I'm not sure that I'll ever
manage to clear away my father's effects. The emotionally draining nature of it
means that I can only manage short bursts at a time. My default emotion when I
try is mostly frustration at his pointless hoarding (for every holiday that he
ever took over sixty years he kept hold of every map and brochure), but
interspersed with blinding rage at some reminder of his pomposity (a letter
written to the paper in the early seventies complaining at some modern
teacher's questioning of the value of homework, in which he compares the
discipline required in learning declension of verbs with the worthlessness of
"time spent loitering on street corners or watching television"). The
worst discovery yet has been finding notes titled "W - personal
development" in which he complains at my eight year-old self's “lack of
interest in serious reading”, among my many other failings.
It’s a dispiriting
experience in several ways, booby-trapped with the occasional emotional
landmine. Such as three
of my reports from primary school from 1981, 1982 and 1984. I have no
recollection of being shown these at the time. Talk about the child being the
father of the man - some of this reads like my immutable and continuous inner
voice of self-reproach today:
William
gives the absolute minimum; no amount of encouragement will alter this. (...) He
is capable of producing more work than he does. (1982)
William
(...) shows an uneven development. He concentrates on the subjects which
interest him the most. A very individual boy. He can appear precocious until
one gets to know him. (1984)
There are some odd
reminders of aspects of myself that I'd forgotten. I always think of myself as
being particularly cack-handed at anything visual or that requires making
things, but at eight the thing that I was best at was art and crafts:
William is a very original and creative boy.
He has some ingenious ideas and the skills to carry them out. He has an
excellent sense of proportion in his drawing. (1981)
I'd forgotten that. I always
think of myself as being verbal, but when I was a boy I was drawing all the
time, not reading or writing. My other aptitude at eight years is Drama -
"William enjoys being in the limelight in drama and can keep the whole
class amused and keep their interest single-handedly." Like many shy
people, I'm always most confident under the formal circumstances of speaking to
a group. Another thing I'd forgotten was (third sentence):
William has
a highly original mind. He writes very intriguing and unusual stories. His
poems are excellent, here his originality and insight can be used to the full.
(1981)
My final primary school
report contains a particularly prophetic passage:
He tolerates other people, preferring to walk on
his own. He is well liked + respected by other children though not always
understood. William prefers a peaceful atmosphere + one can imagine him seeking
an academic career when he's older (followed by the largely undeserved,
"He is a boy with great potential", which I'm glad that no-one showed
me at the time). (1984)
And look who I am and where I am now... The
bit about other children makes me sound more popular than I usually remember
myself being, but I think is also generally right. I tend to remember myself
being an awful contrarian pipsqueak when I was eleven (usually learned
behaviour from my father), but this reminds me that even I wasn't behaving like
that all the time. By the age of eleven, there were lots of occasions when you
would have proper mature conversations with your peers - boys and girls who
you'd grown up with over the past seven years, the type of social interaction
that I now like best as an adult. There's quite a lot to be said for the last
year of primary school, when you could be a mature child without the anxiety of
puberty or exams (more true then than now). Come the autumn, when I'd moved on
to a single sex public school (Dulwich College) it felt like being thrown in a
bear pit and all of that (co-educational) mutual interest and putative maturity
had suddenly gone for good.
I have a generally
melancholic disposition and tend to remember unhappy incidents and feelings,
but reading the earliest of these reports reminds me of the sheer amount of
pleasant time that you spend in school as a child in a well-run and kindly
classroom. The crucial thing from year to year, I realise, was whether or not the
teacher genuinely liked me. It’s something that the teacher can't fake, but
affects the child's sense of whether you're an agreeable or problematic person.
I sound like a different child in these two years - or, more precisely, an
opposite version of the same one:
William takes an extremely mature interest in the
world around him. He has settled well into the class and there are only
occasional outbursts of temper. He is a very affectionate and friendly boy with
a delightful sense of humour. William finds it difficult to concentrate on
things which do not hold much interest for him. I have enjoyed having William
as a member of the class. (1981)
William is
an unusual child. Although he takes a mature interest in the world around him,
his behaviour in class is extremely immature. He is unable to concentrate for
very long and becomes distracted, annoying other children and the class as a
whole. William is capable of giving more than he has shown this year. (1982)
And something that wasn’t thought about in the
early eighties becomes revealed to me. My inability to concentrate,
forgetfulness, and wandering daydreaming mind… is (predominantly inattentive)
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, isn’t it? And all of the constant
censure and guilt about work - careless,
irresponsible, lazy, you don't care/show any effort, you just aren't trying…
Perhaps I actually really couldn’t do
it, after all?
