An important aspect of going to school, especially when you are a child, is to make sure that you pay attention in class. You listen to teachers telling you how important your grades are, that your exams at the end of this year will set jet-black precedents, stone tablets that define who you are. Your SATs will give you some numbers, a 1, 2, or 3 – these are bad, scary numbers. You must learn to be afraid of 1s, 2s, and 3s because they are Delphic oracles – revere them, respect them, and abide by them, or you will be unhappy. Be sure to jump with joy when your mother buys you the Year 6 CLC Science Textbook for Struggling Students, because it is a happy moment; winding, unlit avenues of learning are ones any child should walk down.
School will begin to feel intolerable – when this happens, you will recall when you were 6 years old, watching increasingly vague celebrities climbing Kilimanjaro for charity – and you will recall how you stood up and planted your feet on toe-slicing carpet, and how in that moment you were bigger than any Kilimanjaro you could imagine. You will hold that feeling in the ball of your fist when walking through corridors and classrooms, and for so long it feels like it’s burning you. When you’re finally forced to uncurl your fingers and let it go, the world will be put on your shoulders.
When your father asks if you’re really trying for the 17th time this month, and when he says really he means really really, you should tell him again that you are. This is not untrue. You go to school every day, just like the other children, but when you look down at your desk you don’t see the 4th handout of today’s Maths lesson. Instead you see a page of blank impossibilities because questions never sit well with you, like a radio just out of tune, or an egg yolk that had been cooked for too long. These pages are for doodling. Returning home with pens run dry will make your father happy, because you ‘wrote so much down that it ran out’ – little will he know of your immense artistic portfolio, created by forbidden ink, with each masterpiece ending up in a bin at the end of each day. He will ask you again if you want to be a plumber when you grow up, because a plumber is what silly little boys who don’t pay attention in lessons end up becoming. His words will sting you, and you will shed tears.
Your teachers will refer to you as an enigma – this is a word you will not truly understand for some years, but while you’re still young you will like its shape, the way it rolls around on your tongue like ice cream that’s about to melt. You’ll enjoy how grand it makes you feel, as now you aren’t just another splinter of driftwood in a sea that’s too big to think about, you are perplexing, and the fact that people can’t quite understand you only makes you even more worth understanding. But they will not appreciate the things that make you enigmatic, like the way that you start your sentences with prepositions, or the way you answer the big questions they pose to you by putting them in boxes so that you can make them small (because things that are too big make you sick to the pit of your stomach). They will not like how you prefer the smell of the poppy and lavender plants they put on the outside of the playground to the smell of a fresh felt tip pen, or how you prefer to make up your own games than play tag with the other kids because when you run too fast your lungs complain.
Nor will you like how your chest feels like it’s about to cave in when your mother finally tells you what ‘enigma’ really means; you will not take pleasure in the knowledge that all it really meant was that your teachers couldn’t understand why you were so useless.
You will get older and eventually stop caring if what you are doing is making your father proud, because old people who make children unhappy are not entitled to define how you should live. You will teach yourself how to ride a bike without any hands, and you will create recipes for pasta sauces that taste better than your mother’s. You will teach yourself how to make a computer, and then how to break it. You will take up the drums, learn how to play them better than the older kids, and then give them up, and you will hug your brother so tight that you feel like you’re 4 again, toes buried in Cornish sand, waiting eagerly for your birthday tomorrow.
Creative Non Fiction Writing at Reading 