It was my last day in the Sea Cadets before I left home to join the Royal Navy. I had just turned 16 and Great Britain had just won the Falklands War.

The Sea Cadet officers invited my parents to my farewell party at TS Caprice and we gathered in the officer’s mess for a beer. Everyone was very proud of me. 

At my farewell party, Mr Hargreaves cried into his beer as he said goodbye. Mr Hargreaves had been a radio operator in the Royal Navy during World War Two and he taught me Morse code at his house on Saturday mornings. Mr Hargreaves begged me not to join the Navy. I should stay and do my A-levels and go to Cambridge, he said. I could always join the Navy later if I was still interested. But I had made up my mind. I was going to join the Navy.

Before I left home, I led a double life. At home, I barely spoke and I was always in trouble at school. I didn’t even read a book for the last two years. But in the Sea Cadets, I was the star of the show.

I won Best Cadet two years in a row and I was the only Cadet Petty Officer in my district. We had competitions against other Sea Cadet units practically every other weekend. Sailing, rowing, shooting, orienteering, pentathlon, adventure training, guard drill, PT and more with me as team captain and we won pretty much everything. TS Caprice won the coveted Burgee Award for Excellence.

At school, I was a clown and a troublemaker. I went to a fancy grammar school but everything was so easy and boring that I switched off and did no work at all for the last two years. I was always in trouble and did zero homework but I always came top of my class anyway. 

I came first in my year and won prizes in maths and advanced maths but I couldn’t face another two years of this. I needed a challenge. I needed to get away.

At my farewell party, they gave me a bosun’s call as a farewell gift, and everyone shook my hand. My mum gave me a St Christopher for safe travels and my dad gave me twenty quid for beer.

The train for Plymouth left from Paddington Station at 9:25 am on the Third of September 1982 and I was off. I had twenty quid, a St Christopher and a change of clothes. I didn’t look back.

Chapter Two — Arriving at HMS Fisgard — is here:

This is chapter three of my memoirs.
You can find chapters one and two here.

— 1977 —

My first year at Chis and Sid (aged 11-12) passed without incident apart from an impressive number of detentions. Detentions at Chis and Sid were a serious business where you had your name read out in morning assembly, and you went to the front of the assembly hall to get your little lecture from the headmaster. The list of names was always some permutation of Monroe, Harding, Winch and Lawrence.

Three detentions in a single term and you got the cane. My record was six. My detentions were never for properly naughty stuff. They were mostly for not doing my homework or for talking in class. The naughty stuff came later.

At the end of every school year, we had a few weeks of exams. They were a kind of warm-up for the O-level exams that would come at the end of the fifth year. After the first-year exams, they put us into “streams” according to our results. I should have been in the top stream but was put in the middle stream — perhaps it was all those detentions dragging me down.

— 1978-80 —

I was very happy with the middle stream, though, because my classmates were the best a teenage boy could wish for. I fell in love with a girl in my class in the very first week (more about that here), and we were all best friends (almost everyone — sorry, David) and we hung out together all the time. Birthday parties on Saturday night with a bottle of cider and a Party Six of Heineken. Ice Skating at Queensway, in London, on Sundays. We even took the train for a day trip to Margate (John’s mum didn’t trust him to take the train on his own, and she watched us all the way to Dartford). Most of us boys went to the Good News Christian summer camp at Winchester School where we spent a week singing Jesus songs and getting up to mischief. I’m still friends with several of my classmates 40 years later, and we still meet up for the occasional beer.

We were a lovely bunch, but we often pushed our teachers to the edge and beyond.

We were well-behaved, for the good teachers. On the first day with Mr Carlisle, we were our usual unruly selves when we entered the room, but Mr Carlisle made us all go out and come back, one by one, in silence. We were never unruly again. At the other extreme was Mrs Timm. Mrs Timm would drone on about the English Reformation or the Industrial Revolution, and no one paid even a smidgeon of attention to her. We took a cassette recorder to her class one time to record the lesson and the whole period was just mayhem with everyone talking and walking around the room while Mrs Timm droned on and on. I wonder if all her classes were like ours, or if we were just especially unkind to her. I wonder what her memories of teaching are like.

I’ve always loved history, but Mrs Timm made everything so grey and tedious. We had a history essay for homework every week, but I never scored more than 4 out of 20. Except that one time, when we had an essay on Lord Nelson. I got 19½ out of 20. I got 19½ for an essay on Captain Cook the week after too. But then I went back to 4 out of 20 for the rest of the year. Why did I do this? I don’t know. From the very beginning, I wanted to be myself and demonstrating that I could get any grade I wanted was important to me. Most days, I just didn’t want a good grade.

