Arthur Gascoyne school

This is a satirical false name, in deference to the group's wish not to use real names on this blog. But this school eventually closed down discredited 10 years after this scene, after a slow decline that began from the time described here. Its harmfulness and wrongness as a school is a well-established fact, there would be no libel whatever in using its real name. Not a shred. Speaking out factually about inconceivable savagings of aspies' childhoods and prospects like this is, and getting heard, is of urgent importance and has been for a generation. But here all the names here are false, including mine.

Bob Lawless is actually a character in some century-ago children's literature that my grandma introduced me to. When I was unwisely forced to resit O-level chemistry after getting a C in it I chose this name for the fictional alterego who I used to claim to be in chemistry lessons, I made up a story that Bob Lawless was an old man who wanted to learn chemistry and had to come wearing a mask of my face. I needed to avoid admitting to classmates the visible fact I was resitting, because I was under great stress as to its outcome, actually spending a year in fear of a humiliating fail in the headmaster's favourite subject, which was a bad subject for me, after the mercy of just passing it the first time. In fact I just got another C, so the resit was an ill-treating waste of time and stress that kept other O-level grades worse than expected too.

Right, here is the worst point in the long story of what happened, at a school whose belief in a hard work pressure and in teachers deciding what you can do and insisting you can do it, was utterly unsuitable and devastating of all my life chances. The date is early 80s, a period when when the right wing backlash forces in education felt very keen and confident they were going to win. The place is elswhere in Britain, as the mention of O-levels shows: I'm a returner to Scotland from growing up in exile, which adds another item to the pain of what being killed by this experience would have meant. The school's key mistake was this: they had interpreted some of my aspie strengths at holding simple information, as meaning I was "gifted", but I have an aspie weakness about solving puzzles and finding hidden clues in multilayered puzzles - including the homework questions asked in more advanced schoolwork !!!!!
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Unresponsive catatonia, retained on a holding scale each morning, was escalated, winning the next day off. Its only effect was to make my mother desperate not to let our cultic utopia get brought down by these weird symptoms. Having played it cautiously on the original asleep over homework day, she now dutifully explored the limits of consistency of my responsiveness or unresponsiveness, and couldn't be stopped by angry answers because these just constituted a good sign of me keeping awake. Though she was thoroughly legally terrorised by school attendance, it shows how strong Fred's hypnotic appeal was, how schools' promises grip minds, for keeping on getting me to school to loom as such a priority in the face of such an obvious crisis.
There was no rational reason to try so hard: school attendance allows for illness. Why didn't she take me to the doctor at this point? Clearly it was fear of possibly being told to stop sending me to school. I was caught in a plausibility trap. Unless she stopped fighting my symptoms it could get me into a predicament of unresponsiveness to other, more official, people's faces. If I kept unresponsive through obvious infallible ways of waking a person up, my symptoms would just count as deliberate, with no allowance for exhibiting sheer terror because no good cause for it was officially supposed to exist, even psychosomatically. With the whole point of them as health symptoms defeated, I would be back in the trap of overwork or die, without having forced the world to recognise major stress.

You may wonder how I managed to stay entranced after a lifetime of inability to keep still. If anything shows how seriously and physically school was crushing my health, this does. I was like a catatonic limp rag all day, all usual vitality was gone.

So I couldn't remain totally unresponsive beyond common sense on the way to school, just repeatedly drowsy. If despite this I reached school, the problem could just get passed on to Fred with relief to see if he could cope with it, obliviously to what this really meant, which I couldn't confide at the risk of myth motivated underestimation if I was going to hold on to any leverage at all against a world clutching at straws, to actually make it stop. If I could still get delivered to school in the morning, my symptoms would only be accepted as making it impossible to function there if it turned out so in practice. This time was inexorably quick in coming.

On the second day, I reached school in the afternoon, for chemistry practical. I let myself get seen lying cold over in the lab bench before it started, but it was homework, not practical, that had to be forced as the crunch issue. I had to wake up and do my practical groggily, under jibes from Fred to buck up because "you've only got a cold". This was how seriously he had not taken my asleep over homework event. He put up a casual front at its aftermath, that homework mustn't retreat, and just pressurised me to pull myself together. Remember his bit in the newspaper about jogging his bright prospects' senses of humour?

