Chapter 4 (resumed)

‘School’

When I was in my last few months at Steiner, a boy in my class (who was also a troublemaker) told me one day that he would be leaving Steiner to attend a home from home schooling organisation that was run from a quaint farmhouse in rural Hertfordshire. I can remember a piercing yet lovely sensation germinating in my chest upon hearing about this peculiar place. I somehow intuitively knew that that was where I should be going as well. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be there, it felt more like I needed to be there. After garnering all the relevant information from my classmate, I decided to broach the topic to my mother who reacted rather cynically. Maybe it was because this ‘place’, of which the name was yet to be disclosed to me, appeared to be a little haphazard at a glance.

My friend mentioned quad biking, trampolining, various kinds of outings, long country walks and watching TV during lunch. I mean imagine being able to go to a school like that! Sounds like every girl and boy’s dream, doesn’t it? Well, as it happens, it was, and is, but not for the reasons I just listed off.

Every new ‘student’ (which is probably not the right word to invoke in this context) had to have an assessment before starting. Which may sound a little invasive, but it was really just a way for Felicity, the – oh, I don’t know, let’s call her – ‘principal’, to get to know her new students.

Felicity Evans – my long-standing muse, mentor and dear friend – is the founder of the wonderful sanctuary I was now lucky enough to call (with an element of reserve) ‘school’. A maverick, a leading light, a polymath and guru in her own right. I first met Felicity a day before my 14th birthday. I was to undergo a process whereby my fine motor skills, coordination, cognitive ability and communication skills would all be carefully examined. I already knew that Felicity’s organisation was run from her home, but this pre-existing knowledge did not in any way mitigate the shock I felt when realising, upon my arrival, that I would be, quite literally, attending school in someone’s house. I scanned my surroundings, and I liked what I saw. It was, after all, very beautiful, but still I struggled to envisage her 20 or so students, who were between the ages of four and 18, thronging the place.

Following my mother’s hesitant knocks, the door opened and the quizzical face of a 61-year-old woman appeared in the door frame. Felicity invited me in and my mother went off into town for a bit and would return once the assessment was over. I could feel almost immediately that Felicity was a very special and powerful woman. She possesses these striking sapphire eyes that can peer right into one’s psyche. She read me like a book, and in a way that no one else had ever tried getting to know me before.

Prior to meeting Felicity, I was all too aware of how people (especially those who hadn’t observed me in a school or social situation) balked and scoffed at the idea that I ‘struggled’ with life. I was from a respectable, wealthy family and often struck people as a confident, articulate and bubbly young man who excelled on a one to one basis. My difficulties were concealed by this stratum of charm and it would strain credulity to propose my behaviour could, sometimes, be quite so outrageous and unacceptable.

Due to the disjunction between my two personas, I often felt compelled to ‘milk it’ whenever being assessed by some sort of professional because no one could ever quite bring themselves to believe how such a nice boy could be capable of such misconduct. But Felicity was wonderfully different in this way; she saw and knew who I was from the start.

‘I can see you have problems, Harry,’ she empathised. ‘I can see you find life difficult, but underneath your dysfunction lies a lot of potential. I see it.’ As absurd as this may sound, it was actually a lot more refreshing for me to hear the former part of that sentence. In all of my previous schools, staff members were always harping on about how there was absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t be getting on with my schoolwork and that my perpetual misbehaviour was deliberate and most likely resulted from apathy and a bad attitude. Felicity, on the other hand, before judging and condemning someone’s misbehaviour will always endeavour to look for the causes, and does so with an inimitable style.

After a very enjoyable couple of hours in Felicity’s company, my mother returned to pick me up. I told her how happy it would make me if she and Dad were to send me to Felicity’s school, but Mother maintained her scepticism. I think she was a tad worried that I wouldn’t have many friends my own age at Felicity’s, whereas Dad may have harboured concern that there was a chance I would not receive a first-rate education. Plus, there existed another little red flag that made me furrow my brow, to be honest.

The name of Felicity’s home from home schooling organisation was ‘NatureKids’, and a name like this invokes some rather curious connotations indeed. For me it always conjured up an image of nerdy, bespectacled, pimple-faced teens clad in anoraks, wielding magnifying glasses and notepads, stomping through the woods observing the lives of ladybirds and snails. Come to think of it I suppose there were, at times, elements of this, but the core principles of NatureKids far surpassed its quirky moniker.

Ultimately, my parents decided to send me.

