When Life Deals you Melons - Writing with Dyslexia

  This is an extract from the eBook: When Life Deals You MELONS - Writing with Dyslexia. Images and cartoons do not display on this site.

1970-73: Broom Barns JMI (Junior Mixed Infants) School, Stevenage.

 For many, an odd secondary symptom of dyslexia is having a poor short-term memory. I knew I had a rubbish memory, and my primary school had a special way to regularly expose this to the whole class: We would all be shown pictures of ten different objects that we had a minute to memorise. After that, we had to wait a further minute before writing down all those we could remember. Two clever bastards always remembered all ten. The class average was always five or six. I was much more consistent – I would remember three – even if I tried to cheat.  

Miss Cliff: “Good! Now has anyone written down less than four? - Richard?”

I did manage to escape some of these tests; I was excused from the class to go to the ‘hut’ This was a two-room, wooden shed on stilts, that doubled for a library and over-spill classroom for us ‘remedial kids.’ Here those who were below their ‘average reading age’ got special one-to-twelve help. This is where I first heard the phrases: “Stop swapping the letters around!” and “Oh, come on… a ‘d’ doesn’t look anything like a ‘b’!”

I had no idea that there was anything wrong with me when I left Broom Barns, I simply assumed I was a bit thick. My older brother, Leslie was seven years older than me, and an A-Level – Grade A student. My sister, Cherry was three years younger than me, and I felt her snapping at my heels; despite her young age, she could already spell words that I couldn’t and would read a whole book before I finished chapter one.

Was I jealous of my clever siblings?

No! It wasn’t like I plagued the hell out of my brother when he was trying to study or set fire to my sister’s toy cupboard! … Oh, er, well, yeah; actually… 

1976: (A very hot summer!) Nobel Secondary Modern School, Stevenage

Mrs Edwards was my form tutor as well as our Environmental Sciences teacher. She was the first teacher who seemed to pay any special attention to me. She didn’t fully understand me, but then… neither did I. She was concerned that I didn’t seem to have many friends, was underperforming and also that noticed that I clung to my leather school satchel – it never left my side.

I had a soft spot for Mrs Edwards. Firstly; she, without realising it, had inspired me to try to write: In an Environmental science lesson in 1976, she described fragility of a simple food-chain. During that same lesson, I scribbled down some notes about an apocalyptic catastrophe caused by a pollutant from space that killed plankton after an asteroid hit the sea! I might have been a bit thick, but I had an active imagination.

 Secondly, Mrs Edwards absolutely insisted that I join the school’s beekeeping club. I doubt that current health and safety regulations would allow a school to keep two beehives in the middle of the school grounds but in the 1970’s, education took precedence over health and safety concerns. I quickly became hooked and was appointed, ‘Head of the club’ in her absence, when she left to have her first child.

My mother was particularly impressed by my interest and the knowledge I quickly acquired about beekeeping. She asked me to do an assembly on beekeeping at Mossbury School, where she was teaching. I did a brief demo and talk before fielding a lot of questions – mostly about bee stings!   

In 1979 for my 17^th Birthday, my parents brought a hive for me. I kept bees in our garden for 3 years before they contracted European Foulbrood that wiped them out. Foulbrood was notifiable and MAFF* (The Ministry for Agriculture Fisheries and Food), insisted I burned all the frames and brood chamber. This advice was changed to simply removing the combs and disinfecting the hive, the following month! 

*MAFF was renamed DEFRA (Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) in 2002

 What Mrs Edwards didn’t know…

Back to 1974 and my 1^st day at Secondary School: To me, Nobel School, seemed massive: It had a large hall, with a stage, a separate dining room, a large gym and a fair-sized indoor swimming pool: Dotted around these was a 3-storey ‘form block’ a two-storey ‘science block’, there was a separate library and another sprawling complex that held Metalwork rooms, woodwork department, art rooms and cookery kitchens (Cookery was yet to be named Domestic Science!). Due to the ‘baby boom’, the school was bulging with four large classes of between 38 and 40 students in each year. The sixth form and drama departments had to be housed on a separate site, the other side of acres of playing fields.

