly. ‘Go on. Just do it. What’s the worst that could happen? If you don’t do it I’m going to make your life miserable!’ the Loki would say. I can recall randomly and impulsively kissing another boy when we were on a family vacation. The other children who I was playing with just looked at me, gave me that ‘wow…’ reaction I often yearned for, and then burst out laughing. This incident made others a bit wary of me for the rest of the holiday. Was it really worth it? I guess so. It always fascinates me how I was so very able to do every single dare without question but I would resist and shy away from demands. There’s something about the way in which a dare is phrased and put across. Especially if it’s not direct. For example, if someone were to say, ‘I dare someone to pull the fire alarm!’ I would have pulled it before the question was asked. I would, however, be a lot more reluctant if someone were to ask like this:

‘Harry, can you pull the…’

‘Can you do one?!’ For parents who are looking for a way to get their autistic children to help around the house, then indirectness may be an alternative to demands. I don’t know about other people with PDA, but if someone were to think aloud in my presence and come out with something like, ‘Yuck, look at all those dishes that need to be cleaned,’ then the chances of me jumping to attention and offering to clean them would be pretty high. If someone were to directly ask me to clean the dishes, however, then I wouldn’t be quite so willing.

Inspiration is also something worth going into here, as without it I find anything to be an agonising toil no matter how elementary the task. I’ve never really needed to be nagged into brushing my teeth or making my bed as I’ve always felt inspired by those who do these things beautifully. If someone had lush teeth then I’d want them too, and if their bed looked spick and span then I’d want mine to look the same!

By about the age of eight, my fascination for the natural world began to drift from the animal kingdom to other areas of science. There were two main questions on my mind at the time: 1) is the concept of Santa Claus scientifically plausible? and 2) how do humans, and other living organisms, come into being? These topics were pondered in a more childish way of course. I was beginning to awaken to the lack of evidence for certain childhood fantasies and it was time for Mother to give me some cold, hard adult truths. I questioned the existence of Santa to her while I was in the bath one evening. She knelt down near to me and told me how he wasn’t real, in the gentlest of ways. I sobbed and hoped that she was lying to me; I even asked her to reverse time. I implored her not to tell my brother or sister. The truth hurts I suppose, so I just picked up the pieces and got on with my life.

Around the same time, the real story behind the birds and the bees was about to be divulged to me. Prior to knowing about the mechanics of creation, my parents had kludged together this beautiful little story about how Mummy and Daddy share a special kiss whereby a seed is dispensed from Daddy’s tongue and travels down Mummy’s throat, gets planted in her womb and then sprouts into a baby. This had me duped for a long time, but there was no fooling me by the age of eight.

Wow… The what goes in the where? And for what? And then fertilises the…? Holy s***! Did anyone else share my complete and utter horror when finding out about sex? I just couldn’t believe it! It seemed so grotesque to me that I was almost a little offended.

‘Can I do it with you, Mummy?’ Probably not the question to ask straight after hearing news like this. The mortified face of my father appeared from behind a newspaper while my mother struggled to muster up a reply. ‘Well, we love each other don’t we, Mummy? You could show me how to do it on my first time, couldn’t you?’

‘Harry! I don’t love you in that way! I love Daddy in that way, and we express our love differently than we do to you.’ She giggled and then a moment of silence followed.

‘So can I do it with the dog then?’ The sharp rustles of Dad slamming the newspaper down hurt my ears, and Mother nearly choked on her own tongue.

‘What?!’ Dad coughed.

‘Well, I love the dog differently to the way I love you and Mummy, so that’s how I would like to express my love for the dog.’

My behaviour continued to worry my mother. One time the whole family got together at my grandparents’ house for a Christmas party. I asked Mother if I could take my clothes off and run around naked which she, unsurprisingly, said no to. I threw a huge tantrum that drew much negative attention from everyone present in the room, and this continued on the car ride home where I begged for my parents to, ‘Take me back so I can run around naked! Take me back so I can run around naked!’ At this point, my mother really wanted to know what the heck was up with her son. Despite my father’s insistence that my weirdness was just a phase, things only got weirder.

I went through a period of inviting a lot of children home. This wasn’t because I wished to enjoy an evening of innocent ‘play’ with them, necessarily, but because I strangely enough wished to assess them; checking their height, listening carefully to the rhythm and cadence of their voice and taking note of their scent. So, I’d have some ‘lucky’ person over, give them a formal appraisal and then openly discard their company. That friend would often spend the rest of the evening playing with my brother and sister while I barricaded myself in my room to read, look out the window and dribble or practice doing impressions of people.

