‘You’ll enjoy this,’ says the man in the tweed suit. ‘Boys like this one.’ He hands me a pair of headphones the colour of sticking plaster. ‘They like to pretend they’re pilots … but your father’s one isn’t he?’
‘Ground crew,’ says the school secretary.
I repeat what Mum has told me; that my father failed his pilot’s exam five times in a row because he is colour-blind and can’t tell whether planes are flying towards or away from him.
The man in the tweed suit looks at me oddly. ‘Well, pop them on.’
I cover my ears and the world fills with hush. Tones appear in the silence. I have to raise my hand if I can hear them, drop it when they stop sounding.
It’s all a bit strange. I’ve been taken out of class by the school secretary to this windowless room that I never knew existed. There are other tests as well; pencil and paper games, maths puzzles … they go on all day. Only slowly does it dawn on me that I am the only one in my class taking them.
The school is a state primary attached to a Catholic church and has pupils from all over the world; Ireland, Italy, Mexico, India, parts of Africa—with a big intake from the local orphanage. Quite a few of the kids have disabilities and other problems that hold them back. Am I one of those? ‘He’s inattentive in class,’ the secretary tell my mother later when she turns up to collect me, ‘seems lost in his own little world … ’ They talk as if I were not in the room. It worries me. Am I headed for Junior Remove with the ‘slow’ kids?
But the problem turns out to be of a different kind. I’m not deaf, or slow. The problem is, I can read.
I could read already when I started school, only nobody noticed. So when they gave me Janet and John books—John, see the aeroplanes/See the aeroplane go up/See the aeroplane fly—I found them, frankly, dull. I spent the time looking out of the window instead; staring at the clouds and thinking about aircraft navigation lights—red on the left wingtip, green on the right. What must it be like when you can’t tell red from green, I wondered? How does a red rose look: do the petals blend with the leaves? Can you even tell a petal from a leaf if you’re colour-blind? (Somehow it never occurred to me to ask my father.)
‘Nothing wrong there,’ says the secretary. ‘In fact he’s exceptionally bright.’
After the tests, the teachers are a bit more attentive, even if I’m not. They try to discourage my Enid Blyton habit—chugging a Secret Seven a night under the bedclothes. They try to steer me towards more improving authors. But they get nowhere. Reading is a personal matter so far as I’m concerned, and I see their efforts as unwelcome interference.
I’ll read what I like.