Joys of a stilted childhood

They sat him in the corner with his beanbags, but a circus skills session at school revealed Paul Carter’s hidden talent for getting high

I’m sure we’ve all got some bizarre memories from our time as schoolchildren. I’d hazard a guess that I’ve got more than most, as growing up as a kid with artificial legs tended to attract situations that were often what you might call out of the ordinary.

I remember one particular day, when I was about seven. My school decided there’d be some form of educational and pastoral benefit in devoting an entire day of our lives to circus skills, where a collection of strange looking carnival types came in for the day to teach tricks of the trade to the children.

So anyway, there I was, the only disabled kid in the room. I was sat in the corner and given beanbags or something to play with so I didn’t hurt myself.

I was annoyed at not being allowed to try the good stuff though, like those spinny things on strings that you throw in the air.

After a while, I persuaded them to let me have a go at spinning some plates on sticks – and unsurprisingly I was crap at that, felt a bit deflated and skulked back to my beanbags.

Then came my big moment. The teacher foolishly left the room for a moment. I looked at carnival man, and he looked at me. Our eyes looked – man and boy. And we both knew. Now was our chance, fleeting and brief though it was; now was our chance to give the kid with no legs a real taste of circus life, to push the boundaries, to go where no other seven-year-old kid with no legs had ever been before (I can’t back that up) – yes, now was the chance to put him on stilts!

Looking back, it was an idiotic idea, and had it gone horribly wrong, that man would probably still be serving time in some form of correctional facility, and I would have been a headline writer’s Christmas, birthday and retirement parties all at once.

Except I wasn’t. I was like a gazelle. If gazelles resemble Peter Crouch. Years of wobbling around on artificial legs had taught me how to adapt quickly to a shifted centre of gravity.

I broke into a run. I jumped. I was free. I think at one point I caused my co-conspirator to have a minor cardiac episode: after all, a leaping seven-foot legless child isn’t something you see every day. Even in the circus.

Alas, my carnival career didn’t last long. The teacher came back to the room and, not fancying being sued, ordered me off my newly discovered super-prosthetics.

My days as enormo-child were over.

I often look back and wonder what might have been if I’d chosen a different career path, packed my trunk and clomped my way off to the circus.