I’m guessing that because of all the adversity in our lives, and the profound effect it had on me, it made it necessary to find a way of dealing with it or just simply shutting it out.

Though I never knew it at the time, I think this was what drove my academic achievements.

I wouldn’t say I was the cleverest of children, but one thing I did learn from the outset of going to school, was I had the ability to listen and learn.

This isn’t always the case for others who may have been in the same domestic situation as I was, and if there were any others, I knew better than to ask.

And it was easier for me to discern who the tough kids were, the bullies, and recognise the signs of their malevolent behaviour.

This was to be more significant, and to an extent beneficial much later in secondary school.

But, for the time being, in those first six years of primary school, it allowed me those hours during the day an escape from home.

Significantly, I knew that I was not very sociable at school around kids that I didn’t know and that I became apprehensive around people I didn’t know, and this only got worse as I got older.

Something else that was significant, I suspect the other parents in the street might have had some inkling of the nature of what was going on in our household, and might explain why they became more distant, and then just avoided us.

Of course, it might be that the parents of those children just moved on, heading in a different direction to us. It was quite common for people to move, and new people come, not necessarily with children.

Then, abruptly, and with no real warning we suddenly up and moved.

There was animosity and disappointment, but it was to another smaller house, a much older one, and I suspect it may have had its roots in the fact we were quite poor.

After all, my mother didn’t work, and although it was not a difficult period with fluctuating wages or rampant inflation, things were hard with three children their education and feeding the household.

But during that time from my father’s breakdown to the move we took in boarders who took one of the rooms that my brother and I shared, and for a time, until my father had a sleepout built on, and the toilet being brought inside, an innovation and not the norm, both of us slept on a tent in the backyard.

The result of all that was, in the end, we had taken on too much, the character of the boarders in some cases not a good role model for us, and that had to change. My brother got his room back, I got the sleepout, and then the house was sold.

That ended the house of horrors period.

Moving on, it was now a matter of going to secondary school.

I liked primary school.

I was soon going to hate secondary school, not only because of the huge shift in the teaching methods or learning practices.

It was the other children.