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It came as a terrible shock to Angie and me when we got a letter from the school asking us to come in to discuss Eddie’s attendance record. We knew that he’d found the transition from First to Middle to school difficult, but we had no idea that, by year eight, he had started simply staying away on a fairly regular basis.
After we’d had what felt to us like a dressing-down from the head teacher, we came home and talked to Eddie about his truanting. Angie tried to reason with him, emphasising how important it was to study hard and get good qualifications, and I told him about the law that required us to see that he attended school. I don’t think either of us made much impression on him. He simply wasn’t interested in what school had to offer. We found out much, much later that he was also being bullied, but he didn’t let on about that at the time.
We tried to arrange our shifts so that one of us could accompany him to the school gate every morning and see that he actually did go in. We thought that at least then he would find it more difficult to bunk off for whole days at a time. The trouble was, we both had jobs that often needed us to be flexible about our hours. So Angie asked Bernie to help out, which she did willingly. That was probably the point at which I started to get to know her better through all those mornings when she would be at our house before breakfast so that I could get off to work knowing that she would see Eddie safely off to his lessons.
The start of Eddie’s problems almost exactly coincided with the start of Bernie’s relationship with Richard. In fact, I remember that the summons from the head came through on the very day Bernie was moving back into her own house after spending the summer staying with him, following the fire. (You can read all about that elsewhere.) That was another factor that made me take more of an interest and to stop viewing Bernie as just one of Angie friends from church.
I think Eddie must have found it easier to talk to Bernie than to me and Angie. Probably he though she was less old-fashioned and stuck-in-the-mud. He probably also realised that she was less likely than me to go off the deep end if he complained about the school or about the way some of the other boys were treating him. However, for quite a while we didn’t really see much improvement in his behaviour. Although he now attended school in body, his reports and the comments from his teachers at parents’ evenings suggested that his mind as very much elsewhere.
We even started to worry that he might be getting into drugs. Every evening he would disappear up into his room and showed no interest in being part of family activities. He had one real mate – a boy who lived in the next street who had been his friend since they started nursery together. He had a computer in his bedroom – something that was still relatively unusual in those days, at least amongst our acquaintances – and they used to spend hours together there playing games. Angie and I thought it was a waste of time and that they would be better doing something active like swimming or playing football in the park, but at least it kept them off the streets.
As Christmas approached, Bernie came to us with a proposition. She wanted to help Eddie to build himself a computer. I thought it was a ridiculous idea, but eventually she managed to convince us that it was both feasible and potentially useful for him in his future career. Of course, she was right and I was wrong. That proved to be the turning point for Eddie. I don’t know whether it was having an adult spending time with him doing something that interested him, or discovering that he was actually good at something, or realising that he might be able to spend his working life doing something that he actually enjoyed, but all of a sudden his whole attitude changed.
We’d started to despair of him ever getting any decent GCSEs, but by the time he started in year ten, he’d begun to put a real effort into his school work – especially the subjects that Bernie told him he’s need to do well in if he wanted to do Computer Science at university – and in the end he managed some really impressive grades. In fact, in some subjects he did better than Hannah, who had been such a steady dependable girl and never caused us any worries school-wise.