Saving Gary McKinnon Read Free Page A

the rock but I couldn’t budge it. I ran to the house and begged my mum to come and save the kittens, but a neighbour told her that it was too late: they were beyond help.
    The kittens were hurt and crying and I was too small to help them. I was heartbroken and cried myself to sleep that night. I hated feeling powerless and wanted to grow up quickly.
    I felt far too young when I attended my first primary school. I was five years old and dearly missed my mum, even though she would come up to school to see me at playtime and would pass me sandwiches through the railings.
    I would sit at my desk gazing out of the windows, longing for the freedom of the outside. I wanted to run in the fields with the wind in my face, instead of being trapped in a classroom wasting my days away.
    I always thought it strange that young children, geared to run and jump and laugh and play, were confined to a schoolroom and made to sit still at a desk for seven hours a day. To be at an age when you are full of the joys of life and bursting with energy, and then be forced to suppress that energy seemed odd to me. It was like being put in a straitjacket.
    School was a shock to my system and I became quiet and shy when I was there. When my sister Lorna started secondary school I felt so lost and alone that I walked several miles to seek out her school. I have no idea how, at five years old, I could have found my way through miles of busy streets to a school I had never seen, but by sheer luck my sister was one of only two girls out in the playground when I arrived.
    In those days I would sometimes see groups of children hanging around outside pubs their parents were in, waiting for money to buy a fish supper. It was a reflection of the times that even some very young children fended for themselves, usually going around in groups with siblings and friends, the older children always looking out for the younger ones.
    Times in Glasgow were changing and when the old Victorian tenements where we lived were earmarked for demolition, we moved to a flat in a newly built development on the outskirts of Glasgow. My parents loved having a modern kitchen and a bathroom with hot running water and an indoor coal bunker, but my dad missed his allotment and we all missed our friends and tight-knit community.
    I remember after we moved my mum and I heard a man singing in the communal garden of our new flat. Looking out of the bedroom window we saw it was a busker who used to make a living singing in the back courts of our old tenements; as the population moved, he was searching them out in an attempt to continue to make a living. He was a proud-looking man with a strong voice, and he held his cap over his heart as he sang. It was sad, as he was a really good singer, but apart from my mum I don’t think anyone gave him money, and we never saw him again.

CHAPTER 3
THIS IS MUSIC
    W e had been brought up with virtually no technology apart from a radio, but about a year before we left our old house someone in the street got a TV to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. We were all invited in, and lots of us sat in our neighbour’s house watching the magical vision of TV for the very first time.
    When our old community died I felt that a part of us had died too, but life, like Glasgow, was changing – as was the music.
    My sister Lorna, who was almost six years older than I was and still charged with looking after me while my mum and dad worked, took me with her to the cinema for the first screening in Glasgow of the film
Rock around the Clock
. When we were in the cinema Lorna asked a few of her friends to keep an eye on me, and suddenly Lorna and other people in the cinema were dancing wildly in the aisles to this new music. At the age of eight I was witnessing the beginning of rock ’n’ roll. It was incredible.
    Lorna danced like a wild thing, but I wanted to learn how to play the music.
    Lorna used to teach me to jive and would throw me over her back no matter