I Won't Forgive What You Did Read Online Free PDF Page A

semicircular lenses stuck on the end of her nose, was stern-looking, and wore her hair in a bun. She showed me to a cloakroom which had a peg with my name written by it. I didn’t want a peg with my name next to it. I wanted my mother and I burst out crying.
    Everything about school made me cry that day. The classroom was so bright it blinded me. After the darkness of my home there was just so much going on. There were books, pencils, crayons, paper and building blocks everywhere. I was afraid to touch anything and felt totally overwhelmed.
    I dealt with my anxiety by not speaking to anyone, either adult or child. While the other children chattered and ran around noisily, I closed in on myself, feeling completely out of my depth.
    I continued like this all day. Not knowing what to say, or how to be or what to do, I just sat or stood up or put my hands together, according to what I was told. I didn’t know the words to what we had to say before lunch, and I couldn’t eat my lunch because I was afraid of making a mess and didn’t want the other children to look at me eating. I felt clumsy and awkward and different from the other children, who all seemed to know what to do and how to do it and who I thought must think I was stupid. One of the older children put a bit of food on my plate and all I wanted to do was throw the plate at her, push over the table and run away.
    When the time came for going home I was so relieved, because it felt as though I’d been there for ever. We had to put our chairs upside down on the little tables and were told to put our hands together again while Mrs Hope had us repeat words such as ‘Dear Lord, thank you for keeping us safe today . . .’ I didn’t know who the Lord was and I didn’t want to know. I’d already decided not to go again.
    When I got home, having come back on a coach with my siblings, my mother didn’t seem at all pleased to see me and just carried on peeling potatoes. I didn’t expect a hug, because she never, ever hugged me, but I didn’t think she’d even missed me at all, and I felt bewilderment, sadness and complete confusion, as if by going to school I’d lost all sense of myself, and couldn’t work out where, or to whom, I belonged. I felt completely alone – expecting at any minute someone would suddenly appear and take me to where I was really supposed to be. That was reason enough not to go to school.
    After the shock of my first day it took no time to confirm school was as bad as I’d imagined. This was, in large part, due to the fact that I was simply not prepared for it at all. What I realize today is that this was for obvious reasons – the only people allowed in our house were family, so I had no meaningful concept of what the outside world was like. And even had my mother been the sort who liked to socialize and hold tea parties for her children, it would still never have happened, because my father hated anyone being in the house. He’d be very aggressive and vocal about it, telling callers either to ‘Piss off or ‘Fuck off and slamming the door in their faces. The concept of having a ‘friend round to play’ was not something I ever thought about while my father behaved as he did.
    Not that at five I had any notion of the word ‘friend’. Because neither of my parents had ever shown any interest in me, I couldn’t even speak properly. I didn’t need to. I wasn’t expected to have thoughts or opinions. I was just ‘there’. On the rare occasions when my father did address me directly, it was always a scary business, fraught with stress. One Christmas, when I was small, I remember him holding out a tin of biscuits, and though I only hesitated for a second before deciding which one to take, he snatched the tin back angrily, snarling at my mother that I was an ‘ungrateful little bastard’ and could ‘fucking go without’ if what he was offering wasn’t ‘fucking good enough’.
    I was also, as my mother liked telling everyone,