A letter to my 11 year old self

Nicky Campbell's 'Your Call' on BBC Radio Five Live is an essential part of my day.

It's a phone in, but it's an intelligent, funny, irritating but sometimes very moving phone in.

Today the subject was this: if you were to write a letter to your 11 year old self, what would it say?

Here goes then.

Dear Rick,

The first thing is to be stronger in what you call yourself.  You always wanted to call yourself Rick, or Ricky, but everyone else wanted to call you Rich or Richard.  You hated Richard, with a passion, but you gave in, especially when one of your teachers said he was going to call you Richard whatever you wanted to call yourself.

You were starting senior school when you were 11 but already you knew something wasn't quite right.  None of the subjects made any sense.  The sciences, maths and all the practical subjects were a blur.  You struggled badly in everything except English and even then you didn't know a verb from an adjective and you still don't.

You would sit in a class not having the faintest idea of what the teacher was on about.  Almost nothing made sense.  Why didn't you go an see your housemaster and tell him?  Admittedly, this was not a time when children who had problems with learning or concentrating (both in my case) were regarded as anything other than thick.  But you didn't.  You struggled on and that's pretty well how things stayed through the rest of your life.

You should have made more of an effort to be closer to your father even though you hardly ever saw him.  The year before your 11th birthday, he had upped sticks and moved to Canada, studying for a degree in commerce.  Before then, he had been in the merchant navy and you rarely saw him apart from when he was on shore leave.  And even then, he was usually out and about seeing relatives and friends when he was in England.  He wrote you letters but you hardly ever replied.  He sent you money orders but sometimes you didn't even acknowledge him.  You cut him out of your life, albeit sub-consciously (how could an 11 year old do otherwise?), and it affected the rest of your life.  Luckily, as the years went by, you became closer but you won't get those years back again.

The head teacher in your senior school saw cricketing ability in you and tried to get you to concentrate on it.  But already you were showing signs of what was to happen later in life: the pressure got to you and you rejected the opportunity.   Later on, you realised when playing cricket that he was right.  The potential he saw probably really did exist but it was all too late.

You should have realised what your mother had gone through.  She came to England from Holland in the 1950s to marry your father.  She knew no one in England and once she moved to Bristol it was basically her against the world.  My dad was at sea so she was effectively a lone parent.  She always worked, never claimed a penny in benefits, and raised her son the best way she could, in a foreign land, in a foreign language.  No doubts that we were poor, with one electric heater we carried round the house when we wanted to go to another room and the cupboards were bare, food being bought as and when we needed it, always the cheapest off cuts of meat (when we could afford meat) and a loaf of bread a week.  But I never felt poor, even when I went to friends' houses and marvelled at the warmth and the glittering array of modern electrical goods like a fridge and a washing machine (or an old boiler).  Mum washed stuff by hand or if she had a good week she  might use the local launderette.  And I don't think I ever said thank you.  Like most kids, I took it all for granted.  Looking back, we had next to nothing, but it never felt like that.

And you should have written more.  You should have known that writing was what you really wanted to do and gone for it.  Although there was no one to guide you, at home or at school, you knew where your gifts, such as they were, lay.  Whilst you might not have been a technically perfect writer - some things never change - you could string words together.

You couldn't help the life into which you were born, the job you stumbled into, the despair and emptiness of mental illness that blighted your life so much, but it wasn't all someone else's fault.  There were times as a young boy you spent a lot of time feeling sorry for yourself. You probably knew you could do better, but you didn't.  That was, at least in part, your fault.

So Rick, work hard, follow your dream and see where it takes you. Learn what it is you are good at and stick with it.  Don't do what I did which was nothing special, actually.

Yours Sincerely

Rick