I was sent to the local infant school. I remember only a knee-scouring, elbow-serrating, child-hating exercise yard after the fearful wild freedom of my garden. It was confusing; full of knots and scuffs of boys and constant sniveling. The one clear memory is of a little girl, blond with a chapped pink face. It’s winter. Frosty and wet. She’s wearing thick woolly gray gloves, there’s snot streaming from her nose, down onto her puffy, peeling lips, and she bites the gloves’ fingers one by one to pull them off; the sticky, itchy wool is smeared with the rime of head goo and drizzle, her teeth tugging the claggy, choking digits, and as if she were telling runes, casting bones or incanting spells, instantly I was struck down with a compulsive aversion to gloves . . . and to wool rubbing against wool. It became almost a phobia. Still I can’t wear socks without shoes. I really don’t like being in a room with anyone who does . . . the idea of bed socks is horrifying and it meant that I never managed to keep a pair of gloves on. If I wore a glove, I couldn’t think of anything but the glove. It was like having a spider on my hand, and I would have to keep my hands permanently in my pockets. Then, in my late forties, I gave up smoking—this had nothing to do with the gloves—and took up frantic nicotine chewing. I mentioned to my dentist that I was growing breasts on the side of my face. He told me that was no joke and I might break my jaw with a stress fracture and I thought this was silly. By chance, the hypnotist Paul McKenna lived round the corner. I bumped into him on the street and asked, could he stop my nicotine cudding? “Of course,” he said, and I spent half an hour being relaxed and deprogrammed and recalibrated and positively reinforced. And as I was there, I wondered if he could cure my allergy to gloves. “What’s it like?” he said. It’s like claustrophobia for hands, a gagging, digital panic. “What’s the first image you associate with gloves?” I told him about the little snot girl and the chewing wool, and he spoke softly and clearly and filled my head with positive haberdashery thoughts and refused to take any payment, saying that it was a gift to me from the universe through him. He wouldn’t charge me for it, but I might give something to charity. I left his mews house and never chewed nicotine gum again . . . or smoked. And now I can happily wear gloves—though still not woolen ones. Leather, suede, kid and Pecari are all grand. But there was a price apart from the charitable one, a reckoning, as there always is with magic, when you dabble in the mysteries of the universe and the caprice of unseen powers. Paul fitted me up with a secret and equally irrational passion . . . for buying gloves. I can’t pass a pair without reaching for my credit card. I have enough gloves to accouter an opposable-thumbed millipede.

After infant school, it was off to the Church of England state junior about half a mile down the hill. I walked there miserably. I was not popular at school, and school was not popular with me. I was a weedy, skinny boy who’d never kicked a ball with skill or glorious intent. We didn’t play football at home—my father didn’t support a team, so neither did I. We would play gentle bouts of French cricket, a sport that never, ever, in the history of compulsory universal education has been played in an English state school playground. My first game on tarmac was Spitfires and Messerschmitts, which is basically tag with extended arms and machine-gun noises; and then regular bouts of British Bulldog and Red Rover, always on the fringe . . . to make up the numbers. If there was picking sides, I would be last or next to last. “We’ll take Wilko, you can have Gill and the hop-along with the calipers.” The only member of my family who was any good at sports was my mother, who won the mothers’ race three years in a row, running barefoot, miles ahead of the other, lumpen wives. All our teachers were men who’d had “good wars”—a couple had limps, one a shell-shocked compulsive blink. I was surprisingly dim at school. I say surprisingly—it didn’t come out of the sun for me. I was clever enough to know I knew very little indeed and understood less. I think it was a surprise for my parents, who assumed that I would be at least effortlessly brilliant. Most of the other boys were from the RAF camp that still dotted this bit of Middlesex around what had been Fighter Command at Bentley Priory. Most of them had been to four or five schools and were well traveled to the last reluctant dabs of Empire: Aden, Malaya, Cyprus. The school’s academic attainment wasn’t high—not that anyone was counting in those days. We were on the cusp of all the great changes in education, the waves of isms and projects and protocols, new ways of being, new horizons. St. John’s was a modern, low, timidly brutal, cheap school built to serve the new commuter belt. We were aimed at the 11+ exam, taken in our final year of primary school, without much hope of hitting it, and were taught in a strange hybrid of ancient and modern. Our slanting desks with fold-up lids had inkwells that were filled every week, and we learned to write with dip pens, both cursive and italic script—not just pointless but counterintuitive, to train your hand one way and then force it another. We didn’t do Latin, but we did do a lot of religious education. Secondary modern schools were turning into comprehensives and education was becoming child-centered rather than subject-, teacher- or relevance-centered. But it all made little difference to me, I was spectacularly stupid. Remedial at everything. We did old maths, imperial, fractions, and we chanted tables. I memorized the tune; I can still hum it today, but I never got the words. My best subject was the nature table, because I brought in the shiversome newts with their uterine flanged backs. I was moderately bullied. There were kids more noticeably tormentable than me. This being the first decade of the National Health, there were still plenty of Victorian ailments to go round; every class had a child who just survived polio, there were lots of cross-eyed kids with sex-toy-pink round specs or big clip-on hearing aids. Many were noticeably poor. The only diversity was a pair of Jewish boys who weren’t allowed into assembly—they sat in the hall so as not to sully the hymns. One of them walked home the same way as me and would pick on me. I was very frightened of him and used to run ahead or hang back, but one day he followed me to the front gate and I can still conjure the panicky sense of outrage at the trespass. We fought in front of my home, in my fearful secret garden. I cried great hopeless, terrified, shamed sobs, sat on his chest, dribbled streamers of spit and tears and punched his face. He went home snarling; I sniveled. It was the only fight I’ve ever won, and it didn’t make me want to try again.

