Serpent Column - a memoir

For those who have Awareness,

a hint is quite enough.

For the multitudes of the heedless

mere knowledge is useless.

If you teach only through authority, you are not teaching at all.

Haji Bektash Veli (1209-1271 CE)

Founder of the Sufi Bektashi order.

For the teachers – and those they taught

The Serpent Column

I was walking across Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square with Kuli – his actual name was Saddam, but he preferred Kuli, as working with tourists meant his real name had unfortunate associations that could affect sales.

As we approached the Blue Mosque end of the Square, he told me how the obelisk with the striking hieroglyphs and another monument covered by scaffolding had both been brought to what was then Constantinople by Roman emperors keen to leave their mark on the ‘new Rome’. The obelisk was from Egypt, he said, but the Serpent Column, a green metal spiral with an obviously broken top, was a memorial to a sea battle between Greece and Persia. ‘It should be a lot taller’, Kulı said, ‘but parts are missing, some are here in museums, but the rest are now lost, they could even be in the British Museum’ he laughed. Empires are good at appropriating what isn’t theirs; emperors are good at taking the past of others to add to their trophies and acclaim.

I had long wanted to go to Istanbul, its history is an obsession of mine. My obsessions are an important part of me – like the Column they entwine and fascinate, and, also like the Column, they make up for what is missing.

Wednesday 7 September 1966

First day of school memories seem to fall into several distinct categories. First, there’s the child with siblings who eagerly wants to join them. Then there’s the eldest child, used to being centre of attention, who can’t wait to try something new away from the toddlers. I, was different  – not for the first, and certainly not the last time.

I had been told that school would be by turns interesting and terrifying, that I would be subject to discipline and that the best part of it was 3.30. These were the views of three people who featured prominently in my formative years – mum, dad and grandad.

My mum had learned to love school, she was, to all intents and purposes, the ‘eldest’ child; she had an older sister but there was an eight-year age difference. When she was 12, her older sister had moved out, then when she was leaving school at age 14, her youngest sister was born. This was September 1938. A year later, mum would be pushing her sister in the pram when she heard war had been declared. That loomed large in my life – mum was 37 when I was born, dad was 40. She lived through it, he fought in it and memories, and memorials, to it were everywhere, or so it seemed.

Mum was very good at mathematics – ‘mental arithmetic’ to use her preferred term and she tried to inculcate a similar love of figures in me, sadly to no avail. I liked stories and walks with grandad. I didn’t think rows of figures were anywhere near as much fun as naming trees by looking at the leaves I collected or hearing about my grandad’s childhood, living in a village near Malton. Mum and I disagreed – hence her pronouncement that I would find school interesting and, at times, frightening. I would have to do as I was told – I was a good kid, so largely did anyway, but mum liked obedience to her will, and transferred that onto the way she thought teachers would treat me, if I rebelled or asked what she felt to be awkward questions.

Dad, on the other hand, was happy-go-lucky, no respecter of timetables and proud to have served an apprenticeship that enabled him to earn our entire living from his work as a joiner. Dad also disliked discipline and had found the rules of school hard and unyielding. My parents school years were 1926-1939 for mum and 1924-1935 for dad. They had both attended Belle Vue Road School in Burley, a dark, austere building with strict separation between the sexes. Mum spent all her school years there, even though she passed the 11-plus, there was no room in the family finances for her to go on to grammar school. Dad, on the other hand, left Belle Vue Road at 11 and spent the last three years’ compulsory education at Park Lane, a boys’ school that prepared working class Leeds youth for a life in the city’s factories and building sites. There were families in both schools whose children didn’t have shoes and relied on the charity of the Yorkshire Post’s Boots for Bairns campaign to provide for them. In dad’s case, his older sister would also die of TB within a little over a month following the diagnosis – ‘galloping consumption’ he called it, which led to their house being fumigated after the death. These experiences – along with a widespread fear of not being able to afford medical care – made dad a lifelong socialist. He worked hard, but chaffed against the order imposed by figures in authority and used his easy charm and humour to winning effect as a means of rebelling or at least trying to soften the boundaries.

Home time as the best part of the school day was one of my grandad’s favourite aphorisms. My maternal grandfather was very unlike my mum, his middle daughter. He grew up in the village of Amotherby, near Malton, the youngest of 13 and detested school. Mainly because he was dragged there by his older sisters, and also having to endure a three mile walk both ways in all weathers. Breaking his wrist in his thirteenth summer turned out to be a lucky break too. His headteacher on learning of the injury told him he’d be more use staying at home and working on the harvest than returning to school in September. A view grandad wholeheartedly concurred with. A career as a footman ‘in service’ followed, leading to another lucky break – learning to drive. Not only did this remove him somewhat from harm’s way when conscripted into the Army in the First World War, when he was transferred from the infantry to the Army Service Corps (or Ally Sloper’s Cavalry, as it was less respectfully known), but later to him working as a chauffer in later life. He worked two jobs until his mid-70s, one as factotum for the widow of an army officer, keen not to lose her status in a rapidly changing world, and the other preparing new British Motor Company vehicles for the showroom at the Central Garage in Leeds and delivering such delights as half-timbered Mini Clubmen ‘shooting brakes’ to their new owners in the posher suburbs of Headingley, Adel and Alwoodley.

