Taken at Eight

I do not remember being told. I remember the before and I remember the after, and somewhere in between there is a join I cannot find no matter how many times I go looking for it. The join is the most important part and it is the part that is missing.

The before was my grandparents. The Swift side. A house that held. Military stock on that side — discipline, precision, the expectation that things should be done correctly. Inside that structure something unusual showed up early. Chemistry at five — actual chemistry, the behaviour of elements, the logic of reactions, not the children’s version with baking soda and vinegar for a rainy afternoon. Morse code at six. I built radios from components with hands that should still have been holding toys. The signals going out. The signals coming in. A child who understood, intuitively, that the world communicated in frequencies most people could not hear. A microscope at seven. Biology examined with the focused patience of someone who already grasped that the visible world was only the surface of everything. Beneath it, structures. Systems. Things that explained the things above them. Nobody has fully explained where that mind came from. It was simply there — a mind of unusual precision arrived into circumstances that could not contain it and would not protect it.

At eight that world ended.

I was taken from the only home I had known and placed with my mum in a squat. What followed was years of being moved between different people in the family or close to them. Flicked from house to house like stolen property. Never settled. Never claimed. Each placement another temporary arrangement that communicated the same permanent message: you are not someone’s priority. You are a problem being managed. The fixed address disappeared. The sense that any adult was permanently responsible for me disappeared with it. I learned to pack what little I had in a way that could be moved in minutes. I learned that rooms were temporary and that the people in them were temporary too.

The systems that should have protected a child in that position looked the other way. The extended network around my world — family, associates, connections running from Liverpool to London and beyond — was not the kind of network that invited official scrutiny without official consequences. People knew. Social services knew. Police knew. They calculated, as institutions always calculate, that intervention carried risk to themselves. One child’s safety was weighed against institutional self-preservation. The child lost that calculation. I have said this before and I will say it again: I used to wish I had been taken into care. At least there would have been a structure, a record, something that might have made sense of the chaos to an innocent mind. Two of my brothers went to private Jewish schools and came out the other side intact. I have not seen them or my sister from that side of the family since I was an infant. My father had already started the long prison sentence that would eventually total twenty-one years. The contrast was absolute and it never left me. Private education and stability on one side of the bloodline. A sequence of temporary rooms and no one permanently in charge on the other.

The prodigy did not disappear when the house disappeared. It simply had nowhere safe to land. The chemistry, the Morse, the microscope — all of that curiosity had to find new objects. Some of those objects were useful. Some of them were dangerous. All of them were attempts to keep building systems in a life that kept refusing to provide any.