We were given IQ tests—the reductive and absurd measurement of nothing terribly useful. Their original purpose had been to ascertain which hillbilly hick immigrant volunteer to America’s scratch army for World War I might make a good NCO, because so many of them were semiliterate or spoke English clumsily. A test was needed that wasn’t based on a common academic curriculum but still measured a certain intuition and awareness. It turned out that I was a prodigious whiz at IQ tests. No one actually told me that I was good at them, the results of IQ tests were secret and exchanged on a need-to-know basis. Among those who didn’t need to know were the children who’d done them. I still don’t know what my IQ was or is. Every other achievement at school would be announced with rare pride at assembly, to applause and ribbons. But IQs were thought to be slightly sinister and private and unfair. Unearned. It was, after all, despite the best endeavors of teachers—you didn’t acquire your intelligence by hard work, paying attention and doing what you were told. Intelligence was like penis size—undeserved and best kept to yourself. So my parents were summoned and told confidentially that I had an unusually and, it must be said, surprisingly big one. And as the school expected IQ to march in step with achievement, there must be some reason why I didn’t shine. So, I wasn’t just stupid, I was willful. Was everything all right at home? they asked. Was there some trauma, some wretched secret? A bereavement? Inherited deviance or weakness? Anything that might account for my ability to make connections between inverted geometric shapes and identify synonyms but utterly fail to master the three times table. So I went back to the bus stop for another boring and humiliating journey to see another softly spoken concerned creepy professional, a child psychologist who let me play with toys while he watched over interlaced fingers. They weren’t actually genetically correct abuse dolls, but the ’60s equivalent—Bauhaus modernist wooden bricks. I made camps and fortresses and was asked why I wanted all the dolls to die in a crossfire, so I just stopped talking to him, turned my back and looked at the pictures in the Beano comic books. “Adrian, are you ignoring me for a reason? Adrian, is there something that’s upsetting you that you can’t say out loud?” After weeks of this, they decided I had a new condition, a brand-new disease, box-fresh from America. Dyslexia.

If I’d been born a couple of years later, I might have been given toxic shock syndrome. Go and type “dickslixia” into Google and you’ll be confronted with 11,700,000 entries—that’s the population of Belgium talking of little but bad spelling. Word blindness was first discovered, inevitably, by a German. A nineteenth-century optician called Berlin. The German language is dyslexia’s Everest. He wondered why some people found it difficult to read, but had perfect eyesight. He thought it was a consequence of brain damage and coined the classical name. It really got going in the twentieth century with universal education, particularly in the English-speaking world. It seems to be a genetic weakness in our tongue—the way Gaucher’s disease preys on the Ashkenazi Jews. Apparently there is no dyslexia in China, it doesn’t occur in languages that use pictograms and is less prevalent in ones where the spelling and grammar are logical. They say that the Chinese word for dyslexia is the glyph for “word” but reversed. In the ’60s, the big problem for dyslexics wasn’t that nobody understood what we wrote, but that hardly anyone believed dyslexia existed—certainly very few schoolteachers—it might have been invented by seditionary children to undermine everything teachers stand for. What is the point of teaching that strivers will prosper and slackers will flounder, if the strivers might still drown in the Niagara of words through no fault of their own and despite the best efforts, skill and bullying of the teacher? Dyslexia is a psychobabble heresy to the orthodox belief in education. Like IQ tests, it undermines the doxology that if you do as I say, you will prosper, that education is truly the meritorious road to culture, commerce and being a better person. Dyslexia isn’t a mental illness or a condition that affects behavior or temper or mood, you can’t look at someone and say, “They seem to be a touch dyslexic”; it is a condition of childhood that manifests itself only in schools. Dyslexics aren’t born feeling stupid or failures. Their self-worth and optimism isn’t dented until they get to a classroom. Dyslexia is a personal, ingrate slight to everything teachers and teaching stand for. So here I was with a stammer and this new condition, in a family that valued books and words above all else, that had used education to improve its lot for two hard generations—what were they to do with this tongue-tied, word-curdled boy?

Among the sepia washed-out memories, I vividly recall my interview at St. Christopher School, Letchworth, Herts. The headmaster, Mr. King-Harris, took me into his study, just the two of us. He was one of those supremely confident men that English boarding schools made and then kept to make more. A twinkling, avuncular, encouraging man who skillfully mixed sympathetic kindness with a sort of muscular joshing that occasionally drifted into bullying. These Arnold-inspired teachers were all about finding the person inside yourself, as if personal development were an internal dressing-up box. You could try on the character of a better man than you were shaping up to be. They themselves were invariably un-self-aware, having pristinely unexamined lives, having never known a doubt; their confidence was God-given and came with a cast-iron, copper-bottomed, golden guarantee of steely religion. King-Harris was a Quaker. St. Christopher’s was a Quaker school that prided itself on finding the inner man or woman in the most unpromising child. It was also one of the few institutions in the country that claimed to be able to cure dyslexia. It was fee-paying and private. King-Harris saw an exploitable market, pioneering the monetizing of middle-class dyslexia anxiety. He spoke kindly to me about this spelling thing and said, “Let’s see how you manage.” He handed me a daily paper—The Guardian, obviously—and asked me to read the top story. The Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference was on at the time, and the first paragraph seemed to be a list of African and Asian names. I stuttered and stabbed for a couple of minutes, then handed the paper back. “No, no, don’t give up,” King-Harris said, with his enthusing, teasing voice. And he led me through the names one at a time, letter by letter, compounding the humiliation and thick hopelessness. Having reduced an eleven-year-old to the edge of tears, he smiled, folded up the paper and said, “I think you could do very well here, Adrian. I’d better have a word with your father. Will you wait outside?” So I sat outside in the stark but well-made hall. Quakers are very fond of carpentry, a snug dovetail joint encompassed their temporal and spiritual view.

We couldn’t really afford school fees and St. Christopher’s were particularly excessive, but again, there was the absolute belief in the absolute goodness of education. My parents agreed to find them. My mother went back to work. Neither of them ever mentioned the money, ever made me feel responsible or guilty or indebted, but of course I knew. Not least because boarding school was never an option for my brother. It was an odd decision to privately educate one child and send the other to a local comprehensive, to banish one and keep the other at home. Both of us felt hurt and bereft by this. Nick, that he was given less than me; he went from being one of a pair to an only child. We were close in the way that brothers who squabble and compete are, but I felt cast out as he got the attention of our parents, and felt that I was being punished for my imbecility. It seems worse in retrospect than it did at the time. During the war, lots of families were split up, children sent hither and yon. It wasn’t so unusual. And this was for a good reason.

