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Chapter 11 - Educating The Alien

When I started work in the supermarket I did  not  expect that  a little  over  a  year  later I  would  be starting the nearly normal education that I never knew that I had never had previously. But then again I did not plan ahead because nobody in the family admitted to planning anything, if they did admit  to planning anything then they would get advice from other family members that  would  not  work  and failure was something that had to be kept secret. None of the family wanted to be known by how they failed, nor did we want to connect anyone else in the family with failure.

In work I had a sense of basic fairness towards everyone, particularly towards those who I saw as having the least. I had no idea of how employment fitted, or did not fit, around all the other cycles and processes that went on in the town throughout the year. That was part of my lack of experience. I had been working at the supermarket for ten months when the part timers who were all in full time education a…
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Introduction And Chapter Guide

This is my fifth attempt at writing about my life as a teenager. It was a peculiarly slippery life which has so far resisted accurate description because most of what I knew that I knew about that life I was told indirectly as if I had lived it in the third person and never directly experience anything. My family disliked change and slowed down all the natural changes younger members of families go through by mis-describing life for the young. My mission as a teenager was to try and find out who I actually was, as opposed to accepting who other people said I was. Nearly every time I guessed rightly who I was then other people, particularly my family, would say I was wrong because their self interest lay in preserving the younger and more passive versions of me, rather than letting one new me lead to another new me. For my parents their thinking less about me and thinking only indirectly about me allowed them to think they were parenting me but saved them time, thought, and precious p…
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Chapter 1 - The Alien In The Attic

On turning sixteen years old I left the boarding school 'for the maladjusted' that I had attended for five years. Apparently I was 'no longer maladjusted'. Whether this was less because the school had cured me of any maladjustment I'd had, or more because I was leaving the place for the last time was impossible to tell. One point was clear to everyone; I was not leaving the place on my own terms. If I were then I would have left two years earlier and served an apprenticeship for a skill whilst both skills and apprenticeships were still available. Nor was I returning permanently to the parental house on terms I'd chosen, because as a building it always seemed to set it's own terms on whoever lived in it.

If there were letters and discussions between Social Services and my parents prior to me returning to living in the parental house then I knew nothing about them. I was merely the subject of the letters. Their cosy chats were a private matter between them. …
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Chapter 2 - What The Alien Did Next

I enjoyed the summer when I turned sixteen. Having more money would have given me greater choice and might have helped me make new friends sooner. My parents might even have wanted me to have greater choice through more money too, but I accepted the little that I was given. I had no human friends and very little money. I did not know what I was doing without, so did not miss having more. I accepted being told that I could do what I wanted if worked hard and saved hard enough to get it. With such a small amount of money of my own and my time mostly taken up around college work or family it was a novelty when every so often I was found I had time to myself to explore how I might organise myself if I had even more time. That summer I was just days, weeks, away from the dozen or more role calls and bells each day that I used to respond to in boarding school that I would never experience again except as memories that nobody else I knew would have comprehension of. The rules and triggers o…
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Chapter 3 - What The Alien Did After That

When I started college for the first time in September in some ways it seemed as if I had never left boarding school, the class size of the main class was the same in both places-ten. But I had made a bigger leap forward than I realised at the time. Going to College meant having a sense of purpose, the teachers actually needed us to learn what they presented, rather than us passively accept being taught passivity the way the boarding school had done. There were exams that we were meant to pass and nearly everybody except me in the class had an employer who let them study as part of their training. The Radio and Television Electronics class (from here on called the R.E.T.V. class) was the main reason I was in the college and the subject was the reason it had the smallest class numbers.

The subject required the largest individual use of equipment oscilloscopes, voltmeters and other equipment for measuring voltage, amps, wattage, resistance, and strange units like farads. We had to have…
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