I have now written up my life up to the age of sixteen. What follows here is a both a selective summary of those sixteen years and a preparation for anyone reading the next memoir in the series. It clarifies the social forces that shaped me as I went from being young to being slightly older, from having zero sense of agency to not knowing what agency I had, or should have had. If I was happier than the following suggests I was then I must have been stronger than I realised, because the following gave me strong reasons for feeling both depressed and baffled by life as it presented itself to me.
Before I was born my father was an alcoholic in denial. The older I got, the more the support that I needed from him as a father, and the more support he with-held from me and kept for himself, the better to prop him and his fellow drinkers up as they leaned on each other. The older I got the more evasive he got and the more he hid behind arguments about money when emotions and honesty were what he was being asked about. For him money was his answer to emotional questions. Money paid for his drinks and friends and drink brought him his happiness. As a friend I met later would have said 'Oh an alcohol based life form!'. As long as he could disguise where he drank, how much money he spent on drink and who he spent it with he could deny to us that there was any such thing as 'an alcoholic' and further deny that he was one. But his secrecy about the life he led whilst drinking was what made him the alcoholic that he was.
Mother's main choice of where to be away from the house was on her allotment, a space that was very much her own. On the allotment she worked hard because she knew what she was doing and enjoyed it. Near the parental house she kept busy the more to avoid looking too closely at who we all were, and what we might think. I had no hinterland space of my own, away from the parental pressure. I joined the cub scouts very late. I was disallowed from joining a church Sunday School. My gran wanted me to go but my parents would not provide the basic parental support that the church/school required.
The lack of hinterland into which to retreat from a man who was hard wired to be hard had pushed me, at age ten, to have a nervous breakdown. The breakdown happened in school during a period when we should have been supervised but we weren't. I went AWOL after because I needed peace and silence, rather than the noise of children's shrieks as the sounded like they are torturing one another. My school was not scared of my breakdown but were scared about me being physically absent from lessons. As a result of the breakdown I went from being calm and mildly absent minded to being thin skinned and prone to tears or anger for no obvious reason according to whoever I was with. Everybody, particularly other children, wanted me to behave 'normally' and they all wanted to blame somebody else for me being unable to feel comforted by the minimum support for maximum expectation that they offered.
After the breakdown all emotions I felt were I were firmly shut down with adult strength anti-depressants. The parental house must have been much calmer on the surface when both of the male members of the parental house zoned out on different drugs for awhile. The doctor decided the dose and Mother made sure I took them. I was a cheerful zombie for years after the seven months that I took the medication. My concentration and physical co-ordination went AWOL for varying degrees for the next fifteen years, minimum, and in certain ways I never fully recovered.
A decision had to be made after the medication ended as to which school to send me to. Most people in Britain be familiar with certain types of schooling. They know of the private boarding schools that rich parents send their offspring to, the better for their children to network as adults. These are schools where parents buy their offspring a good reputation by sending them to a school with the reputation they want their children to have. In state schools the focus varies between being 'academic' and 'vocational', exam oriented or more about preparing pupils with varying levels of coherence and realism for the job market.
When I was going on eleven there was a third type of school which very few people ever knew about. For closing in 2003 it no longer exists. But in 1972 it was for pupils who were diverted from all mainstream schooling. The schools were 'special' and the pupils were 'maladjusted'. Being 'maladjusted' was not a mental health condition in itself. It was a catch -all lay term created for ordinary people to use to disguise the many complex mental health labels/problems that every child who, for whatever reason, got in the way of their parent's lives. From the mid 1960's it was thought better to remove the children 'before they became criminals' as it was thought they might become criminals if their parents parenting failed the child sufficiently badly that the child would then 'fail society' and in particular fail the part of the education system that they were originally meant to be assigned to. The education system could not be seen to fail, any failure there was was had to be the fault of the pupil or their family. The predictive mental health labelling of children was the surest way to make schools and parents succeeded. But this also meant that few ordinary parents who sent their children to mainstream schools knew about 'special' schooling for 'the maladjusted'. In fact those not labelled as 'maladjusted' knew nothing about the predictive school labelling and the long term effects of it on the pupils and their families.
Before I was born my father was an alcoholic in denial. The older I got, the more the support that I needed from him as a father, and the more support he with-held from me and kept for himself, the better to prop him and his fellow drinkers up as they leaned on each other. The older I got the more evasive he got and the more he hid behind arguments about money when emotions and honesty were what he was being asked about. For him money was his answer to emotional questions. Money paid for his drinks and friends and drink brought him his happiness. As a friend I met later would have said 'Oh an alcohol based life form!'. As long as he could disguise where he drank, how much money he spent on drink and who he spent it with he could deny to us that there was any such thing as 'an alcoholic' and further deny that he was one. But his secrecy about the life he led whilst drinking was what made him the alcoholic that he was.