The NatureKids motto was ‘freedom to learn’ (which was, for the record, a term coined by me). Each child had the luxury of being able to learn in their own time and at their own pace, and could draw snacks from the cornucopia of wholesome and nutritious foods as they pleased, spend ample time playing outdoors, they would be encouraged and assisted with academic undertakings or personal, creative pursuits, and would always be treated as the beautiful individual they were born to be. We had so much land to explore and have fun in. We’d regularly make bonfires and go on long nature walks where the activities would range from building bridges across streams to searching for edible plants. We even had a teepee in the back field where a few of us would occasionally stay overnight. During these evenings we’d enjoy philosophical conversations around the fire, make prank phone calls in the middle of the night on top of the hay bales in the fields, and would spend hours pretending we were all aliens from a faraway planet who had come to save planet Earth. Because we were all ‘outcasts’ there was something so pertinent about this game we all cherished so much.

Felicity specialised in children who had diagnoses of ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and autism, and because of this, many of the children could be quite challenging, to say the least. The farmhouse, at times, could become quite hectic and I watched as stress accumulated in Felicity time and again as she fought to keep everything under control. But for the most part, everyone got along famously. We were a mélange of strong and eccentric personalities that constituted one big family. I could never describe Felicity’s place as a ‘school’, to me it will always be a refuge for people who do not fit the system. The outside world may have branded us ‘disabled’, but when we were at Felicity’s we were just human beings, with different brains, in our natural habitat. Sure, we could all be a bit of a handful and wound Felicity up quite a lot, but this still wasn’t an indication that anything was ‘wrong’ with us. We were just a bunch of spirited individuals who couldn’t be understood or tamed by society. I think it’s safe for me to say that the times I spent at Felicity’s were among the happiest of my life.

My honeymoon period at Felicity’s consisted of a very long and protracted duration of one whole day… I’m not really too sure why this one was so short. Maybe it was because I had a lot of energy after Steiner and couldn’t be an introvert for too long in case I’d implode or something similarly disastrous. The last time I found myself in an unexplored land, I did what I usually did in those situations and became the clown through a tireless and incremental process, but I cavorted out of my shell on my second day at Felicity’s like an impatient jack-in-the-box. Felicity describes my presence at this juncture as ‘like a whirlwind’. If I was a little crazy in Steiner, then I was surely a full-blown wild child by the time I was at Felicity’s. I would swear profusely in the faces of the other children, get my bottom out at inappropriate times (i.e. during a lesson), one time I urinated on Felicity’s pet rabbits and on several occasions dry humped her cats to get a laugh from the other students. I was neither trusted nor permitted to ride the quad bike as I would deliberately crash it into walls and wipe out a few plant pots while I was at it.

Felicity is, I must say, a character, and can be impossibly entertaining. She was full of these rather amusing and old-fashioned phrases that she’d employ in certain scenarios. Whenever we were all in a hurry to get somewhere she’d shout, ‘Quick sticks!’ And whenever she wanted to know how we were doing she’d ask, ‘Is everything A1OK everybody?!’ I don’t know if she knew quite how euphorically dippy this made me.

When I was at Steiner, I started swimming for a local club a few nights a week and took part in a few galas. I lost a lot of weight as a result and became fighting fit. However, this all came to an end when I started attending Felicity’s as the ‘schooldays’ were exhausting and I’d expend so much energy being hyper. The other students could be afraid of me, and I would, admittedly, annoy them, but I was also quite popular at the same time. I’d do a pretty mean impression of Felicity which everyone found rather funny and I would run around and play with the much younger children for hours on end. I drove Felicity spare but she never gave up on me, and I commend her highly for that. She went out her way to find me music and English teachers, some of whom I’d benefit from while others I would scare off with my puerile tricks.

After a few months of bliss, my behaviour improved immeasurably. I calmed right down and found some sense of focus with my guitar playing and creative writing. Despite the unstinting love I held for Felicity and her haven, the novelty of it all eventually palled as I started to crave a new adventure or perhaps a new environment to explore. I knew I didn’t want to go back to a ‘regular’ school, but I knew it was definitely time for something else.

One day when sitting in the car with my mother waiting for my brother and sister to finish school, I opened up to her about what was going on inside my heart and mind. Mother listened intently and then asked:

‘Have you ever thought about a boarding school?’

‘…?!’