I would go to other people’s houses occasionally as well. Whenever arriving at a house that I’d never been to before, the first thing I’d usually do was give myself a grand tour. I wouldn’t think twice about wandering up the stairs and opening bedroom and bathroom doors before going back downstairs to have a look to see what was in the cupboards or the fridge. I know this sounds rude, but it really isn’t. I would never rummage through people’s drawers and pilfer their belongings. In order to feel completely relaxed in a new place, I have to know it like the back of my hand. One time when I was invited round to play at a friend’s, his mum phoned my mother to ask what kind of food I ate.

‘Oh Harry isn’t a fussy eater at all!’ Mother said. ‘He eats anything you put in front of him.’ However, when dinner time came around that evening at my friend’s house, it was a totally different story.

When I was presented with my meal I was shocked and appalled to discover that it was cold. Cold?! Really… How dare she?! Well, I described it as cold at the time but it was most likely room temperature, but still unacceptable. I decided at that very moment I wouldn’t eat a single bite. I sat there with a most malignant scowl on my face.

When it was eventually time for me to be picked up, my friend’s mum was more than eager to talk to my mother about me.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Thompson, but I thought you said that Harry ate anything? He didn’t even touch his supper.’ Aaaah, that’s the reaction I’m looking for; total acknowledgement that I’m different.

While my conduct in social situations was raising some eyebrows, my performance at school, along with my reputation among teachers, ever worsened. My form teacher whom I was given near the end of my time at this oppressive snob-ridden cesspool of a school was almost the end of me. I do not remember ever feeling such contempt for a person in my childhood as I did for her. I was convinced she was a witch. She was tall, pallid, had long straggly jet-black hair and had this permanent disdainful look scribbled across her face. The way in which she’d shriek at her pupils still makes my hairs stand on end to this day. If I fell behind in this teacher’s lesson, she would keep me in at playtime; depriving me of the one time of day I looked forward to. Once, during playtime, she forcefully tugged my arms away from my chest when asking me a problem-solving question and shouted at me every time I either got it wrong or told her I didn’t understand it. This was around the time I started refusing to go into school and would put up a fight most mornings. I told my parents how much I disliked my teacher, and my mother went up to the school to speak with her and was met with a rather fawning act which was completely inconsistent with the horror stories I’d often relay. It looked as though I was exaggerating, but I assured both my parents that she was, in fact, a witch.

I can remember randomly vomiting a few times while in her class. This wasn’t due to sickness, I was legitimately terrified. It would just come over me all of a sudden and I’d be powerless to stop it. I remember throwing up once during break time in front of the other children who were all disgusted, and another time all over the school corridor on my way to the lavatory.

There comes a time in the life of the British public schoolboy when he must prove his worth by demonstrating that he has the handwriting ability required for him to wield the coveted fountain pen. Since my handwriting looks like the production of a blind, arthritic pensioner, I was one of the last pupils in my class who still used a pencil. Even when the right to bear ink was eventually bestowed upon me, I was soon demoted back to the lowly rungs of graphite and wood after getting into a few ghastly messes. At the end of a school day, I’d have ink all over my hands, some up my arms and some even around my mouth. I was probably better off not using a pen.

At this juncture, the only area at school where I showed any potential and promise was drama. I felt rapturous during this class. I loved being able to escape myself and become another person for a moment. I partook in the school play and was cast as an evacuee boy in the Second World War who had bad anxiety (apt, eh?). I improvised a scene in which I brushed my teddy bear’s teeth when I was getting ready for bed which elicited felicitous laughter from the audience.

The 9/11 attacks in New York had a very strong and strange effect on me. I became obsessed with tall buildings and developed a fear of being inside them. I wondered whether my school would ever be attacked by terrorists. I’d drive my parents nuts asking them questions about terrorism, especially my father who I’d often ask if I could use the computer to do my own research on the hijackers. I’d also spend much of my time drawing pictures of what I thought was happening inside the buildings following the impact, or on the planes prior to the impact.

My mother thought it might be a good idea to look into some kind of counselling for me at school. I liked the therapist I was given a lot, she was very nice. Though I always feel as though she was in a quandary with what to do with me as she was trained to deal with textbook cases, which I, of course, was not. My favourite staff member at primary school though had to be Matron. I often sought refuge in the sanctity of her office. I wasn’t the avid and highly competent sportsman that my brother was, so I didn’t really care much for football in the same way he and most of the boys in my class did, so instead of heading to the green for a game of footie at break time, I’d run straight to Matron’s office and spend the afternoon with her, often feigning illness in hope that she’d send me home. Out of the hundreds of times I asked her if I could leave early I think she only ever let me go home once.