My mother took me to school. We didn’t own a car; rather than take the train, she got Mr. Button to drive us. Mr. Button was a florid and genial gent who drove a Rover and acted as the local chauffeur for weddings, funerals and snobbery. This was his first trip to a boarding school, so he wore his black suit and chauffeur’s cap. My new trunk was unloaded into the spartan dormitory. Two sets of bunk beds that I would share with three other boys in a cold and grubby threadbare hut with a communal bathroom over a concrete playground in the main house. A matron showed me my bed. I went back outside to say good-bye to my mother, but she and Mr. Button had already left. I expect she didn’t want to upset me by seeing her cry. I sat on my bed and have never felt quite so utterly, desperately alone. I swore an oath that I would never, ever send a child of mine away.

Even today St. Christopher’s is an odd place. In the ’60s, it was both utterly bizarre and spot-on the zeitgeist. When people ask if I went to public school, I say yes, but it’s really not what you think. It had been started during the First War, in the first Garden City, an idealized town for the future, designed by Ebenezer Howard to be the third place—half urban, half rural, with the best of each, but no pubs. It turned out to be the template for all suburbs. St. Chris, as the school was universally known, had been started by Theosophists, a sort of hedge fund of religions that was cooked up in the mid–nineteenth century around the visions of a Russian aristocrat medium spiritualist and chronic liar who had revelations that all religions were based on a single secret truth which united everything and was overseen by a spirit quango known as the Masters of the Ancient Wisdom. The point of everything was to understand the intelligent evolution of existence and then attain perfection. Unfortunately, the Theosophists couldn’t stop splitting up into competing schisms and splinters, so the school was taken over by the ever practical modest and humorless Quakers as part of a broader questioning of the nature and purpose of education. It had some peculiarly extreme principles. Unusually for boarding schools then, but as a great consolation to us, it was coeducational. It was also vegetarian. The only wholly vegetarian boarding school in the country. And organic. Two decades before anyone had ever heard of organic, we grew our own wormy, woody food and kept a herd of uninoculated cows whose bacterially unchallenged, unpasteurized milk was delivered in churns (this was how my father had contracted TB). The vegetarian thing meant that we were encouraged to sell our dung for medical research. We’d shit into plastic bags and get a fiver at the end of term. There was no school uniform. We could wear what we liked—though strangely not jeans. We could grow our hair as long as we wished . . . which was long. One of my friends cropped his hair and dressed in a very authentic SS officer’s uniform as his own protest against something or other. He would smartly Sieg heil teachers and visitors, pedaling past on his bicycle. The school prided itself on listening to children and that everyone’s voice carried equal weight, so we were self-governing. There were layers of councils and committees, including a moot and a judicial committee, all of which were elected by the school, as was every official position from head boy to bell ringer. Voting was by proportional representation on the single transferable vote. Tallying the votes was a nightmare. And there was supposedly no punishment—certainly there was no corporal punishment—the school had proudly pacifist principles. There was, though, Arnold’s correctional behavior. If you were caught smoking, you were made to pick up cigarette ends. We could be gated, have meager privileges withdrawn and be rusticated, as I was once for being caught in a girl’s dormitory too often; the letter King-Harris sent to my parents was a model of mealy-mouthed liberal manipulation. We called the teachers by their Christian names, except for the headmaster, whom we called Mr. King-Harris. The teachers were a rum bunch of alternative educational zealots and hopeless lost causes who needed the protection of an institution. The all-purpose carpetbag of thwarted and should-have-done-betters that you will find in any private school. They wore sandals with socks all year; some only wore shorts. There was a lot of exclamatory hair, hessian, tweed, flax, hemp, macramé and craft jewelry. One woman remained silent every Wednesday in remembrance of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Lessons were compulsory and old-fashioned. The teaching was unremarkable, rote and boring. Despite all the New Age prospectus dressing, it was still an English boarding school with all the concomitant casual bigotry, bullying and solitary misery. We had exeat and Quis? and Ego and all the kiddie prisoners’ patois of internment. I was hopelessly homesick. We weren’t allowed to phone our parents for three weeks at the beginning of term, and then only from one public pay phone with a permanent queue of rheumy-eyed boys desperate to send their love to the family dog.

My mother kept my letters home. We were made to write every Sunday. Recently she gave them back to me. After half a century, I was completely unprepared for the pang of pitiful unexpressed sadness that radiated from each staccato, uneventful repetitious and awkward page. “Hope you are well, I’m fine. The film was Dr. Strangelove. Please give my love to Nick.” They all finished with my love to my brother. I’m amazed my mother kept them. I’m amazed she managed to receive them with equanimity—or to give them back to me. Eventually we were all dulled and steeled ourselves to the routine of bells and timetables, found the unlikely pleasure in tiny things: hoarded sweets, a shilling’s-worth of head cheese from a local butcher, cold toast and marmalade hidden in a sock drawer. I vividly remember buying my first pomegranate and sitting on my bed in the empty Saturday dormitory eating each iridescent ruby seed with a pin. The school was ugly, run-down, chipped and cracked. And it was cold. The Quaker belief in simplicity and modesty without indulgence or flamboyance, conveniently dovetailed with the public school ethos of character-building, chilly, scratchy, damp bombast. The heating wasn’t put on until the first week of November, irrespective of the weather. Baths were had twice a week in secondhand water, the food was foul, cooked by Italians who couldn’t understand how the English could treat their children like this. But there were things that were good. Along with my oath not to send my children to boarding school, I also decided that I should be someone else—not to find the person inside me, but simply to pretend to be someone I wasn’t, because who I was, was bullied and friendless and plainly failing. And somehow it worked. Like a spy in deep cover, I am still pretending to be the person I made up on a dreary Sunday in September. This character liked being around girls and discovered he was popular. Within a term, his stammer had been swallowed whole. I made friends, started smoking, discovered the contagious excitement of masturbation, then competitive masturbation, along with the great, obsessive-compulsive head-pumping awful pleasure of teenage crushes and the fabulous helter-skelter excitement of pre-almost-fornicatory sex.

—

THE SCHOOL HAD ANOTHER contrary ideal—noncompetition. We were cooperative, not competitive. Life wasn’t about who came first, but how you helped those who were last. No one would eat till the last person was at the table. It drove the games teacher to distraction. I remember a football game where our first XI had finally found a visiting team who were worse at the beautiful game than we were, and when the differential in goals grew too humiliatingly great, we purposely scored two own goals to even things up. The visiting teacher, who was refereeing, was incensed by this communist subversion of the ethos of sport that ought to be the crucible of leadership and a metaphor for public service; he ranted to anyone who would listen that we were all immoral, corrupt and unnatural and did our parents know, and that he would never allow his boys to play against us again.