***

I must say this was the last thing I expected to come out of my mother’s mouth. Had The Beast made this utterance then I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised as he probably thought that a good old-fashioned bout of toff tuition would have done me a world of good at this particularly pivotal point in my life, as this is exactly what he was the recipient of in his boyhood. This seems a custom in middle-class families and I for one was determined, from a young age, to be as revolutionary as possible and jettison any mode of behaviour one might associate with the typical ‘posh boy’. To attend a boarding school would be to abandon my principles but, as it turned out, this particular boarding school was fantastically unconventional.

Brockwood Park School was founded by the great late Indian philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, in Hampshire, and was fairly reminiscent of Steiner in that it had an alternative, or ‘holistic’, approach to education. It was a hippy international school where there were actually more people from overseas than there were Brits. No uniform, a strictly vegetarian diet, gardening (or ‘care for the Earth’ as they liked to call it), daily meditation, school discussions, and, since they did not employ cleaners, everyone was assigned to a particular job in the morning after breakfast, and everyone had to take turns in helping with the washing up after meal times. What really sold it to my mother, when she heard about it from her cousin’s wife (again), was that Brockwood Park had very small classes (averaging about ten students per class) and she thought it might aid my concentration if there were fewer people in a room.

The two of us, along with my grandmother, went to an open day and were all thoroughly impressed with Brockwood Park. I decided right there and then that I wanted to secure a place for myself for the following September, but some people – especially Felicity – doubted that I’d be ready for a school environment by that time, if ever. Felicity wasn’t being pessimistic per se, she wanted what was best for me and was fearful that I might end up hampering, or even reversing, my progress.

In spite of everyone’s qualms, I went ahead and attended a prospective week at Brockwood. I vividly remember the drive up there; the long and windy road leading up to the sumptuous country manor which was situated in a most bucolic part of Hampshire. Then through the main doors where the scent of wood, tahini and miso suffused the air and wafted gently towards my nostrils. After taking a deeply satisfying breath in, I entered the building.

It was imperative for my honeymoon period to begin at the exact same moment as my prospective week, as I knew if it didn’t then I’d have to kiss my chances of going to Brockwood Park goodbye. Conveniently for me, the two simultaneously occurred and I was affable and agreeable to every staff member and student I happened to cross paths with. I had to snigger to myself after a pleasant conversation with someone at lunch or a nice jam with someone in the music studio: ‘These people have absolutely no idea what a little s*** I can be.’ It felt a bit like I was hiding a lethal weapon under my shirt. I knew it was there, but as far as everyone else was concerned, it didn’t exist.

I returned to Felicity’s after my lovely week at Brockwood Park School and about a month or so later, a letter which was addressed to me arrived in the post. It was from Brockwood. I opened it with bated breath and proceeded to read it. They were delighted to announce that following a successful prospective week they would like to offer me a place to start in September. I informed my parents who were most proud, and we accepted right away.

I only had a few months to go before starting my new school, but so much happened in that small window. I found myself beleaguered, for the first time, by mind-altering substances and received a second diagnosis.

After my prospective week at Brockwood, a few people noticed and remarked on how my behaviour had got worse and I am in no position to deny this was the case. I found myself in a catch-22. September, for one thing, could not have come around any faster if it was made of greased weasel s***, so this meant my impatience was abject, but at the same time I had to prove to everyone that I was mentally and emotionally ready for a boarding school, which was incredibly difficult given that I probably felt readier to go to Brockwood than I actually was.

Since I was little, I always wondered whether I might have Tourette’s syndrome. This was on account of the sudden jerky movements and the occasional expletives I inappropriately blurted out here and there. By the time I was at Steiner and developed more intense tics and found it next to impossible to hold in full sentences laced with abuse, profanity and salaciousness, I started to give it some more serious thought; even more so when at Felicity’s after my prospective week. The frustration of having to wait for something, while trying to be as well behaved as I could possibly be, was at times incapacitating. I noticed my tics and abrupt involuntary vocalisations were more frequent when I was out of sorts. A very nice young man named Jack who worked for Felicity, one day found himself, unjustly, on the receiving end of one of my verbal ejaculations. There were about five teenagers, myself included, who attended Felicity’s at the time and we were at an age where we required a medium through which we could channel some of our raging testosterone. Jack, who was 23 years old, would take us on runs and bike rides and other stuff like that. We were all sitting outside one day during lunch and he and the other teenagers were enjoying a civil conversation about some fairly mundane topic that happens to elude my memory. I was awkwardly perched on the periphery, struggling to find a way into the conversation until the perfect opportunity emerged:

‘Yeah, so I’m not really sure why, to be honest,’ said Jack, rounding off something he was talking about with the other teenagers.

