Just as I was about to evolve into a Dolphin, what they called the eldest students in my hippy-bippy school in Cape Town, we moved to America. And just like that my one chance to be a clever animal went up in smoke. My dad had been offered another advertising job and it was more money and more travel. So we packed all our things in boxes, gave lots of toys away and waved goodbye to Table Mountain.
That first night we arrived was Halloween 2000. Nana and Beardie, my dad’s (adoptive) parents, had given me and Cas weird masks made from that material people wrap fancy fruit in. Mine was a green witch with a wart on her nose and Cas rocked a very disturbing image of Frankenstein’s monster. Though, of course, then I would have said he was just Frankenstein because I was eight and hadn’t read Shelley yet. But we all know what someone means when they say it – it’s just snobbery to point it out.
We went out trick-or-treating in a new country, with our subpar costumes, and it was the very beginning of the culture shock. I was excited for the adventure. But I had no idea what a weird and uncomfortable thing it can be to throw yourself into an unfamiliar place. We came back laden with new foreign sweets; sacks full. I’d never seen, let alone owned, this amount of candy. This was my introduction into the OTT nature of the Yanks. Every house was huge and dressed up like a theatre set, with cobwebs and ghouls and lights. Then everyone made such loud and emphatic noises when Casius and I told them it was our first day in America. There’s nothing more terrifying to Americans than a new wave of immigration. And there’s nothing like being the new kid to claim your own body weight in sugar from strangers.
The first thing we noticed as we poured out our hauls onto the floor of our new pad was that the sweets were so weird. So much chocolate and peanut butter combined. Then brightly coloured sugar-flavoured shapes, Candy Corn. Little silver-foil-covered turds, Hershey’s Kisses. Weird shrink-wrapped cakes with creme fillings. Everything had to be spelt wrong because it wasn’t really chocolate or really cream or really cake. It was a trademarked approximation of food. We were there at the height of the fake food gastronomic innovation. The era of Oreos that turned milk blue when you dunked them, 3D Doritos (although not as exciting as they sound) and Heinz deciding that red ketchup was a thing of the past with their EZ Squirt in mouth-watering shades of green or purple. I can’t help but think such feats of engineering would have been better spent in pioneering affordable healthcare, but let’s not forget this was America after all. Freedom tastes delicious.
I joined first grade in Bedford Village Elementary. My teacher was called Mrs Zwick and I liked her a lot. She had a big cloud of curly black hair and smiling eyes. Mrs Zwick took a shine to me, warmly welcoming me into her classroom and encouraging her pupils to do the same. American school was weird. There were less child-height shelves and trays and a whole lot more injections, sticker collecting and public rituals with implicit ceremonies that everyone else understood. Take Valentine’s Day, for example, when you were expected to give chocolate to everyone, even though you’re eight years old and you don’t fancy any of them. I didn’t know any of these unsaid rules. So I began being an outsider. A state I’ve either sat in or thought I sat in for most of my life.
There were a lot of reasons for me not to fit in here. Firstly, the little hamlet we lived in had a community of just 1,724 (according to the census they held in 2000, the year we moved there), so everyone noticed the one new girl with the South African accent. The other thing was that the median income for a household there appeared to be something along the lines of the pool of gold Scrooge McDuck nosedives into.
Now, to put this into context, we were living in someone’s outhouse and to use my mother’s choice phrase we didn’t have a pot to piss in. Admittedly, rich families’ sheds are still pretty nice as it goes, but it was a whole different world. I would go round other kid’s houses and they would have a separate room to put all their once-touched toys in and then I’d go home to a shared mattress on the floor (and food and clothes, just no bed frame). The real difference, however, was that I saw my parents. These kids were spoilt brats, given stuff because no one was around apart from some much-abused nanny, and Mommy and Daddy felt guilty.
School brings all of these things into a very particular focus:
Oh my god, you’ve never heard Britney Spears before?!
What a cute little accent!
So what sort of car does your dad have? And your mom? Only ONE car?
What do you mean you don’t have a nanny?
Mainly it wasn’t bad. I was exciting and new and different so I made friends. I learnt quickly that I needed to have some commodities to be taken seriously. That particular year the currency was stickers. I had a sticker book with puppies on and inside I collected velvety Dalmatians, shiny butterfly and cartoon characters I didn’t know (still no telly). We would trade and swap and gift. The greatest of all were oilies. These squishy stickers with what looked like a BP oil spill in them. The colours changed and swirled when you pushed down on them. You would have to trade something like four shinys and five velvets for one of those bad boys. Once I had some currency, I could build some social relationships.
