Chapter Five

Sidmouth is a quiet seaside town on the South Devon coast. A pretty tourist resort for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has a long shingle beach and distinctive red cliffs, and, to the north, is surrounded by miles of gently rolling hills, fields, and greenery. In the semi-imagined Wessex of Thomas Hardy, Sidmouth provided the inspiration for the town of Idmouth, which, if nothing else, suggests there wasn’t much about it he’d change. And because Sidmouth was never bustling or grand even in its summer season heyday, it doesn’t have too much of the sad, faded pathos you find in so many English seaside towns today. There are narrow streets of pretty whitewashed Georgian buildings leading to half a dozen Victorian-era seafront hotels lining the town’s esplanade. Stephen moved there with his mother and father when he was eight years old. “I can remember the day we arrived,” he says. “We went a scenic route and it looked really beautiful. It was the spring, I think.”

It was just the three of them, and it was not the first time they had relocated to a new town. During his early childhood, Stephen, along with his parents, Peter and Jenny, had moved around Devon several times without ever managing to settle. At Sidmouth, Stephen started at his fourth new elementary school. Prior to this move, they had lived in a small village where he remembered being incredibly happy. “I remember being really upset when we left,” he says. “I didn’t know why they moved so often.”

The Jackleys moved to the north of Sidmouth, a mile or so away from the seafront and historic town center. This was not Thomas Hardy’s Wessex so much as semirural postwar suburbia: a sleepy world of bus stops, bungalows, privet hedges, and cul-de-sacs. Sidmouth is a relatively affluent town thanks to the number of people from across the UK who choose to relocate there for retirement. But the Jackleys had never been wealthy and moved into a house on one of the town’s two council estates, which are a form of public housing in the UK. “We had always lived in council houses,” says Stephen. “It would be fair and accurate to describe my parents as ‘working class.’ ”

For a couple with an eight-year-old child, the Jackleys seemed unusually old. Peter Jackley was almost sixty when they moved to Sidmouth; Jenny was fifty-two. Over the course of his life, Peter had held down various jobs, working in care homes, as a gardener, and in the local motor museum. Stephen thinks his father may have once worked as an engineer of some sort, but isn’t entirely sure. Peter blamed an old back injury for keeping him out of regular work.

His mother went through spells of employment, taking on low-paid menial work now and then, but she would also spend hours engrossed in arts, crafts, and poetry. She painted, sketched, and crocheted. She decorated large pebbles from the beach or from the banks of the nearby River Sid with floral patterns or smiling faces, and much of the Jackleys’ ramshackle interior decor was Jenny’s handiwork. She cared for their indeterminate number of cats. Their new home was a neat two-story, two-bedroom 1960s row house on Manstone Avenue, a quiet street of identical council houses with gardens in front and back. From the end of his new street, Stephen was able to see green hills and meadows.

Stephen began at Sidbury Primary School, a tiny institution located in a village about two miles north of his home. A decade later, he wrote down a definitive list of every school he’d attended over his academic career, rating his overall experience at each one with a mark out of ten. There was an accompanying key that set out this system in more detail. A score of ten, he wrote, meant his experience had been “Excellent.” A score of one meant it was “Totally Awful.” He gave Sidbury Primary a rating of six: “Bearable.”

Upon arriving at Sidbury, he met a boy named Ben Weaver. Like Stephen, he lived in Sidmouth. And like Stephen, his family lived in a council house. “I remember Stephen transferred in a bit late,” says Weaver. “I don’t know where he had come from before, but we were in a really small school with maybe eight people in our year. There weren’t really many others to talk to. We sort of hit it off there.”

Weaver, who is now a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki, would go on to form a ten-year friendship with Stephen. It was a relationship that would not always be straightforward. But to begin with, at least, he remembers a boy who was easygoing and sociable. More than anything, though, he remembers Stephen’s imagination.