The school, of course, thought Matron was being too soft on me, and maybe she was, but the time I spent with Matron was the only time I didn’t feel terrified. She called my mother a few times to apologise when she thought she might’ve been hindering me from my studies.

‘I’m ever so sorry, Mrs Thompson, but he turns up at my office with his big beautiful blue eyes and I can’t help but let him in!’

During my last year at this ‘school’, things got really bad. My head was always down, I always looked scruffy, I didn’t like speaking to people, and my face, which usually evinced a healthy tan, looked pale and beaten. Even my reputation as a class clown could no longer be upheld. I had put on a bit of weight by virtue of comfort eating, and when I wasn’t eating, or if food wasn’t readily available, my fingers would constantly be in my mouth. I’d chew them until they bled. This nervous habit of self-mutilation took me years to get over.

We were assigned a maths project in my last year which I failed to complete on time and, to my further chagrin, everyone else in my class handed theirs in long before the due date. Every day my maths teacher would ask me in a condescending tone, ‘Have you got something for me, Thompson?’ I avoided this man like the plague. If he was coming towards me in the school corridor I’d about turn and run for my life. Similarly, if I was walking to class and I knew there was a chance we’d cross paths then I’d choose to take a different route which would often be much longer. I didn’t care how tedious the detour would be, I could not bear the thought of being buttonholed by this maths teacher. Once he sat right behind me in a school assembly. I was looking around the room, as I often did, and I clocked his eyes burning into my soul. He leant over the bench and whispered in my ear in the most hair-raising and unsettling gravelly voice I will never be able to purge from my memory:

‘Have you got something for me?’ He knew full well what my answer was going to be.

‘No, sir. I still haven’t done it.’ There was an icy interlude. As a ten-year-old, my brain would jump to rather far-fetched and illogical conclusions. I genuinely thought that the next thing he was going to do was kill me.

‘I’m going to punish you if it’s not on my desk by tomorrow.’ As he leant back his face disappeared into the darkness of the auditorium. One would assume that with my teacher’s smoldering rage, and the humiliation of being the last boy in my class to hand in a teensy bit of homework, it would in some way impel me to go home and get the bloody thing done. But this only made it worse. I would have rather been the laughing stock of my class, received scary threats from my teacher and avoided him for the rest of my life than to obey his stupid commands. Sometimes, and I kid you not, even death is more preferable than doing as I’m told.

My grandmother approached my mother one day and said, ‘Darling, you have got to take Harry out of that school.’ Nothing felt right to me. I’d have these blistering headaches in the evening after school and would feel very carsick on the journey home. I physically couldn’t get myself to do any of my homework at all. It all seemed too pointless and tortuous.

‘School is for work! Home is for play!’ I’d declare. ‘You cannot mix the two!’

The mornings before school were equally distressing. I remember waking up every day and feeling like I was headed straight for the gallows to be executed. Mother would play Pavarotti in the car on the way to the school to try and calm me down. I still sometimes get a bad feeling in the morning which I believe stems from those fear-ridden moments before school.

My mother would drop me and my siblings off every day wearing her gym attire. On the occasional day she’d be in regular clothing I’d break into a cold sweat.

‘But what if you forget to pick me up from school?!’ I’d quaver.

‘Darling, of course I’d never do such a thing,’ she’d console.

‘But sometimes you go upstairs to run the bath and then forget what you’re doing as soon as you reach the top of the staircase. You could make the same mistake with me and forget to pick me up!’ Mother had to laugh this, but she made a habit of wearing her gym kit every day, without fail, to relieve me from my worries. When Mother would drop me off at school, I’d disembark from the car and walk a couple hundred metres towards my classroom which overlooked the green and the school gates. Moments before I’d enter the grounds, she’d restart the engine and I’d turn around and call out, ‘Outside the classroom!’ and then she’d give me a thumbs up before the car disappeared behind the trees along the road. ‘Outside the classroom’ meaning that’s where I wanted her to be when she picked me up. Mother and I did this every single day; not once did we forgo this procedure. However, one afternoon I was unfortunate enough to discover that my mother was indeed absent from the spot I’d usually expect her to be in. This was due to an auditory error on her behalf when she mistook my regular request of ‘outside the classroom’ for ‘outside the car park’. When I failed to find her outside the classroom I almost lost the ability to breathe and stand up unaided. This seemingly innocuous mistake was nearly the end of me. I still can’t recall having a worse panic attack to this day.