‘Well, maybe it’s because your mum f***s dead people!’ I odiously interjected. Random and totally uncalled for. Not my proudest moment. Felicity was furious when she heard about this. She phoned my mother who came to pick me up at once. I wasn’t allowed to be near any of the other children after this episode so Felicity and I sat and talked in a room by ourselves while I waited for my mother to arrive.

‘Why say that?!’ Felicity barked.

‘I have no idea. It just popped out.’ I can remember sitting there floundering, full of regret and disgust with myself and thinking, ‘Why did I say that?’ To me it was as if someone else had said it.

Felicity and my mother would often phone each other to talk about me. I didn’t mind this at all as I knew there was a lot to discuss. Plus, Felicity sat in no judgement of my behaviour, she genuinely wanted to find a solution and a way for me to thrive in the world. Following a few incidents, such as the one I mentioned earlier, the topic of autism began to infiltrate their ongoing dialogue. For years my mother suspected that I might be on the autistic spectrum, and believed that the older I got the more that certain ‘symptoms’ were transpiring. Luckily Felicity had an arsenal of resources at her disposal and provided her with the phone number of one of the most esteemed speech and language therapists in the country, Margo Sharp.

I didn’t really know too much about autism at the time, and ruminated on it during the car journey to the dark and decrepit land of Birmingham. Mother and The Beast were both present which I was pleased about. When we arrived at Margo’s house I was struck by how adept and formidably intelligent she was. I remember thinking, ‘Wow. This is a person who really knows what they’re doing.’ She wanted to see me on my own first. For an hour she asked me countless questions and put me through a number of tests. She then requested to speak to my parents, so saw me to her living room downstairs where a scrim of toys and magazines covered the floor. Margo had a husband who was pottering about. I was 14 at the time and felt a little too young to start up a conversation with him but a little too old to play with the toys. Time seriously dragged its heels while I was sitting around waiting. I was fidgety and couldn’t relax knowing there was an in-depth conversation about me going on upstairs, so I decided to eavesdrop.

I stuck my ear to the door of the room in which Margo and my parents were conversing. Listening to Dad trying to describe my behaviour was funny: ‘Well, I come home from work and try and have a normal conversation with him about school or something and he just comes out with a load of gibberish.’ He then proceeded to do an impression of the sound I’d always make to him which made me giggle so much that I had to quickly move away from the door so as not to be heard.

Eventually I was allowed in the room as it was necessary for me to be present for the moment Margo revealed her conclusion.

‘Okay then, Harry, I’m going to say Asperger’s.’ For some reason, instead of digesting what I’d just heard and taking a few precious moments to reflect on it, my eyes shot straight at my parents who looked relieved, a little stunned, and of course, emotional; especially Mother who had tears in her eyes. I’m not sure why I was so interested to see how my parents would react. Maybe it was because for years I had tried so desperately to get some kind of message across to them. A message of ‘Look at me! I am different! I am weird! This is me! I am not changing! Lalalalala!’ All of which were conveyed through behaviour alone, and then to suddenly have a qualified professional verbally affirm all of this to my parents was satisfying in a way that is too great to be put into words.

We thanked Margo Sharp earnestly. I then asked her for more information about my new condition. Which I suppose wasn’t exactly ‘new’. Margo spoke eloquently and comprehensively about Asperger’s syndrome and gave me a little booklet on the subject which I perused for most of the way home.

Although I agreed with a lot of it, the booklet still left a few ‘gaps’ in my knowledge. Don’t get me wrong, I did share my parents’ relief, but something still didn’t feel 100% right. In the booklet it mentioned how ‘Aspies’ exhibit a lack of empathy. Apart from when triggered, I couldn’t relate to this at all. I was also left without a good explanation for my intolerance to authority and need to be in control. There wasn’t a section in the booklet that mentioned any of that, and these were my main ‘problems’. Alas, my search for answers continued.

With only a few months to go before I started my new school, I was introduced, by my friend, Connor, who also attended Felicity’s, to tobacco, marijuana and alcohol. One could say that he served as the Cupid who entwined me with some of the fieriest lovers of my life. I’d managed to get a bit tipsy once when I was eight or nine after quaffing a bit too much cider at a family friend’s, but I had always found the taste of alcohol to be somewhat disagreeable, which, therefore, made me avoid it more or less entirely. This all changed though when Felicity, and a few of her helpers, took us all to The Home Educator’s Seaside Festival (HES FES) in Essex.