Being actively uncompetitive has remained with me. I can’t bear games. Sports are ridiculous. I don’t even like being part of a team. I can’t care about cards, I don’t like awards, I don’t like the feeling that winning and losing impose on me. All for something that is essentially worthless, except as an allegory for something else that I don’t believe in. I still trust that as a society we shouldn’t sleep until everyone has a bed and that you can tell more about a nation by how it treats its lunatics than how it treats its footballers. And whilst the teaching was forgettable, there was the one, an English teacher, Peter Scupham, who didn’t really teach English so much as uncover it. Exude it. Produce it like the world’s greatest magic trick. He would come into the dormitory at night and sit by the window and read M. R. James ghost stories by the light of the moon. Late one night I was prowling around, visiting girls’ dormitories, and I saw a light on in the English department. Gingerly I put my head round the door. Peter was sitting on the floor, surrounded by the dismembered corpses of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, all untimely ripped from thumbed and spavined school-edition Shakespeares. He was busy tearing them up, dozens of them. “What are you doing out of your bed . . . a bed?” he said without interest. “I suppose you’re wondering what I’m doing? Once in a while you’ve just got to show them who’s boss.” Peter ran—or rather sauntered—away with Margaret, the games teacher. They went to a small manor house in Norfolk and started a press to print Chaucer, and he became a splendid antiquarian book dealer and a considerable poet. Peter Scupham gave me something far more lasting and useful and memorable than exams or respect for nineteenth-century novels. He showed me a man who plainly loved, and could shepherd, words with the assured elegance of Cerberus, snapping the backs and tearing the guts out of Bardery. It was a saving grace. A liberation from the hallowed hushed reverence for books. The careful cradling of them, the delicate turning of pages, the idolatry of paper and the marching columns of little black glyphs that moved and inverted and made nonsense and a fool of me. It was the one moment of true education in a long and tedious scuffle through school—nothing writ is holy, not even Holy Writ.

I’ve had a much happier relationship with books since then. They know who’s boss. Whenever I write one, I send it to Peter. I hope he uses them to start fires. He started one for me.

Peter never mentioned dyslexia. In fact no one did. Saint Christopher’s had no real—or even unreal—idea of how to teach those with learning difficulties. There was no cure and no dedicated staff, no plan, no joined-up thought. Just a general woolly belief in finding your inner spelling bee, helped by the nice plump woman. The school may have sold my parents a wishful lie, but essentially all schools that claimed to help alleviate or extinguish word blindness or innumeracy are still offering patent lies. Regimes that are about as efficacious as this Sunday’s fashionable diet: colored plastic sheets, spectacles, standing up instead of sitting down, phonetics, meditation, calisthenics, sweets, bribes, compliments . . . In the end it always comes down to the nice plump woman who sits with you and, in a kindly, prodding voice, suggests you try again . . . but concentrate this time. The plump lady is not there for the child’s support, she is there for the school’s, to show that they’re on it. They’re doing shit. Getting it fixed. Still, the medicine given to dyslexic children is more work, extra writing, remedial reading, more numbers . . . the utter abysmal useless cruelty of this has never occurred to a teacher. To compound failure with repeated failure reaffirms this humiliation and the fear and the loathing for words and learning, constantly pushing a door marked LUPL. You wouldn’t treat any other condition like this. It has nothing to do with the difficulty or uniqueness of dyslexia. It is all about the inability of teachers to think outside their narrow one-way street of learning. “I say and show, you see and hear and learn.” The answer to all learning difficulties is more teaching, and if the kids grow slow or contrary or surly, as they’re bound to, then it’s “more” more teaching.

Ironically, a dyslexic does learn. We learn a series of sleights and misdirections to get us through the misery of the special slow “try again” learning. I watched my son doing it. He relies on your impatience because, with the best will in the world, teachers, particularly kindly plump women, will encourage by offering hints, noises and vowel sounds. They can’t stand the suspense or the fact that we can fail to recognize a word we managed a moment ago. The child learns to decipher these with a lightning speed then gets the word right or will rattle a stream of possibilities till he hears the squeak of congratulation that gives the teacher a little glow of pleasure, because she’s taught well. The recognized word is her little success, and the dyslexic will continue to encourage the plump woman, will help and reward her with the right word and a big smile that looks like gratitude but is actually pity because we found someone who’s worse at what they do than we are.

Essentially, a dyslexic child will cajole adults into reading for him; he will also listen to other children to learn content. My elder son can have knowledgeable conversations about the entire Harry Potter series without ever having read one, and both my boys have learned to radiate an ungainsayable, granite-melting charm that slides them through classes on casters made of flattery. None of this works with maths. I have worse dyscalculia than dyslexia. And the plump lady would sit and say, “Now, Adrian, if you go to a shop and buy something for fifteen shillings and sixpence . . .” What have I bought? “A hat, you’ve bought a hat . . . and you hand the shopkeeper a pound note. How much change will you get?” I’m sure it’ll be the right change. “But how do you know?” Because it’s a hat shop. He’s a hat shopkeeper. They wouldn’t let him near the till if he couldn’t add up. And if he can’t count, then he’s just as likely to give me too much as too little. “But what if he’s cheating you?” Well, he doesn’t know I can’t add up. It’s a bit of a risk just for 15s and 6d.

I never understood or memorized the rules of mathematics. I can’t do long division, or short division for that matter. The maths leading up to O Level was inexplicable. We still used log tables. Does anyone now know or care what a logarithm is? If you were late with homework, you would be made to work for an hour and three quarters on Saturday morning, like in The Breakfast Club. It was a big deal. Boarding school pleasures are scant and occasional, and Saturday mornings were when we were allowed into town (you can’t get scanter than the occasional pleasures of Letchworth), and it was when your parents would visit. On Saturdays, we could go on bike rides on the Icknield Way. They’d put the list for Saturday study up on Friday and I was always on it. When I left school at seventeen without an exam or qualification, I was made to go and see a careers adviser in lieu of punishment for smoking. I asked him if I could become a careers adviser. “I don’t think you’re likely to be able to achieve that,” he said, looking at my form. “Edited the school magazine, I see you’re arty.” He made the word sound like a synonym for sodomite. “I would suggest you consider training to be a hairdresser.”