As I approached my fifth birthday with the first day at school looming, I was ill prepared for what was to come. I spent all my time with either mum, dad or my grandparents, as an only child, I had little or no contact or experience of other children my own age. I knew about the seasons, could tell trees from each other by the shape of their leaves, liked stories and also learning facts which I would preciously regurgitate, usually to an adult a generation or two older who expressed or feigned interest. Life was nice and safe, the 60s hadn’t reached our two-bedroom council house yet.

Keep to the left

The choice of school was largely left to mum. There were three nearby that I could go to, but all had certain drawbacks. Iveson House was across the Ring Road, and there was no crossing patrol, so she would have to walk me there and back. It was ruled out when a boy a little older than me was run over on his way there and the horrors of the Ring Road were fixed, firmly in my mind. 

St Chad’s was the second possibility. It was a small school in Far Headingley, but getting on for a mile from home. There was no school bus, but there were a couple of buses I could catch. However, it was on the ‘wrong side’ of the busy Otley Road from the bus stop, so, while, in terms of religious affiliation as a Church of England school it would be alright, transport and the danger of traffic ruled it out.

Finally, there was Beckett Park, which had two plus points in its favour. It was on the ‘right side’ of the road and a school special ran from the bottom of the street to a quiet road from which children walked up a cul-de-sac to the school gates. This was the particular grove of academe chosen for me.

Mrs Baxter takes charge

From a road safety point of view, Beckett Park won hands down, but it had certain drawbacks in terms of both size and catchment. Both St Chads and Iveson House were ‘single form entry’, meaning they had only one class to a year, whereas Beckett Park was a three-form entry school. It also had a mixed catchment, admitting children from the Moor Grange council estate, where I lived, and the leafier and decidedly more middle class area of Headingley. Starting school with little or no experience of other children and being thrown into this melting pot caused problems from the start.

I vividly remember the first day even now. Wednesday 7 September had been built up in my mind as the first day of school – the day everything changed. It wasn’t a gentle introduction, but full days from the start. In my white shirt, grey shorts and red elasticated tie, – an invitation for a painful twang that others found hard to resist – I was off to school.

By lunchtime, I would have met my teacher, Mrs Baxter. I’ve met reception/first year infant teachers in ‘real life’ many times since and know how rosy the glow can be that comes from being close to the first adult from outside the family circle, one who, moreover, is a figure of authority and can make things happen for you – good and bad. To set my memory of Mrs Baxter in context, this was the age of Mary Poppins and the Sound of Music – so a first flush of kindness and authority added easily to the mix. The shine didn’t last, however, as it wasn’t long before she disciplined the lazy or the talkative, which often included a slap to the hand or leg. 

I’m talking here about corporal punishment of five-year-olds that infant teachers employed on quite a regular basis. It made me uncomfortable, although I can only honestly remember being smacked once. However, this was for the relatively minor offence of letting my exuberance carry me away, so that I augmented a group countdown from ten to one with a rocket ignition impression. Mrs B also caused me some anxiety when she crossly told us to ‘make haste’ after a PE lesson; what was haste – and did she have the ingredients, or a picture of one she’d made earlier? I asked mum, who said it was a pretty daft thing to say to class of five-year-olds. Perhaps the kids from posh Headingley understood – it was certainly lost on the council estate cohort.

Breaks – or playtime – also came as a shock to me. Before starting school, I’d spent nearly all my time with my mum or grandparents during weekdays and was used to drinking tea or coffee mid morning. But at school that was for teachers on playground duty to flaunt in front of me. The only drink at morning and afternoon break was to be had from the sink taps in the boys’ toilets with glasses of water from large metal jugs in the dining hall at lunchtime, a very poor alternative in my eyes. 

Other children were noisy and nosey, and some were keen to show they were boss. I met the school bully on that first day. He was seated opposite me at lunchtime. Lunch was pieces of fish in an insipid liquid, each piece with a slice of tomato on top and he decided we all had to eat it, leaving any made him angry and his anger continued after lunch in the cloakroom. I had left some, he wasn’t happy about that and used his fists to hammer home the point. To me this was a total shock, sure, I was told to eat my food at home, but there was a reason given. OK, it was usually hungry children in Africa or not being able to leave food in the war, but refusal wasn’t met with violence. Even at my tender young age, I soon learned that his anger was misplaced and also completely irrational; it also came with astounding double standards – he could swear like a trooper, but swearing at him brought immediate and painful retribution. He could laugh at us, but laughing at him, made him furious and vicious. Bullies tend to have flaccid egos that need stoking by inflicting pain and humiliation on a chosen scapegoat and he had mastered this by his fifth birthday. It also meant that he had a control mechanism to keep him on his assumed pedestal: go along with him, or you might be next. A classic but toxic recipe for domination and control mastered early and used with terrifying effect; he would not be the only bully I’ve come across, but he was the first and set a pattern I soon learned to identify.

