Free Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored by John Lydon Page B

understood or liked me. I suppose I might have come across as a very silent character. They didn’t know what
my potential was, and neither did I at the time. She’d always have a dinner ready for Sid – just Sid, whom she would oddly call Michael, even though we knew him as John, and Sid by
nickname. Not even Simon. It was so strange, so dissipated from reality in a weird way. So there I was, the man who’d just saved her son from a kicking, and I wasn’t allowed to eat.
I’d have to just sit there and watch Sid scoff it all.
    The teachers at Hackney & Stoke Newington were really good, some of them, really inspiring; they’d get my mind to open up to all manner of things. For instance, there
was one who made us write an essay on the word ‘encounters’, and what that meant. There was no answer to it, and that was the joy of it. It really annoyed me at the time: ‘I want
to know what you mean. What is an encounter? Tell me!’ ‘Nope, find it out for yourself, and put it in an essay.’ Of course, I was nowhere near it. It was an eye-opener, but also
infuriating, and I wanted more of that challenge.
    From what I remember, I came away with about seven ‘O’-levels. I wanted these things. I’d started those courses when I was young, and I wanted to finish them, as a sense of
personal achievement, but also of course out of the foolish belief that by getting all these exams I’d become amazingly clever and everyone would want to employ me. Funnily enough, it
didn’t work out that way.
    I felt like I’d committed to school, though, and I wanted to better myself. I decided to go on to do ‘A’-levels elsewhere, but I had to pay for my education at that point, so
my dad got me jobs on building sites to earn the money to be able to go to KingswayCollege. There was no grant for me. I just didn’t qualify. Bad school reports from
the previous places didn’t help. No student loan. Nothing. I paid for it with the money I earned working on the building sites, and the money was so good that I could do that, and also live
off it rather comfortably while also contributing to Mum and Dad’s rent at Honeyfield. I thought Kingsway was a very good investment for my future. And it paid off, because no matter what I
did or didn’t learn there, I learned social skills, how to get on with other people, and how to listen to teachers. When they’re saying interesting things, I’m all ears.
    Kingsway was about a ten-minute walk from King’s Cross up Gray’s Inn Road, and when you followed the road right up to the top, you could get into Soho in the heart of town. But the
college itself was bang opposite a council estate – poor people’s housing all round.
    The main thing was, I wanted to continue with English Literature, because I loved my reading, and Piss-Stains Prentiss, however much of a bastard, had got me into Shakespeare – so yippee,
thanks to him, not all bad. I also wanted to do Technical Drawing, because I love draftsmanship, but it came together with Maths and Physics, so that was a no-no.
    Apparently I’d been quite good at Maths before meningitis, but afterwards it was like that capability had been extinguished in my brain. Stuff like Physics is a literal rocket science to
me. I find those subjects mind-numbing because I can’t place them in any kind of reality. They all seem to be like complicated suppositions to me. It’s like imagining three-tiered
chess, without the chess boards. Where’s the inspiration in logarithms and binary? It was never explained why we’d sit there like dummies, going ‘Zero, zero, one, one’, over
and over again. ‘X plus Y equals what?!’ ‘Who cares, if I don’t know what X is!’
    So I did three ‘A’-levels: English, Art and History. Initially, I found it extremely difficult to get into the way subjects were debated rather than lectured; previously you were
told, ‘This is this, and that’s that,and don’t ask a question.’ But now it would