Several teachers had a way of getting our attention. More than a few had perfect aim with a blackboard eraser thrown at the head of any student not paying attention. Mr Williams would slam his metre-long ruler down across your desk and if you didn’t move your fingers fast enough… too bad. Sore fingers. “Basher” Lewis slammed Martin’s face down into the bench in biology, and he beat me and Paul around the head over and over and over until half the class were in tears. The Terrible Mr Gooden deserves his own story

It was about this time that my refusal to do homework became a problem. Julie and I were put on Homework Report, which meant our teachers recorded every homework assignment on a card and our parents had to sign it. We had to come to school 30 minutes early every day to show our completed homework to Mr Durbin, the head teacher. The homework was easy, so I didn’t stay on Homework Report for very long, and I was soon back to my old ways.

At the end of every term, we were given a report card, and Julie and I took turns to come last in our class, but when the end-of-year exams came around, I came top or thereabouts in nearly every exam. I won a prize for my exam results and bought a book on computer programming with the book voucher. That was the book that changed my life.

My history exam became something of a legend, because I answered every question as a joke. In the essay question about the Suffragettes, I wrote how the Suffragettes were a bunch of silly women who didn’t do as their husbands told them. In the Reformation question, Raquel Welch was a Buddhist. The teacher marking my essay wrote STUPID BOY! in huge letters diagonally across the page in red ink and gave me a zero. Why did I do this? Who knows? Maybe I thought it was funny at the time. Martin still has my essay.

— 1980-82 —

For the next two years of school, I did practically zero work and never even took a book home. Still, when the final exams — O-levels — came around, I came first or thereabouts in most of the subjects and won another prize. I shared the top spots with Alison, Corrine and Roger, and they all went to Oxford and got their names in gold lettering in the school lobby. I quit school and joined the Royal Navy.

— 1982-86 —

I thought I’d get more of a challenge in the Navy, but what a joke that was. The academic work in the Navy was so easy I felt like my brain was rotting.

— 2024 —

Epilogue
I am finally doing the degree that I should have done forty years ago, but now my brain is rotting for real. I wonder if I’ll finish my degree in time.

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The essay takes many twists and turns and each one of them is a fascinating journey in its own right.

It starts out as a review of the movie The Reader.

I was watching Tony Scott on the Charlie Rose program, and he said, in connection with “The Reader,” that he was getting tired of so many movies about the Holocaust. I didn’t agree or disagree. What I thought was, “The Reader” isn’t about the Holocaust. It’s about not speaking when you know you should.

[It’s great that The Reader is not about the holocaust because I’d like to see it and my wife wouldn’t watch it with me if it were about the holocaust.]

In his first meander, Ebert uses Twain

That wise man Mark Twain told us: “In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from others.”

as an excuse to reel off a laundry list of Things He Believes

This is true. It is even sometimes true of me. Perhaps of you. However, there are certain areas in which I consider myself an authority, like the movies. I have devoted years to learning about the Theory of Evolution. I think Creationism is superstitious poppycock. I believe the problem with the literal interpretation of the Bible is that anyone can easily discover its support for the opinions they already hold. I believe Conservatism has proven itself disastrous every time it has been implemented in this country.

After meandering past speaking engagements, dinner parties, segregation and atheism – with every meander a gem – he ends up back at The Reader.

The Reader, Ebert says, [Spoiler Alert!] is about a woman’s wrongful conviction that she could have easily avoided if only she could overcome her shame about her inability to read. A key witness realizes this but fails to speak up because of his own shame that he had an affair with her.

This is where his essay gets interesting because it leads Ebert into a riff on the power of shame

We learn of young mothers who put their babies in dumpsters because they are ashamed of their pregnancy. Young fathers who murder their girlfriends, simply because of the universal human reality of pregnancy. We hear of prison guards who follow orders to torture, orders they know are illegal and immoral. And leaders who issue the orders. We learn of terrorists who die and kill others rather than face the shame of being frightened to. We hear of gang members who kill people unknown to them, not because they want to, but because they have been shamed into “proving” themselves as men. We hear of Wall Street executives who lead their firms into what they know are dangerous and unsound practices, because they would be shamed to be outdone by rival executives. They steal the savings from millions of victims, so they can win a pissing contest.

and ultimately triggers Ebert’s memory of a shameful episode in his own past. Ebert’s shame story is about cheating in a game of chess with a blind man who was his very good friend.