As a teenager, I once met him with his parents and felt they had created this monster – his father was a loud mouthed, swaggering bully and his mother could see no wrong in her son. What a toxic mix – breeding and parenting should have been denied them.

Bullying was to be expected, so I was told. You had to stand up to them and not let them see that it upset you. This advice came from my parents and teachers. Woefully misplaced, downright wrong, and completely inappropriate in my case. I had no idea how to relate to the other children in my class in the first place

Friendships were hard to forge and harder to keep. I didn’t fit in and didn’t like sport, I also committed the cardinal sin of not being a team player in any activity that I was coerced into. 

These were Leeds United’s ‘glory days’, but they completely passed me by. Instead, I wanted to be left alone to read or just do my own thing. One hobby that came to border on an obsession was collecting bus tickets. In the 60s and 70s, each bus company operated its own ticketing system and I was interested in all the varieties on offer, I even wrote to companies asking for tickets and pictures of their buses. Mum and dad were happy to indulge this, taking me to see vintage bus shows and even once spending a day at the Tramway Museum at Crich in Derbyshire. At school, however, it was met with ridicule by pupils and teachers alike. Later, when – against the odds – I became a teacher myself, a child with a hobby like this would have been an ally; if you’re interested where a bus goes, you naturally learn about geography and that’s something to harness, not ridicule. 

However, the primary education I received was, in the main, narrow and uninspiring. Failing to acquiesce and conform to what was expected brought unwelcome attention from teachers as well as my fellow pupils, and those lessons I did enjoy and worked well in, such as English, History, Geography and RE did not compensate for my failure in maths and dread of PE and the football pitch. There was a strategy in play here, but one that came to an end with my school year intake – the first in Leeds not to sit the 11-plus as the city’s education system converted to comprehensive  when I was coming to the end of my junior school years. Prior to this, teachers had been largely trained to manage failure. There were, after all, only a finite number of grammar school places, so the 11-plus notional pass rate would be adjusted year-on-year to ensure that they weren’t oversubscribed. On average, this meant roughly a third of pupils sitting the 11-plus would go on to grammar school, with the rest herded into secondary moderns. At parents’ evenings, primary school parents were routinely told that their child was not ‘university material’ – a highly questionable verdict to make on a child of 10 or 11 years-old. The 11 plus did continue, however, in a much truncated form to decide which pupils were suitable for the small number of scholarships to Leeds’ private independent grammar schools, but in reality, these were rarer than hen’s teeth. Children with ability who failed the 11-plus were failed by the vaguaries of a selective system that used the ‘all or nothing’ of the examination and left teachers to offer mild platitudes to the disappointed. The age of deference was coming to an end, and the coming of the Open University and the rise of the ‘mature student’, the ranks of whom I would join aged 30, meant the damming ‘not university material’ verdict was rendered meaningless: Sir or Miss no longer knew best.

Throughout my time in compulsory education – from the ages of 5 to 16 – it was common for teachers to ask what we wanted to be when we ‘grew up’ or left school (I separate them, because to my mind, the former was used to challenge, or head off challenging behaviour or displays of wilful ignorance, while the latter might just possibly be a genuine inquiry). A reply, such as a lorry driver or mechanic would be met with ‘well, you’ll need maths/English/science/geography etc (delete as subject specialism appropriate) if you’re going to do that’. However, something a bit more ambitious – doctor or diplmomat, say (and, yes, I did once say diplomat when asked…) would tend to be instantly ruled out – imposed, arbitrary and decidedly unnatural selection was a key method of keeping order by dismissing  or even ridiculing perceived outlandish hopes were the stock in trade of  of the pre-comprehensive education trained teacher.

Dustbin

Being part of a team was an idea that my primary school was keen to promote. It was surprisingly forward-thinking, but contained a number of dangerous assumptions and pitfalls. Key amongst them being that we were also told, perhaps confusingly, that we were each of us different and not all the same, but individuality has limits imposed on it – whereas being a good team player was an idea whose time had come for all of us. 

Nowhere was this more evident than in sport and PE – both of which I came to loathe with a passion. Unfortunately, my primary school – the one where I could travel to without fear of being run over – was separated from a large teacher training college by a public park, which meant we were frequently used as unwilling guinea pigs by student PE teachers undergoing their ‘teaching practice’ 

Coupled with, and encouraged by, the school’s own PE and sport teaching staff, most of whom were not subject specialists, but rather enthusiastic chancers probably looking for a bit of relief from the class or staffroom, the emphasis was on competitive football for boys and netball for girls; with cricket and tennis as spring and early summer alternatives.