In IT class I would ask to use the lavatory at the same time every week. Not because I needed to go, necessarily, but because this was the last class of the day, which meant I could sneak out the building to check to see if my mother had arrived at the school. She would always be waiting outside my brother’s classroom. Ben’s two and a half years younger than me so would finish school around 15 minutes or so before I did. That IT class was torture. I would not be able to stop looking at the clock the entire lesson until it struck three, which was the time I’d ask the teacher if I could go and do my business. My heart would be racing away, and I felt as though I had to go out and check to see if my mother was there just in case something might’ve happened to her. The teacher wasn’t aware of this ritual of mine until a good two-thirds of the school year had elapsed.

‘Do you really have to go every lesson?’ he huffed. My skin went hot. I couldn’t think of anything to say so I just gawked at him like a frightened rabbit. ‘Go on then,’ he nonchalantly added. With that, I darted downstairs and out the building. I whipped around the corner and, as I hoped, my mother was there waiting outside my brother’s classroom. She looked over at me, smiled, then waved. Phew! She’s alive!

The final straw for my mother was when, at a parent’s evening, my new form teacher said, ‘Now, Harry is a rather sensitive and passive boy, Mrs Thompson, but don’t you worry! We’re going to make him competitive!’ With that, Mother decided to withdraw me from the school by summer, and started to look for other options.

Mother got into a conversation with her cousin’s wife one day who talked about the school her children were being educated at known as ‘The Rudolf Steiner School’ and by many others as a ‘Waldorf school’. She explained to my mother how their approach to education was very gentle, free and avant-garde. Mother was fascinated and thought that this could be ideal for a boy like me. She organised a visit to the school where my dad joined her. It didn’t take long for them both to decide that this might just be the thing I needed. My siblings and I attended the open day where we met a few of the students and teachers. It was very, very different to what I was used to. To our delight, three places were available for me, my brother and my sister. My parents secured them right away and we handed in our leave notice to our current schools.

When my parents broke the news to me that I would soon be going to another school I was over the moon, and when the time finally came for me to leave my current school, all who knew me noticed a positive change in my demeanour. I seemed more chipper, relaxed and smiley; an astronomical load had been lifted from my shoulders.

The holidays soon came to an end and my first day at the Rudolf Steiner School was within reach. Could this be it? Could this be the school that’s right for me?

***

The Rudolf Steiner School was far more bizarre than anything I could’ve ever imagined. The first day didn’t even feel like I was preparing for a school day. It gave me that feeling one gets when they go away on holiday. You know when you wake up super early to go to the airport but put normal clothes on? Yes, I was amazed to discover just how relieving it was to not have to wear a school uniform anymore, as donning that dreadful, itchy private school livery every day always seemed a needless chore and hassle.

I must have possessed a very mild form of PTSD because my first few weeks at Steiner were spent in fear and trepidation. The other children warmed to me, thankfully, but I was always anticipating maybe a lecture or disapproving remark from the staff members and felt, as a new student, I had to work extra hard in order to earn everyone else’s respect when in reality I didn’t. This was just one of the ways wherein my mind had been tainted and my self-esteem zapped by my old school. I’d been tricked into believing that my worth could only be validated by others (who were much older than me), and that believing in myself was a waste of time insofar as I was following my heart and passions without simultaneously adhering to some bulls*** standard. Steiner were the complete opposite in this regard; their ethos was all about ‘developing the whole child’, and didn’t focus much on academic excellence or fitting the mould.

The unforgiving pressure I was under in my old school seemed to be non-existent in Steiner. There was no more homework for a start, we weren’t kept behind after hours for pointless and tedious tasks, we weren’t forced to be sporty or academic against our will and I found myself in lessons I didn’t even know could be taught in school. Gardening, knitting and hut making to name but a few, and of course the one which will always win first prize for strangeness had to be ‘Eurythmy’. I have my reasons to believe that the Rudolf Steiner School could be, at times, wilfully unconventional, and this is one of them. Please forgive me, dear reader, while I proceed to use Google’s definition of Eurythmy, as I cannot for the life of me begin to explain it: ‘A system of rhythmical movements to music used to teach musical understanding, or for therapeutic purposes.’ To me it was like a fusion of ballet and yoga. A staple of Waldorf tradition, though not many students took it seriously.

In my first school, the deputy head pulled me aside once to comment on my ‘dishevelled’ appearance.