More than 40 years have passed since that game, but I have not forgotten it. I can never even think of the University of Cape Town without it coming to mind. My cheating itself was shameful. When I denied it, that was despicable. Herb, I hope someone reads this and tells you about it. You were right. Of course, you always knew you were right, and we both knew that I had lied.

Just reading that makes me feel that familiar burning sensation that heralds the unbidden return of my least favourite memory. Suddenly I am transported back to my fourth-year Latin exam in Room 41 and

David Samuel is handing me his exercise book under the desk.

We are halfway through our end of year exams.

Our exams are kind of a big deal because, unlike America in 2009, in England circa 1981 the only thing we will have to show for all our years of schooling is a certificate that said how we performed in a bunch of exams — O Levels — that we’ll take at the end of the fifth year (aged 16).

We do two of these three hour exams for each O Level (plus an oral exam for languages). I’m taking 9: English, English, Maths, Maths, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, French and Latin.

Every year until now has ended with a solid battery of two weeks of exams with 8 hours a day under exam conditions. Our grades throughout the year are based on classwork and homework but all that was tossed aside after the exams. Only the exam counts. The fourth year exams are special because they are a dress rehearsal for the real thing at the end of the fifth year.

For me, exams are a godsend. The laziest student ever (until I have children of my own), I have made avoiding work into an art-form. In the last two years of chemistry, I have written a total of three and a half pages of notes and have done no homework at all. I read computer magazines in Latin class and I am teaching myself BASIC in French. I am bottom of my class. In two weeks I will be top of my class. Again. They stopped giving me Most Improved Student Award after four years of improving from worst in class to best in class every exam time.

Best of all, I genuinely enjoy exam time. We have no homework assigned and I have no need to study. The fact that I have no notes to study from is irrelevant. I will not open a book. Last Christmas, Miss Mills said that we should be studying about 6 hours a day by now. I have not studied for 6 hours total in my whole life and Not At All for these exams.

Each subject has two exams: one essay-based; one short answers. In Latin, the second exam requires us to translate passages of Latin.

In class, we have translated Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Tacitus’ Histories, umpteen poems by each of Ovid, Horace and Catullus and the complete works of Pliny the Younger. In the exam, we’ll have to translate some 10 or 12 of these.

And now I’m sitting in the back row of room 41, next to David Samuel and, when I open the exam paper, I realize that I don’t know anything.

It’s easy to fake your way through translating French. It’s all “Ou est la Place de la Concorde” but Latin is much more precise, more distant. More foreign. And you certainly can’t fake your way through poetry. They expect us to understand it.

David Samuel leans over, opens his bag and shows me that he has a book with all the translations. “Give it to me”, I signal. He smiles and hands it over. I copy just enough to save me from being booted out of Latin class because Mr Hickey doesn’t want bad students sullying his class’s record.

That feeling of dread when I opened the exam paper inspired me to study for an exam for the first time in my life.

I still didn’t study for Maths or any of the sciences because they were easy (all As, in case you are wondering). Nor English Lang because: what’s the point? Neither did I study for English Lit as I had never got better than 8% and studying wasn’t going to make much difference.

[I didn’t even read one of the assigned books – Brighton Rock – until I was 23. When I did finally read it, I fell in love with Graham Greene and have now read all of his books. If I had read it at 15 like I was supposed to, I might’ve gotten a better grade at ‘O’ Level but I might’ve hated Greene and never read him again.]

But I did study Latin.

I memorized the translations of every single one of those histories, poems, legal documents and letters to Emperor Trajan except Pliny X.96 — the one about the Christians — but that’s a story for a different day.

I still remember many of them by heart now.

That Suffenus, whom we know well Varus,
Is a charming, witty and sophisticated man.
Yet at the same time he writes more verse than anyone else.

Not, as usually happens, on second class papyrus.
He uses new papyrus, all ruled with lead and smoothed with pumice…

But, more than the poems, I remember the shame because it eats into my conception of who I am. I have barely spoken with David Samuel since that day but I don’t think I could even look him in the eye if I saw him again.

Worse still, he was the boyfriend (and eventually married) my girlfriend’s best friend. I imagine him telling Sarah who tells Jo: Remember Kevin? The kid who was good at exams? He was a cheat. I saw him. He used to take books into the exams.

David Samuel’s mum used to work with my mum. They were very competitive about their offspring as mothers often are. What if David’s mum knows I am a cheat?

I never cheated again but that once was enough to give me a lifetime of shame.