I loved this experience and found the attendees to be delightfully uninhibited and authentic. I played my first gig at HES FES; myself and a few of Felicity’s students performed ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ by Queen on stage to hundreds. It was exhilarating, and inspired me to one day pursue a career in music so I could have that insurmountable feeling more often.

Connor and I were walking around the campsite one afternoon when we came across a slightly shifty looking lad who happened to have weed on him. Connor, after correctly surmising this lad was a possessor of drugs on the basis of his looks, called him over for a word. He pulled a joint out of his jacket pocket, which I – admittedly, greenly – assumed was a large rolley that happened to smell nice. The three of us wandered off into the woods, lit it up and passed it around. Needless to say, I soon found out what it really was.

Later that evening, Connor, our new friend and I set out on a hunt for an irresponsible adult who would buy us a bottle of swill or two. Once we successfully found our unscrupulous young scallywag, we walked with him to an onsite shop, told him our order and waited patiently outside until he came out with three large bottles of WKD. We chugged fervently until not a drop remained and then took a little hobble around.

Connor and I got drunk every night after that until the festival was over. He sought amusement in getting me to do dares similar to the ones I used to do when I was a younger child. Most of them were pretty tame, then at one point I stole someone else’s wine, and then Connor mentioned (he wasn’t being wholly serious as it turned out) approaching a random girl and asking her to f*** me. I leapt at the chance because (as discussed previously in this chapter) he didn’t exactly tell me to do it. It was phrased more like, ‘Harry, imagine if you went over to that girl and asked her to f*** you?’ There was a strong cautionary undertone here. He was tacitly implying that it would be pretty darn unusual and socially unacceptable if anyone was to do so, and that’s exactly what made me foolishly trot over to her. I should point out that the two of us actually had a minor argument with this girl a few moments before. It was after we cockily asked her if she would just hand us the bottle of alcohol she was holding. Another stupid question met with a disheartening refusal. So, when the time finally came for me to ask her, ‘Will you f*** me?’ the utter revulsion on her face before her foot launched for my testicles, stays with me still.

I didn’t realise quite how much Felicity and her wondrous idyll of NatureKids had made an impact on me until a couple of weeks after I left in the summer of 2007. I was looking forward to going to my new school, but I couldn’t help but feel a bit sad about what I was leaving behind. I knew though, that the cherished memories I had of that beautiful place where I found my tribe, and of Felicity, the philanthropic genius who saved my life, would live on in a deep recess of my heart, forever.

***

September hastened and jostled past August and greeted me like a smack in the face. I all of a sudden felt slightly nervous about going to Brockwood, and after about two or so weeks into the first term I decided I didn’t want to be there at all. This untimely spell of cold feet extirpated whatever social inclination I had, so I decided to shut myself in my bedroom in the evenings to avoid having to interact with the other new students. I remember calling my mother in tears once or twice, threatening to run away if she didn’t come and take me home. She never did, and managed, adroitly, to persuade me to stick it out for a bit longer.

Anyone could see from day one that my time in Brockwood was going to be short-lived. The first thing I thought after bidding my parents and siblings farewell was, ‘Right, who smokes? Who drinks?’ It wasn’t so much that I was in pursuit of drink and drugs for the recreational enjoyment they could bring more than it was how I knew that they could serve as such charming nerve dampeners and confidence boosters. I can recall traipsing, timidly, around and noticing many large groups dotted about the school, comprised, mainly, of new students whose conspicuous lack of diffidence rendered me envious and sulky.

‘Why do they make that look so easy?’ I muttered under my breath. ‘Why can’t I do that?’ As an alien, I was eager to learn more about this abstruse human race and their bizarre behaviours. Small talk, to me, feels like what I’d imagine being trapped inside a wheelie bin full of scorpions for half an hour would feel like. Abject and unnecessary pain.

For the first few days I would sit on the perimeter of one of these large groups and listen in to the conversations. I was secretly and selfishly hoping for someone to say, ‘Does anyone want to go for a joint?!’

But that moment never came. They were all giving each other massages, talking about their favourite music and what life was like in their own countries. I was going to have to find another plan. Fortunately, I came across a lad from Northern Ireland who agreed to help me out, so the two of us cycled to a nearby petrol station.

‘What am I gettin’ for ya, Harry kid?’ he asked in his beautiful Belfastian lilt.

‘Twenty Marlboro lights please, mate.’ I mentally intoned the words ‘Please have fags’ repeatedly, like a mantra, until he returned. He reached into his pocket and handed me the tawdry cardboard treasure chest which enclosed my 20 cylindrical jewels. Weed would have been more ideal, but this would have to do for now.