“He had this game that he used to play. It was called ‘International,’ I think. It was a space game that he had conjured up and it was incredibly vivid for him. We would go into the woods, or even just in his bedroom, and suddenly the things around us would come to life for him. There might be a spacecraft flying in, or like there might be a peace treaty that needs to be negotiated. So we’d be in the woods and then suddenly we’d have to sit down on the floor and deal with this,” says Weaver, who recounts all this warmly. Stephen, he says, had a way of drawing him into this world with him. “I was kind of enraptured by it. Back then he was very charismatic, and it was just a fun thing to do because I never really had an active imagination. It wasn’t something that I thought was strange. I thought it was fun.”

As the two boys continued their friendship into their early adolescence, however, Weaver began to observe things about the Jackleys he found odd. First and foremost was their social isolation. Sidmouth may have been a conservative town with a disproportionate number of elderly inhabitants—at one point Weaver describes it as “a cemetery with streetlights”—but it was still, at the end of the day, a friendly place to live. In 1977, for example, Sidmouth made the Guinness Book of World Records by staging the world’s longest conga line, with 5,562 residents dancing along the Esplanade. Neighbors held conversations over garden fences or stopped to bend your ear if you passed on the street. “It was a very sociable neighborhood,” admits Weaver. But the Jackleys? They seemed to exist apart from it.

“They just never saw anyone,” Weaver continues. “Stephen’s father would sit at home pretty much every day in front of the television. They had this massive wall of VHS videos, and he would watch and rewatch the same things over and over again. His mother would go off into this area of parkland and do her own thing and come back with a new pebble. But Peter isolated himself. I can’t remember there being times when you would see him talking with somebody. They never really spoke to anybody. That was the impression I got as a kid.”

They were unlike other families. In Sidmouth everybody took a degree of pride in their front gardens. But the Jackleys simply allowed theirs to become messy and overgrown. “Which was like a crime against the town,” says Weaver. And the strange thing was that they actually took great care of their back garden. They just ignored the one that needed to be tended in public view. The apparent unwillingness of Peter Jackley, in particular, to show his face invited “distrust.” They carried out unusual bits of home improvement. They threw together a kind of rickety conservatory at the rear of their house that Stephen describes as a “greenhouse,” though Weaver recalls it being made from “some kind of plastic sheeting.” A rumor went around that the Jackleys had converted a small garage at the rear of their home into a spare bedroom, which was in fact true. Later, when Weaver was in his teens, Stephen’s father sometimes encouraged him to use it. “He would say, ‘You can come and stay any time you want. You can sleep in the bedroom and you don’t have to tell Stephen,’ ” he says. “Which, now that I think about it, is a bit weird.”

Weaver says Stephen’s frenetic and intense games of make-believe ceased almost overnight. “I remember when he was about twelve, suddenly he was like, no more. That’s done,” he says. “It was as if this was no longer what we do. I remember being a little bit confused and thinking…well…what do we do?”

Instead, the two boys played on their computers, talked about their shared interest in science and astronomy, or went on fossil-hunting trips. They would set off on long walks, ranging around the countryside that hems Sidmouth or trudging the high coastal footpaths that rise and fall with the cliffs.

It was always just the two of them. This, Weaver began to realize, was nonnegotiable. He had other friends and would sometimes suggest to Stephen that they go and meet them or see if anyone else would be interested in coming on one of their walks. Stephen would always make it clear that he did not want this to happen. “For him, it really did seem that bringing anyone else in would sort of…” He trails off for a moment. “He wasn’t able to cope with it. Looking back, you can see that he wasn’t able to connect with people well, and definitely not in groups.”

By the time he started secondary school, Stephen had become increasingly withdrawn. He began to play truant. He would go whole days barely opening his mouth and spent hour after hour sitting on his own under the sympathetic supervision of a middle-aged home economics teacher named Angela Thompson. “He would come into school in the morning and he’d be wound up like a spring,” she says. “We had a little office, and he would spend most of the day in that. Very often he would go missing in the day and then I would have to go find him.”

As often as not, Thompson would find him sitting alone in a field next to the school. “He often didn’t have lunch money, and we would have to go get him lunch. I remember once he came to school and his glasses were broken. So I took him to get new ones from the opticians in town.” She gives a sad, fond sigh. “He was blind as a bat.”