The next day September 24 was the last, the most frightening day of my life. Unable to keep consistent blackout against it while showing a consistent fake effort to fight the sleep, under a constant jogging for wakefulness that was stressful in its own right, I reached school. It was the homework deadline, and the day both began and ended with chemistry lessons. I now had no alternative but to scare an angry dictator into taking my health scare seriously, to his face in the heart of his power.

Entering the dragon's lair, I could only keep as drowsy as possible, and made no impression at all by it. But I had positioned myself, when Fred asked for my homework, to descend in a way resembling a kind of autistic trance - remember this is long before I had ever heard of aspies -until my head was inside my bag, and keep it there, right in front of him, with my heart at fever pitch. Try to imagine doing this with the horror pressing close. "Robert?" he asked, softly at first, and I did nothing. Then "ROBERT!" It was his heartstopping bellow. he was willing to use it on me, and still take my eternal loyalty for granted regardless of it. It was the most vital moment in all my resistance to him, that I must not crack now. This was the pivot of far crisis.

I couldn't have done it without being religious, without knowing my existence wasn't utterly in Fred's hands. Contemplate that. This was the classic moment when the voice of authority goes for your split second instincts, to crack you like an egg because by long habit of earthly circumstance you crumple to placate the authority's usual power. It takes an effort of logic over fear to escape getting cracked like this, in a situation where you know that crumpling to a power beyond toleration is worse than keeping your head, with your feet solidly on the ground of eternity. I achieved this in a predicament where I could no more get away with directly defying the bellow than I could afford to obey it, so had to sustain a fudged disobedience of acting a groggily incoherent burble of incomplete arousal and darting my hands around in a half tranced panic act without rising from my tactical position slumped over my bag, able to switch myself off again. I kept this up, careful neither to produce any results nor express any desperation before his presence, to bluff him whether he would visibly attack me in this condition and discredit himself. I kept over that bag and waited, terrified.

He didn't. In our macabre contest of escalating mutual frights, each by our own destruction to destroy the other's destruction of our ideals, I had caught my dictator overreached.

He tried a quieter, though still bad tempered and cold, tone of beratement to nag me back to coherence, or "if you're ill, go home", as if I was in any state to get myself home. I was in no more state to leave than I had been in to arrive, in fact. It was utterly irrational for any adult to expect me to be in school. When this didn't work he tried to start the lesson, as if that would help. I got out a pencil, in crazy blurry movements, and visibly failed to hold it coherently, scrawling in pained jerks with foggy eyes and a bleary vacant face. This forced Fred to send me out of the lesson as ill. As soon as I was out I started an unresponsive sleep at the bench outside his office, there to be found at it by JR and later by the sixth form.

The scene in his office achieved forcing him to accept the serious existence of a problem stopping me functioning at school. It meant I could now force my complete removal from school without fearing any plausibility crises. All the plausibility was now established that I needed to causally link the homework pressure to my disintegration. I had pulled off the tricky task I had embarked on my breakdown for, to soundly derail my gifted myth career and through it Arthur Gascoyne school, and to force the world's forcing of me to beach at a limit, so I could continue to operate in this world to undo my old life's benefit to the cause that could create such an evil predicament.

Between all this being possible, or dying a helplessly permanent figure of believed credit to Arthur Gascoyne's methods, this confrontation of bluff with Fred's wrath that day was the branch point.

The day was still not over yet. I caused bemusement by slumbering catatonically through the private study period in the late morning, in the sixth form room. That it aroused no wave of ribaldry to bait me awake was an important barometer that the sixth form were having to take my breakdown seriously as officially recognised. I glanced idly at the prefects' report book for offences, which was lying around near me. 3 folks were named in it so far, all for using the wrong door. As a barometer of these prefects' bottomlessly unabashed enjoyment of serving the regime's absurdities, which carried on cyclically as class upon generation of hearts corroded by ribaldry reached the privilege and power lust of the sixth form, it sank me into cosmic despair at the whole world where it was possible for reasoning and scientific people to fall for the monstrosity of school, the destruction of dupes like me ensuring they would never realise the truth. The authoritarian will to dictate what a special class of master brains must be engineered to turn out like, genius off a production line, even had eugenic overtones.