There were many activities going on at Brockwood to help all the new students integrate, which I would either deliberately miss or partake in very reluctantly. I’m sorry to say this but I simply did not give a toss. All I was interested in was getting out my head. I hadn’t been alive for very long, but I’d been alive for long enough to know how I felt about the world: it sucked. Most overrated, if one were to ask my former adolescent self who was under the mistaken belief that he knew everything.

The evening, after I’d finally got my paws on some juicy smokes, most of the 67 students (yep, you heard) had organised a gathering in the school Grove. The Grove was the most beautiful garden situated at the back of the school behind a couple of fields. A variegated salad of trees and shrubs from all over the globe, liberally peppered with sublime flowers. It was like being inside a Lewis Carroll novel. When I turned up that evening I lit up a cigarette and started offering them around. Part of me knew I was asking to be reprimanded. Sometimes I can’t resist the thrill of p***ing people off en masse. There’s something so roguishly appealing about it that makes me feel, inexplicably, totally at peace with myself and at one with the universe. One student put an end to my equanimity by wresting my gasper from my hand and stubbing it out.

Brockwood, instead of using words like ‘rules’ to describe an obligatory set of regulations, and ‘headteacher’ as a name for the big bad boss, preferred terms that were less heavy and less sinister in nature. ‘Agreements’ is one example; chosen carefully to give off the impression that all that is required from the student is their cooperation and willingness as opposed to their obedience and submission. ‘Director’ is another good Brockwoodism; not an omnipotent ruler per se, but one who guides and oversees without being too much of a dictator. Now, I really did respect Brockwood for this as it displayed humility, but it did make me curious as to, well, what would happen if I – didn’t cooperate? If the ‘directors’ possessed a more ‘equal’ air than the average headmaster at a conventional school, then how much goading from me would it take for them to assume a more authoritarian stance? I was determined to find out.

The word ‘Harry’ began circulating around the school and not in a good way either, for my very name was drenched in vitriol. However, to quote Oscar Wilde: ‘There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’ I smoked weed incessantly, but thankfully only ever got caught smoking cigarettes, which happened several times. A series of ‘student’ meetings followed my transgressions. I never took these meetings seriously and assumed the other students didn’t either. Perhaps this was because there were never any staff members or adults present, and had there been then it might have given me more of an incentive to… Oh. Never mind.

Even when the staff members did eventually have to intervene and I’d be called for a meeting with, say, the director, I’d always be eerily honest about my offences. For example, the director may have asked:

‘So you’ve been smoking again, Harry?’

To which I’d reply, ‘Yes, that was me,’ in a most cavalier tone, not showing the slightest hint of remorse or concern for the consequences.

‘Okay. So what should we do about this then?’

‘Well, you should probably expel me. It’s happened many times now after all.’

‘…’

Brockwoodians loved to discuss everything at length, and so did I to be honest, but not when I felt pressured to do so as I did in all of those meetings I was forced to attend. I was so very quiet in meetings; apart from during the compulsory minute silences we had at the end of school assemblies where I could never seem to stop laughing, I rarely uttered a word. It was never officially stated, but Brockwood, an unspoken breeding ground for orators, did feel as though at times they were slyly forcing their students to speak in public. Maybe I’m wrong, but it is something I picked up on when noticing my demand avoidant reactions in such situations. If I didn’t feel a demand there, then I wouldn’t have been quite so disinclined to make my voice heard.

I do catch myself releasing a little wince of pity for Brockwood now and again when I hop aboard the Nostalgia Express. I had such a nasty and flippant attitude at 15, which I’m sure could be said about a lot of kids that age, but I really cringe at the bravado I cowered beneath as it was such a shoddy contrivance manufactured for my own advantage. I feel compunction mainly because now I am older, and not quite so governed by self-interest, I am able to see and appreciate all of the marvellous things about Brockwood, of which I childishly trifled with as a student. Alas, a system is still a system at the end of the day. Brockwood may have had an approach that was wonderfully different, and far more open-minded and benevolent than other schools, but it was still a system nonetheless. It is, after all, in my nature to disassemble any kind of system and to do the opposite of what’s expected of me, even when it’s something I’m generally in favour of.

Though my behaviour was a little erratic and unpredictable, I did eventually make some very special friends while at Brockwood, which helped to significantly reduce much of my abiding tension. We would sneak out of our dorm rooms together at night to go and smoke weed or cigarettes together in the Grove, gossip and play truth or dare up in the school tree-house and sometimes we would even run around the school grounds naked and play a game of tag. But what really made a difference was falling in love for the first time.

