I was a tomboy kid who was forever trying to escape my mother, who used any possible excuse to stuff me into a long frilly frock and do my hair into some fancy style involving lots of pins (and boy, she was savage with those hairpins!).
I liked playing with my brother's old Meccano and Lego sets, digging up the garden (for some reason the soil contained a lot of bits of broken blue and white china, and I thought if I collected enough I could glue them all together and make a dinner service), and especially, reading. I made up long elaborate stories in my head based on the Greek and Egyptian myths. I'm told I also had an imaginary friend, but I don't remember anything about that.
I had a thing about dinosaurs and evolution, and I remember watching Life on Earth every week when it came on TV. Heraldry, was another thing; I wrote to the Portcullis Pursuivant (one of the heraldic officials) asking him about a possible family coat of arms, and I think I still have the letter I got back from him. Also, Watership Down; I tried to form a club based on it, but I couldn't get anyone interested. I painted rabbits on the walls of my dad's garden shed and he had to paint over them.
I used to initiate conversations by taking a book I found interesting up to someone and reading to them from it. My nickname at school was 'Actually' because I used the word so often. While we were working class, my mother was aspirational and taught me to 'talk nicely', and I got teased like anything for my 'posh' accent and ended up losing it to try and fit in.
My brother had a set of children's encyclopedias that was in the front room bookcase in our old house. I was so terrified of the skeleton in volume 2 (B for Bones) that I wouldn't go near the bookcase.
I was put in remedial at school at age 6 for being 'disruptive'. Among other things, I'd wander off during assembly and be found in other people's classrooms...usually reading a book. The so-called 'remedial' class was, I think, aimed at learning difficulties (the kids in there didn't mix with the rest of the school at all, and I swear at least one had Down syndrome) - I was above average academically, I had a reading age of 10 or 11, and I suspect they put me in there because the teachers only had about eight kids to deal with and could keep an eye on me. When I came out, I was mocked for having been in the 'sp****cs' class' (sic). That reputation went up through school with me, and I had no friends to speak of until I was fourteen or so.
Oh yes...I had, and still have, naturally olive skin, and my mother (who hated it, and tried, and failed miserably, to make me more pink-and-white) claimed I must have been 'left by gypsies'. I actually believed her...and I spent years waiting for them to come and take me back.
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"Grunge? Isn't that some gross shade of greenish orange?"
02 Oct 2009, 1:03 pm
I was an odd kid, lets put it that way.
