Childhood & School Life

Childhood & School Life

Looking back at my childhood, I can see certain things which were to become more obvious as I grew up even in my early days.  The interest (some experts say Aspergers sufferers have obsessions) in railways was there – both in things like Thomas the Tank Engine and various toy train sets and similar things, but also in that from the age of 5, my Dad’s garage was at the back of Lincoln railway station, and so that was a large influence in my interests to this day.

Looking back, I can see the start of my social difficulties all the way back in primary school.  Even at that stage, I found “playing” with friends not to always be a positive experience, and was often alone at lunchtimes and break times, or was at the wrong end of jokes etc.

I don’t remember too much about Primary School, but I will really start when I moved to William Farr School at Welton at the age of 11.  Looking back, this was one of the transitions I don’t think I found more difficult than any other 11 year old.  To me, there was a very good structure to allow everyone the best chance to settle in, meet new friends, and adapt to the new surroundings.

I can’t pinpoint exact timescales in some of what happened, and how things changed, or particularly why things changed, other than at the child stage of life, I perhaps wasn’t as different as my peers at a younger age – the differences coming as I grew into adulthood.  In the early days, I found myself with a few friends, but not probably as many as others.  As time went on, and different people matured at different times, I found myself with fewer friends.  Whilst the lesson times were generally good, the break times and lunch times where socialising became more and more difficult, and eventually, it got to the stage where my difficulties and differences really started to show.

Before I talk about the social times, I will mention the lesson times briefly.  I was generally considered as “bright”, and found myself near to the top of most classes.  Those subjects which had definite rights or wrongs usually came very easily, whilst others which were more opinionated were more difficult, and those which required me to “express myself” or imagine things were the difficult and more frustrating ones.  Imagining things has always been hard for me unless I have some kind of experience of what I am imagining.

As time went on, and we all “grew”, I found the non-lesson times more and more difficult.  Friends were few and far between, and so interacting with others was very difficult.  Looking back, I perhaps matured quicker than many, and so my views and outlook on things were different at that time to many people around me.  I think I perhaps saw school as somewhere I went to learn, and not somewhere I went to play, and the way I dealt with that was to focus on the work and learning, and try and get away from the “playing” and other bits which gave me such problems as were to come.

By the time I was 13, I had grown quite apart from many people.  There were a handful of friends who I spent time with, but even then I was finding myself more comfortable alone.  This didn’t go unnoticed by the teachers, and it was through the school that my difficulties were diagnosed, with professional opinions, as Asperger’s Syndrome.  At that time, I didn’t really understand how I was, and I don’t think it really affected me.  I certainly couldn’t identify things which were not my fault at the time.

Over the next couple of years, the differences grew.  Things were put in place to try and help me avoid the difficult times.  Looking back now, I wonder whether these were the best things long term, but I will never really know.  I was given jobs and tasks to do to help teachers at lunchtimes, to give me something to do away from my peers.  For some time, this helped the situation a lot, but it did mean the times I was with the normal group of people my own age were perhaps even harder, as I feel I was probably even less a part of any “groups” of friends than before.  Looking back, it was probably this separation which ultimately made me see school as such a negative place, and made me feel so unhappy there.  I remember, during these times, crying and crying at times, and just wanting to be on my own, in my own space, and sometimes just wanting to either be completely on my own, or have someone to talk to who I really could trust.  Most people had their best friend – I didn’t have that.  All I got were teachers who told you to trust them and that they wouldn’t tell anyone else what you were saying, but then did anyway (looking back, they had a “Duty of Care”).

Eventually this built up and built up to the stage where I felt like there was no point – I remember feeling really bad for about a week, and one lunchtime, I remember being pulled off the top of a set of stairs I was threatening to jump off.  After that, the idea of being watched constantly grew, and people were told to keep an eye on me a bit more.  I can’t remember too much about the exact events, but I probably spent even more time segregated from others at lunchtimes and breaks, which only made the situations I did face a bigger thing to face.  I generally found myself pushed away from groups of people, or never really feeling that I fitted in.  I saw things very strictly as either right or wrong, even when there wasn’t a right or wrong.  I perhaps found myself as the odd one out, and likewise with some of the things I did.  I also found myself on the receiving end of a lot of the “fun” and “jokes” that went on.  Whilst some were probably what teenagers did, some were not very nice at all.  Looking back now, these things have probably influenced my cautious outlook on friendships that I have today – something I will talk about more at a later date.

During year 11 (the fifth year), things did start to improve slightly.  I guess the influence and pressure of exams took over (both on me, and my peers), and together with us 15 and 16 year olds maturing and growing up, my social situation started easing.  There were still jokes, and I still didn’t have very many friends, but looking back, I did spend more time around people my own age, if not that I was particularly comfortable doing it.  At the end of that year, I took the big batch of exams towards my GCSE’s, and attained 11 A*-C’s.

By this time, I had started taking a real role in my Dad’s business (I shall cover this in another blog in the near future), and during that following summer, I spent much of it working with my Dad.  Even the time spent working for him during school time, and during the holidays had given me an insight into the adult world, and through what I had already done, I was working with adults from other companies.  In terms of school life, by this point I spent very little time with my peers outside of school.

As I’ve said before, I didn’t have any (of what I see now as) real friends, and always found groups of people more difficult than individuals.  I was rarely involved in school based social occasions – the ones I did go to were often difficult, and like school itself, I often found myself separated.  By this stage (after my exams), I was able to make the adult decision to go to work for 10 weeks, before returning to William Farr to do A levels in the September.