Jessica and I got together in the November of my second year. I’d once enjoyed a brief ‘romance’ with a goth girl in Steiner for a few months, but Jessica was my first ‘serious’ girlfriend, if you will. I can’t pinpoint what it was exactly that made me fall for Jess. She had these extraordinary and entrancing different coloured eyes, a warm and disarming smile, a fearlessness beyond measure, and had mastered the art of being abundantly confident without ever displaying the faintest flicker of arrogance. I will always remember her either as the keen sportswoman playing football on the South lawn sending a ball hurtling through the atmosphere with her powerful left foot, or as the diligent academic labouring away in the dining hall with her head in a book and a pen in her fist; assiduously ploughing through a piece of homework she would not fail to hand in on time. I suppose, upon reading the last half a paragraph, one may assume that Jess and I were polar opposites? In some aspects we may have been. I certainly wasn’t sporty, it had probably been years since I last did any homework, and I wouldn’t say ‘confident’ was a good word to describe me at this juncture as I was more teetering on the edge of narcissism. We had the exact same sense of humour though, and shared a similar method in the way we analysed Brockwood and the other students. Our relationship was woven together with a streak of innocence. I can remember us climbing trees together and going for walks on a rainy day and jumping in puddles. Jess and I would sometimes be chilling out in my bedroom at school in the evening and I would never like it if she were to suddenly get up and announce she was leaving. I needed plenty of notice as I couldn’t bear the anxiety brought on by surprises or sudden change. This usually happened just before room time on weeknights, or if Jess had class to attend. Even if the two of us were speaking on the phone during holidays, I’d try my hardest to stop the conversation from ending. Jess would say:

‘Okay, Harry, I have to go now.’

I’d try and create a distraction by saying something like:

‘Jess, guess what?! I drew a picture of a butterfly!’

As I basked in Jess’s intoxicating presence, just about everything else in my life was falling to pieces.

On more than one occasion, my mother was asked to drive an hour and a half up the motorway to meet with my teachers to talk about my misbehaviour. The teachers were growing increasingly more concerned about the abnormal amount of energy I seemed to have at night time.

‘Why won’t he settle down?! What could possibly be so fun and exciting about going to bed?!’ the director asked in an exasperated tone. Anyone would think he was talking about a toddler. As it happens, I do get very hyperactive at night. I don’t know whether it’s the demand of having to go to sleep or if it’s that I’m bewitched by the evening’s crepuscular hue, but all I know now is that it’s a prime time for me to be creative. When I was at boarding school, however, I was too busy not doing as I was told. An average night for me at Brockwood would be to host a gathering in my room after hours, or, failing that, sneak out of my bathroom window and break into the girls’ dorm to get drunk or stoned, and perhaps top the night off by going for a woozy wander around the school grounds under the stars. It was soon brought to my attention by my friends that I had a devastating dearth of subtlety, finesse and spatial awareness at times when one is expected to uphold such qualities, or at least have some wits about them. I wouldn’t contend this to be honest. If the others were creeping through the corridors at midnight, I’d barge and stomp through, slamming doors behind me as I went. Similarly, if they were whispering in a room or someplace we weren’t supposed to be in for fear of a staff member hearing us, my voice would be blaring away at full volume. This carelessness was often the reason my mother kept on getting dragged into the realm of my shenanigans. Had I been more subtle and vigilant then I could’ve precluded much of the tiresome hullabaloo. I was suspended at one point and spent a good part of a week travelling on the London Underground to Camden Town where I enshrouded myself in a wreath of weed smoke, before returning to Brockwood pitifully unreformed.

I had learned about the concept of ‘Indigo Children’ through Felicity, and I once tried (and miserably failed) to use this as an excuse for my appalling behaviour at school. My director called me into his office one day following some incident or other and asked me why I possessed such a strong urge to destroy, or words to that effect. I told him that I was an Indigo Child who had come to Earth from outer space to tear down the system and bring about world peace, and would return to my home planet as soon as the mission was complete. I do wonder what was going through his head while I rambled on in this fashion. And so, a trifle concerned and deeply disturbed by my tedious spiel on New Age rot, the director called my parents to tell them about our recent bizarre encounter.

One thing I did have going for me was my music. I even joined the school band; the eponymous and appropriately named: ‘Harry and The Troublemakers’. We provided the music for all the school concerts, and I did, with all honesty, take this band seriously. When I wasn’t jamming in the music studio with the other band members, I remember playing the acoustic guitar in the school corridor by the staff room. I was secretly hoping that one of the teachers would notice me in my entranced state and see that I wasn’t just a surly teenage boy, I did have it in me to be passionate and that I could amount to something.