The common element of all these shame stories leads me to propose the following hypothesis:

Our greatest shame arises when we do something that is not just bad but that conflicts with our image of ourselves.

Ebert’s is bleaker:

I believe the movie may be demonstrating a fact of human nature: Most people, most of the time, all over the world, choose to go along. We vote with the tribe. What would we have done during the rise of Hitler? If we had been Jews, we would have fled or been killed. But what if we were one of the rest of the Germans?

It’s a shame that the movie is about the holocaust because I’d really like to go see it but my normal movie-going companion won’t take me so it will be condemned to my Netflix queue where it will fester until it finally arrives and sits on the shelf for three weeks because I can only watch those movies after everyone else has gone to bed which seems to get later and later as the years go by.

It’s a shame, I tell you.

As I mentioned at our reunion, we had quite a few stories of teacher on pupil violence. Mine was best!

It was the end of the third year (8th grade for the Americans)  and we had to pick our subjects for ‘O’ Level so Paul and I went to speak with Mr Lewis to get some advice.

As a result, we were late coming into Mrs Timm’s history class as we often were. But this time we had a rock-solid excuse.

So we milked it.

Mrs Timm [angry]: Where have YOU been?

Kevin [shame-faced]: Er….

Paul [shame-faced]: Ermm…

Kevin [frantic]: Where shall we say we were?

Paul [scheming]: What if we tell her we were talking to someone?

Kevin [relieved]: Sure. Who?

Paul [delighted]: How about we say we were talking to Mr Lewis?

Kevin [delighted]: OK. Let’s say that.

Paul & Kevin [together]: We were talking to Mr Lewis.

Mrs Timm [still angry]: You know I can check?

Kevin & Paul [together. shocked]: Er? Really?

Kevin [conspiring]: Shall we change our excuse?

Paul [assertive]: No. Let’s stick with Mr Lewis.

Paul & Me [together]: We were talking to Mr Lewis.

We forgot all about it as taunting Mrs Timm was just the usual harmless fun and, anyway, we were telling the truth.

We forgot about the incident until the next day when we heard the Tasmanian Devil coming up the stairs to room 41, four at a time. The door almost burst off its hinges and it wasn’t Taz. It was much worse.

It was Basher Lewis. And he was very, very angry.

Basher Lewis [very, very angry]: How dare you take my name in vain!

[Basher Lewis takes backhanded swing at Kevin. Kevin ducks. Basher Lewis misses]

[Basher Lewis tries a forehand and connects with Kevin’s cheek]

Basher Lewis [angrier]: Why…

[Basher Lewis hits Paul open-handed in right ear]

Basher Lewis [ibid]: did…

[SMACK!]

Basher Lewis [ibid]: you…

[POW!]

Basher Lewis [ibid]: lie…

[SOCK!]

Basher Lewis [ibid]: to…

[CRACK!]

Basher Lewis [ibid]: Mrs Timm????????????

[sound of sobbing from the girls in the next row]

Kevin: But…

Paul: We…

It’s hard to tell your side of the story when blows are raining down on your head and eventually our teacher, Mr Gooden, decided to intervene and walked us out of the class.

Don’t know what happened next with Mr Lewis but we never did get to tell our side of the story. Until now. I hope he reads it and feels guilty:-)

[I have another story with even more violence but that’ll have to wait for another day as I have to go check in for my flight]

A long time ago, I went to a school called Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar. It was a good school: very academic and very sporty. Purple blazers. It was about as close to being a public (i.e. private) school that you could get without paying large sums of money. At one time, Chiselhurst and Sidcup was officially the second best school in the country (after Manchester Grammar).

Then one day the school became famous. Front page of every national newspaper. On the editorial pages for about a week. Suddenly, Chislehurst and Sidcup was a symbol for everything that was wrong with the country.

I was a part of that and this is my story.

I had already left school to join the Navy in 1982 but all of my friends were still in the sixth form when I came home for Christmas holiday. Come to the Christmas Party they said. Of course I said. Why wouldn’t I?

Make sure you bring beer my friends told me because we are only allowed beer, wine or cider. Nothing stronger. So I brought some beer. Most people did. Mr Gooden brought a couple of boxes of wine.

Mr Gooden saw me going into the sixth form centre where the party was to take place. Where are you going, Kevin? He asked. He checked my bag and, when he saw that it was only beer, he let me in.

The party was fantastic!

Spirits were high. Lots of dancing. Lots of singing. Apart from that one kid who threw up, no one really got drunk because we had all been having beer at birthday parties since we were thirteen.

