A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

1100 boys from all over South Buckinghamshire each year this was not because it was a
small school. Within a Tory-run county that still operated a tripartite system of secondary
education there may have been disabled pupils at some of the secondary moderns, but as far
as I know they usually went to segregated special schools.
In 1979 an American family with a son named Pete who had spina bifida joined the church
my family attended. A number of days during the school holidays were what I considered to
be ruined by arrangements made between mothers for me to go and spend the morning with
Pete. It was suggested to me that I should have an understanding of Pete‟s situation and that
therefore I should befriend him. As far as I was concerned this was completely unreasonable.
He was disabled and I was not. I was taken to visit him several times but did nothing to
encourage friendship.
The fact that I did not consider myself disabled did not, however, mean that I enjoyed being
who I was. I became increasingly angry and negative, wishing uselessly that I had not
stepped in front of that car. As far as I was concerned it was my impairments that held me
back. At a time when it seemed most of my peers were busy getting off with girls (or were,
at least, boasting about it), I was painfully aware that this was not happening for me. My first
real intimate sexual contact occurred when I was seventeen when I was sexually assaulted by
a man on a train. Smoking from the age of thirteen was, of course, an obvious form of
rebellion.
1981 was the International Year of the Disabled. Stories about disabled people seemed rarely
to be off the TV screen or out of the newspapers. Predictably, these were solid in
representing disability as personal tragedy, to be triumphed over at a personal level and
responded to with charity at a social level. My own rejection of disability identity at this time
can be illustrated by reference to two events. In June I represented the school in a balloon
debate against a nearby girls‟ convent school, appearing as Joey Deacon. Joey Deacon was a
man with cerebral palsy who had been featured with condescending sentimentality on the
children‟s TV show Blue Peter while publicising Tongue Tied, a book he had written about
his life experience of institutionalisation. Quite vindictively, I played the character for
laughs, to the amusement of most of the audience and the absolute fury of Mr Cuthbert, the
master who had driven us in the school minibus to witness this disgrace. In December I
published 250 copies of A Tale of Christmas Cheer, a story I had written with a friend, John
Hussey, about a poor disabled boy, also named Joey, who is entrusted with a magical task by
a drunken Father Christmas, to deliver presents to all the children of the world. This provides
an opportunity for Joey to shine „in spite of his awful and ever-increasing disabilities‟
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