From these friendships my world expanded once again. I wasn’t Jewish nor had I ever met anyone who was before, so I learnt about Hanukkah. I learnt about the Disney Channel and brands. I learnt that certain music was the right thing to listen to and certain films were must-see. This was a million miles from a school which wouldn’t allow mention of Spiderman.
But one of the weirder things was that I’d missed a school year – sort of. In the US of A, you start kindergarten at four and start reading, writing and filing tax returns. But I’d come from a different system where I’d been taught I’d do all that letters and numbers stuff after I’d had some fun with pouring and touching sand.
I found myself lost. I simply couldn’t do what everyone else could; I was struggling. I’m not sure I realised that I was so behind. I went to the toilet a lot. I would wander down the corridors and sit in the cubicle until a teacher came to find me. I remember being like ‘I was just having a poo’ when they asked me if I was OK in that patronising American voice. I don’t know why I lied and I don’t remember consciously not wanting to be in class. At that point in my life the teachers thought that maybe I had a learning difficulty. But I had also missed kindergarten… I could just be very behind because I had gone between two different systems. Either way, their solution was to give me one-on-one tutoring. Each day I did an hour with a woman whose name I can’t remember. She can’t have been that important – she only taught me to write.
The way she taught me was simple. I just had to write one sentence a day. We’d discuss it, settle on the sentence and then began the arduous, torturous task of putting pencil to page.
When I think about writers and writer's block, I think about little Kaiya clutching onto her pencil as hard as she could, face levitating only inches from the page as she struggled to squeeze out a sentence. Trying to write when you can’t is like trying to milk a stone or squeeze out a particularly solid shit. Everything is an obstacle and the prospect seems impossible. You look at the blank page and wonder how on earth I can put what I’m thinking into the symbols everyone else understands. Honestly, it’s a miracle that anyone can write.
Firstly, you have to pick up the writing implement. In the early days, it’ll be a pencil or a crayon maybe. Then you have to navigate how you hold the bloody thing. Your hand swerves round it trying to work out what the best angle to pick it up is. Initially, you want to curl your whole little fist around it, punching it into the page, but some well-meaning middle-aged woman with ‘jazzy’ earrings will soon correct your form. You have to hold it in the most complex pinching gymnastic contortion. When you finally sort that you hold onto the position for dear life with a white-knuckle grip.
And then there’s spelling or working out what image you have to put on the page and the sound that it chimes. So you have to sound out each bit of the word, finding its corresponding letter. Some are easy, the ssss of a slithering snake and a letter that curls like an adder. But vowels are nearly impossible to distinguish – not that you know what a vowel is – so you just guess one between a e o and hope you’re lucky.
Then comes the mark-making. Each word is made up of letters. Each letter is made up of lines. You’re supposed to do the lines in a certain order, a certain size and sitting on the blue line on the page. If you can see the image in your mind, your trembling hand can’t quite mimic it. You try to copy the examples but yours are big, wobbly and nothing like the neat printing of teacher.
It is no wonder that one day I went into the special room for kids that needed extra help, defiance running through my veins. I sat down with crossed arms and scowling.
I don’t want to write a sentence today.
It was all too much effort. I knew that she couldn’t make me, or could she? Well, I guess we would find out. She looked at me smiling, her head cocked.
Well, why don’t you write that down?
It hit me like a sack of bricks. What she’d just suggested was the greatest idea ever held by man. It was true rebellion, defiance in its finest form, it was political graffiti! To write that I didn’t want to write. It would be permanent. That moment was a realisation that I could write anything. It didn’t have to be ‘I like cats’ and ‘today I will go swimming’. It could be so much more.
Took me an hour to scrawl it out but at the end I felt full of dissent and power. I’d won that battle. At its best that’s how it feels when I write as an adult. I think because of how many hurdles it takes just to put something down on paper sometimes, it becomes freeing. The struggle to write it down means that I can’t be too harsh about what I am writing about.
After that little incident, my nameless teacher told me that I was going to grow up to be a writer. Having read and spoken to other people with learning difficulties, this strikes me as extraordinary. I often think about why on earth she said that. Was it simply to encourage me or was it because I was? I was told that I should consider a career doing a lot of reading and writing even though at that time I couldn’t objectively do those things very well at all. So naturally I learnt to write because why wouldn’t I have? I was going to be a writer. Someone older and cleverer than me told me that I was. Let’s all be thankful she hadn’t said firefighter or doctor, else I’d be playing with other people’s lives not just my own.
So my future was set out for me. I would sit in a room full of books and audio books and comics and write with fancy pens on coloured paper and my stories would be the story equivalents of having cream and ice cream on jelly. It wouldn’t matter that I wasn’t American or that I didn’t understand Valentine’s Day or Independence Day or that I made up the pledge of allegiance every single morning.