The highlight for me was when Come On Eileen came on and everyone held hands in a big, boisterous circle and sang with lung-bursting joy. I got to hold hands with Jo Burston (who I had wanted to hold hands with for 4 years) and we danced together for the rest of the afternoon (and the next three years).

The rest of the vacation passed without incident – except that I started dating Jo Burston – and I went back to HMS Fisgard brim full with happy memories…

…until the second week of January.

Suddenly, our party was on the front page of every national newspaper. Every op-ed page had a stern reflection on alcohol in schools. The Telegraph had a 6-page special on the evils of drink. The Sun had an editorial cartoon.

I called Jo that night to find out what was going on and she said she was suspended.

The whole sixth form had been gathered into the assembly hall and given a lecture. The headmaster called out some names of kids who admitted to being at the party and said they were suspended. Other kids said “I was at the party too” then more kids (I imagine “I am Spartacus! I am Spartacus!”) until finally the headmaster said everyone who was at the party should just go home because they were all suspended and the whole sixth form walked out.

Good times!

I’m writing down some memories.
You can start at Chapter One if you like or just keep reading here.

– 1978 –

I fell in love with J*** on the first day of class at Chis & Sid. I was 12, but I was shy back then, and didn’t get around to talking to J*** for several years.

Class 2P was the most social group of kids you could dream up. We did everything together. We went to the disco every week. We went to each other’s birthday party with a Party Six of Heineken or a bottle of Cinzano Bianco. I even got to dance with J*** a few times but nothing ever came of it because I was still too shy to talk to her and anyway, she had a boyfriend.

We were together for the next two years, but we were split up for the last two years. We all still hung out together most weekends. We often went ice skating at Queensway in London, and I got to hold J***’s hand as we skated together around the rink. We even went to the seaside on the train.

— 1982 —

I left school at 16 to join the Royal Navy, but everyone else stayed on to do A-levels, and I lost touch. But just before Christmas, I received a fancy invitation to Prize Day at Chis & Sid. I had won prizes for coming first in maths and for lots of O-levels.

I was due home for Christmas Leave on Prize Day, so I accepted the invitation. It was six hours on the train from Cornwall with a ferry ride and tube ride on top of that, but I thought I‘d make it.

Mum picked me up at Sidcup Station and drove me to the school, but I was an hour late already, and we had to run the last bit. The headmaster was already making his ‘Well done, everyone! Have a good Christmas…’ speech as I burst through the doors at the back of the hall. Mr Hahn spotted me in my Navy uniform and grabbed the microphone from the headmaster:

“…and the prize for maths goes to… Kevin Lawrence.”

After the prize-giving, I was invited to a party — still in my uniform — and everyone wanted to hear my Navy stories. Later that evening, David said, “Hey! There’s a party in the Sixth Form Centre on Wednesday. Why don’t you come? We’re allowed to bring beer, wine and cider. No spirits though!”

I got the bus down to the school on Wednesday afternoon, and all my old friends were there. We drank and we danced until Dexy’s Midnight Runners played Come on Eileen! and we all held hands in a big circle. J*** held my hand!!!

We held hands all night, and we danced to the slow ones together. And we kissed.

The next evening, I decided to ask J*** out. I was terrified. I had never asked anyone out before.

I called from the phone box at the top of Sidcup Hill, and my hands were shaking as I tried to get my 10p into the slot. I dropped it twice. But J*** said ‘Yes’ and we went to see E.T. the next day. J*** became my girlfriend.

We went out to the pubs in Bexley Village every night of my Christmas leave until, filled with sadness, I got that lonely train back to Cornwall.

— 1983 —

Our romance blossomed for the next couple of years, and we wrote love letters every week. Later that year, I was drafted closer to London, and I could travel up from Portsmouth to see J*** almost every weekend.

It was cool to be a teenager with a full-time salary, and we could do things that most teenagers can’t afford. We went to tons of concerts. Kool & the Gang. Wham! Queen. Elton John. Spandau Ballet… I still have all the brochures. And nightclubs! J***’s favourite was The Empire, Leicester Square, and it took me years to get over my allergy to disco music.

J***’s family took me on a horse-riding holiday to Wales every Easter and for a week in Annecy, France, every summer. We had the perfect romance until I joined my first ship, and they sent me away to the Falkland Islands for six months.

— 1985 —

When I got home from The Falklands, J*** and her mum came to meet me as we came alongside in Portsmouth Dockyard. The band played Rod Stewart’s I am Sailing and we kissed like Romeo & Juliet.

Our romance carried on where we left off — but it wasn’t quite the same.

