I suppose I should be grateful that I can read and write a bit. God knows what kind of state I’d be in if I couldn’t. I’m not joking, either. It was only in January of this year that I learned I had ADHD and had always had it. For some reason, the condition certainly hampered my learning of English – no matter how many times I try, I still can’t tell the difference between a noun, a pronoun, an adjective and a verb – but not my ability to write, although I accept that is a subjective view and others may feel different. Every so often, I return to the drawing board (not literally) and try again to learn the differences. It always ends the same way: failure. I usually begin with the basic rules of grammar. Apparently, they include:
“Ensuring all sentences have a subject and a verb; placing adjectives directly before the noun they describe, or after it if separated by a verb; and using a comma to connect two ideas.”
I’ve cut and pasted it from the internet because I have no idea what it means. I look at it in the round, I take it to pieces, I look up what an adjective and a verb is and by that time my brain has completely switched off.
I have bought books on this stuff, but it never works. By the time I have ploughed through the first page, I have forgotten how it started. I look at the words and they mean nothing to me. This bit: “placing adjectives directly before the noun they describe, or after it if separated by a verb.” It may as well have been written in Mandarin Chinese because I wouldn’t have understood it any less.
I’m always amazed at my ability to spell. It just came naturally to me, although I was appalled to find out that my long-suffering partner is even better at it than I am. I never learned words, I just kind of knew how to spell them. It was just the technical aspects which were a problem, like putting them in order as per the laws of grammar.
My use of English was part of the bluff, I think, that I subconsciously deployed to get through life at school and at work. It enabled me to float, if not swim. My threadbare understanding of all things mathematics, science, and pretty well all the major subjects should really have killed off any ideas I had of succeeding in life. And actually, I didn’t succeed in life. I just about got by.
Put yourself in my place. You’re in a classroom at school for a maths lesson. Your mother has bought you a slide rule and everyone else in the class seems to know what to do with it. You have absolutely no idea what to do with it. I just make random notes in my school books, essentially copying what the teacher has put on the blackboard. When the exams came along, it was carnage. If my classroom had a dunce’s hat, I’d have been wearing it for years.
I remember sitting in Chemistry classes not knowing what the subject was about, although there were Bunsen burners to set fire to. Physics was the same. And Biology? That was something do with cutting up dead rats and examining a sheep’s lung, wasn’t it?
My worst subject was unquestionably Woodwork. The practical side held no interest to me, the written side even less. Our teacher, on Mr Jay, hated my guts, as if was trying purposely to be absolute shit at it. At 14 I wasn’t getting any better. One memorable day, he got angry about something and stormed across the woodwork room, only to catch his apron on a vice. The buttons proceeded to fly off, one by one. We all laughed but guess who he picked out to stand outside the woodwork room in deep shame until the end of the lesson? Why, me of course. I left the room, feeling sad and more than a bit tearful and having reached the corridor I just carried on walking until I got home.
A week later when I went to the same lesson again, Mr Jay literally ignored me, as he continued to do for the rest of the year. The CSE exam – like an O level but only if you got a Grade 1 – was impossible. I didn’t get a single question right on the written paper and in the practical exam I spent the three hours making a shoe rack which fell apart when I handed it in for marking. I placed a pile of loose wood into the collection box and left it at that. The invigilator, a genial old music teacher called Mr Lovell, asked if I wanted to try and quickly re-assemble my work, but I declined. It came as no surprise when later that summer I went to school to collect my car crash results that I had scored a big fat zero in woodwork. Mr Jay, breaking his long silence, told me it was the lowest woodwork score in the history of the school. I only wish I’d express my pride in such an achievement or simply told him to fuck off, but I just wanted it over.
So I left school – and I promise you this is not me angling for pity – not being able to do anything of any use. Long division, percentages, multiplication beyond 12 X 12? Just forget it. That, you will not be surprised to learn, is still the position today.
I did reasonably well in the school of life, which meant I was able to just about navigate a way through school and work but the only achievement was to make it through without being found out. Conditions like ADHD, with maybe a little autism thrown in, didn’t exist when I was young. You were either thick or inattentive and unable to concentrate, the latter two being entirely the fault of the pupil concerned. Nowadays, I’d like to think a report might say something along the lines of, “Despite his moderate to severe ADHD, and likely autism, Richard – they always called me Richard, bastards – always gives of his best. His performance has been as good as the school could have hoped.” But no. I was the lazy kid who always arsed about, the kid with the butterfly mind.
Not being able to understand even the most basic information didn’t exactly help in my 40-odd year working life. I would go on training courses and come back having learned nothing. I would repeatedly make the same mistakes despite being corrected and I never knew why. My brain was racing away on other subjects, as if there was a motor that couldn’t be switched off. But the subjects were nothing to do with what I was supposed to be doing.
English, and some street wisdom, got me through. And if I’d been as bad at English as I was at everything else, a mediocre working career could have been so much worse.
At least I understand this stuff now, even though there is nothing treatment wise I can do about it. Making it this far in life is my triumph. Not much of a triumph, I agree, but it was best I could do.