‘Do you brush your hair, Thompson? You always look rather messy.’ I did always seem to have bed hair, but in the Steiner school I now looked around me to find that so many of the boys had long, and sometimes unkempt, hair. I decided to grow mine out myself.

Girls were another novelty. Apart from my sister, cousins and a few female family friends, I’d only ever associated myself with boys as I was only ever exposed to boys in my previous school. I wasn’t at all accustomed to the ubiquity of young females and found it rather amusing just how different they were which I remarked on to my mother: ‘Mum, girls are so weird. They clap their hands when they’re happy and plait each other’s hair when they’re bored.’ She giggled at my astute observation. Though I was initially stumped by these peculiar creatures, it didn’t take long for them to inure me to their ethereal appeal.

The Rudolf Steiner School, for me, was like a period of respite after a long and gruelling phase of having my personality steadily corrupted. The friendly ambiance along with my nerves saw that I really wasn’t going to be much trouble for the school during my first term. This is all part of what I’d one day describe as ‘the honeymoon period’. The initial few weeks after arriving at a new place when I’d be compliant and off the radar as I explored, got a feel for the place and found my feet. If I were to thank Steiner for anything, it would be for all of the confidence it gave me. I had been depleted of verve before arriving and soon found my voice and strength and, in some way, rediscovered the person I was at my core, and as positive as this all sounds, there was, unfortunately, a catch.

I was all too aware of the lack of discipline and boundaries at my new school. ‘Where are the boundaries?’ I wondered. ‘How far can I really go?’ I watched the behaviour of my fellow students intently and sought to emulate them. Once I’d achieved this and realised I wasn’t content with copying, as it felt a bit feeble and unoriginal, I knew the only way I was ever going to be seen as the class legend would be to take whatever the other students did and do it better. It all started with a bit of chattering here and there in lessons which developed into drawing rude pictures and passing them around. Mostly of penises. One time even a graph of the penises of some of the boys in my class in size order (not that I actually knew what these boys’ willies looked like and whose was bigger, I just made a prediction based on physical appearances), but other times I’d write little cartoons and stories about the other children or teachers. These obscene and prurient productions were designed to display my creativity and wit. I got into a strange habit of making up and spreading disgusting rumours about people to the unalloyed aggravation, and sometimes amusement, of my fellow students. For example: ‘Hey, everybody! Adam inserted his hand up Gary’s a***hole and pulled his c*** through to the other side!’ and during break time I’d violently shove people while shouting, ‘Take your clothes off!’

I can recall one day after a PE lesson entering the changing room with the other boys in my class. Everyone was in a particularly excitable mood which was often the case in school after being dismissed by a teacher. That sense of ‘we’re free!’ when it’s time to play outside at break time or time to go home at the end of a school day, and of course when it’s time to get changed before and after gym class because the teacher would almost never be present for (what I’d like to think) obvious reasons. So, into the changing room we galloped. I remember my adrenalin kicking in when the teacher dismissed us and we darted off. Everyone around me was buzzing and chatting away. At least three of us at a time would try and squeeze through those narrow doorways and then into the changing room itself where the lighting was slightly (and irritatingly) dimmed. I could never tell whether I was more nervous or excited. Different feelings would supersede one other. ‘Oh my god oh my god oh my god!’ I’d be flapping my hands like a madman barely able to contain myself. A pudgy lad in front of me named Leigh removed his t-shirt and I felt this almighty force surge up my spine and into my head which then came out of my mouth as…

‘Leigh’s fat!’

Everything around me went silent, which was followed by peals of laughter from everyone in the changing room. I was then, of course, attacked by Leigh. While the impulse was brewing moments before, I remember the fact I wasn’t supposed to say things like that made me want to say it more. I would like to make it clear to readers that at that time I did things to make people laugh and acted in ways I thought were socially acceptable, because I didn’t have the social tools to figure out playground etiquette or distinguish mildly inappropriate behaviour from behaviour that was just plain wrong. I recognise that my behaviour was inappropriate and that I upset many people.

Of course, even in a neurotypical setting, autism can have its advantages. On birthdays, each student would be given a poem to learn which they’d have to recite in class every week until their next birthday when they’d be given a new poem. It would take most children weeks, if not months, to get to a stage where they didn’t need frequent prompting by the teacher, and some would even read from the original card they were given (on which the poem was written) which they’d hold covertly behind their desk, glancing at it occasionally as they faltered through the verses. When the day finally came for me to be presented with my poem on my 11th birthday, I memorised the whole thing overnight, and when it was time for me to recite it to the class a week later, I did so fluently and without hesitation. The teacher had his spare copy of my poem at the ready to prompt me (as he did for the other students) but he soon realised that he would not need to. The whole class were staring at me in disbelief by the time I finished.

