1990

We used to sit down, Cross legged. I’ve often wondered how. I can only seem to sit cross legged now on the softest of grass. That spongy moorland type of grass, where gravity gives us a break.

I was insular. But was I shy? I can’t remember.

I had a dummy until my fifth birthday. I became terrified that this secret would become public knowledge, especially as i was leading towards leaving Infant school.

It was the end of the day. I was daydreaming. Daydreaming was all I did. I used to have story after story that I lived in.

But I was chewing a pencil whilst I daydreamt. And it didn’t go unnoticed by the support teacher.

She made a spectacle of it. And said, as a form of punishment for my immaturity, she tomorrow was going to bring a dummy in and make me suck it in class.

I felt humiliated. But more than humiliation I felt dread. Dread about tomorrow.

I don’t think I slept. I woke up, breakfast became for the first time in my life an unwelcome and unpleasurable step in the day towards a thing I dreaded.

Looney Tunes was on the TV. One of the typical fall guys (Elmer Fudd, maybe?) Had a moment of humiliation. The next 10 seconds of accompanying “oh dear” music would sit deeply in my gut, mocking me before the anticipated event.

To this day that music, although I’ve never heard it since, haunts me, when I fear facing “the music”.

My parents saw I wasn’t in a good place. And asked me why. The support teacher lived next door to the house my mum grw up in on the top estate.

She told my mother she was only kidding. But that feeling of dread was one of greatest I’d felt up until that point in my life.