It was not just Stephen who struggled to settle. A gentle presence, Stephen’s mother, Jenny, was, unlike her husband, generally well liked. “I just remember her being really kind but always really busy,” says Weaver. “She and Peter seemed to be very separate from one another. And she existed quite separately from Stephen as well. She would cook and clean and provide for the family. But she was in her own world.”

As the months passed, however, Jenny became increasingly known around Sidmouth for her erratic behavior. She would do things that left locals unsettled. She went through a spell of posting sinister pictures through the letterboxes of her neighbors—“strange, abstract images based around eyes,” says Stephen—and was sometimes convinced that she was being watched or followed. She visited local shops and purchased as many items as she was able, and then attempted to give them away to people she passed on the street. She would sometimes play records at very high volume or drag furniture around the house at strange times. On one occasion, she was found trying to place a lit firework underneath a parked taxi. When a number of bicycles went missing and were found dumped in a nearby stream, the blame fell upon her.

Weaver describes how, as they entered their teens, he would often go round to see Stephen on weekends only to be greeted by his father. “Peter would say, ‘Oh, come in and have some tea,’ so I would sit down in the living room.” This would be at noon, and Stephen would still be asleep. The whole time, says Weaver, he would be stuck downstairs with Peter, who talked nonstop about how worried he was about his son not fitting in at school or, increasingly, failing to keep regular hours. “He’d be railing against him, going, ‘I don’t know what to do with Stephen’ and off-loading emotionally onto me, a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old kid.”

Stephen says that he does not know how his mother and father met. “I think I asked them once,” he says, frowning slightly. “But I can’t remember.”

They had, in fact, first encountered each other at an Exeter hospital. They were both patients on the psychiatric ward. Jenny Symons was schizophrenic. Peter Jackley suffered from manic depression. That their relationship began under these circumstances does not seem to have been a secret. Or at least, not by the time the residents of Sidmouth had done some detective work. Angela Thompson, for example, knew all about it. “From what I can gather his father was in a psychiatric hospital, where he met Stephen’s mother,” she explains with a chatty matter-of-factness. “They got together. I think they both had severe mental problems. Stephen was the product of that relationship. So he had interesting genes on both sides.”

Peter’s half brother, Jolyon Jackley, frames things a little more romantically. “They were two kindred spirits,” he says. Jolyon has spent much of his life working as an actor and theater manager. After I approached him several times, he agreed to a brief email correspondence. He confirms that Stephen’s parents had, indeed, met on a psychiatric ward. “Jenny was a long-term resident and Peter had signed himself in following the breakup of his first marriage,” he explains. “Their meeting was the road to recovery, and Stephen was the blessing and happy fruition of their true love for each other.”

“Road to recovery,” though, was perhaps wishful thinking. Both Jenny and Peter struggled badly with their illnesses throughout Stephen’s childhood. Which is not to say that he did not experience the same fierce love and dependency that most young boys feel for their mom and dad. When describing his mother, Stephen always emphasizes her kindness, gentility, and compassion. “She was very creative, she did lots of artwork, she was very into gardening and nature, and she loved animals,” he says. “Honestly, it’s hard to think of many other people who were that kind.”

But she was only like this when she was well. “When she became ill, it was a very chaotic environment. Furniture being moved about randomly usually marked the beginning, followed by loud music, all the windows being left open, and things being chucked out.”

The loud music, in particular, distressed Stephen. She would often play the Beatles at increasingly higher volumes as she built toward a psychotic episode (“which is part of the reason I’m not too keen on their music today”). In addition to the paranoid delusions that saw her fixate on the idea of eyes and the sense that she was being watched, his mother’s episodes involved auditory and visual hallucinations, a distorting of reality that left her fearful, angry, and manic. Listening to Stephen describe it, you get the distinct sense that his younger self was somehow privy to fragments of what his mother was experiencing. That, just as he was able to draw Ben Weaver into his own vivid imaginary world, he couldn’t help but follow his mother into hers.

