It’s a new day. It’s up in the morning and out to school. I take Jackie’s hands and introduce them to the sleeves of his coat and he pulls his gloves on all by himself, and holds them up with his thumbs crammed into the little fingers. We head out onto the frosted streets of the city. Into one of those fine clear winter mornings where the contrails of passing airliners on their way to Singapore and New York criss cross the sky with artificial clouds. Like glaciers in Iceland, clear blue skies in Northern Europe are becoming a thing of the past. But the church clocks keep chiming, and there’s ice on the canals.
We stop at the herring stall on the bridge to get breakfast and my unusual boy slips the oily fillets down his throat so readily that the fish man behind the counter says, “There’s a boy who can eat!” and, holding up his ruddy hand to Jackie, “high five!” The cold day coils our breaths into steam and Jackie barks smoke signals at the gulls lurking round the stall just like he used to at the pigeons back home in London. He thinks there is nothing better than tearing into a flock of landed birds and shooing them to flight, grey pigeons, white seagulls, black crows; they’re all fun. They all do it so differently. The pigeons wait till the last second and go off like an explosion, the crows look as though they can’t believe you’re really going to do it, hopping a leggy retreat before jumping into the air and catching themselves on their huge black wings. And these Dutch ducks! In Amsterdam they squat by the side of the canals until Jackie comes hooting up and then just jump off the wall into the water two metres below like serial suicides; and in the splashing commotion his face lights up again with delight as it does a thousand times a day.
And so we travel, stopping and hooting and dashing and shooing, until we turn the last corner and there is the school with its jam of bicycles; and the milling parents, and the hoots of the children meeting up with their friends.
This school of Jackie’s is what’s called a special school. ‘Special’ means ‘not like the rest of us’. Complicated, because the word comes from the same root as the word species, which distinguishes one kind of being from another. So special means different in kind. It can also mean exceptional; out of the ordinary. Except that the implication delivered in special school is that not like the rest of us is not a good way to be. Or, to put it the straight way –just like the rest of us is the best way to be.
It is left to the parents of special children to rage against this discrimination, which is given a further twist in the clubs and cliques that claim distinction when they describe those outside the club as not one of us. We are not like the rest of them – we are special, they say! So that when it comes to schools, which preserve their distinctions from each other in performance league-tables so rarefied that children like Trogo can never keep up, they find that he is special-not-special, not only not one of us but also not one of them. By the time the special-not-specials have clattered through the slots of the machine and into the reject tray, you have a distillation of the unteacheable of the herd. You can glimpse there the stupidity of what William Blake called the Satanic mills. He imagined the academies of his day as machines that separated out the spirit from the material like a mill separates kernel from husk, and although I am thinking of a different kind of separation, the metaphor holds because the ever-tightening standards in schools means an ever-narrowing path to success, which means an ever-growing group of excludeds that have to be managed in special ways. I think you would call that process Satanic, if you could conceive of a secular Satan.
So we parents invent our own ways of carrying on. Some feel they have been chosen by god for the difficult task of raising a special child. Some spend all their time on the Internet looking for cures, some spend all their money looking for justice from the law. My way is to rant against the conformity that excludes the special. It helps to be writing a book called How To Like Everything. And in the background for all of us, maybe because of the way the genome project and the possibility of cloning is driving the popular imagination and its craving for origin stories to believe that everything is genetic – we feel that it’s possible that all our children’s problems may have been inherited from us. What a strife torn collection we are!
THE BEAUTY OF THE CHILDREN THEMSELVES is that they are beyond such quarrels. Along with all their other oblivions, they are oblivious to discrimination. Earlier I said that children are not innocent but ignorant; meaning that they are adding to their experience of the real world and its complex social contracts every minute of every day. This bunch of Jackie’s don’t progress like that. They maintain something like an actual innocent state. I think that’s why they scare people so much. What it adds up to is a strange kind of freedom: freedom from peer pressure, freedom from expectation. Freedom from the uniform that normal children – we call normal children neuro-typicals – so happily put on. Our children will never be soldiers. They may turn out to be killers, but they won’t kill on somebody else’s orders.
Lola, who stares reality harder in the face than I do, is not so sure. She tells a story about meeting some disaware – unknow-ingly ignorant – adult when she was out with Jacko who asked “and what do you want to be when you grow up?” Met with silence, he carries on “Oh! I see! Not talking to me, eh?” Which is what they always say to cover their embarrassment. And Lola suddenly thought, thought this about her own son: he could always be a torturer. He certainly has the detachment for it.
Torturers? Are they special? Damn. How do you like that?
The uniqueness of a person, of every person, confounds the idea of normal. We all know that. But if that can be so, so it could be with everything that there is. There is no ordinary, there is no everyday. There is no curriculum for learning about life – there is simply knowledge and there is what you know. The experience of caring for Jackie has shown me a working model of diplomacy, which is a different mode of engaging the world than criticism. And that the idea of criticism as a way to differentiate the world in the pursuit of goodness, as discrimination again, has generated a medusa’s head of problems. Here’s one: if you’ve made up your mind to like everything beforehand is that not prejudice? Prejudice again! And can you have a prejudice against discrimi-nation? It’s another question for Katrina.