As an infant I was baptised into the Anglican Church even though my family was non-religious. I have a set of godparents. We initially lived in the village of Old Town near the town of Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. On Sundays I would go to Sunday school at the village Methodist Church. I remember it being taught by some nice old ladies and colouring in pictures of Jesus printed on to horrid cheap glossy paper using ineffective felt-tips. On Thursday evening I would sometimes attend the church youth club, which was called the Star Club where I would play games with other children and draw things. At a later age I would complain to my mother that I was forced to go to Sunday school but she told me I was very enthusiastic about it at the time. I don’t remember how many times I attended Sunday worship there. I remember a very nice old man who lived on my street called Mr B who used to go down to the church with me. He’d be long dead by now. The church was a big weathered sandstone cube and was pretty windswept. I remember drinking horribly diluted orange squash there.

One memorable thing happened when I was at Sunday school. There was an art contest where we had to draw a picture based on the resurrection of Jesus for which there would be prizes. My picture was widely acknowledged as the strongest work of art but was given only second place due to it being somehow heretical. Apparently “radical” is what they called it. I understood who God and Jesus were; I just had no concept of reverence or theology. I’d imagine that God and Jesus would have a party at night in the church once everyone had gone home after Star Club. I think the fact they tolerated such things is good as it means they didn’t practice brainwashing and accommodated childishness.
At about the age of nine or ten we moved house and I transferred to a Church of England school attached to the church where I was baptised. It was a very nice school. The vicar there owned a skull, which he would sometimes show us at assemblies. I think his possession of that skull and how he’d show it to us constituted a desecration of human remains and I would have expected better from a member of the clergy. I don’t think the teacher I had in my last year there liked me and I never liked her, she made a habit of showing her pupils who was boss by making us put our hands on our heads in a kind of stress position for a few minutes for no justifiable reason. I once got told off for speculating that the church was hoarding vast quantities of treasure in false graves and she actually thought that Sunday was the first day of the week. We had wooden desks with lids that lifted up. At both of the primary schools I went to we had to sing hymns in a morning assembly. I didn’t understand any of them. I thought “I am the lord of the dance said he” was “I am the lord of the dance setee”. Why would people dance on a sofa? I also thought the line “victor in the wilderness help us not to swerve or fail” which was about Jesus defeating the devil’s temptation when he went out into the wilderness was “Victor in the wilderness” about a hermit named Victor who lived in the wilderness and knew Jesus. There were many more such misunderstandings and they were not limited to hymns. Whenever at the start of a new term the teacher talked of “turning over a new leaf” I thought she meant a leaf as in what grows on trees, as opposed to another way of saying a “start a new page”. No wonder this didn’t make sense. This is how out of touch I was with the things everyone else understood. In the early 1990s there was a popular dance track by Black Box called Ride on Time and the chorus was basically the title of the song repeated a few times but I thought what was being repeated was “Orang-utan”. I thought this popular dance track was about orang-utans. Why shouldn’t it have been? Also, I believed the word “moron” was “moor hog” so when I wanted to insult someone’s intelligence I’d call them a “moor hog”, which probably confused them more than it insulted them.

I was totally illiterate until the age of nine so had to have private lessons from a very good tutor whose services my mother was fortunate enough to be able to afford. Without those lessons this book you’re reading would not exist. I was diagnosed with dyslexia and eventually outgrew the condition but the label was to come back and cause me problems. I used to attend a type of dyslexic children’s support group (called the Tuesday Group) run by an educational psychologist. At my first primary school when all the other children were working I’d just sit and draw. The teacher gave me an exercise book to fill with drawings whilst the other children got on with their education. I was praised for my art but looking back this was probably because it was the only thing I could do rather than because I was actually good at it. I spent a lot of time in a “special needs” group which I didn’t enjoy and which made me feel somehow backwards and more stupid than the other children, away in a little room. I remember being illiterate, I’d see an ordinary street sign and would ask what it said, expecting it to be poetry or a story. When I had to draw something in one of my pictures with words on it I’d write down characters that looked like letters but weren’t. It was a very big moment for me when I was promoted from using a pencil to write with to using a pen like everybody else. I think this dyslexia had something to do with starting life bilingual. There were some awful petty people who taught “special needs” and being ladled as educationally backwards made me feel distant from all the other children and somewhat dumb and as though I was always somehow missing out on things everyone else understood, that I was not bright enough to be on the same level and to get everything everyone else got and that I’d always be somehow different or abnormal and consequently always be an outsider. This feeling persisted and shaped my subsequent breakdown.