J*** had a job now in a bank in London and had new friends from work. I still went to meet her every weekend and we still went out on the town every Saturday night but things soon began to get awkward.

We had already booked a holiday together but I think we both knew our love affair was coming to an end. We had one last wild fling on Las Playa de Las Américas but when we got home we agreed to go our separate ways.

A few months later, I got a phone call out of the blue. It was J***.

Live Aid was special.

You probably know that Bob Geldoff rounded up the greatest bands in the world to perform at Wembley Stadium with a simultaneous concert in Philadelphia. They’d announced on the radio that the tickets were all sold out but J*** went up to Wembley anyway and they had a few left. With 72,000 other lucky ticket holders, we went to see the best concert in the history of music.

We had the best seats in the stadium — just to the left of the stage — and the concert was truly amazing. At most concerts, artists play their new stuff that no one ever heard before but at Live Aid they were at their best because there were two billion people watching on the telly.

All my favourites were there: Sade, Elvis Costello, Paul Young, Spandau Ballet. We all cheered when Freddie Mercury stole the show and we all cried when they played the Drive video by The Cars while children starved in Africa. Everyone there remembers the teddy bear who did laps of the stadium in between sets and we all cheered with each toss into the air.

When the finale came around and we all sang Do They Know It’s Christmas?, we sang and we sang and we sang. We sang those last two lines over and over; all the way down Wembley Way to the tube station and halfway back to London on the Tube. What a day!

After Live Aid, J*** and I rekindled our romance for a few more months and went on one more trip to Annecy with her family but we had a massive falling out the night before we left. We practically broke up the first day we got there and didn’t speak to each other for the whole week. What a horrible week that must have been for J***’s family!

– 2010 –

Time moved on and we didn’t see each other again until many years later when I was visiting from America and met up with a few old school friends at Hall Place in Bexley. We’ve met for lunch a few times since. It’s fun to reminisce about the old times.

I sometimes wonder if we might’ve made it if it weren’t for that trip to the Falklands. At the time, we thought we would last forever but, looking back, I don’t think our romance would have survived. First love is always special but we had our separate lives to live. I am glad mine turned out the way it did and I hope J*** can say the same.

First love is special though and looking back at those early memories brings a twinkle to my eye.

The theme of the series is that no one really understands what it is like to be neurodivergent, so they have to put on an act to make it through life. At the end of each episode, they each make a very personal movie to tell how their life is different to others’, and how they deal with that.

The ADHD stories could have been mine. Henry and Jo told us how they deal with their ADHD and how little other people understand — even their families.

Henry’s and Jo’s stories hit a nerve, so I thought I’d tell mine, too.

There was no such thing as ADHD when I was young, and I didn’t even know what it was until my son was diagnosed when he was eight.

The headteacher called us in.

“I think your son has ADHD. He is super-smart, but he can’t focus. He goes from As to Fs and back again. You should take him to see a doctor.”

We took him to a psychologist who confirmed his ADHD and put him on ritalin. When I told the psychologist, “My son is just like me”, he put me on ritalin too. The ritalin did nothing for me, but my ADHD was not really a problem at that point in my life, so I just stopped it and got on with living.

When I was my son’s age, I was just as smart as him, and I was just as wild. Wilder.

I snuck off to the river when I was nine. I got the bus to London when I was 10. I was always jumping from high places. And I was always in trouble at school. At primary school, the teacher made the naughty children stand outside the staff room door at playtime, and I spent all my playtimes there.

We didn’t have the ‘gifted children’ thing they have in America, but they pulled a group of about six of us out of class and into the Panda Club. The Panda Club took us on a tour of the local police station and entered us in a quiz that was like University Challenge for little kids. We were reading grown-up books while everyone else was reading Peter and Jane. We were doing long division while everyone else was learning their times tables. School was more fun when there was a challenge to enjoy.

I was always fighting, though. I can’t tell you how many times I came home with a black eye. And I was always in trouble.

Everyone in Panda Club passed the 11+ and went to grammar school, but my behaviour there was even worse. I broke the record for the number of detentions, and was given the cane multiple times. The everyday punishment was to ‘write 100 lines’. Or 200. Or 500.

“I will not talk in class”
“Le silence aide le travail”

I was always writing lines.

At least I was just writing lines, though.

My best friend Paul went to prison for raiding the chemistry lab and throwing stolen phosphorus at another kid. I think Paul had ADHD, too. After Paul was taken away, and after I had just been beaten around the head, over and over, by our biology teacher, our Form Teacher, Mr Gooden gave a lecture to the rest of the class saying that if they did not buckle down, they would end up like Paul and Kevin.