My lack of ability had been spotted as far back as first year in infants, where it was found that didn’t even have the hand-eye coordination to catch a slowly pitched small bean bag. By the time I got to junior school, being picked for teams meant a long wait for me – and even, on a couple of occasions – being sent to play rounders with the girls in what was, I suppose, a humiliation visited on me for being so genuinely hopeless at manly sports. Either way, I hated the weekly trial by ordeal that was PE, and my feelings came to be fully reciprocated by the teaching staff – student and qualified alike.

Matters came to a head one afternoon during my second year of junior school, when I, along with two friends, made the cardinal error of moving after the end of break whistle. The head of PE, a squat, swarthy and rather obese man who favoured nylon tracksuits, who had recently decided to tag along to our music lessons because he plainly fancied the new singing teacher, was soon on hand to make examples of the moving miscreants.

The infraction committed by we three gave him an ideal opportunity to practise his ‘divide and rule’ skills as, while myself and one other boy were known to him, the third hadn’t yet come to his attention as a sporting hopeless case. Asking this lad’s name, he pointed to the two of us and then asked him why he was spending his break time with these two ‘dustbins’. We were 8-years-old and already marked out: respect for individualism be damned; lack of sporting ability and failure to be part of the official ‘team’ spirit meant my friend and I were garbage in the teacher’s eyes.

My reaction was to keep out of his way as much as possible after that, but it has given me a lifelong aversion to the breed. While Brian Glover’s brilliant portrayal of Mr Sugden in the film Kes was nearly contemporary to my ‘dustbin’ naming and shaming, that garnered laughs – my treatment still smarts. When I became a teacher many years later, I endeavoured to work with understanding and appreciation of my pupils’ talents and differences. I hope I succeeded to a far greater extent than was shown to me in my early years.

It was common at this time for teachers to refer to boys by their surname only, whereas girls were afforded first name terms. Sport and PE instructions were frequently hurled with the recipients surname given either at the start or end of a barked order or rebuke. Years later, I watched my younger son playing rugby, coached by an ‘old school’ PE teacher who followed this time-dishonoured method. Hearing ‘Hyatt’ bawled across a wet and muddy pitch at my son brought memories flooding back and I could quite cheerfully have beaten that particular ‘sir’ to a pulp if there’d been a spare studded rugby boot to hand. Times do change though – or perhaps facility and skill at sport, which my son fortunately has in inverse proportions to my own. When I talked to him afterwards, while trying to filter out my PETSD (physical education traumatic stress disorder) induced feelings, he merely shrugged it off. To him, this particular ‘sir’ was almost a Mr Chips-like character – one of the older teachers who was good at his job and wanted the best for the pupils he worked with.

The ’dustbin’ epithet still rankles with me, however, and I have a long memory for such slights – as well as for the praise that has come my way. Being long of memory can be both a blessing and a curse – I’m useful for pub quizzes, but prone to flashbacks, which makes forgetting and forgiving a double-edged sword often wielded in my subconscious. 

Don’t let them see it upsets you

A phrase redolent of those in positions of authority who can’t be arsed to sort an obvious

problem and as irritating as the old ‘sticks and stones’ mantra. This was the common

recourse to complaints of bullying when I was at school and more generally growing up in

the 60s and 70s. Bullies are bad, but bullying was to be expected, or so the common thread confusingly ran.

Bullies weren’t good team players, but, then again, neither was I. However, they were good

at manipulating their victims and onlookers, with the former becoming sensitised to their

actions with the latter co-opted to either acquiesce or even participate. From an early age, I

found it very difficult to handle name-calling or even mild teasing without a defensive or

even overly aggressive reaction.

During my first year of infant school, I was reported to Mrs Baxter for swearing at a group of

classmates who had been calling me names in the playground. ‘What did you say, David?’

Mrs B asked, to which I responded truthfully that I’d called them all ‘bloody buggers’ – an

entirely appropriate epithet that I stand by to this day. Doubtless in an effort to diffuse the

situation and show me the error of my five-year-old ways, my teacher took me to one side

and calmly explained, a la Maria Von Trapp, that I should just not let them see it upset me.

Thankfully she didn’t go on to sing about it, but it became the first in a score of other similar

authoritative hand washes I was to be treated to during my compulsory and further

education.

The point being that being different – in my case being easily wrapped up in my interests,

routines and obsessions – made me a focus for unwanted attention, and if provoked by

even mild name calling it felt as if I was genetically programmed to respond. All in all, I could

be relied upon to lay on a free floor show for the entertainment of the masses. Once lost,

the temper was on display for all to see: red-faced, shouting, lashing out at anyone in range,

‘not letting them see’ how it affected me wasn’t a reaction I could have cared less about. As

Marc Almond so rightly sang ‘well, it just wasn’t me’.

It’s almost comforting to know that now this is recognised under the umbrella term ‘victim

blaming’ but at the time being told not to let my tormentors see what I felt seemed like a

total cop out. School wasn’t a safe place to be different – an important, if dispiriting, lesson I

soon learned. Don’t let others see what it means to be you.

