Special Effects: Unseen Flowers

Joshua loved school. He interrupted the teacher with answers before she was finished speaking, and he shouted louder than anyone else in the class when the teacher called for loud replies. And he always had something funny to say at just the right moments, and he knew how to make the girls giggle.

When we played sport, Joshua ran as hard as his body could run, and he always did his best, even when he couldn't win.

But by the time he was six, Joshua was different. He didn't like school any more and he didn't play as hard as he used to. He still made up jokes, but the teachers were not so happy to have him in their class. They were always telling him to sit down and be quiet.

When Joshua was seven he pretended to be sick, so he could miss school. When his Dad dropped him off at the gate, he would sometimes wait until his Dad was gone and then go for a walk down the street to the river. He loved poking about there. I went with him once, and we spent the whole day looking for "wild rats". We thought they lived down the holes in the river bank, so we poked sticks in to make them come out. I always hoped they would never ever come out because secretly I was real scared of meeting a "wild rat"!

In the afternoon, my parents and some other people came looking for us. We got a big telling off that day! We didn't know it was a serious thing to bunk school for the sake of a big adventure.

The thing about Joshua that made things difficult for him and everyone he was close to was his habit of saying and doing things which weren't the same as everyone else. He didn't try to be different. He just was.

Take art, for example. The teacher showed us how to draw a flower using the 'round and round' method, but Joshua drew a completely different flower, and he used a new method, which the teacher had never seen. She told him off and made him start again, only this time he had to do it 'the right' way. He was like that with everything. He always had some other way of doing things, and not many people liked it.

When Joshua was eight, the authorities really came down hard on him. His parents threatened to take him and put him in another school if he didn't "knuckle down" and "pull his socks up". The teachers gave him lots of 'pep' talks, about 'doing what he was told', and the Principal hauled him into his office at least three times, to try and help him see what an advantage 'fitting in' would be.

Joshua tried very hard to do what everyone wanted, but