‘Impressive…’ my teacher said, smiling.

When I was about 12 or so I went through a bit of a grunge phase. My image was modelled on Kurt Cobain from Nirvana, which was my favourite band at the time. I wore rolled-up flannel shirts, ripped jeans, red Converse and at this point had long blonde hair. I had also taken up the bass guitar a year earlier after my grandfather – a cool and altruistic man – kindly lent me a couple of guitars from his vast collection in his attic. Music became my whole life; I played every evening after school for hours on end. It was cathartic and a great way to decompress. I never had a knack for composition; my strength lies in my musical ear. I’ve always intuitively known how to sing the harmony over a melody, and after learning the bass and then the acoustic guitar a year later, I figured out the bass lines and chords to numerous songs. I relish any opportunity I get to sing or play music with people but I can be extremely pedantic. One evening while my family and I were driving home after an excursion, I was trying to conduct a three-part harmony with my mother and sister. Mother kept getting her bit wrong which resulted in me raging. When someone sings even slightly out of tune, or, worse still, changes the key, I react as the Pope would if the Sistine Chapel got destroyed before his very eyes. It’s nothing less than barbarism to me.

Because music had now become my passion, it meant that it wasn’t just going to be an after-school avocation, but an activity I’d parade at school. We were in German class one day, and halfway through the lesson when we were all reciting a German poem I arbitrarily jumped out my seat, played the air guitar and yelled at the top of my lungs: ‘Let’s start a rock band! Dernernernernernerner!’

Goodness knows where that one came from. I was immediately sent out of class and danced to the door while my classmates convulsed with laughter. Strangely enough, no one accepted my offer to start a band.

There were other times where I’d be sitting in class, the teacher would ask a question and I’d go to answer, but what came out my mouth would have absolutely no relevance to the question whatsoever. I’d either randomly say, ‘Hello!’ or, ‘…and I’m Harry!’

Or sometimes I would shout out the name of one of my fellow classmates. Other times I’d reach for the genitals of my fellow classmates while doing an impression of a turkey, and often some kind of ague would descend on me and I’d burst into a fit of raucous noises.

‘Are you trying to get sent out?!’ a teacher asked once.

‘Ummmmm. No?’ I’d lie.

It’s almost as though I have to do some things rather than want to. I’m even tempted to say that it sometimes feels as though I will die if I don’t follow it through, like I have no other choice. My brain will not stop hassling me until I accede to its biddings, and will end up flooding my prefrontal cortex; effectively violating my ability to make my own decisions. Then, of course, my inner Loki takes the driver’s seat, and, most likely, shocking antics will ensue. The autistic seeks not pleasure, but safety.

Academically, Waldorf schools are a year behind mainstream schools which meant I was more or less repeating the same stuff I’d already completed, though in a much milder setting. Because of this, I did find the schoolwork relatively easy and I was top of the class for the first couple of years. However, as my behaviour worsened, so did my academic performance. My form teacher watched me transition from a sterling student into a deplorable menace and couldn’t help but feel a little sad about it.

‘Harry,’ he sighed. ‘You should really know better than this. You are such a clever boy. It’s a shame to see someone with as much potential as you willingly throw their life away.’ This really unnerved me. I knew I was a pain in the ass to everyone, and I knew of the adverse consequences I kept careening into, but I somehow couldn’t stop myself. I found myself in a bit of a catch-22. What got me down was that, for once, I was actually feeling quite happy in myself, but as my happiness and confidence grew, so did the number of problems that befell me. To overthrow authority, spontaneously bring about change and to defy and undermine the ‘norm’ and status quo wasn’t just what I did, it was who I was. And unfortunately a personality like that cannot be part of any system unless they are prepared to make some serious sacrifices and alterations to their character; which would result in unfathomable melancholy. At any rate, I decided not to curb my insubordinate ways. I was too intent on riding out my mission to find out just how far away the frontiers of tolerance stood. My teachers started to phone my house an awful lot to complain to my parents about my strange behaviour, and letters containing similar complaints endlessly flew through our letterbox. So many letters in fact that it was almost like the scene in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone when the owls delivered a plethora of letters down the chimney until the living room looked as though it had been flooded with large confetti. I became rather obsessive about my reputation as the ‘naughty boy’, and took it very seriously. If for whatever reason I didn’t get in trouble one day, or if one week I got one less letter home than the week before, then out of panic I’d end up completely overdoing it the following week because I would feel as though I had failed myself.

