Clarke - Becoming Julie: My Incredible Journey

Julie Clarke 2014

The author asserts the moral right to be identified

as the author of the work in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of

Fledgling Press Ltd,

7 Lennox St., Edinburgh, EH4 1QB

The names of certain people in this book have been changed to preserve privacy.

Published by Fledgling Press, 2014

Cover Design: Graeme Clarke

graeme@graemeclarke.co.uk

www.fledglingpress.co.uk

Print ISBN 9781905916832

eBook ISBN 9781905916849

Description of Gender Dysphoria from www.transwirral.btik.com

chapter one

an innocent beginning

Life in the late fifties in a small Scottish town was hard, as it was in the whole of Britain. Peace was only eleven years old when I was born on the 16th of February 1956 in the upstairs bedroom of my grandparents farmhouse, Ancaster Cottage, on the edge of the small town of Callander in Perthshire, in the heart of Scotland.

My mother and the midwife were no doubt delighted to bring a baby boy into the world as Dad paced around at the bottom of the stairs fathers werent present at the birth in those days. I was born in the bedroom that I would share with my brother and two sisters.

We moved soon after I was born to a street called Willoughby Place, although we returned to Ancaster Cottage later. The houses there were prefabs, small temporary metal houses built after the war to meet the countrys housing needs. They lasted many more years than intended. I remember ours being very much like a metal box inside, with slightly rounded corners, if I can put it that way. From the outside our house looked like a nice little cottage with a front door in the middle and two windows equally spaced either side and a straight path leading from it to the road.

Within about a year we had moved again, this time to number three Glen Gardens. Glen Gardens was all council houses then, the right to buy not yet existing, though no one could have afforded to anyway. It was a very smart street the grass was cut and the gardens kept very tidy. On our side the gardens bordered the main Stirling to Oban railway line literally only ten metres from our back door. We got used to the noise and smell of the huge steam trains thundering past. In fact they were a source of excitement to us children and, looking back, we were true railway children. A great part of our young lives revolved around the line. Im surprised none of us were killed by a train we used to clamber up the embankment at the end of the garden, through the fence and onto the line. There we would rest our heads on the line you could hear a train coming for miles, or so we thought, although it sometimes appeared without warning, racing down the straight at high speed. As a train approached we would place a penny on the line and wait as two hundred tonnes of locomotive and carriages passed over the penny. There were dozens of pennies imprinted into the line on that stretch of railway, and in the early sixties a penny was a heck of a lot of money to a child you could buy a McCowans Dainty bar with one.

After only about a year we were on the move again, back to my grandparents farmhouse, the place of my birth. My grandad moonlighted for British Rail and was the guardsman on the Stirling to Oban overnight mail train. He knew all the engine drivers so well that when the night train went past the farm the driver would toss great lumps of coal into the field from the tender. In the morning we would go down with wheelbarrows to collect it.

Going back to the farm was the start of another great adventure. Ancaster Cottage was primarily a pig farm, and one of the biggest in Perthshire at the time. We also had a few cows and ponies and huge Clydesdale horses. There were hens too, and ducks and geese.

At five years old, it was time for me to start school. I remember my first day there, knowing that I was going to hate every minute of my school life. I believed that my carefree childhood was ending, but I had no idea why. However, as the days, weeks and months went on, I felt increasingly that I had been right. It seemed to me that, for no reason I could fathom, I was treated differently to the other children in the class by the teacher and sometimes by some of my male classmates. For the next two years this was the way it was. I was often bullied on the way home from school we all had to walk home, some of us for a mile or more; nobody used cars to ferry children about in those days.

But the railway was always there and on the way home from school we would cross the railway bridge just as the 3.15 Callander to Stirling express came powering round the curve. We would all be hanging over the bridge parapet, looking down the engines funnel as it passed below: there are some things in childhood you dont forget.

I loved living on the farm. Friends came over from the housing schemes and we just roamed around, feeding the hens or looking at the piglets. There was one Clydesdale horse in particular called Bridget her job was to haul felled trees out of the forest for the wood cutters. Bridget was so well trained that I could make her sit, just like a dog, and climb on to her and ride her bareback, hanging on to her mane as she trotted round the field.

At the age of seven I was beginning to feel that something was going on. I realized then that I was different, although I didnt know in what way. I just knew I wasnt like other boys. I remember one day, when we were painting pictures in class, I was sharing a desk with a girl called Alison, and she said to me, You have very small hands theyre girls hands. I didnt know what to say, but I knew right there and then that I was happy about what she had just said, because I knew that a girl should have small hands. I didnt know where that thought came from, but from that moment I knew that my life would never be the same again. It was the moment that everything changed for me.

I couldnt stop thinking about what Alison had said. I realized that I didnt like playing football with the boys, didnt like playing conkers or playing kick the can in the playground. I preferred to watch what the girls were doing, though I never had the nerve to go over and join them. I suppose this made me a little bit of a loner at times, which didnt go unnoticed by the other kids or by the teachers.

At home, I was beginning to take an interest in my big sisters clothes. I would sneak into her bedroom and look at them and at her makeup on the dressing table, and think, Why cant I be like this? Soon, I graduated to trying on some of my sisters clothes and it felt so right to me, but I still couldnt understand why. Mum caught me one day and told Dad, and later on that day they told me there must be something wrong with me and that I would have to go to the doctor. I started crying because I didnt want to go to the doctor when I didnt feel ill, but they never made me go and nothing more was said about it. This was the start of a lifelong trend where no one would face up to my differences or attempt to understand me because no one knew how to deal with me.