Julie and I took it in turns to come bottom of our class, and we got Cs for effort in every subject, in every term. We were both put on ‘homework report’ and had to go into school half an hour early every day and show our work to Mr Durbin. Mr Durbin told me,

“You are a smart kid, but you have to apply yourself.”

I always loved academic work; I just didn’t like doing it at school. It was so slow and so boring. I always read all my textbooks in the first week of school and never opened them again. I read my own books under the desk and taught myself programming, instead.

I always came first in all the end-of-year exams, though, but I still got Cs for effort.

In all those years of school, I never had a teacher tell me I was doing a good job or that I was clever or whatever. Except that one time in French class.

My friends used to tease me that Miss Mills fancied me because she was so nice to me. She was kind and beautiful. I certainly fancied her! I still did no work, but she noticed I was good at French and told me so in front of the whole class.

“You have such a linguistic brain”

My parents never helped me with schoolwork, except my Dad once told me I should write bigger. They never paid attention to my grades either. I stopped doing homework entirely when I was fourteen, and I never took another book home.

After about six months, Mr Lewis noticed that I had never handed in any chemistry homework, and he asked to see my workbooks. They were empty. I came top in chemistry, though. And physics. And biology. And English (almost). I was good at maths, too. My maths teacher didn’t spoke to me once in two years, but he entered me for a national maths competition.

Looking back, I don’t know why my teachers disliked me so much. Apart from being a little naughty and a little exuberant, I think I was quite likeable. I was clever. I had lots of friends. Maybe I would have been less naughty if they’d given me something interesting to do.

At the end of the fifth form (age 16), we did our O Levels (the exams that determine whether you’d be allowed to continue at school). I didn’t revise (except Latin), but I came equal first with Roger, Corinne and Alison, and we all won prizes. They all went to Oxbridge, but I didn’t know that was an option — so I left school at 16 and joined the Navy instead.

The Navy was fun. Lots of adventures. Gibraltar. Santander. West Palm Beach. A trip to the Falklands. It was fun until they put me on a nuclear submarine. I had five more years to go until I could get out, but the prospect of being under the sea with nothing to do for months at a time — it horrified me. To my good fortune, I found a loophole in the rules where, if you got promoted to officer, you effectively left the Navy and rejoined. So I got promoted and left but didn’t come back.

After the Navy, adventure called. I backpacked around the world and hitchhiked across Australia. When I got home, I was entirely broke, so I got a job as a programmer in London. That turned out to be a lucky choice for me, because I was pretty good at it, and have had a successful career in software engineering ever since.

ADHD never gave me much trouble after the Navy, but it took me on plenty more adventures. I loved the excitement of the City of London and Wall Street, and then a series of tech startups in Silicon Valley, but now it’s time to sit in my armchair with my philosophy books and put my feet up until the siren song of adventure calls me away one last time.

One of the themes of Alan Kay’s sparkling career has been to try to make computers accessible to children as a learning tool and his history is full of little anecdotes about how he would teach Smalltalk to twelve-year-olds and they would spontaneously invent stuff.

What was so wonderful about this idea were the myriad of children’s projects that could spring off the humble boxes. And some of the earliest were tools! This was when we got really excited. For example, Marion Goldeen’s (12 yrs old) painting system was a full-fledged tool. A few years later, so was Susan Hamet’s (12 yrs old) OOP illustration system (with a design that was like the MacDraw to come). Two more were Bruce Horn’s (15 yrs old) music score capture system and Steve Ptz’s (15 yrs old) circuit design system. Looking back, this could be called another example in computer science of the “early success syndrome.”

I get the impression though that Kay thought of this as a failure as he was looking to revolutionize education as a whole rather than train the next generation of super-geniuses (like himself).

The successes were real, but they weren’t as general as we thought. They wouldn’t extend into the future as strongly as we hoped. The children were chosen from the Palo Alto schools (hardly an average background) and we tended to be much more excited about the successes than the difficulties. In part, that we were seeing was the “hack phenomenon,” that, for any given pursuit, a particular 5% of the population will jump into it naturally, while the 80% or so who can learn it in time do not find it at all natural.

I wonder how he feels now when he looks back?

Alan Kay, along with his team at Xerox Parc, invented a huge chunk of the technology that has made modern computing successful.  But computers have still not had much impact on the way kids are taught. When they are not used as glorified textbooks, they are used to teach PowerPoint skills and word-processing.