“A peculiar thing I recall was how some of the music itself had a warped feel to it,” he says. “Does that make sense?” When his mother was ill, he describes sometimes hearing and seeing things as a young child that simply didn’t seem natural. “Banging noises when nobody was there. Once I’m sure a picture frame and cup moved by itself.” And he says that when she would rearrange furniture, she would be able to move heavy cupboards, beds, tables, and dressers around their house with a speed that didn’t seem possible. He would come home after being out for what seemed only a short amount of time to find literally everything had been moved. As a result of his early experiences of his mother’s illness, he says that he remains open-minded when it comes to the supernatural. Looking back, he says, “there was definitely the sense of an energy present.”

His mother had conversations with invisible people. To a young child, this was incredibly unsettling. “As a kid, I found that really scary. Obviously, I thought there was someone else there. Sometimes my dad had to explain that there wasn’t. But I couldn’t understand.” Even if she appeared to the casual observer to be “normal,” Stephen could pick up on the slightest signs that his mother was, yet again, beginning to slip away from him. “I mean, living with someone you love and who is your mum, you notice a change in voice tone or saying things that didn’t make any sense. While it wasn’t visible to other people, they were visible to me.”

The fact that his mother was usually so loving and gentle only made the pain more acute when that loving and gentle mother would vanish. It wasn’t just that she was behaving oddly or hearing voices. It’s that she would look at Stephen as though she had never seen him before in her life. “When she got ill, our connection just evaporated,” he says. “So if anything I would have preferred it if she was less kind when she was well. Because then it wouldn’t have affected me so much when she was ill.”

Jenny, like Stephen, wrote poems. Her verses are airy and gentle, full of trees, woods, animals, and nature. They are often melancholic, sometimes hopeful, though always with an undercurrent of soft, gentle pleading that can verge on the eerie. Her schizophrenia is constantly alluded to, as are her feelings of isolation and inability to connect with those around her. One such short poem is called “Drop Out?”

Drop Out?

Out of where?

In a land of dreams

which are apart from your world

Your world exists like mine

Your reality is strong and hard

My reality is weak

I cannot be so real

because reality frightens me

Please don’t condemn me

for what I am…

Eyes watching, waiting

in the corners of my mind

Piercing, striking…

then retreating steadily

when they find nothing is there

Stephen remembers his mother being forcibly institutionalized. “The one characteristic of her illness that I remember the most was how it could come and go. For months she could be well, then for no apparent reason that I knew then, she lapsed, and had to be hospitalized,” he says. “Several times the police came and dragged her off.” He remembers the doctors and psychiatrists who would treat her, but as far as he was concerned, they were just as bad as the police. The former were taking his mother away. The latter were keeping her from him. He began to see authority in a negative way. Many years later, during the height of his crime spree, there was a part of Stephen that enjoyed the fact that he was, in his mind at least, making the police look foolish. It was a measure of revenge for the times they’d taken his mother away.

Stephen says that his father, Peter, was a stubborn man, argumentative and prone to shouting. The first few times we speak about his father, I come away with the impression that this stubbornness was somehow plucky and pugnacious, a simple function of the fact that he seemed to be the one holding his small family together. He was the one dealing with everyone from disgruntled neighbors to psychiatric doctors. He was the one always trying to provide Stephen with some semblance of normalcy, going away on father-son holidays while Jenny was institutionalized or taking him on trips to the local observatory in Sidmouth as Stephen’s fascination with the cosmos developed. He was the one who, ultimately, chose to marry and then start a family, at the age of fifty, with a schizophrenic woman. To do any of these things, a degree of obstinacy probably doesn’t hurt.

Stephen had, initially, talked about how his father had also seemed a generous man, always on the side of the underdog, insisting on picking up hitchhikers they’d pass on Devon country roads or allowing the Samaritans in for a chat “even when me and my mother asked him not to.” Again, it’s hard to hear all this about a man who would sometimes be forced to jump into a car with his young son in order to look for his missing wife and not feel that, ultimately, he must have been decent. Difficult, perhaps. But decent.