That incident gave me a mantra, which I’m afraid to say I have used ever since: It’s all just material. From the age of seven, when things happened to me that made me sad or angry I would shuffle it into a part of my brain and tell myself that it was just something to write about. I’m not entirely convinced it’s the best method of coping with suffering, but it is fruitful.
So I went to school every day on a yellow school bus. I was living the American dream: bagel boats for lunch. (If memory serves, they were just sandwiches with bagel as the bread. In no way aquatic.)
While writing remained a struggle, books were a steadfast place of refuge. I love reading and I always have. I just absolutely love stories, all sorts of stories. It started with those trips to the library. We’d pick the books my parents would read to me before bed. All the heavy hitters – Handa’s Surprise, The Rainbow Fish, that one about the kid who cuts their knee. Then it was Topsy and Tim and Paddington and Tintin. And Roald Dahl – I know everyone agrees – but bloody hell – he’s great. He had made-up words and told us stories of real-life magic and evil adults. There were sweets and farts and flying and lawbreaking – a child’s dream and a normal weekend for me (then and now).
Then, of course, it was Harry Potter. We lived in America from 2000 to 2001 and obviously the newest book fad had hit the world hard. My mum read them to me and I was completely taken over. I used to beg, beg, beg please one more chapter. She used to go hoarse from reading aloud for hours. The solution to this was audiobooks.
For my fifth birthday I had received a cassette player. It was a black Casio with a little handle you could pull out so you could, as I did, carry it around like a handbag, going about your daily tasks and be soundtracked wherever you went. I still have it: it was my most prized possession for many years and it would be a real disservice to get rid of it even if it is a phased-out bit of technology. I’m still waiting for the cassette renaissance, if vinyl had it so will rewinding tapes and making mixtapes off the radio.
I spent much of my early childhood listening to the same stories on repeat. It allowed me to access stories that, if I had been left solely to my reading ability, I would never have been able to read, like Little Women for example. This allowed my brain to begin to wrestle with odd vocabulary and old-fashioned sentence structures that if I had seen them on the page I would have run a mile.
I would turn out the light and listen till I fell asleep. We borrowed tapes from the library and (don’t grass on us) record our own cassettes off them. I’d watch the wheels go round and round. The whir of the cassette was as important a part of it as the narrator. The noise of analogue and having to wind in streams of loose tape with a pencil just built a stronger emotional experience with the story. Some of those voices are so closely knitted to my childhood and certain actors feel like close family members. Sandi Toksvig will always be Wilma the dumpy witch from Wilma’s Wicked Revenge and no number of Radio 4 comedy panel shows will undermine that. I will also fight anyone to the death who disagrees that Jim Dale is the ultimate voice of Harry Potter.
I have always been allowed to read anything. No books have been out of bounds. My parents always believed that I would self-censor. They were right. I would just stop reading books that got too scary. There were cassettes that I would miss out. In my set for Goodnight Mr Tom I would always miss out the horrifying bits; side A on the third tape was only played once. The self-censoring thing worked because often adult books are quite tricky for kids to read and generally they are pretty dull.
They were stricter with TV and films. With books you have to understand the words. Then imagine things. Your limit is your imagination and your own set of references. Books work with the readers acting as film directors. The words trigger images and we create pictures that chime into our own personal worlds. Whereas films have already been made. The images are there. I couldn’t really imagine a room made of skin until I saw Jeepers Creepers. Now I can. I didn’t sleep for a solid two weeks after that sleepover when I was thirteen. I get to be in control with books.
I learnt more from books than I ever learnt in school. I guarantee you that. School was all well and good but, even from the beginning, I was aware that I had to take what I was being taught in school with a pinch of salt. For example, soon after we arrived in America, Thanksgiving came round. We started learning about Chris Columbus and the discovery of America. My mum sat me down after school one day. I remember her looking me in the eye.
America existed before colonialism. People lived here before white people. Thanksgiving doesn’t acknowledge that. White people came here and we stole and we murdered. We have to be careful what we accept as truth.
This obviously stood in big contrast to the lessons I was being taught in elementary school – of welcoming, of discovery, of the land of free. What can a paper turkey wearing a pilgrim hat teach you? What does marshmallow melted over sweet potato tell children about colonialism? From then I realised that there was more than just one side of the story and, just because a teacher tells you one thing, doesn’t make it the whole truth.
