It's never too late to prove them wrong

This little boy was told he wasn't good enough. Yesterday he got a PhD from St Andrews university

I’m writing this in a different cafe this morning, a student one in St Andrews in Scotland. Listening to bad 80s music, and watching an awkward procession of students and families in a variety of Sunday best and national dress, make their way from one queue to another. Me? I’m drinking coffee, eating toast and waiting for a man looking a smidge uncomfortable in a dark grey suit and white bow tie (don’t ask me, I don’t make the dress code) to return from one of those queues with his gown and hood.

By the time you read this Jon will be a doctor. He's just completed a PhD in memoir and memory and passed with “exceptional merit”. (He'll ask me to take that bit out, but I’m going to fight for it!) If it sounds a bit boasty mcboastface, that’s OK, because it’s me doing the boasting, not him. Boasting's not in his makeup. But me? I couldn’t be more proud. Not just because of the achievement of a PhD, although there’s that, but because, at 70, he's confronted and put to bed the last in a long line of ghosts that have haunted him since he was wee.

Take another look at that small boy, sitting at the top of this page, teeth gritted through itchy jumpers, scratchy tartan trousers and admonitions to smile for the camera. Every time I look at that picture my heart cracks a little, partly because I've spent decades living with and loving the man he grew up to be, but also partly because I know what was coming for him between then and now.

Some backstory. But not much. That's his to tell, not mine (the first rule and, in my opinion, the most important rule of memoir):

I’m not sure how old Jon was in this picture. But when he was six years old, something bad happened, and he was sent away to boarding school. Away from his family, and his young sister and baby brother. To the kind of school that has spent a lot of time in the news of late. A tiny boy, not yet waist height, in an itchy shirt and shorts (what is it with grown ups and itchy clothes?), and a school trunk bigger than him. Heading for a place where he would be the littlest of the little, the boys were bigger and the masters seemed to think they had free rein. Because they did. You get the picture.

The small boy couldn’t settle. He was disruptive. Unhappy. Troubled. Sad, and angry, basically. Also lonely. Not that those things were acknowledged or even recognised then. Letters were sent. No one asked what might be wrong and nothing changed.

Instinctively left-handed – a sure sign of deviance! – the small boy was forced to write with his right. (To this day, Jon's handwriting is just as atrocious as mine would be were I forced to write with the wrong hand.)

The small boy struggled with reading and writing. Numbers were a no-go. At first they thought it was distress. (It was.) Then they thought it was wiring. (It was.) Then they thought it was probably both. (It was.) Word blind, it was decided. Dyslexia’s predecessor. It didn’t matter what it was called. He'd never be able to do maths, or more than read the headlines of the tabloids. (That last an actual quote.) Neurodiverse wasn’t a thing then. Instead he was condemned as “stupid”. He would never achieve anything, certainly not at an academic level. Which doesn’t necessarily matter. But it did to him. Already he wanted, needed, to tell stories, to help him make sense of an increasingly confusing world that didn’t seem to have room for him.

And so he just kept on keeping on. Going through the motions. Waiting to be released into the world. Away from the grown ups who’d written him off.

When we met, almost three decades after the small boy scratched into the camera, those reports still echoed in his head. You can’t. You won’t. You’re too stupid. We don’t know what to do with you. The failure was theirs not his, of course it was, but what small child knows that? When the grown ups tell you it’s you that’s wrong, why wouldn’t you believe them. They’re grown ups.

It took thirty years more – and with twenty novels to his name, several award-winning, most critically acclaimed – before he woke up one morning, in 2022, and said he'd decided to do a PhD. To see if he could do what he'd always been told he couldn’t. I still half think it was a test he set himself, expecting the world to tell him no.

He wrote to four universities and, even though he’d missed the admissions closing date, three offered him a place. He opted for St Andrews, in large part because it was precisely the kind of college that wouldn’t have considered teenage him, and chose to research memoir and memory with brilliant thinker and memoirist Dina Nayeri as his supervisor. The result is his memoir, Swimming to the Moon, in which he revisits the small boy and one by one faces down his ghosts. (I may be biased – hands up, I am biased – but this is the best thing he’s ever written; what every book that went before has been building up to. And I’m not alone in thinking that. It has not yet been sent out to publishers, but already the quotes are rolling in.)

Yesterday I sat on the balcony of the Younger Hall with all the other “parents” while Jon collected his PhD, in a room full of mostly twentysomethings. Decades after all the grownups told him not to bother. The small boy who was told he couldn’t. And proved he could.

(But, before I finish, this isn’t just about Jon. It’s about me and you and everyone who was ever told they couldn’t, they weren’t good enough. Your dreams are just that and not for the likes of you. And, let’s face it, I’ve hardly met a person who doesn’t have a story. Not one this extreme, admittedly, but somewhere along the way paths blocked or diverted or thwarted or laughed down, by teachers or parents or lovers or friends or bullies or employers. People who saw only limitation – race or class or age or gender or neurodiversity – and made it their business to throw on the brakes, in case we didn’t.

Well you know what? Screw that. It’s never too late to prove them wrong. Never. Just ask that wee boy.

illustration: Beth Spencer