But the more Stephen—and others—discuss Peter Jackley, the more this image changes. His stubbornness seems to morph into more malign characteristics. On the one hand, he could be controlling, manipulative, and arrogant. On the other, he could be needy, wheedling, and eager to ingratiate himself to others. Stephen says that his parents saw a lot of a local couple, Ken and Judy, who were born-again Christians, but that otherwise they did not attract many friends. There seemed to be something about Peter’s character that just made some people uncomfortable. “He was vile,” says Angela Thompson, flatly. “He would come into school and I would have these meetings with him. I didn’t like being in a room alone with him. He was horrible. A horrible man,” she says emphatically. “He was creepy. He would touch your knee. He was horrible.”

“There was just something really off about him,” says Ben Weaver. “Even as a kid I remember feeling uncomfortable with him. I remember my stepmother asking, ‘Has he touched you?’ Because there was that kind of weird vibe from him. He never did. He was always very, very kind to me.”

It had always seemed to Stephen, though, that his father was very good with people: that he appeared able to act with a confidence and assurance that seemed alien and impossible to Stephen himself. But he also talks, consistently, of how “controlling” and “domineering” his father could be. Where the truth lies is a hard thing to gauge, and for a couple of reasons. For a start, when asked for examples of his father’s controlling nature, Stephen tends to cite things that don’t seem that big of a deal. He complains that when his father carried out DIY work around their small home—such as putting together their odd jerry-rigged kitchen extension—he would allow Stephen to help only under close supervision. “Everything had to be done ‘just right’ and his way,” he remembers with frustration. But this, I try to explain to Stephen on more than one occasion, isn’t really that weird. If you’re going to let your child help with a household construction project or allow them to have a go with some power tools, you are, as a parent, going to want to supervise them closely. It’s not being controlling. It’s being responsible.

What’s more, Ben Weaver says that as Stephen entered adolescence, it was clear that he “ruled the roost” within his house. He kept his own hours. He was allowed, it seemed, to come and go as he pleased. “I think he became aware quite quickly that he could do whatever he wanted and within reason it would be allowed to happen.” Stephen would sometimes try to make weekend plans with Ben, and Ben would have to explain that his parents had said he couldn’t spend his entire Saturday going on a hike because they had made other plans. “And he would be quite surprised that my parents would impose these limits on me.”

So why does Stephen insist that his father was controlling? Part of the answer may lie in a phenomenon that has been observed across a number of studies involving the children of a schizophrenic parent. Specifically, that it is not uncommon for boys or young men with a schizophrenic mother to report having a difficult relationship with their fathers because they believe them to be too authoritarian. It’s not hard to imagine why this may be the case: As the father in this situation, you are often the one who must initiate the hospitalization of the mother. You are the one having to do the bulk of the day-to-day parenting while your wife is either physically absent because she has been institutionalized or emotionally absent because she is at home but so highly medicated that she is barely there at all. Either way, she’s not telling anyone that they can’t help with the DIY. So either your son perceives you to be controlling relative to his mother, or, when faced with the stress and chaos of a schizophrenic wife and a family to raise, you do actually end up being more controlling than the average father. You can’t really win.

Weaver, when sharing his recollections of Stephen’s family life, makes what seems like a strange observation. “This is going to sound like an awful thing to say,” he begins. “But I always got the impression that the father liked the fact that Jenny was ill.”

By which he means, for all the upheaval her schizophrenia could cause, in the long run, it made her easy to control. Weaver remembers Stephen’s parents having arguments—or at least, he remembers the feeling of just having walked in on an unresolved dispute—and something telling him that Peter was deliberately instigating the confrontations as a means of pushing his wife toward some kind of breaking point. “Sometimes I wondered if the argument that would then cause an episode were engineered by the father so that she would go away. They would fight over something, and she would then be sent away for treatment and come back high on whatever meds they had given her. But malleable.”

“I would agree with that,” says Stephen. “And I have many times established that connection to when my mum got ill. Yes, she did have mental illness. But how much of it was exacerbated or brought on by my father’s behavior? I think it played a big part in her being hospitalized and possibly exacerbating the schizophrenia.”