My dad got a laptop, a Mac. He needed it for work. It was a huge deal – it had a DVD player. This was the height of technology and it meant we could drive down into town and go to Blockbusters. The first film we watched on the laptop was Star Wars: A New Hope. It was obviously a pivotal moment. It’s hard to say who I related to more. Earnest Luke with his floppy 1970s hair, Leia a badass princess or Hans in his sexy little leather vest spitting sarcastic lines. In many ways, they are the trinity of my own personality. But more than that, the first time I saw the pink sky with two suns setting with John Williams’s score swelling, I realised that I too could feel that longing for something to happen. The blushing oranges lighting up Tatooine was a beacon. A symbol that the huge world was opening up and offering epic stories to me. Dad told me about when he had gone to the preview of Star Wars aged eight. That it was life-changing for him. It felt good to be a part of that legend, too, to have my own version. He explained that Star Wars was in fact a Samurai story and that it had all the parts that all ancient myths have. I guess it was my introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I was so fascinated with the idea that this epic, set in the past, and yet also the future, was part of a long tradition of storytelling.
When I wasn’t lying about listening to stories, thinking about R2-D2, or feeding our neighbour (a potbellied pig) popcorn, I was thinking a lot. I had continued to wonder who I was and unfortunately hadn’t quite grown out of self-reflection. I had received a compilation album of reggae classics for another birthday. I danced innocently around to Musical Youth’s ‘Pass the Dutchie’ and to Dawn Penn’s ‘You Don't Love Me (No No No)’. I would lie around wondering why Cameron from the other class didn’t return my intense feelings (which I only actually felt while listening to that particular song). This is early evidence that I am in fact just an emotional sponge. But one particular track hit me very hard.
My dad was adopted. I had always known Nana and Beardie weren’t his biological parents. But my dad had been looking for his birth family for several years. Then along came Jayne and the Boys. My father found his birth mother, who had recently been widowed, and he also found out he had three teenage half-brothers – Jonny, Andy and Dave.
Now, the third track on my compilation album was Eek-a-Mouse’s ‘Ganja Smuggling’. It was my dad’s favourite but I didn’t really know why. But it felt very significant. I was for some reason completely certain that the man singing was my paternal birth grandfather. He sings about his girl, Jayne. I’d just met my new grandmother with the same name, coincidence I think not. More than just that, there was one line about Mummy and Daddy being so poor that we all slept on the floor. I’m paraphrasing but I’ve already mentioned that my little family shared a mattress on the floor in our American pad. It was all too much for my little head. I held this secret very close to my chest. It was only recently that I realised the absurdity of all this. I was lying awake at night thinking about my long-lost grandfather, the singjay from Kingston. You can’t imagine my disappointment when I did eventually meet Micky ten years later when he was an old white guy living in Oxfordshire.
Jayne and the Boys came to visit us in the summer before we moved back to the UK. It was an opportunity to bond with the new family. We went on a big road trip, in two cars, from New York all the way down to Florida. The outward journey took three days. I love epic car journeys. I stared out of windows, at the changing scenery and at the men driving trucks alongside us. I made up stories of who they were and why they were driving. I wondered how many of them were also going on a big holiday with long-lost family. At least three or four of them I concluded. We stopped for pancakes in diners and slept in motels.
When we arrived, we were staying in a holiday cottage with a pool in a big glass house looking out onto a golf course. This being Florida, we could see ’gators crawling with their jaws snapping as they travelled leisurely across the swampland. This triggered weeks of Steve Irwin impressions from the Boys and my dad. We cannonballed into the pool, we took photos under the water with those special disposable cameras and drank gallons of Doctor Pepper. We went down log flumes and went to all the Orlando parks there were. We went to NASA, but the freeze-dried ice cream ended my short-lived career ambition of being an astronaut. Fun holidays are a good way to start a family, I guess.
What was odd, though, was knowing that at the end of this trip we were moving back to England. The holiday was a flag in our time in America, marking the time as over. We were moving to a world so distant from everything else I remembered. I’d never been to school in Britain, and I had no idea if it would be the same. At Bedford Village Elementary, the facilities were exemplary. They had a school nurse, who when you lost a tooth gave you a special little box to take it home in. They had a little printing press where they turned the students’ work into bound colour-illustrated hardback books (even this one you’re reading now is black and white!). Each child had a little cubby hole and the school had an internal post system so you could write each other letters. What would I do without Mrs Zwick, who was so warm, and my lady who taught me to write?
We were moving back because we had no money, despite my dad’s supposedly fancy job. My mum hated America, she was isolated and her visa didn’t allow for her to work. Plus, alongside Adoo’s new relationship with his mother, my own mum had to go and help her own family who were in a state of chaos. I accepted this move, sad to be losing what I knew but excited for new possibilities.
So we were moving home, back to Yorkshire.