Mr. King-Harris, with his unexamined bluff self-confidence and glacial smile still intact, shook my hand and wished me luck in whatever I decided to do next. “I’m not sure we were always a perfect fit,” he said, thinking about his dovetails. “We’ve never had a pupil who has been put on Saturday study as often as you.” He beamed as if it had been a shared hardship. Every single Saturday for seven years. And I thought as he gripped my hand that it was an ignominious proof of the inflexible self-interest that runs through teaching and teachers, like the illegible writing through sticky seaside rock. Whose failure, Mr. King-Harris, does that represent, yours or mine? It’s a rhetorical question. He is long dead, run over by a lorry whilst on a cycling holiday on Gozo. It will have been his right of way, right up to the very end.

I went to assembly for the last time and sang “Jerusalem,” the school hymn . . . for the last time . . . and blubbed. Boarding schools are miserable, twisted and maladjusted institutions made weird by generations of miserable twisted and maladjusted people who fashion them into simulacrums of their own gimpy insecurities and fill them with children who are sent away for a farrago of reasons that are mostly about their parents’ projections, aspirations, failures, fears, snobbery, vanity or simply a lack of imagination. I think my parents’ reasons were decent and caring. Their aspiration was all for my good and the fear of what would be lost without education. I shared dormitories with a disproportionate number of boys from divorced families, too many from homes that were abroad, and the saddest child I’ve ever known, Suleem, an East African Indian whose father owned bakeries in Dar es Salaam. He was spindly and spectacled and shy, with beautiful deferential manners. Consequently he was friendless and periodically, thoughtlessly, picked on, but mostly, more cruelly, ignored. Deftly lonely, he would walk around the school like a chilly ghost, and I would find him at weekends on his bed, sobbing, looking at photographs of his brothers and sisters. My overriding memory of school was of a terrible, yawning, relentless boredom, the sluggish hours between bells and petty institutional routine. But there were also inevitably good things . . . always things that were despite the institution, not because of it. My bike. Good mates. Big laughs. Canned Heat, The Doors, Cream. I’m surprised to remember how serious we were about politics, Vietnam, feminism, human rights. I joined the first Amnesty group, and there were books—I could read, just slowly, and consequently my comprehension is very good. I had a titanic crush on George Orwell, and Albert Camus, Mervyn Peake and the discovery of poetry. First through the Great War, but quickly on to Eliot, Larkin, Heaney, the Liverpool poets, Ted Hughes and the bleak flintiness of Crow, and by a small step to The Bell Jar, because every girl over sixteen said she couldn’t love a man who didn’t love Sylvia Plath or Carole King, and I must have undone bras to every track of Tapestry. And then there was the drink and the drugs. I remember with a Proustian wonder my first acid trip, which went on for hours in the summer sun like a brilliant cartoon. I stood on a hill laughing and throwing iridescent wine gums at passing airplanes. They ascended like sparkling comets. I sucked hollow-cheeked at massive joints of Red Leb and sticky Moroccan Black and opiated dope from Afghanistan. We smoked Gitanes and Sovereign and shared No. 6, walking through moonlit fields, swigging cooking sherry in evening hedges. The nearest pub was two miles away in a village called Willian, where The Fox would serve underage boys bottles of beer out of a back window and we would sit in the graveyard of the old church and giggle and snog and undo bras and roll back pretending to be drunk, herding cows onto the immaculate cricket table. I liked sidling through the front gardens of the little suburban cul-de-sacs in the dawn, pulling the heads off roses to fill my jersey with petals and cast them over a sleeping girl and then watch her face as she came down to breakfast in the morning.

On my last Saturday, I lay in the familiar sweet fields with an assistant matron who was blond and bored and gamine with a provocative pink pout. She was older than me and she lay on top of me and held my face and whispered into my mouth, “You’re so new, so pleased with yourself, have a big life, I’ll never see you again.”

Boarding schools dip you in an unfading nostalgia; like the Venetian sea snail purple, it gets deeper and lustrous the more you try to wash it away. The core, prime, defining purpose of public schools is the self-preservation of the institution. Children and curricula are merely the means to that end. All the high-minded selfless Mr. Chippery is delusion and promotion. Childhood is the fuel flung into the furnace that school was run on. They need to make sure you are contagious enough to infect your infants.

When Flora and Ali were born, I repeated the oath I’d muttered on my first bunk. Ali was dyslexic in the same way I was, he struggled at school and grew to be a past master of the alternative parallel learning of avoidance and charm, the dyslexic’s craft, far harder and more profoundly valuable than anything that’s book-learned. Flora was diligent and did well, she liked school and liked being praised. Then, when she turned thirteen, she said, “Dad, you know you said you would never send us away, well, I’ve been to see a school that I really like . . . and I’ve had an interview and they’ve said I can go, but it’s a boarding school. Will you let me?” And so I let her. And a year later her brother followed, and they loved it. It was a school not unlike St. Christopher’s. I spent my time in the art room because that’s where dyslexics go, to paint, or the pottery shed, the carpentry workshop, the dance studio, the music room. These are the corners of academe that don’t deal in letters and numbers. When dyslexia became the chic children’s condition, along with outré intolerances and something-or-other up a spectrum, mothers would gush, “Oh, you’ve got it? So has my little Noah. He’s artistic too.” There’s absolutely no evidence that dyslexics are more innately prone to artistry than those who can do crosswords and work out percentages in their heads, it’s just that we practice. On the principle that ten thousand hours makes you master of anything, we put in the time avoiding the columns of black squiggles.