It would be false for me to say that I never saw him drunk. From the late 1960's onward he got drunk every Saturday afternoon. He always pretended that he is not drunk when he was in the parental house*. We pretended along with him. If any of us had said to dad 'Dad you are drunk' he would have angrily responded by saying 'I am not drunk. You don't know what being drunk is. Nobody can be drunk if they are not in the pub. Am I am in the pub? I am sober and I don't even have a hangover.'. Challenging this belligerence and inconsistent logic, all lies and what seemed like sheer stupidity was too nerve shredding for us to do. He would vehemently deny everything that he did not want to admit to in the physically tight confines of the parental house* where he expected to be accepted regardless of the mood he was in. We had nowhere else to go either. We did what we had to, including telling ourselves lies, to survive being kept by somebody who cared, but he cared for appearance more than the reality of where he was weak at covering up.
Mother's main choice of where to be away from the house was on her allotment, a space that was very much her own. On the allotment she worked hard because she knew what she was doing and enjoyed it. Near the parental house she kept busy the more to avoid looking too closely at who we all were, and what we might think. I had no hinterland space of my own, away from the parental pressure. I joined the cub scouts very late. I was disallowed from joining a church Sunday School. My gran wanted me to go but my parents would not provide the basic parental support that the church/school required.
The lack of hinterland into which to retreat from a man who was hard wired to be hard had pushed me, at age ten, to have a nervous breakdown. The breakdown happened in school during a period when we should have been supervised but we weren't. I went AWOL after because I needed peace and silence, rather than the noise of children's shrieks as the sounded like they are torturing one another. My school was not scared of my breakdown but were scared about me being physically absent from lessons. As a result of the breakdown I went from being calm and mildly absent minded to being thin skinned and prone to tears or anger for no obvious reason according to whoever I was with. Everybody, particularly other children, wanted me to behave 'normally' and they all wanted to blame somebody else for me being unable to feel comforted by the minimum support for maximum expectation that they offered.
After the breakdown all emotions I felt were I were firmly shut down with adult strength anti-depressants. The parental house must have been much calmer on the surface when both of the male members of the parental house zoned out on different drugs for awhile. The doctor decided the dose and Mother made sure I took them. I was a cheerful zombie for years after the seven months that I took the medication. My concentration and physical co-ordination went AWOL for varying degrees for the next fifteen years, minimum, and in certain ways I never fully recovered.
A decision had to be made after the medication ended as to which school to send me to. Most people in Britain be familiar with certain types of schooling. They know of the private boarding schools that rich parents send their offspring to, the better for their children to network as adults. These are schools where parents buy their offspring a good reputation by sending them to a school with the reputation they want their children to have. In state schools the focus varies between being 'academic' and 'vocational', exam oriented or more about preparing pupils with varying levels of coherence and realism for the job market.
When I was going on eleven there was a third type of school which very few people ever knew about. For closing in 2003 it no longer exists. But in 1972 it was for pupils who were diverted from all mainstream schooling. The schools were 'special' and the pupils were 'maladjusted'. Being 'maladjusted' was not a mental health condition in itself. It was a catch -all lay term created for ordinary people to use to disguise the many complex mental health labels/problems that every child who, for whatever reason, got in the way of their parent's lives. From the mid 1960's it was thought better to remove the children 'before they became criminals' as it was thought they might become criminals if their parents parenting failed the child sufficiently badly that the child would then 'fail society' and in particular fail the part of the education system that they were originally meant to be assigned to. The education system could not be seen to fail, any failure there was was had to be the fault of the pupil or their family. The predictive mental health labelling of children was the surest way to make schools and parents succeeded. But this also meant that few ordinary parents who sent their children to mainstream schools knew about 'special' schooling for 'the maladjusted'. In fact those not labelled as 'maladjusted' knew nothing about the predictive school labelling and the long term effects of it on the pupils and their families.
Against my family's wishes, but with their consent. I was labelled 'maladjusted' and sent to one of these 'special' schools. I attended it for five years, for thirty nine weeks a year. Originally it was meant to be three years and then I was meant to be in work or training but I was simply kept at the school. Nobody knew what two years extra of living with the label 'maladjusted' did to me. The truly bizarre point about this school is how little we were taught in the classrooms and how much the overall structure of the school so closely resembled the running of a care home for children who don't have parents. To trace the predictive labelling argument backwards, it is as we had parents who were unfit to be parents by the profile that normal schools expected of parents, and therefore for all practical purposes we did not actually have any parents to speak of, though actually we wrote to our families once a week. The pupils were living in what would now be called 'an official reality distortion field'. What guided us were the rules, ranks and permissions of the school. The bells and roll calls that happened a dozen times a day were what guided us. We knew nothing outside the school routines, so we knew nothing about ordinary life.