Alongside recognition of the effects of victim blaming, has come a wider understanding of

the extent to which masking feelings and behaviours can be a factor in the lives of

neurodiverse people. This inward drive to conform to the expectations of others by placing

a gloss or veneer over true inner feelings and emotions comes at a cost, however – and with

a dangerous form of duality between the sexes.

For boys and young men, masking takes the form of adopting to the values and expectations

of others – be they classmates, co-workers or the wider mores of a friendship group. The

better known and accepted you are, the more a certain degree of divergence can be

accorded to the ‘odd one out’. For girls and young women, however, the pressure to 

conform can be much less accommodating. Some commentators refer to this disparity by

reference to the difference between male and female autistic spectrum diagnoses, where the

ratio most commonly quoted is 3 female to 5 males. The tendency to self-

absorption/obsession and a lack of care in terms of outward appearance and dress are

badges of difference treated with a wider degree of acceptance amongst males. For young

females, however, divergence from fashion trends can manifest itself in ostracism from a peer group

or worse, with consequences for long-term mental health leading to higher rates of

depression, anxiety and self-harm. This is not to reduce the very real mental health and

wellbeing dangers of younger males, but the disparity does perhaps go someway to

explaining how some autistic spectrum condition (ASC) traits are viewed more as accepted manifestations of a form of extreme maleness. Pressure to conform to societal standards or meet material expectations (think income, car, clothes, car) does impact men in other ways, an extreme example here borne out by reference to suicide statistics, where the rate amongst males at 22.8 per

100,000 is four times that for females, at 5.7 per 100,000. Contrast this with the rates of depression and anxiety reported by females, with 24% expected to be diagnosed with depression at some point during their life, against 13% of males. For anxiety, the figures are worse, with 37% of women reporting anxiety symptoms, and 29% for men. 

Reach out and who’ll be there?

The statistics also show that, generally speaking, women are more likely to seek help earlier than men, where, whether down to male pride or just stubbornness, there is a noticeable reluctance to seek help and try to deal with symptoms through drug or alcohol abuse, or even just to suffer in silence – a ‘strategy’ that seems to be more about hiding serious symptoms from partners, family, friends and work colleagues until the crisis becomes overwhelming. And there’s nothing more indicative of being completely overwhelmed than suicide, with marked increases in rates of suicide for men aged 25 to 44 years, from 17.8 (17.4, 18.3) to 19.2 (18.7,19.6) per 100,000 population between 2014 to 2018 and 2018 to 2022. For females, by contrast, the rates for the same age range were 4.9 (4.6, 5.1) to 5.8 (5.6, 6.1) per 100,000 population between 2012 to 2016 and 2018 to 2022.

While the statistics do not reveal how many of those suffering depression and anxiety – or choosing to end their own lives were neurodivergent, the effect of triggers such as financial worries, work-related stress, family breakdown and loneliness are likely to have a far greater impact on those who find coping with life itself difficult and confusing to start off with.

Don’t get noticed

Growing up in the 60s – the age of the kitchen-sink drama – carried with it a measure of implied guilt. Family members and neighbours might be watching was a common theme. Don’t get caught being ‘different’ or ‘difficult’; Jeanette Winterson summed it up brilliantly with the title of her autobiography Why be happy when you could be normal? 

This quest for the Holy Grail of normality is something I’ve failed in throughout my life. At school and around people my own age, up to my late teens and early twenties really, the ‘normal’ of my peers could often be another country as far as I was concerned – and it came with mob rule attached for the different or the uninterested. My first real brush of my normal versus their normal came with sport. Boys around me at primary school got into football as we moved up from infants to juniors, just in time for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. This was sport overload – you were expected to watch matches, collect coins from petrol stations, know the names, clubs and national teams of players like Pele and Eusébio. This was also a time when boys going into the 2nd year started to play football as part of PE lessons – led, perhaps inevitably, by the swarthy track-suited would-be lothario. It felt like I was being demanded to play, live and bloody well dream this unfathomable thing – when all I wanted to do was read stories and watch TV – the former being frowned upon by my peers and the latter now a place dominated by football matches.

I tried to adopt a low profile, I didn’t try to answer questions in class or do anything that could, as I saw it, attract the attention of others, particularly my male classmates. Indeed, at this time, I forged friendships of a sort with two other boys who also exhibited differences to the common herd – one was an avid collector of military badges, and the other, while kind, had a tendency to eat alarming objects – old cabbage stalks and a couple of copper sulphate crystals come to mind. We three took to being shunned together. However, I soon learned that I was alone if I attracted unwanted attention or criticism from the rest of the class: these friendships weren’t a defence pact, rather a case of outsiders offering minimal support, largely for fear of being tarred with the outcast by association.