The muse I really wanted to be kissed by was Clio. My passion was history. I loved it. It was the only subject I worked hard at. Our history teacher, Gammy Mercer, a malevolent, bitterly mean man with a withered hand, wasn’t a good teacher. He wasn’t even a good human, too busy being resentful about his own sorry life. But still I worked hard and he consistently marked my homework as failed. After a couple of years, I was upset and disheartened enough to stay behind and ask him—not an easy thing, he didn’t like pupils and was terse and sarcastic—Why do you mark me so badly? I know my history is better than this. “Your history? Oh, your history. Yes, you’re one of the best in the class at history. I’m marking you the way an examiner will. You have a problem with your writing,” and he walked off. I thought, Actually, you know, I don’t have a problem with my writing . . . you’ve got a problem with my writing. Fuck you. I’m never going to let this be my problem ever again. And I never have. I’ve always made it someone else’s.

This book isn’t written by me, it’s written by Michelle. She’s typing it now. It’s getting late, I’m in my little study in the corner of my kitchen reading this from unpunctuated, ungrammatical type on a screen. If I leave it for more than a couple of weeks, even I can’t read most of it. The computer is an aide-mémoire. Why don’t I use a spell check? Well, the computer can’t read my writing, either, and voice recognition stops you writing altogether, it’s just moaning out loud. Writing isn’t joined-up chat. It isn’t recorded speech. There is a particular process, a connection between brain and hand that is very similar to drawing. I speak it into the phone. Michelle is sitting in her kitchen with chickens . . . I can hear the chickens. We’ve been working together for a long time. She’s very accurate, very fast . . . used to be a copytaker on the paper when they still had copytakers, who would famously be tersely unimpressed by journalism: “Is there much more of this?” they’d say, in the middle of a deathless paragraph from some hellish danger zone. Then they let them go because everyone files on their computers—except me. Michelle and I kept going. I don’t know how many books and articles and words she’s plucked out of the air and made solid. We’ve known each other for a lot of years now, but we’ve never actually met. Talking to her in the quiet evenings has been one of the most enduring pleasures of my life with words . . . and now I can tell she’s blushing.

I never really understood how angry I was about the dyslexia thing until I went to write a story about it for The Sunday Times Magazine. I hadn’t written about it before, not because I wanted to keep it secret or was ashamed, I just didn’t want to be known for it. I’d had enough worried mothers bearding me at parties. My line was that it wasn’t that big a deal; it’s only a big deal at school, but that’s the school’s problem. When you leave, you never think about it again. I can’t remember a single time in my life when dyslexia has stopped me doing something. I can’t fill in online forms with confidence, but it just stops me buying shit I don’t need. I can’t read an ordnance survey map, either, but I’ve never been lost in a wilderness. I had a thing I used to say to parents who’d want me to tell them the secret, what to do with their children who are failing to read and write. I’d lower my voice and say, “Look, between you and me, I can fix this . . . like, I can cure it. There’s a thing I can do. I don’t tell everyone of course, I’d end up having to do it all the time, but I can cure Noah now. No pills, no spectacles, no meditation . . . I can just do it. But there’s a cost. There is always a consequence. He’ll be able to spell like a dictionary and add up like a bookie . . . but he’ll be ugly. So is that okay? He’ll be quite ugly. As ugly as he is dyslexic, so do you want me to go ahead?” Of course no, obviously not. But that’s the perspective, that’s how important dyslexia is, cosmetic skin-deep. It’s other people’s problem.

When I was preparing to do the story, I spoke to an academic. The country’s leading authority on learning difficulties. He said that dyslexia didn’t really exist. We spoke for an hour and I was convinced. He pointed out that no single condition can have as many disparate symptoms as dyslexia has been given—everything from short-term memory loss to having an untidy room to not being able to tie your shoelaces or catch a ball—that’s not to say that word blindness is imaginary or middle-class stupidity, it’s just that it’s a learning difficulty along with lots of other things that can make learning difficult. But the name got some traction. It was a label that caught attention, it made teachers listen, and local authorities are bound by statute to make provision for it (a plump lady). And so it’s a lifeboat for desperate, disappointed parents with all sorts of children who aren’t achieving what their parents want them to achieve. Dyslexia has become an ark for so many fears and worries, full of wide-eyed little Noahs, frightened and guilty—not about reading or writing, but about constantly disappointing and upsetting their parents. So I went to visit a special school that treated dyslexics to get them through common entrance so that they could go on to boarding school. It is a well-meaning place run by nice, decent, kind and committed teachers. I sat in on a maths class with nine-year-olds. There were only five of us, with a teacher half my age who gave us all a packet of sweets, and we were told to sort them into columns and percentages and I didn’t know what he was talking about. And the most unexpected thing happened: I felt a flooding panic that was such a strong recall of incomprehension and fear. A feeling I hadn’t had for forty years. It burst out of the cave I’d bricked it up in with insouciance. I thought I was going to sob, and the little girl beside me sensed it, because we are sensitive to each other, and she did my sum for me and smiled at me.

The headmistress asked if I would mind talking to the children at assembly, just a few words about how I’d coped with—“overcome,” I think, was the word she used—my dyslexia. How long do you want me to talk for? Oh, about twenty minutes should be fine. God. We strode into the gym and there were the children sitting in neat lines and the teachers around the walls like prison guards. The headmistress introduced me and I stared at the rows of faces and I recognized every one of them—the look that is half open, half closed, inquisitive and guarded—and the great, hot spike of anger rose from the pit of my stomach. I felt light, a little unhinged by the shock and the ancient familiarity of it, all those childhood years spent being patronized and patted, blamed and resented and excused. The years of being a problem, a down beat, a blot on the graph, a glitch in the table. I opened my mouth and let the spike go.

