Julie Helen: ‘Reading led us to have conversations around bullying’

As I read the words of Roald Dahl’s The BFG aloud, I glanced at my boy and realised he had fallen asleep. I thought about how nice it is that he can fall asleep cosy in his bed, with his imagination whirling. Even more special is the fact that he shares these precious, quiet moments with me. I am so lucky and I really felt it on a core level. I can bring myself back to my own childhood, in my own bed, feeling the same sense of safety.

The BFG is my favourite Roald Dahl book by a country mile. I always loved the goodness of the giant, but also as big and all as he was, he was still bullied by the bigger giants. It has led us to have conversations about bullying.

I experienced bullying when I was in first class. Luckily, Ricky is very content in school. Bigger boys started calling me an animal because when I walked with my two walking sticks, I looked like I had four legs. I didn’t believe them, not even a tiny bit, but I was scared when they were surrounding me and being intimidating. They told me if I told a teacher, I would be “dead”. I decided to be smart and told my aunt, who also happened to be a teacher in the school. I don’t really remember the ending, other than that it stopped and that I always knew my aunt had my back, as did all the other adults around me.

I was never afraid to tell my worries as a child. My real challenge was that I often didn’t really understand my feelings, particularly around cerebral palsy and being different. I found it hard to put into words. I found it hard to explain how tired I felt and I didn’t really know that everybody else didn’t feel that way. It took a long time to realise my body was working extra hard to keep me going. I used to get so frustrated when I couldn’t do things. I remember obsessively counting my steps when I tried to walk without my sticks, trying to make myself better. I thought if I tried hard enough, my cerebral palsy would get less and less.

To an extent, as a kid that was true, I was still growing and developing and then at age 11 years old, my knees started to get hot and sore if I did any sustained walking and my situation changed to needing to preserve the energy I had and minimise pain and injury.

Interestingly, around the same time I experienced a second bout of bullying. A group of girls started to exclude me from games or at break times and I began to feel immediately nauseous when I got to the school gate and would beg Mum to let me go home again. She often did, and then my parents got me help with a psychologist Hilary, who I still meet, and I feel like she still holds a piece of me nobody else knows about.

That intervention was my first interaction with psychology, and it led me to study it and hold the discipline in very high esteem.

For years, reading for pleasure fell foul of the energy I had to expend in school and doing physiotherapy. I was too tired to read. Then when I was in secondary school, I fell in love with English, telling stories and writing speeches and today I will happily sit and read for hours. It feels very special to be able to share that joy with my son now too.