Some teachers were more amiable towards me but others had very little patience, if any. One teacher, in particular, had it in for me, and I dealt with this by ripping my name out of all his classes on the school timetable that was pinned up on the wall outside the reception and director’s office.

I can recall a time during my first year in English class when we were all set a creative writing task that had to be completed before the end of the lesson. From the moment the teacher said ‘go’ I was instantly paralyzed and watched my fellow classmates writing away contently while I just sat there, motionless. We were told to stop what we were doing around ten minutes before the end of class and were then asked, one by one, to read out what we had written. My paper was shamefully blank. I cannot convey to you, dear reader, the sheer embarrassment that befell me when it was my turn to read out my story and all I could say for myself was, ‘I just couldn’t do it.’

This incident haunted me for years. I remember really wanting to join in with the others. I love writing, but when someone tells me to do it, it’s as though I suddenly fall victim to some kind of neurological constipation. I get cut off from the stream of creativity and am left to languish in my echoingly and eerily empty mind.

There was another English teacher of whom I was actually rather fond and vice versa. We were blessed with Louise in our second year; her teaching style was singular. She would often set us a task and join in herself, and there was almost no teacher-student separation. She felt like our equal. Sometimes she wouldn’t prepare for a lesson and everything would be spontaneously executed. This I liked ever such a lot, and it was enough to make me put aside my antics for once and be compliant. My passion for writing was revamped in Louise’s class and I embarked on a few creative writing projects with her in the evenings when school had finished. Isn’t it interesting how I couldn’t bring myself to do the creative writing projects set by my first English teacher but with Louise I punched out poems and stories so prolifically?

It appeared that my promising performance in Louise’s class was not enough to turn me into an all-round sterling student. I was suspended again after getting caught in the girls’ dorm at night.

Jess was very worried about me when I returned from my second suspension. I hadn’t exactly been rehabilitated while at home either. I’d been drinking a lot and smoking far too much weed. Jess remarked on how the weed was having a negative effect on me; I was forgetful, aggressive and continually dazed out. The two of us went for a walk and shared a tearful moment together. I told her that I was done messing around and that I really wanted things to change, but I felt trapped and would need some support as I couldn’t for the life of me do it alone. Jess was more than happy to help. I decided to go for one last joint before starting an intensive exercise and rehabilitation programme with her, but as luck would have it, that fatal last joint would be my ticket out of Brockwood Park School.

The directors had had enough of my nonsense. My mother was called up to the school for the final time where she learned of my expulsion. She didn’t make a peep, whereas I begged for the directors to reconsider. They kept firmly with their decision; the die was now cast. I staggered back to my room drunk with emotion. I could barely summon the energy to pack my bags. Jess turned up at my door and I disclosed the news to her. She didn’t look at me. Instead just stared at the ground while silent tears streamed down her face. I wrapped my arms around her and buried my face in her shoulder.

‘I’m so sorry, Jess,’ I wept. Although our heads were teeming with activity, we didn’t say much else to each other. Once my bags were packed I left Jessica in my room after one of the most agonising goodbyes of my life. I walked the long way back to my mother’s car, saying goodbye to everyone in my tracks. This took a long time indeed. I must have passed 90% of the students who, after a long duration of weeping and hugging which accompanied each farewell, would join the ever-growing trail of people following after me on my last saunter through that rural oasis. I knew I would never see most of these people again. I was astonished at how upset everyone was that I was leaving. I knew I was loved by the rebellious kids and a handful of others, but I assumed everyone else detested me. I was clearly, and thankfully, mistaken.

I clambered into my mother’s car and she drove away more or less instantly. I couldn’t bring myself to look behind at the school and all the teary students who were seeing me off. I just couldn’t bear it. We endured a long, quiet and reflective car journey home. I felt like my whole world had been shattered.

My father was far from happy when I broke the news to him that evening. Incensed, he sent me to my room. Even though I was 16 years old and exploding with emotion that would’ve almost surely rendered me demand avoidant at any other time, I mysteriously just did as he said. I felt more in control that way. I was too ashamed of myself to show my face to anyone, too ashamed of the disappointment I was to everyone; too ashamed of my very existence.

I then knew, with absolute certitude, it wasn’t just that the few schools I’d been to weren’t right for me, but that no school was right for me, and never would be.