One apparition I conjured from thin air was my imaginary Rastafarian friend named Joe. Joe sported a large tam, embroidered with the colours of the Jamaican flag, with which he sheltered his thatch of coarse, matted dreadlocks. I’m pretty sure he wore a basketball top, bulky trousers and flip-flops, but his exact dress sense eludes my memory somewhat. I never told anyone about Joe apart from a few family members, of whom my brother and sister, I recall, responded with laughter.

I invented a very complex imaginary world to which I used to retreat whenever I found myself becoming tired or bored of the real world, or if ever I felt upset about something and needed to escape. I would usually enter it when I was in the toilet for some reason. Every day after a meal I would lock myself in the downstairs toilet in our house, or in a cubicle in the school lavatory, for up to 20 minutes at a time and sit back and allow myself to roam freely from within my inner landscape. I am not going to tell you too much about my imaginary world, but I will tell you that my imaginary Rastafarian friend, Joe, was a part of it.

I think part of the reason I found it so difficult to sustain genuine friendships as a child was because I felt as though I couldn’t really relate to other children. There wasn’t anybody with a mind even remotely like mine. I remember trying to speak to my classmates once or twice about my thoughts:

‘Hey, do you guys ever shake someone’s hand when greeting them and imagine head-butting them, spitting at them, or pouring a pot of boiling water over their head?’

‘Um, no, Harry… We don’t.’

‘These humans are strange creatures,’ I’d think to myself.

Intrusive thoughts were always randomly popping into my head and plaguing my life when I was young, and they still do today if I’m honest. Typically, the less anxious I am, the less they occur. I’ll have these visions of myself doing something ignominious in, say, formal situations which precede an upwelling of adrenalin. I’ll wince and whine and flap my hand (‘stimming’) until whatever unpleasant image that’s being projected in my mind passes away.

People may have tried to bully me at points, but my responses to banter and teasing were always odd and a source of confusion for my classmates. I would shrug off quotidian insults yet I was hypersensitive to criticism. So, if someone were to say, ‘Hey, Harry, you’re ugly!’ I wouldn’t have flinched because there’d be a demand to retaliate. Had someone said, ‘Hey, Harry, you grate your cheese awkwardly,’ on the other hand, I would have flipped.

I could be an extremely literal-minded child. For example, when I was at my first school and my teacher announced that we were going on a school trip, I automatically assumed that she meant the whole school would fall over. Unsurprisingly, I was an easy child to fool, sometimes believing anything anyone told me. A few of my classmates at Steiner clocked onto how gullible I could be, and once during break time a couple of boys approached me to tell me I was in a lot of trouble and that a certain teacher wanted to speak to me about it. So, with that, I scurried off to look for this teacher who, in my naïve mind, was about to chastise me. It took me half the break time to locate her, but I did. I asked the teacher innocently why I was in trouble. She was perplexed. As it turned out, she hadn’t summoned me, but she assured me I’d done nothing wrong and that I needn’t worry. On my way back to the playground I mulled over possible explanations for what just happened, without once considering the fact I may have been deceived by my so-called ‘friends’. Alas, it soon became clear when I returned to find them laughing at me.

I remember, once or twice, actually deciding to conform. I’d sit in class and try my hardest to pay attention and follow what the teacher was saying. So…damn…hard. I would exhaust myself just by trying. The room would be abuzz with seductive and annoying noises; flies, heaters, chairs and desks creaking. My heart thudding away in my chest would feel like it was a man buried alive in a coffin frantically trying to scratch his way to freedom. I’d hear some classmates murmuring away at the back and I’d feel a tremendous urge to get involved. I would try and fight it, but the more I fought the urge to be mischievous the stronger the urge became. It was no use ‘trying’ to be another person, or even a person for that matter; some unrelenting force inside me wouldn’t allow it.

I compulsively took things one step further than anyone else who dared to destroy a lesson. If one boy muttered the word ‘rape’ under his breath, I’d yell it at the top of my lungs. If someone lobbed a woodchip at another child during woodwork then I’d throw one straight at the teacher and readily take the blame. Similarly, if a food fight were to break out during lunchtime, I’d suborn everyone to carry it on into lesson time. Even though I was now 13 years old, I didn’t think it at all inappropriate to pull stupid faces and make silly noises in the middle of lessons. I was simply resisting the demand to ‘act my age’.