 

The fear of alienation led me to some strange places. I started using ritual behaviours – protective talisman if you will. These were actions I took to carrying out unseen and in a strict order. Getting them right, in my own head at least, gave me a degree of comfort and some reassurance that tomorrow would be a ‘good day’; one where I wouldn’t be noticed or singled out. Most of my rituals could be performed at home: an apple I had to eat at the same time every evening, the home-made bow and arrow I had to use to shoot three arrows over a wooden arch in the garden. Inevitably, these behaviours could attract parental attention. One day, the bow snapped, so I took to throwing the arrows over the arch while holding the bow in my other hand. My dad saw this and, not unreasonably, asked why I was throwing the arrows, when I could just make another bow. But that missed the point: I had to keep the broken bow, useless as it was, a new replacement – although fun to make, wouldn’t have conferred the same protection in my eyes.

 

As an added safeguard, I developed an ‘extra’ ritual, a sort of get out of jail card, if I was unable to perform my usual set of tasks at home. However, this action of last resort carried an added element of danger because it had to be done on the street outside.

 

Mr & Mrs Craven’s hedge

The Moor Grange estate in Leeds was built in the late 50s and early 60s. For a council estate, the two and three-bedroom houses are well designed with what would now be seen as larger than average room sizes and gardens at the front and rear, which are separated from the street and neighbouring houses by uniform privet hedging. We lived in a corner house and the corresponding house on the other side of the road junction was occupied by Mr & Mrs Craven – parents of John of Newsround and later Countryfile fame.

 

Let into the Cravens’ privet hedge was a metal street sign and this became the fetish object of my ritual of last resort. If I’d been unable to complete my rituals at home, or worse still, been caught performing one, then as soon as I left the house and crossed the road the following morning, I had to touch the sign first with my right hand, then the left, and finally with the right again. I had to do this unseen. This task was vitally important to me because the sign was close to the house of one of my chief tormentors and the ritual gave me confidence that was lacking due to being unable to fulfil my usual routine.

 

The sign bore the name Latchmere Gardens in raised black lettering with the number 16 (denoting the postal district from the days before postcodes) in smaller red letters, all on a rough white, weatherworn background that I had to lightly scratch with my fingernails, a sensation akin to drawing your nails over a blackboard. The unpleasant nature of the exercise impressed on me the urgency of the routine I had to follow to ensure a ‘good’ day, hopefully free from conflict and aggravation at school.

 

This emergency fall back insurance manoeuvre seemed to serve me well for a while, until, that is, the day my mum happened to see me performing the right, left, right fingernail scratch routine from our landing window. When I got home, she wanted to know what I thought I was doing and how long it had been going on. My attempt to close down her line of questioning with a mumbled ‘didn’t do anything’ before moving on to more strident denials were just met with more questions: didn’t I realise anyone could see me? What would people think? Looking back now, I think I’d have got an easier time if it had been my dad who’d seen me. Years later he fessed up to have a number of superstitious routines as a child – and there were even some he used when he was in the Army in WWII, where the propitiation of bad luck carried even greater consequences than being bullied at playtime. But my mum was a steely-eyed proponent of the ‘don’t draw attention to yourself’ school of utilitarian Stoic put-up-with-ittery. I wasn’t normal and I couldn’t do things that gave me even an illusory feeling of security, in case the neighbours saw me…

 

Hands together, eyes closed

There was, however, one area where even my mum deviated from the don’t be different/draw attention mantra, and that was by going to church, something of a minority event even back in the 60s on our estate, and this was something she passed on to me. Religion could be a difficult path to navigate in my family. My dad insisted he was ‘chapel’ because he’d been dragged to Belle Vue Road Methodist Church a couple of times every Sunday by his sisters when he was a lad, but he married mum in the Anglican All Hallow’s Church in Hyde Park – where I was also baptised. Mum herself was a curious mix of mainly low church Anglican – viewed through a Church of Ireland lens, courtesy of my maternal grandma and most members of her extended family, although, confusingly, some had converted to Roman Catholicism on marriage, with the result that meeting great aunts and uncles warranted a preparatory briefing from mum so I knew who was what and why, and also what not to say.

 

Mum’s low church predilections meant that she preferred as little ritual as possible, no ‘bells or smells’ favoured by the Anglo-Catholics wing of the CofE were allowed: the priest was a ‘reverend’, never a ‘Father’; candles were OK – as long as there weren’t more than two; incense a complete no-no. But the times they were a changing.

 

By Autum 1970 the ‘left hand’ school was proving to be just too much for me. The rituals weren’t doing their job and my behaviour was causing problems with teachers as well as my inability to relate to or mix with my fellow pupils. I was not badly behaved or disruptive, it was more that my anxiety increased in school-related settings to such an extent that my attention wandered and I was unable to comprehend or act on instructions, let alone pick up on non-verbal clues. I wasn’t good at maths – something that those more able, or just in need of deflection, picked up on and used as another stick to beat me with, to the delight of the rest and to my clear detriment. Frustration and anxiety led me to tears of rage and near apoplexy, which teachers did not seem to know how to deal with, except by pointing out the blindingly obvious that there was ‘something the matter with Hyatt’.