“This is only for the children here. We’re dyslexic, but there’s something you need to know. Something they don’t tell you, we have to learn it for ourselves. This language in your mouth, the words that don’t need spelling in your head, this English, is the greatest thing that biology, civilization and natural selection have got to offer. Nothing else in a hundred thousand years has come close. It is the finest language ever coined. Not just by a little bit, not just by a couple of commas and a simile, but by volumes, by torrents of words, of meaning, of metaphors, of allegories and parables, of such nimble perspicacity, so exact and specific it can encompass a universe and split an atom. It is bigger than every god ever imagined. It is a thing not just of unparalleled power and accuracy but of peerless beauty and elegance. Heartbreaking poignancy and breath-catching loveliness. It is sinewy, gutsy, ballsy and bowelsy, shitty, pissy, bloody and snotty. It is heroic and mythic, has the strength to crack worlds, and is as delicate and subtle as dew on a web. All other tongues huff and puff in its wake, nothing has its poise, no other language comes close to English in its vista or its vision and it’s yours, all of it, every single syllable and long hallooed vowel, yours for free, yours for life. If you have English in your head, you can already think things that people who don’t have it don’t even know they can’t think . . . and no one can take it away from you, no one has more right to it than you do, no one can tell you what to say or how to say it, there are no rules, no lines, no instructions to this English, there is no correct accent or pronunciation, no proper order or style, it doesn’t have judges or a police force or governors, you can’t be punished for getting it wrong, because there is no wrong. Dictionaries don’t police language, they chase along behind it. Grammar is whatever suits your design and need, there are no commandments of grammar, only people too frightened of its power with small, clogged and clotted minds. Teachers don’t give you the language and their marks are meaningless, they don’t have the keys to it or the secret of it, it wasn’t made by a committee or a common room or a club, it was built by people like us, millions of them, not in classrooms or halls or palaces or churches, but in streets and fields, in trenches, at sea, in forests and tundra, in jungles and on top of mountains. In shops and stinking laboratories, in barracks and hovels and tents and gibbets and stiles, in ditches and over garden walls, in cradles and in dreams. It is the one truly, wholly democratic free and limitless thing we all own, it is yours. It will do whatever you ask it to do, in as many ways as you can imagine saying it. Don’t ever, ever allow anyone to use this language against you, to make you feel excused or silenced or small or to make you doubt that you own every single breath and sign of English, and never speak it like a guest with an apology or deference or hesitation. Dyslexia is only one word. It is our word. There are millions of other words and they are also all our words.”

And then, I was lost for words. The spike of anger evaporated. I stopped and there was an English silence, and all those unmade faces.

—

THERE’S A GLASS CABINET in the house I now live in with Nicola and the twins. It’s an old shop fitting, probably a vitrine from a haberdasher’s or a chemist’s. I put things in it, curiosities. Things that don’t go anywhere else. There’s a blue whale’s cochlea; the kneecaps of a medieval child; a pair of spectacles with a false nose for the mutilé de guerre; my grandfather’s First War dog tags; a stuffed hoopoe; a pre-Columbian quern stone; a piece of fool’s gold from eGoli; two finches preserved in salt from the Kalahari; a model of heroic communist women from Tashkent; a collection of weaverbird nests; Dark Age teeth in fragments of jawbone; Haitian voodoo dolls, one black, one red, and one half black and half white for mulattos, with real head and pubic hair; a small, probably European, probably Bronze Age, fertility figure that I gave to Nicola before the twins were born; Zuni Indian animal fetishes; Greenland whalebone tupilak carvings, part seal, part man, part fish; a toothless human skull given to me by Damien Hirst; Roman coins from Carthage that my father bought from a hissing Berber behind a Doric pillar; the bullet I shot a buffalo with; a bullet from Gettysburg; a stuffed ruff; a Bushman’s bow and quiver; an Ethiopian royal guard’s headdress made from a gelada baboon; a plastic model of Sigmund Freud with a Japanese manga schoolgirl; a rabbit’s scut; a small dinosaur’s coprolite poo—and that’s not the half of it. I spend a lot of time staring into the cabinet. It is a mirror. A slowly accumulated self-portrait, a simulacrum of the inside of my head—an incoherent, crowded, Gadarene collection of artifacts, each of which launches a story or an anecdote that leads to another and another, but none of them having any real intellectual or scientific rigor or purpose. Alone they are just objects of votive or squeamish interest, like the ivory-faced Victorian hemorrhoid clamp. This isn’t a case that tells you anything profound about the objects themselves or their place in the world. There is no historic or philosophic curation, no bigger picture, no encompassing question. It is the antithesis of scholarship, a magpie serendipitizing. Altogether it says something pathetically small and dormitory sad about me. Still, after all these decades, the need to prove that I’m not dim. They are the props for a character I don’t really have—the tchotchke of an eighteenth-century reason, a broad Linnaean Aristotelian inquiry that isn’t really there. It is merely a bowerbird’s collection of shiny gewgaws, a clutter of insecurity, armor to deflect the blows of stupidity, the patronizing smiles of ineptitude, the muttering and tooth-sucking, head-shaking shoulder-shrugging disappointment of underachievement. It isn’t a cabinet of curiosities, it’s a memorial to a thousand disappointments.

Well, now I know lots of things. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of things. Lots of things about lots of things about bigger things—but they’re not joined-up things. For as long as I can remember, I’ve stored away facts like a mad old muttering man clipping newspapers. The facts aren’t useless in themselves, in the sense that words aren’t useless, but they are purposeful only if they’re combined into phrases and sentences. A solitary fact, a single unattached nugget of knowledge, is an orphaned Lego brick. For instance, I know that ducks, geese, swans, ostriches, flamingos and chickens all have penises—chickens only just. Most other birds don’t, they have cloaca, which they rub together briefly in what’s known sweetly as the “cloacal kiss” to pass on sperm. Do you think penis envy explains something about birds’ behavior: all that shouting and screaming, the flocking and flapping, the eagle all talons and beak, mighty soaring emperor of the dawn, but nothing downstairs where it counts? But your pond duck, the joke inspiration for Daffy, Donald and bath toys, is out there dragging weed. In fact, the single largest penis of any vertebrate comparative to body length belongs to the Argentine blue-bill. Its curly duck dick uncoils for half its body length. Little wonder the blue-bill has to be afloat to get an erection. But the really interesting thing is that once all birds had penises. They evolved from dinosaurs. They owned great velociraptor knobs. So the real question is—why did they get rid of them? To lose a penis from one species is a misfortune, to lose it from a whole genus goes beyond careless, it’s a fucking Darwinian-humping disaster. Imagine giving up your willy for evolutionary convenience.