Not recognising anybody, I entered the hall, where about two hundred noisy children were already seated. Desperately I search for somewhere to sit where nobody would see me. You see, I started school desperately shy and withdrawn. I’d probably have been diagnosed with GAD (General Anxiety Disorder) if I was so shy now. Luckily, I avoided any such diagnosis and the drugs that would have inevitably followed. I now realise I was shy because I thought I was pretty thick and really didn’t want to witness a whole new set of teachers and ‘friends’ discovering this and being disappointed in me.

Luckily, Julie Baxter, Nigel Hill, Peter Hoskins and Reg Butler – all friends from Broom Barns, had spotted me. They waved me over, and I settled down with friends who were already aware of my short-comings and who didn’t really seem to care. They were curious about my new leather satchel, though…

Earlier that morning my parents had proudly presented me with this sturdy tan leather bag. It was ideal; the long straps allowed me to put it on my back when I cycled to school, and the partitions were perfect for keeping school books pristine. I thought it was brilliant. The other kids had either plastic bags or cloth holdalls, and a few had sausage- shaped sports bags with loop handles. My new satchel seemed so much more practical than any of these.

But… I soon discovered that not only was I the only child with such a bag in the hall that morning – I was the only one in the entire school. The guys from Broom Barns did laugh at it at first, but they were not the real problem. First, some of the older girls said they liked it. “Oh, that’s lovely, can we have a look?” Then I had to dash into the girl's toilets to recover it from where it had been tied to a cubicle and face the howls of laughter that greeted me when I emerged into a crowd of chanting kids. I was seeking obscurity but getting unwanted attention.

Before long, ‘Weston’s  satchel’ became a constant target for every wanna-be Joker in the school. Instantly recognisable as my bag, I couldn’t leave it anywhere: It was thrown onto the library roof, I saw it hanging out of the 3rd-floor window of the form block, but, by the time I got to the top, it had hit the ground, I was regularly flung over a fence into the woods that bordered the school. It was even thrown out across a frozen lake in nearby Fairlands Valley.

So, I kept it close, at all times, often winding the straps around an arm so it couldn’t be snatched and impatiently waited for it to either wear out or get stolen. But the damn satchel wouldn’t wear out – by the end of the third year, it barely showed more than a scuff and, by then, sports bags had become the ‘must have’ accessory. But, I had a plan!

Instead of wearing the satchel on my back, I tied it to the back of my bike and cycled the three miles home with it bouncing and dragging along behind me. “Excuse me! – Your bag has fallen off!” I ignored the calls for concerned passers-by because I was on a mission: The satchel was going to wear out, and I’d ask for a sports bag to replace it! – Simple! – I should have thought of this sooner.

“What?!” I couldn’t believe it – The bag made it home in once piece. A (very hot) buckle was badly worn, and there were some white scuffs, but there was no cause to ask for a replacement.

Bricks... That will do it. I put my books in a separate plastic bag and three house bricks and a full bottle of Corona in the satchel. I set off early to school. Boy, it was hard work towing that behind the bike. I went up and down Six Hills Way three times. The satchel was starting to lose the fight, the Corona bottle exploded, and I finally killed it on the way home, when the strap ripped out of the tatty bag.

‘Adidas’ – That’s what it said on the side of my new sports bag. My parents were disappointed with my choice and were quick to point out that a satchel would be better – though very much more expensive. What seemed weird, was that when I returned to school with my shiny new plastic sports bag, nobody seemed to notice – but that’s exactly what I hoped for! I was no longer tied to my bag. My only problem was recognising it among so many identical bags.

Christmas 1977: 

At Christmas, I’d always save the biggest present till last. After opening our stockings at some unearthly hour of the morning, we took it in turns to unwrap many exciting goodies. That year, my Mother had qualified as a primary school teacher and had started teaching at Giles Primary School in Stevenage. As a result, the household income went up significantly. I got a Thomas Salter Chemistry set, Battling-Tops, MouseTrap, a magnetic chess set from my older brother and, the biggest present of all – saved to the very last … A brand new, tan-coloured, leather school satchel!

This has been edited since Jimmy Hollis I Dickson pointed out some errors.

 I've hit max (3000 words) if you want to read more - the whole thing is on amazon for just 99p