 

In the end, even my mum came to see that road safety could no longer be the overriding factor in the choice of school for me; the ‘left hand’ school was too big and revelled in a ‘team work’ ethos that was just beyond me. So an appointment was made with the educational psychology department and one afternoon mum and dad met me at school, a rare occurrence as dad would have had to ‘break time’ from work to be there. The three of us went to an old house in Hyde Park, not far from where my parents grew up so I could be assessed. I was, of course, under strict maternal instructions not to tell anyone about the appointment.

 

I remember being ushered into a room where a man and woman asked me questions about my home life, my family and school before sending me out to sit in the waiting room while they talked with mum and dad.

 

After a short time, I was called back into the consulting room, where the duo asked me if I though a new school might be a good idea. I hastily agreed and was then told I would be going to St Micheal’s in Headingley from the first day back after the Christmas holiday.

 

I remained, however, under strict instructions not to say anything, but the spell was broken by, of all people, the deputy head at the ‘left hand’ school, who breezily said in front of my whole class that I was off to pastures new after Christmas. My mum was furious – people would gossip, she opined, but the age of deference was still upon us, and not even my combative mother would take up cudgels against a teacher – even though she’d crowned him with the epithet of a ‘stupid old man’.

 

The change of school meant that many, though certainly not all, of my animistic rituals fell away, but their place was soon to be taken by the far more alluring world of Anglo-Catholic liturgy. Bells, smells and plenty of candles were on offer at St Michael’s, where the vicar was most definitely a Father, and every term and half term started and ended with a school eucharist in what the priest called ‘our famous Church’ because it featured on test match coverage from Headingly Cricket Ground only a quarter of a mile away. I find myself in good company regarding St Micheal’s in this was – Alan Bennett too worshipped there in his pre-university youth. 

 

At home, however, fame was to be replaced by infamy. Mum called it Holy Communion, so ‘Eucharist’ sounded suspect, but she came to accept it after a fashion. The Church of England likes to think of itself as a broad church,  meaning – largely for historical reasons – that the sum of its often disparate parts, though often fractious and even mistrustful of each other, have to stick together and observe a semblance of unity  because of its constitutional ‘established’ status; the hierarchy can’t jealously claim the historic legal right to anoint and crown the monarch if the bishops, clergy and laity spend too much time fighting like ferrets in a sack. However, tolerance between the competing traditions, be they evangelical, charismatic or catholic only goes so far as I discovered when I returned home from school on Ash Wednesday 1971. Earlier in the day, during a school eucharist to mark the start of Lent, I’d been ‘ashed’. This involved having a priestly fingertip dipped in the burnt remains of last year’s leftover palm crosses imprinted on my forehead in the shape of the cross. Mum took one look and realised that the feared forces of the counter reformation were alive and well and living in Headingley: ‘wash that off and don’t say anything about it to Grandma’ she demanded.

 

Whatever the rights and wrongs of Lenten liturgical practice, the ritual on offer at St Micheal’s beat scratching street signs and chucking arrows around. I was still not normal in the eyes of my new classmates and there were still the usual aggravations that those wanting to be regarded as having a higher place in the pecking order dish out to those they look down on, but this was a smaller school and I responded far more positively to the experience.

Coping – or trying to

I suppose one way of looking at the routine/ritual thing I fell into was the need for reassurance: by doing X  I convinced myself that I would get Y, the Y being a good, hassle-free day at school. If it worked, the need to carry on performing was reinforced and if it didn’t, well, perhaps I’d done something wrong or the actions needed fine tuning. There was little to do with any conscious religious faith on my part, rather keeping to a routine/ritual was a form of insurance transaction, even though I was unclear who or what I was transacting with. But it was a tiring business and fed into other anxieties – some of which were probably perfectly natural and form part of growing up. After all, bullies bully to ensure their perceived standing. They want to be able to frighten and manipulate soft targets that find it hard to fight back and lack the reassurance that comes from having a good friendship base. By making no secret of the fact that I’d rather have my head in a book than play football I made myself a target by being a loner, but what scares me even now is to think that I was singled out even by some teachers – witness sweaty tracksuit man – because I was engaging with education in a way they didn’t approve of. Not only was I supposed to conform to what a bullying fellow pupil thought I should do, but also to make sure that my actions conformed to a rigid timetable. Is it any wonder that masking caused me anxiety – even dread on occasions, or that the struggle to be happily normal was for me doomed from the start.

At this point, I need to say that we weren’t an overtly religious family – we didn’t say grace before meals or have any signs of Christian observance in the house, but we just went to church. This was something that particularly irked the next-door neighbours, an elderly couple who were keen to argue and find fault, which led to rows over the hedge for what seem now to be entirely trivial matters. But churchgoing was something they liked to bring up in any dispute – I can still remember my dad being accused of religious hypocrisy by our neighbour for watering the garden with a hosepipe one summer evening. It felt surreal to have combative aged protagonists so close to home in addition to the aggravations I was only too glad to leave behind when the bell rang for the end of school. Little wonder that my anxieties could lead to a siege-like mentality, which on more than one occasion led me to lock myself in the garden shed. It was dark and being brick built, felt solid and a good defensive hunkering down spot where the world could be ignored.

