The Story So Far
the early years

On July 13^th 1969 while Buzz Aldrin and chums were limbering up in readiness to swan around in zero G on the moon, I was desperately pleading with a highly questionable midwife called Gerard to get his damn hands off me.  I was quite comfortable where I was thank you very much, and quite frankly, after taking one look at my fathers beer belly and my mothers facial moustache, wanted no part in carrying on the Treadwell lineage.

Three days, five bottles of gas, ten pairs of forceps, six packets of lard and one tug of war team later, I was reluctantly born to Harold and Diane Treadwell and brother Kevin. The birth was quickly hushed up and I was whisked away in an unmarked car to my new home in Birmingham, England.

As a result of suffering copious amounts of stress and a fair bit of stretching during that birth, I was inflicted with the unfortunately named disease Perhese.  Unfortunate because I was later to get it mixed up with another like sounding disease and relate to anyone that enquired that I had in fact got Herpes.

Anyway, after a highly technical detection process, namely much measuring and adding up, doctors soon found that one of my legs was longer than the other.  Back in the then dark days of medical practice the treatment for Perhese, a disease which causes bone growth abnormalities, involved specialists securing me tightly to the bed, tying a rope to one end of my shorter leg, a three tonne weight to the other end and stuffing a sock in my mouth to muffle my screams.

Thus, my childhood was off to a flying start and I spent the next couple of years trying to come to terms with the nightmares I was having. I finally got the chance to vent my feelings of my so-far tortuous life when I uttered, nay screamed my first words at age two and three months, “Ahhhhhh I’m finished.”

I was no stranger to alienation in these early years of my life.  On many an occasion when taken to the local park (where my family hoped I would lose myself) to play on the swings and roundabouts, I would find that the park, which was teeming with kiddies, would magically empty and I would be left to stand ominously in the middle of the plain field.  Usually just in time for the click of the camera and another classic photograph for the family album.

Nursery school proved to be every bit as depressing as I had expected and I never could see the point of riding three wheelers round the four foot square perimeter play ground or building scale models of the local shopping centre out of play dough. Although burying Mrs Tablecloths three hundred-pound necklace in the sandpit did have it’s moments.

My first proper dose of doing full time school was another traumatic episode in my life. Obviously, I’d refused point blank to be part of anything that involved being near a hundred horrible screaming little monsters, armed with felt tip pens and rubber plimsolls. I told my mother that there was no way I could make the arduous journey there every morning, but the fact that we lived next door to the place didn’t help my plight. I was frog-marched to school against my will, but didn’t give in without a fight. Yet again stretching was on the agenda as I thrashed, twisted and held on to the school gate as my mother and a teacher pulled me toward the school. My complexion turned red, purple, and blue before I passed out and was huddled into the interior of the building.

I never did warm to school life and when the opportunities came, I made a point of either running away (closely followed by the school caretaker) or feigning sickness by pretending to vomit in the bathroom, using partly eaten cornflakes. My mom wasn’t easily fooled though and I eventually had to accept that I would just have to knuckle down and serve my sentence.

If I thought junior school was bad I was in for a bigger surprise when I was transferred to the maximum-security secondary school just down the road. Twenty-eight other suspicious characters and myself were placed in the hands of a spotty middle aged form teacher in X-wing. I took to the place like a government minister to a game of truth and dare. The only thing in it’s favour was that there were plenty of places to hide.

 

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