Further excavation unearths my first and
second form school reports from Dulwich College. The striking thing about these
when read after the primary school ones is the lack of pastoral interest in my
emotional state or how I get on with the other boys. This makes them more
disconnected from my inner life at the time, that I can vividly recall and
instantly bring back.
The story of me over these
two years can be quickly told. I was a very unpopular boy at school and the
object of derision and mockery. Almost every day there would be some collective
baiting of me that would culminate with me in tears, power rituals that built
towards a climax that its hard not to read as an adult as being in some way
sexual (and with an institutional parallel in the ritual humiliation of playing
rugby union twice a week). There was a dual quality to my understanding of
this. I didn't understand what was going on while simultaneously riding
what was happening to me and evaluating and testing what got a particular
reaction. This was in part coping mechanism, and part Christian fatalistic
stoicism:
He is very
much a 'day-dreamer' (Summer 1985)
And largely stemmed from my
distaste at enforced mass male company, which remains something that I go out
of my way to avoid.
[Even
Smart's tremendous disorganisation] tends to distance him from his peers
towards whom he feels no empathy whatsoever. (Michaelmas 1985)
The two years took two
different routes and I'm still not sure which was preferable. In the first form
I somehow managed to conceal what was going on to my parents and teachers,
although I think I was mentally ill by the summer (I'd wake myself up at four
in the morning and wouldn't eat lunch). It was a private suffering, unhealthy
but which also carried a certain dignity:
He is a pleasant and reserved boy who ought
to have the ability to make further academic progress. (Michaelmas 1984)
He is
as yet very passive, shy and uninvolved: a real loner. His interest in Drama
could prove very useful in overcoming this. (Summer 1985)
In the second form (thanks to a do-gooding and
evangelical concerned form master) I was officially recognised as a problem
child and sent to educational psychologists, etc, which felt like a continual
humiliation. (By the third year, I became bolshier in a way that must have made
me tiresome in a righteous teenage way but was also a better approach to coping
with an institution).
All four reports
continually reiterate my disorganisation and, especially, my poor handwriting.
I suspect this wouldn't be so much of a big deal today, not just because of
universal computerisation, but because people have stopped making such a thing
about the paramount importance of joined-up handwriting. On a few occasions I
was sent to handwriting specialists and felt a great sense of a burden being released
when I was fifteen and the final one told me, "Your writing is much better when you don't
join it up. You should just stop doing it." My marks
are always wildly poor in these two years. Retrospectively I hold some
contrarian pride in having been the bottom boy in the bottom class:
It’s apparent from an exam mark of a mere 10% that
after the difficult first term he simply never understood this year's course.
(Chemistry, Summer 1986)
But sometimes the grades
for application are not so bad. I'm surprised to see B plusses for Science and
French - two subjects that I can only remember being bad at. I intermittently
show aptitude for History and Geography. The only thing that I'm consistently
good at is Art, which certainly hasn't carried over into my adult life.
I had four English teachers
over these two years, and my observation in my primary school reports of the
paramount importance of how much the teacher likes you, and that being
something that can't be faked holds just as true here. The first two weren't
much taken with me:
Although he is an enthusiastic worker, his written
work leaves much to be desired. (Michaelmas 1984)
There is still a rather strange disparity between
his written work, which is often very poor, and his oral ability. He reads well
and has a lively imagination but his written work has shown little improvement.
(Summer 1985)
And then the third teacher,
I'd forgotten about her. Young and inexperienced, she must have been a rather
ill at ease but nice woman. She only lasted a term and wasn't good at managing
the unruly and glib lower stream class. I remember her leaving at least one
lesson in tears and the boys feeling a bit guilty and deciding to lay off
because they quite liked her. Although my marks are almost as bad in English as
in any other subject, I also get an A and her comment is the only one in these
reports that strikes me as particularly perceptive or empathetic about myself:
Puzzling, original, unusual. His maturity of
thought and his intellectual calibre is not only way above the technical
standard of his written work, but also above the rest of the class in its
sophistication, so he suffers from misunderstanding and isolation.
She must have recognised
something of herself in my position, I think now. I wonder what became of her?