Money was another constant source of tension at Manstone Avenue. Because of her illness, Stephen’s mother received some state benefits. His father worked occasionally, but during his periods of depression, work was impossible. Jenny did have a small allowance left to her by her parents and which continued after they died, but her habit of buying things and just handing them out to strangers meant that her husband would hide the credit cards from her. As with so much of Peter’s behavior, this can be interpreted in two very different ways. Was he protecting her? Or was he controlling her? Or was it just convenient that one felt very much like the other?

Peter’s first marriage—the failure of which ultimately caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown—took place in the late 1960s. Though born in London, he’d found himself living and working in the north of England, married to a Yorkshirewoman and running pubs in the Lancashire towns of Preston and Blackpool. In 1969, they had a daughter, Lisa. Ben Weaver remembers that there was always a small photograph of Lisa in the Jackleys’ living room, although he also remembers that when he asked who she was, nobody seemed to want to talk about her.

Lisa—Lisa Watson, Stephen’s half sister—is today a mother of two. She lives on the Wirral, near Liverpool, and speaks with a gentle singsong Merseyside accent. She says that she doesn’t remember growing up with Peter as a father for the simple reason that her parents’ marriage ended when she was two years old.

“One of the reasons my mum and dad divorced was because, I don’t know what job he had at the time but he had lost his job,” she explains. “And he didn’t tell her. He would pretend to go to work. My mum didn’t have a car so she would get on the bus, take me to nursery, then go to work. It would have been hard to tell her, but it would have made my mum’s life easier. But he didn’t tell her. He was quite selfish in some ways like that. Lots of things happened like that, and my mum, who is a very strong, independent woman, just wouldn’t put up with it anymore.”

Lisa fell out of contact with her father during her teenage years, but during her twenties she recommenced her visits to Devon, by which point Stephen had been born and grown into a young boy. “He seemed like a happy little kid, but I did feel sorry for him. His parents were quite old and I thought it would be difficult to meet other kids because of his circumstances,” she says, meaning that the Jackleys were notably insular and antisocial. “I just felt that the way my dad and Jenny were, they wouldn’t encourage him to mix with other children or take him to clubs or things like that. I think he was quite isolated.”

She was right. By the time Stephen was at secondary school, he found socialization virtually impossible. “I wanted friends,” he says. “It wasn’t that I disliked people. It was just very hard. A part of me was also quite scared that if I did make a friend, I would only lose them through moving house. Or they would come back to my house and they would see the state of my mum and my dad. That was the one thing with Ben Weaver—that didn’t seem to bother him, so I guess that is why he remained a friend. I’m not sure why.”

Because of his mother’s schizophrenia, Stephen was placed under the care of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, who monitored how he was coping with her illness. He was seen by a succession of child psychiatrists and social workers who all did their best to encourage him to open up about how he was feeling. “Sometimes they took me out to different places, to do activities like walking, going to shops and cafés. I think they just wanted me to talk, to get me to say stuff. Emotions,” he says, a little impatiently. As a child, Stephen was instinctively wary of psychiatrists thanks to his experience of them in relation to his mother, and because his father had a habit of dismissing them as “quacks.” He remembers, “They just dug and dug and dug. They were not satisfied unless you told them everything about how you were feeling.”

He was eventually diagnosed with a social phobia. Then, in 2000, at the age of fourteen, Stephen was made the subject of a child protection plan, which is a system devised by a local government authority to help keep a vulnerable young person safe. This was for a combination of factors: the stress that his mother’s illness was having on him, the increasingly fraught relationship he had with his father, and his inability to cope with school. Stephen’s medical records include a report of a child protection plan meeting on October 23, 2000. It includes an observation by one of Stephen’s teachers, which is recounted in the report:

The teacher gave a disturbing account of how Stephen does not interact with people at all to the extent that he will not sit opposite them. Stephen never utters a single word to any of the youngsters. Fellow people are not unkind to Stephen and are very patient with him. If people brush past Stephen this is dreadful for him. He will utter abnormal comments about other children, for example ‘they sit behind me and they hit my chair’. Stephen also refuses to sit in the dining room on most occasions saying he does not wish to eat. Staff are finding it very difficult to cope with this disturbing and distressing behaviour. Stephen is slightly more relaxed with women teachers. He cannot bear any shouting. When Stephen has attended lessons he has displayed elements of bizarre behaviour. This consists of killing ants even when not in existence, turning around in circles in the classroom, pacing up and down, banging his head against walls and breaking his spectacles.