Through the rowdier atmosphere of dinner hour, as I spilt blearily spluttering crumbs all down my tie, the classmate who had always been better at chemistry kept calling me "a great actor", with the censure all against me not Fred. Even if I was beyond physical violence, they didn't want to miss the chance to catch me out if possible. Neither did Fred.

Heath did not send me out of maths for going into a catatonia at the beginning, but kept me sitting listening quietly. There was no confrontation to panic Heath - and Fred took advantage and sent JR to interrupt the maths lesson and ask for my homework. He was a savage. Even after the morning, he wouldn't give up, but he was obviously rattled out of any more scenes with himself directly. Despite all the past week's warnings that he had a catastrophic meltdown on his hands, after all they had seen of his vicious crazy twisted persistence, he had taken the trouble to hunt me down through an intermediary, to catch me at a less unfunctioning time. Great guy?

Thinking fast, I had to get out of the classroom before I was caught in a contradiction between wake and trance, and awake enough to be valid to punish, in a sudden lurching moment. I got straight up and came out, past JR saying it wasn't necessary, and made for Fred's office, decoying her after me along the top corridor, to escalate the appearance of something anomalous being the matter that must already be implied by her use as an intermediary like this, and after finding me in an unresponsive sleep earlier. It had made key sense to have her find me, because as secretary she was in the front line of Arthur Gascoyne's public relations with parents, and handling the rapport with mine including my recent reasons for absence. Having had time to grow more drowsy again, I thus had her worried enough that Fred shouldn't show himself up as the obvious cause, that I could give her these events as the excuse for not having my homework sorted out and present. Now what she'd seen happening to me was correlated with Ned being up to something with my homework, and it was not making him look good.

JR went and checked on Fred's mood as an intermediary, giving me backing for the public image necessity of recognising my weird crisis as something serious. Fred was politically forced to back off for the day. It wouldn't have made any difference to me no longer coming to school after this day if he had had a disciplinary tantrum on me now, but it was important to keep the pressure on his image cranked up as high as possible, just as he was doing to me, to sustain the political ground I was gaining and make the day less dire to cope with.

He still asked to see me directly, but he didn't dare try a bellow again. He asked me questions about why my symptoms were happening, and how much sleep I'd had recently. Here too it was important not to have an instinct to placate him with self-justifying lies. It would draw suspicion on my breakdown if I knew a handy reason why it was happening that justified me to stop doing homework. I had to act as puzzled as everyone else, to keep Fred on dangerous ground.

Once I had stood up to these questions and convincingly wriggled out of having anything substantive to say, the trauma of this day was over. Fred laid it on thick about the kindness of his heart (sicK) in giving me an extra day for my mysterious condition. I knew there was never going to be an extra day.

I sat unobtrusively through the last chemistry lesson, writing marginally better in visible synchrony with the pressure of the morning being off. Gregory, present due to getting a low sub-Cambridge grade in his first sitting of Fred's wonder subject, played the vulture, necrophilially interrogating and discomforting Fred for still not having got my homework. I listened quietly glowing in the divine warmth that my life was one Fred no longer had the power to make misery. [ refers to an earlier scene where he told a homework offender in front of us, "I have the power to make your life misery."] This turning point, on the imminent edge of impossibility to survive, had reclaimed for liberty a chink of hope to turn the tables on Fred's awful plans and scupper his sensation program to subjugate more lives in his dismal misery factory.

My future status as a failiure for him was now secure. I had saved myself from being trapped on the wrong side of history. My most urgent desperate concern, with my whole identity at stake, had now been overcome, and there had been no certainty of that.

Bob Lawless