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outcasts, all of us trying to make the best of it. I suppose it should have created a greater sense of togetherness, a closer bond brought about by bad luck. Whatever insults you got from people on the outside, Bedelsford was a sanctuary, a place where we all could stick together.
    The problem was, I didn’t feel like the others. I didn’t feel disabled. I know that will sound weird to people who are able bodied. I can hear them asking themselves whether I have looked in the mirror lately. But I have never really accepted it.
    Maybe it’s because I grew up on the Roundshaw Estate, where all my mates treated me as one of them. Maybe it’s because my mum and dad never made excuses for me. Theyexpected me to fend for myself as much as possible, even from an early age. I always tried to think as an able-bodied person would. I have never had any changes made to the houses or flats I have lived in to accommodate my chair. I have adapted to the houses, not the other way around. It has always been about creating a sense of normality. And I think that’s what has made me so strong – so determined to prove people wrong.
    But at school, that just made me feel more alone. I tried to talk to the other kids but I felt distant from them. And maybe that’s why, when I look back, school didn’t feel like a happy experience for me. I never told my mum how I felt. I didn’t have the bottle. By the time I plucked up the courage to say something to her it was almost time to leave. All I wanted was to go to a mainstream school with my friends. But she knew I would just get into trouble. All I know is that I would have been much happier. I don’t blame my parents for that – they were just looking after me. Trying to do their best.
    As I got a bit older I did get a taste of what it might be like in a ‘normal’ school. A group of five or six of us were taken for lessons at Tolworth Girls’ School, a mainstream comprehensive just up the road from Kingston. That made me feel a little less cut off. But in another sense it also reminded me of what I wasn’t able to do. It was a terrible system for mildly disabled people like me.
    Had I been going to school today I would have had a very different experience. Thanks to the Equality Act I wouldbe integrated into a mainstream school. There would be no feeling of segregation, of being shut away from the rest of society. Having separate schools, well meaning though they might have been at the time, only reinforced the differences. Is it any wonder it’s so hard to close the gap in the workplace once disabled children leave school and go out into the real world?
    There’s no doubt things have changed. Kids don’t stare at you now. Whenever I left the refuge of Roundshaw I would have the piss taken out of me. I tried to put it out of my mind, to channel it in a way that made me stronger. I was always trying to test myself, to prove I was normal. About two miles down the road from my house there’s a leisure centre called Westcroft. It’s a decent walk for most people but for someone on callipers it’s like a marathon. Not for me. After a few years of getting around on these things I had developed quite a technique and it didn’t take me long to cover those two miles. I would get some very strange looks from people as I trundled along, slamming the crutches down and then pivoting my legs and body through the middle, a bit like a gymnast on the parallel bars. But by that point I didn’t give a stuff about what people thought. This was how I got around and they should just mind their own business.
    Sometimes when I travel abroad I get that sort of attitude . There are some parts of the world where they are simply not used to seeing people with disabilities out in public doing everyday things. I have learned to expect itand now just turn the other cheek. In Britain these days, I rarely get that awful feeling that someone is