In a letter to Stephen’s general practitioner, dated October 21, 1999, Julia Lee, the head of year nine at Sidmouth College, echoed many of these concerns. Stephen, she wrote, appeared depressed. He fell asleep in lessons. He twitched and scratched the desks and floors. “On 19 October 1999, he had to be taken to the health centre by the school health sister after losing control in school, snapping his glasses and banging his head against the wall, tearing his hair out, mumbling and shaking.”

That same day, wrote Lee, Stephen expressed a desire to get away from his home for a while. Angela Thompson, the teacher who spent so much time looking after Stephen at school, says that Stephen’s mother seemed to agree this was a good idea. “One day she came and we had a meeting with the head teacher, and I can remember her saying to me, ‘Could he come and live with you?’ I said, sorry, no, I don’t think that would be appropriate. But she said, ‘He would be happy if he came to live with you.’ ”

Throughout this period, Stephen’s great fear was that he, too, suffered from schizophrenia. It was a fear shared by his parents, although whenever the possibility was raised, they were assured that their son was not schizophrenic. “But part of me would have been relieved to have had it,” says Stephen. “Because then I would have understood why I wasn’t so good with social interactions. But everyone I saw was adamant I didn’t.”

Uncommunicative, anxious, and alone, around the age of twelve, Stephen took to writing down his thoughts. He acquired a black hardback notepad with a red spine and wrote “Stephen Jackley, Writing Book” on the front cover. From this point on, Stephen kept a regular journal, writing for nobody but himself. As he got older, these writings would take the form of diary entries reflecting on the events of the day, but to begin with, he seemed to jot down whatever was on his mind. On the inside front page of that first black “writing book” he elaborated: “Ideas, stories, notes, poems, handwriting practices, theories and other things.”

It’s impossible to neatly characterize the contents of this first book, which all roll into one another in a flow of free association. They are equal parts touching, funny, strange, mundane, and, occasionally, unsettling. He wrote a short poem about the family pet, a yellow Labrador named Hammy, in which he declared his love for the dog but accepted that it would one day die. He noted various astronomical distances. The Sun is 93 million miles from Earth. Jupiter is 600 million miles from Earth. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.2 million light-years from Earth. He wrote episodic fantasy stories about a hero named Memo and his companion, a creature called Mingo Platypus. He practiced his cursive handwriting relentlessly, copying out the alphabet many times and reproducing certain sentences and phrases over and over again.

But some of these phrases, you start to notice, seem oddly misanthropic.

England lacks proper people

People are extremely stupid nowadays and do not understand the meaning of life.

Much of what the twelve-year-old Stephen wrote to himself was highly didactic. He produced regular bullet-point lists of instructions to himself.

Practise your handwriting and spelling every-day
Eat an apple everyday
Win all English competitions
Don’t watch TV too much instead read a good book
Be a bookworm!

Elsewhere, he veered from grammatical rules—“I before E except after C”—directly into motivational fantasy.

Continue to read and write and you’ll find yourself in a millionaire’s mansion.

At one point he wrote a news bulletin that seemed to echo the arguments his parents had about money (“We have just been informed that 1 million credit cards have mysteriously disappeared”), and every few pages, he jotted down a joke (“What makes a tree noisy? Its bark”).

It’s also possible to observe Stephen’s own concerns about his mental health. He wrote a poem, replete with schoolboy misspellings, called “The Boy Who Said No.”

THE BOY WHO SAID

Their was once a boy who

Said no all the time. He arrived

At school one day and went mad

Just to put you in the picture

The first signs of madness

actually I don’t no the first

signs of madness

The poem ends here. But Stephen later returns to the final line and, in a different-colored pen, adds an annotation: “But they should be somewhere in this book.”