I wonder if he would have had more success if he had optimized for the kids who are excited about computers? The sweet spot for his glorious Squeak seems to me to be kids who find joy in creating and exploring. I wonder what would have happened if he had stuck with that 5% who jumped in naturally instead of trying to satisfy a broader audience? (If someone runs into him, can you ask him for me?)

The rest of Kay’s paper is well worth a read. It’s inspirational despite its underlying theme of if only they had listened to us. He was telling his bosses at Xerox in 1971 that

In the 1990’s there will be millions of personal computers. They will be the size of notebooks of today, have high-resolution flat-screen reflective display.s, weigh less than ten pounds, have ten to twenty times the computing and storage capacity of an Alto. Let’s call them Dynabooks.

The purchase price will be about that of a color television set of the era, although most of the machines will be given away by manufacturers who will be marketing the content rather than the container of personal computing.

He talks a lot about education and about constructionist ideas and about how schools didn’t teach real world skills.

The general topic was education and it was the first time I heard Marvin Minsky speak. He put forth a terrific diatribe against traditional education methods, and from him I heard the ideas of Piaget and Papert for the first time. Marvin’s talk was about how we think about complex situations and why schools are really bad places to learn these skills. He didn’t have to make any claims about computer+kids to make his point. It was clear that education and learning had to be rethought in the light of 20th century cognitive psychology and how good thinkers really think.

He ends on a sad note

When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous disatisfaction with one’s designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the disatisfaction from self worth–otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results.

Not sure whether he is advocating that we compare our efforts with the entire history of human art and become inevitably dissatisfied or to go ahead and compare and be happy anyway.

We were taught chemistry, physics and biology as separate subjects and, while I enjoyed all the sciences, I enjoyed physics the most because it was more mathematical. Chemistry had less maths and biology, at that level, hardly any at all. In my 11 year old mind, physics was pretty much just applied maths and therefore fun.

In geography, we covered such topics as map reading, how rocks are formed and weather but I never thought of it as science because science was something I enjoyed and I didn’t enjoy geography. Geography had a little bit of counting, measuring and charting but less maths than the sciences. History had no maths at all and I hated it.

At Dylan’s school, they have a single subject called science and they cover such topics as map reading, how rocks are formed and weather. Dylan hates it. In 7th grade he’ll do life science but he already knows he’ll hate it because he hates science. It’s like they want to avoid exposing kids to the hard sciences until it’s too late. Until they have formed an opinion one way or the other.

I have this theory that the people who design school curricula don’t really like science or maths but they know it’s important to the economy and that not enough people are following science careers. The remedy? Make the science in schools appealing to people who don’t like science!

I wonder if they stop to consider the effect it has on people who actually like science? If a kid likes science would making it less science-y make him like it more or less?

I know the answer for me and I know the answer for Dylan. Maths good. Science good. The more the better.

“So, who do you belong to?”
“Dylan”
“Oh! Dylan! He works so hard!”
“No! Dylan Lawrence!”

Apparently, Dylan’s teacher was under the misapprehension that Dylan works hard at maths. I tried to explain to her that maths was Dylan’s favourite subject because it required no work at all. She found the notion very odd. I thought it was obvious.

For me, at Dylan’s age, maths was my favourite subject too. It required no study or work and, every now and then, the teacher would give you some cool puzzles to work on. I would often slyly do maths in other classes when the teacher wasn’t looking. Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to Dylan’s maths teacher that people would enjoy doing maths.

I have encountered this odd attitude before. When Dylan started fourth grade, at back-to-school night, his teacher explained how hard maths was for the children but that she had a bunch of manipulatives to help with the difficult concepts and she would take them through it step by step and, usually, by the end of the year they would understand.

What would it be like, I wonder, to have a maths teacher who enjoyed maths? I had English teachers who enjoyed their subject ..and history …and physics …and chemistry …and biology …and French…but never maths.

What if the default assumption in the maths class was that kids like maths and find it easy? What would that class be like?

Imagine if, at the start of the year, they said

OK. Everyone who loves maths come with me. We are going to teach you separately. Your teacher likes maths too.

What would that class be like?

To their credit, Dylan’s school has advanced placement for maths and they give the new sixth graders a test. If they pass, they go into a class with a bunch of surly seventh graders who don’t like maths.

Anyway, Dylan just passed the test that lets him take high school maths next year. All he needs to do now is get the form signed and handed in on time which, apparently, was the hardest thing he had to do all year in maths class.

Why is it so hard for him to get a form signed? I don’t know where he gets it from.