Before I was twelve I was sexually assaulted in the school. When the bullies who attacked me were caught in the act I was put in a three boy dormitory separate from them where I felt wary but relieved. But like my seeing dad drunk every Saturday afternoon whilst the wrestling was on, dramatising his hangover, it was assumed that the serial assaults had no effect on me. But the assaults became a silent and painful trauma that is still with me, albeit in a modified form, nearly fifty years later. The school bade me be silent about the assaults as much as I was later to be silent about the semi-consensual sex with older men that I felt obliged to have because they insisted on it, particularly when I got nothing out of it. Though there was a little sex that was more friendly between a few boys that went on in the school. Consensual gay sex in school was like smoking, the staff knew it happened but it was not to be admitted to and not to be used to challenge the officially asexual and sometimes quite macho school culture.
When I returned to live with my parents I was not a criminal. Maybe the school saved me from that, but the school also made sure that I was not the success my parents wanted either, I had no qualifications and still wrote awkwardly with my left hand-which I had flipped to after the nervous breakdown. I was returning to live in a house where dad still drinks, still lies about it, and expects us to lie to ourselves, and he utterly resents any inference that he is secretive, or that he an alcoholic.
Before I was twelve I was sexually assaulted in the school. When the bullies who attacked me were caught in the act I was put in a three boy dormitory separate from them where I felt wary but relieved. But like my seeing dad drunk every Saturday afternoon whilst the wrestling was on, dramatising his hangover, it was assumed that the serial assaults had no effect on me. But the assaults became a silent and painful trauma that is still with me, albeit in a modified form, nearly fifty years later. The school bade me be silent about the assaults as much as I was later to be silent about the semi-consensual sex with older men that I felt obliged to have because they insisted on it, particularly when I got nothing out of it. Though there was a little sex that was more friendly between a few boys that went on in the school. Consensual gay sex in school was like smoking, the staff knew it happened but it was not to be admitted to and not to be used to challenge the officially asexual and sometimes quite macho school culture.
As I reached the age of sixteen I had to leave the school and return to live with my parents, not that they wanted me back. Having me thirteen weeks a year for five years was enough for them, particularly dad. So I had to return to the living lies and trapped logic about dad's dishonesty and drinking. but I can now add to second hand experience of dad's drinking the rich memories of school which nobody can ask me about. Only I knew of strong routines of the school where I lived under the bogus generic mental health label and nobody knew of the trauma of once being assaulted. Nobody around where my parents live has heard of the school or the mental health catch all label 'maladjusted' and my parents knew but since they disagreed with each other and denied all disagreement then it was a closed subject.
I was going into a choice of work reduced from even the recent past. Mass unemployment was going to be the new normal. It would be a reality that my parents refused to accept even when the evidence was there to be accepted. It was as if work seemed to be devalued and yet people still wanted it because they attached to older ideas of status than presently it would sustain. Newer employees were setting themselves up for lives of fresh disappointment. Many more of us had less experience than employers wanted as we applied for fewer jobs.
I was going into this newly reduced market with none of social networks that having gone to a normal local school would have granted me. With each application I had to name the school I went to regardless of the fact that it made more sure I would not be offered the job. Most employers either didn't recognise the name of the school, or if they knew something about it would see it as grounds in which to reject me. I have no friends my own age and the last time I was with local boys near my own age was when I was ten, which was practically a lifetime ago.
Obviously I am no longer 'maladjusted', because I am no longer at the 'special' school. Any other, more genuine, mental health term that might still apply to me is kept well hidden in the files that I don't know exist and my parents don't want to know about, and don't want me to know about, which are held as 'confidential' in the offices of Social Services.
I was going into this newly reduced market with none of social networks that having gone to a normal local school would have granted me. With each application I had to name the school I went to regardless of the fact that it made more sure I would not be offered the job. Most employers either didn't recognise the name of the school, or if they knew something about it would see it as grounds in which to reject me. I have no friends my own age and the last time I was with local boys near my own age was when I was ten, which was practically a lifetime ago.
Obviously I am no longer 'maladjusted', because I am no longer at the 'special' school. Any other, more genuine, mental health term that might still apply to me is kept well hidden in the files that I don't know exist and my parents don't want to know about, and don't want me to know about, which are held as 'confidential' in the offices of Social Services.
*I call it 'the parental house' because it is a house and it belongs to my parents. But it always feels impersonal, it stopped feeling like 'home' to me when I seven years old, when the attic store room became 'my bedroom' and I felt 'stored away'.
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To read the next memoir start here
To go back over this memoir start with the chapter guide with links to each chapter, here.
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