Embracing eccentricity
We book-ended the family, he and I. 12 years between us and two siblings in between, but as a tiny child it was 'Dabid' I turned to for the maternal warmth which I seldom seemed to find in my mother. He taught me to play chess when I was 3, making few allowances for my age. I remember saying, "You can't take my king!" to which he replied, "I can if you make a bloody stupid move like that!" I had my first piano lessons from him at around the same age, and he encouraged me in my precocious love of reading. I simply adored him and even though he was a teenager pretty soon after I arrived, he always made time for me, always loved and accepted me, didn't mind me curling up and listening to his hours of piano practice or sniffing his second hand maths books, and had a way of looking right into me that made me feel understood.
I think it's fair to say we were an eccentric family. Mum certainly liked to think of us as more interesting than the people around us, and perhaps with some justification. There was a strong zany streak of humour which was never far beneath the surface - something might happen (such as a chop falling onto the floor) and suddenly there would be an improvised jazz song with piano accompaniment, with whoever was around joining in to add verses and harmony.
And then there were the epic games of Scrabble, annotated in the Score Book with all our daft comments. Games of Charades where rounds would end prematurely due to our telepathic link. I remember standing up and signing Three words only for someone to shout, Sons and Lovers! before I had even begun to mime.
Thinking back to how we were as a family helps me to see how I masked my differences for so long. Because in truth, I wasn't really any different from the rest of them. David belatedly identified as Aspergers (as it was still called back then) in his late sixties, after a lifetime of walking the tightrope between genius and breakdown. Occasionally he plummeted from the dizzy heights and had lengthy episodes of incoherent mental anguish. He found some peace from the label; gained some understanding of the tortured paths his life had taken at times.
It was relatively easy to embrace eccentricity in that neurodivergent hothouse, and why none of us ever realised who and what we were decades earlier is a slight mystery to me - but we were all academic and that hid a multitude of sins at grammar school. My other brother left school at 15 in his teenage attempt to make a different mark but he still ended up with a 1st Class Honours degree, won the hard way, with a wife and tiny child and sleepless nights.
I look back with fascination at the child and teenager I was, the person others must have seen. No sense of fashion (I lived mainly in my sister's cast-offs until I was a teenager). No real sense of how friendships worked - thank goodness for Church, where I was absorbed into the Youth Group and carried along on a tide of mostly very nice young people with whom I bonded on Evangelical religious matters and so my quirks were largely irrelevant.
I was a mimic and I had a flare for silly characters and making people laugh, and so that's who I became. A heavy mask which I didn't notice until my forties. A people-pleasing entertainer; this had the advantage of being largely scripted and of knowing what was expected of me in any situation - I was the Funny One.
I loved classical music, the Wombles and ABBA. To this day much of the music I 'should' have grown up with has largely passed me by. When Emma Thompson's character in Love Actually spoke of her love for Joni Mitchell, I realised I had never heard a single song of hers although we are the same age. I grew up in the Sixties but know very few Beatles songs - although there is a reason for that. They always made me feel sad. I only realised many years later that I was responding to the minor keys.
I have a huge sense of having somehow missed out on all the culture I grew up with. Sometimes there's a sense of loss. I joke - but half mean it - that just as some are in 'the wrong body', I am in the wrong life. I don't understand how there is so much I don't understand, so much I don't know, so many cultural references I simply don't get even though I was there when they were laid down. What was I doing? Probably reading the Bible, or taking long, solitary walks to watch the dawn, or indulging in one of my bizarrely strong crushes on somebody with Kind Eyes.
I had no idea how to go about being a teenager, no fantasies about meeting and marrying someone, no real concept of how dating worked, or even friendships... and my only ambition back then was to be a missionary in South America, which was a slight improvement on my 5 year old self deciding I wanted to stay at home with Mummy and have ten children.
I've made a decision though. I am not going to wallow in regrets. I do have regrets at times but I try to look at my life as a series of Sliding Door moments and remind myself that at the time, the decisions I made were the right ones for that Me. Because not to do so would leave me floundering in deep waters, blaming myself for things I didn't know because of who I am. I was aware even back then that other people seemed to know 'the System' but I didn't know what to ask or who could have explained it. Instead, I embraced being a Holden (we're a very odd family) and used that as the reason I didn't quite fit in.
So now, I look back at the little girl who made pets of snails and accidentally grew cannabis from budgie seed, who stuck a stick in the ground and proclaimed it Her Tree, and watched it grow into a towering sycamore over the next 6 decades. My mother named it Doris, after the lady who stopped to help her transplant it into the back garden when it became obvious it was going all-out to Tree Maturity.
Doris is on the right.
I look back at the little girl whose best friends were all in their 60s, who head the phrase 'devoured a book' and conscientiously ate a corner of each page of her favourite stories.
I smile as I look back at her now. Not least because she has begun to peep at me through the eyes of my granddaughter, who is embracing her eccentricity as we speak.
I smile because I love and understand both those little girls, and I tell them so, frequently.
Better late than never.
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