The collecting of pub quiz information is an intellectually insecure nervous tic; the cerebral equivalent of nouveau riche overdressing for a golf club lunch. It’s assuming a slightly posher accent—something else that I’ve acquired, along with bow ties. Only looking back from my “give a fuck” sixties do I see how much I minded, how hurt I was by being stupid. So I’m barnacled with this thick crust of facts. They are a menial weight, not ballast, just a Sisyphean resentment against my stammering, word-blind bottom-of-the-classness. So I’m sure that you know that the man who shot Abraham Lincoln was John Wilkes Booth . . . but I know that the man who shot John Wilkes Booth was Sergeant Thomas “Boston” Corbett. Shot him with his Colt pistol in the back of the head, almost exactly the same spot where Lincoln had been shot. Corbett was born in England and was a hatter by trade. Milliners used mercury for curing skin, it’s a poison that affects the brain—hence Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter. Corbett was definitely odd, he was exceedingly religious and castrated himself with a pair of scissors to prevent lust. He then had a spot of lunch before walking gingerly to hospital carrying his severed dick. Free as a bird from the tweet of carnal desire.

If you’d really wanted to know that, you could simply have picked up your phone. Carrying information around in your head is as pointlessly antediluvian as memorizing every phone number you’ll ever need. It’s like dressing up and sounding like someone you’re not—the knowledge is off-the-peg imitation wisdom. Knowledge is not a synonym for clever. Clever is not in the same bed as wise. In fact, knowledgeable might be an indicator of a lack of wisdom. The problem with all this “Did you know?” baggage is that it’s almost impossible not to use it. I can’t stop myself. Last week I passed a statue in London and heard a tourist say to his wife, “I wonder what he did?” It was a rhetorical question. He assumed his wife didn’t know and didn’t care. He was commenting on the nature of statues and the passing off of fame rather than making an inquiry. In one half of my brain I knew that, but the other, vitrined half stuck its hand up and shouted, “I know, I know.” I couldn’t stop myself. “This is Napier of Magdala. A general dispatched to rescue Methodist missionaries held hostage in the impregnable fortress of Magdala in Ethiopia, or Abyssinia as it was then known, by King Tewodros II, or Theodore. After a staggeringly difficult march, Napier and his detachment defeated the emperor’s army of nine thousand fanatical warriors with the loss of just two soldiers. Theodore shot himself with a revolver that had been given to him by Queen Victoria, having set fire to all his wives. Napier looted Ethiopia on behalf of civilization and the British Museum, returning home a national hero, and they put up this statue to him. He shouldn’t be confused with another Napier, Charles James. He stands in Trafalgar Square. He too was in charge of an army, this time in India. He was instructed to subdue the troublesome Sikhs, but on no account to acquire any more land for the stretched Empire. He fought another glorious battle where sixteen dysentery-dribbling Highlanders and a jammed Maxim gun decimated a gazillion French-trained, well-disciplined Sikh warriors on the Plain of Sindh and contrarily accepted a vast new swath of territory for the crown. He sent back a telegram of a single word: ‘Peccavi,’ which is Latin for ‘I have sinned.’ A pun that was printed in Punch and made everyone chuckle and feel warmly patriotic, because that’s just the sort of élan and classically mocking savoir faire we expected from army officers standing up to their belt buckles in the gore and guts of dusky, fearsome natives whose land we were purloining. But I expect you probably already knew that. Everyone knows that. But what you may not know, what I do know [see how infuriating this becomes . . .], is the bonus fact that in fact he didn’t send the telegram at all. It was a joke made up by a Mrs. Catherine Winkworth, who posted it to the magazine. And actually, you want to know about Mrs. Winkworth, for she was far nobler and more inspiring than either of the native-bashing Napiers. She was, by calling, a hymnist, who specialized in translating German hymns into English . . . and as The Harvard University Hymn Book points out, was more responsible than anyone for bringing German harmony to an English-speaking audience. Of far more lasting value than the dusty Plain of Sindh or some broken Coptic crosses in Bloomsbury. She was also a fervent proselytizer for women’s rights, particularly education . . . She was on the board of Cheltenham Ladies’ College—where, incidentally, my second wife went. There is a memorial to her in Bristol Cathedral and she is venerated by both the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the American Episcopalians, her feast days being July 1 and August 7, respectively.”

Well, when I’d finished all that, I was talking only to Napier of Magdala, and he wasn’t listening. This trainspotting pecksniffery, this faux-intellectual small talk, is one of the most unattractive and repelling social gambits and I’m stuck with it. The residue, the Plimsoll mark of miserably shallow and constantly disappointing schooling. I could tell you about Plimsoll and his mark, but I shan’t. Let me instead draw the attention of your underfurnished craniums to Marilyn vos Savant, the blissfully apocryphally named possessor of the largest, highest, fattest IQ ever measured by Guinness World Records. A tome I can’t be in the same room as. She came in at a massive 228. The mental equivalent of the Argentinian blue-bill duck dick—although this is disputed by people less intelligent than her. Marilyn took her globe-beating brilliance and turned it into the “Ask Marilyn” column of a popular American weekend magazine called Parade. Mostly she answers questions of probability. Parade has special issues throughout the year: “What People Earn,” “Where America Lives” (under Canada, above Mexico, across the street from Russia) and “What America Eats” (anything; everything). It also has a mission statement: “Parade celebrates the emotional touchstones of American life: We cherish family, friendship, the pride of small towns, and the rush of big cities. We champion good food and great writers. We believe in living longer, healthier—and happier. We adore holidays. We honor service. We delight in all types of personalities, from pop stars to presidents to favorite pets. We respect the past but live in the present. Above all else, we believe in America. We know who we are, and we’re confident about where we’re going.”

What Marilyn is really doing with her IQ is living out a terrible cautionary tale of being too clever by half. If you ever wondered what too clever by half looked like, what the consequences of that disposable spittle-flecked schoolmaster’s insult really were, there it is . . . being the problem page of Parade magazine. It is Marilyn vos Savant.

—

I’VE BEEN REREADING my father’s autobiography, published just after he died, and I found this description of his RAF training barracks and the nicknames recruits from very different backgrounds and parts of the country gave to one another. “I rapidly became the Professor or Prof, though I think I was by a month the youngest in the squad. My years of enforced idleness had led me to read a great deal and I had information available on most subjects, knowledge I was only too ready to impart. Wyndham was better read, but a great deal more sophisticated in revealing it. Like all these epithets, mine was double-edged. It suggested learning, but also pedantry and an inability to cope with the practical side. A reputation well deserved.”

—

ALL THAT TIME, for all those years, I wanted to be like my dad, to have him proud of me, and we both of us had the insecure curse of the English. I inherited the other half of the cleverness he had too much of.