This urge to hide away was particularly strong during the long summer holidays when childhood friendships became fractious through boredom or petty jealousies, placing me in a kind of limbo: I didn’t like the stifling and false – even mindless – conformity of school, but neither did I respond well to the complete removal of structure that became evident after the first couple of weeks into August. I did not understand the way other kids my own age thought and behaved so the darkened shed offered a refuge from the chaos and disorder that could erupt with little or no warning.

It is not that I actively mistrust people but masking my true feelings and uncertainties can be very tiring; I manage pretty well now in work situations, although there have been times when I’ve had to walk away from jobs. The sense of release can be overwhelming, even if the act causes financial worries in the short to medium term. This has been a last resort when masking or cloaking my inner fears is no longer a viable option. The accepted term for this is a meltdown, but it has taken me many years to understand this. The overriding sense of release when the mask comes down and my true thoughts and feelings are laid bare can be unnerving for myself and those around me; it has cost me friendships, jobs and played a major part in the failure of two marriages, but I cannot deny who I am and wider understanding of the barriers faced by people with autistic spectrum conditions today makes acceptance and tolerance more widespread than at any other time in my life.

Diagnosed

It is 7.00 am on an October Monday morning in 2024 and I’m trying to get Zoom to work. The app won’t play ball so I opt for the browser version, which manages to show me in a stark, sleep-deprived light as I wait for the organiser to start the session. This has been booked for a couple of weeks and, on the basis that a single named person had been given as the organiser, meant I was just expecting an online meeting with one other person, a psychiatrist, but two blank panels appeared on screen and I saw two names, soon accompanied by images of two people, one male the other female. 

We start off with introductions, during which I’m told that two mental health professionals have to be present when a diagnosis is given. I’m expecting the big reveal at this point, but they then say there are some questions they want to go through to get a clearer picture of the answers I’d given in the assessment document. I start to get a clichéd image in my head of a psychiatrist asking a patient reclined on a couch to tell them about their childhood. 

So the gentlest of interrogations began as they took me through the assessment responses provided several months earlier by my son and I (he fulfilling the role of someone who knows me well, as per the assessment rules) and asking further questions as we go to clarify some points. Do I have trouble forming friendships? Yes. Can I talk confidently in a group? Yes. What were the main problems I experienced at school? Bullying – and official indifference from teachers. My two interlocutors then ask for a short adjournment when I get to twiddle my thumbs and wonder both how I’ve got on, and how I will feel about the result – after a 58-year gestation period, this final pregnant pause feels like a reality TV show reveal. And then they’re back. There’s an apology for needing to go over a ‘few things’, before one tells me that I have a high functioning Level 1 Autism Spectrum Disorder that has been diagnosed on the basis of the five internationally recognised DSN criteria. I suddenly find myself bridling at the word ‘Disorder’, I realised I want to call it a ‘Condition’.  After all, disorder suggests, to my mind at least, that there’s something wrong, but now that I finally know the truth, I think Condition is better because there are good points as well. The traits have made me what I am,  and in large part given me a number of different careers, from publishing to teaching and policy research. My mind may not work in a ‘normal’ or ordered way, but ‘disordered’ isn’t the whole story of me by a long way.

As the news sinks in, I start to feel euphoric. This is confirmation of what is deep within me and has caused my responses to the world around me. To celebrate later I dad-dance to Gloria Gaynor singing I Am What I Am. The anthem of otherness applies to me and I revel in it.

I received my ASC diagnosis aged 63 after a lifetime of wondering why and how I was somehow different, being told I was odd, weird – even nasty. The confirmation of my ASC came on the very day that Kemi Badenoch, then still wannabe Conservative Party leader but already a seasoned culture warrior, portentously told the world that a neurodiversity diagnosis places someone in a similar category to race or biological sex in terms of discrimination law and ‘general attitudes’. Children with a diagnosis, their parents were doubtless very surprised to learn, get the best treatment and equipment at school. The following day reality struck home with a vengeance. Rachel De Souza, Children’s Commissioner for England reported that nearly 400,000 children with suspected neurodevelopmental conditions, including autism and ADHD, face unacceptably long waits to be diagnosed – over four years in some areas. For adults it can be even worse; one centre in Leeds has now closed to new referrals because it has an estimated  10 years’ wait for assessment outcomes. These delays strikes me with something akin to horror. These are lives put on hold in many respects, where personal difference without explanation marks people out but leaves them without a concrete reason or the ability to seek out specialised support that is able to identify and address their needs. This is bad enough for adults, but unforgiveable for children and their parents/carers struggling to find acceptance or understanding.