My parents sought professional help for me after my father, at last, surrendered to the fact I was far from a normal boy. An esteemed psychiatrist in London, after assessing me, gave me my first ever diagnosis of ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’ or ‘ADHD’. I don’t recall feeling much emotion, but I suppose it did bring about some relief as it yielded an explanation (albeit a crude one) for my naughty behaviour. The psychiatrist’s suggestion, however, that I should take Ritalin, didn’t sit well with my mother and myself. Dad was up for giving it a go, but was, thankfully, outvoted.

Apart from when I got into illegal drugs as a younger man (which we’ll come to), I never once felt the need to be on any kind of prescriptive medicine which would to some degree alter who I was, and possibly who I am today. By the time I got my first diagnosis, I knew I was fine the way I was and, if anything, it was the system that needed remedying, not me. I liken medication to a solar eclipse. The moon being the drug, the sun being the person and how the drug just dims the person’s light as it passes through, much like the moon does to the sun during an eclipse. I had no desire to dilute myself in this way. If school couldn’t accommodate me the way I was then so be it, it would just mean that school wasn’t the right place for me. The last thing I was prepared to do was bow down and tailor myself to fit the system.

I’m not denying that medication is necessary in some circumstances. If a child is diagnosed with a serious illness, for example, then I’m sure the last thing on the mind of his or her parents would be to skip the hard-proven treatments that have stood the test of science, for fear of making alterations to their child’s personality. No. They will do everything in their power to somehow make their child well again. There is a place for medication in extreme cases. If someone with an atypical neurology wishes to go down the regular route of school and aspires to one day get a normal job, then by all means medication may be what they need in order to scrape the mark. If that were me, however, then it would feel most inauthentic. I would feel as though I was in some way rejecting the person I was and am at my core, in tragic and hopeless pursuit of being someone I’m not. Autism is not a terminal illness, but a lifelong condition. Something those who are blessed or – some would say (depending on how one looks at it) – afflicted with have no choice but to accept and embrace.

The only time I ever felt the need to change myself was when I wasn’t happy with myself, so I began self-medicating with illegal street drugs and staggering amounts of booze. The legal status is irrelevant. I may have even been desperate enough at that point to try out prescriptive medicine. At the end of the day if there existed a quick and easy way for me to abscond from reality, then I was taking it. Thankfully now, life for me is more bearable, and I have no desire whatever to enhance or muddle it up it in any way. It wasn’t years of attempted self-alteration that got me here, it was learning to appreciate and respect myself enough to become healthier and find my natural habitat.

Anyway, back to the story. My reckless antics soon prevented me from being invited to all the outings my classmates would go on at weekends. This hurt, but I was really done with the Steiner school by this point. My form teacher was pretty much at the end of his tether, too. I had this habit of making popping sounds with my lips which drove him berserk. He asked me to stop about three times in one class. Then a few moments after the third time, unable to refrain, I made the fourth teeniest tiniest pop.

‘Get out!’ he roared. This was most disconcerting as this teacher was a very mild-mannered and cordial man, so for him to erupt in such a way meant that he had really been vexed. I scurried off and he joined me outside about five minutes later.

‘When are you going to approach adulthood, Harry? When are you going to just grow up?!’ He wasn’t asking sardonically; he had this exhausted, desperate tone in his voice. A truly broken man with absolutely no idea what to do with me. ‘You could get so much out of school, Harry. It all depends on which way you choose to go.’ I knew he meant well, but it stuffed me further into a hole I already felt unable to get out of. I eventually decided to stop going to school altogether. After delivering an explosive and emotionally charged sermon to my mother on why school stank, she let me stay home. She couldn’t bear to see me so distressed and knew it would only make me worse if I were to routinely subject myself to seven hours of (what I thought was) pointless torment. It was also far less of a risk keeping me at home and out of harm’s way, plus, she’d read my report; it was atrocious. My parents were constantly driving up to the school for meetings with my teachers who had started threatening to kick me out; all of this my mother could have done without.

I actually admire some things about the Rudolf Steiner Schools and the Waldorf way of life. It just wasn’t for me. New adventures were now beckoning from the horizon and it was time for me to move on. I wasn’t to be bumming around the house for too long as I learnt of another school that was potentially even weirder than Steiner. I mean ‘weird’ in a good way of course. In fact, I only ever mean weird in a good way; the weirder the better! Because if a place is weird then there’s more of a chance I’ll feel at home. The same applies to people: the weirder someone is the more chance I’ll get along with them, and this particular school was so weird that one might not even call it a ‘school’.