Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (13 page)

Adolescence

I counted the seven seconds that it took my father to stagger and slump to the living room floor, falling into his own shadow. The sound of his breathing as he lay on his back was coarse and dingy, and his eyes looking up into mine were round and staring and bloodshot.

My father’s illness had been presaged in the gradual changes in his behaviour following the birth of my twin sisters. He had stopped working in the garden and refused to see old friends. He swung between long periods of talkativeness and others of almost complete silence. Physically, he seemed to age ten years in the space of a few months: he lost a lot of weight and became very thin, moving increasingly slowly and tentatively around the house. Even the lines and creases in his face grew deeper.

I was ten when I became an accidental witness to my father’s first mental breakdown. In the months leading up to it, my mother had done all that she could to protect us from the sights and sounds of his erratic decline. On this day, however, I had walked unnoticed into the living room and found him stumbling around the room, his eyes wide and bulging, muttering unintelligibly to himself. I didn’t do anything except watch him in silence, unsure of how to feel, but at the same time not wanting to leave him alone. The noise of my father’s fall brought my mother quickly inside and she gently pulled me away and told me to go upstairs to my room. She explained that he was unwell and that she was waiting for a doctor to call. Ten minutes later an ambulance arrived, its sirens switched off. I watched from the top of the stairs as my father was put onto a stretcher, wrapped in a blanket and carried away by the paramedics.

The next day the house was quieter and felt colder somehow too. I remember sitting in my room and trying to think through my feelings for my father, because I knew that I should be feeling something but I didn’t know what. In the end I realised that the home felt incomplete without him and I wanted him to return.

We were told that my father needed time to rest and had been taken to a hospital where he could get better. He was away from home for several weeks, during which time we children were not allowed to see him, though my mother travelled by bus to visit. The hospital was a long-stay psychiatric institution, but we were too young to know what mental illness was. My mother did not discuss my father’s condition with any of us and would only say that he was getting better and would be home soon. In the meantime, with seven children (five of them four years of age or younger) to care for, my mother relied heavily on the support of her parents and family friends and helpers brought in from social services. My brother and I were also expected to help out as much as possible, tidying and drying dishes and carrying shopping.

When my father came home from his hospitalisation, there was no celebration. Instead, there was an attempt at some sort of return to normality, with my father trying to do those everyday things – changing nappies and cooking supper – that had been the core of his daily routine before his illness had struck. But things were different and I think I knew even then that they would never be the same again. The man who had protected and cared for me with all his strength and energy had gone and had been replaced with one who needed protecting and caring for himself. He was prescribed medication and advised to rest regularly by the doctors at the hospital, and every day after lunch he went up to his room and slept for several hours. My mother asked my brothers and sisters to play quietly, as quietly as I did, so as not to disturb my father’s rest. Whenever one or both of the babies started to cry, my mother would rush to take them out of the house to the garden before attending to them.

The relationship between my parents changed too. My mother, who had previously relied heavily on my father both practically and emotionally, now had to reimagine their life together and in a sense start all over again. Their conversations became short and the cooperation between them, which they had previously perfected, seemed to have been lost. It was as if they had to relearn their relationship. They argued more and more frequently and their voices grew loud and dark and I didn’t like to hear them argue, so I put my hands over my ears. Often after a particularly loud argument my mother would come upstairs and sit with me in the quietness of my room. I wanted to wrap the soft silence around her like a blanket.

The state of my father’s health fluctuated from day to day and from week to week. There were long periods of time when he might talk and behave as before, only to be interrupted by sudden spells of disjointed, repetitive speech, of confusion and isolation from the family. He was hospitalised on several more occasions over the following years, each for weeks at a time. And then, just as suddenly as his illness had first appeared, my father seemed to make a recovery of sorts – he began to eat and sleep a lot better, grew physically and emotionally stronger and regained his confidence and initiative. My parents’ relationship improved and there followed the birth of an eighth child, my sister Anna-Marie, in the summer of 1990. Seventeen months later came my parents’ final child, Shelley, born four days before my thirteenth birthday.

The improvement in my father’s condition and the continued growth in family numbers meant another move, in 1991, to a four-bedroom house in Marston Avenue. It was terraced, situated close to shops and a park, with a large garden at the back. Like all the houses before it, it had only one bathroom and toilet for the entire family of eleven. Queues outside the bathroom door were a frequent sight. The living and dining rooms were separated by a set of doors, which were often kept unlocked so that the rooms downstairs flowed into one another. Whenever I had some thought or idea in my head I would walk through the rooms, living room to dining room to kitchen to corridor back to living room, in a continuous circuit round and round with my head down and my arms fixed by my sides, absorbed in my thoughts and totally oblivious to anyone around me.

I started secondary school in September 1990. That summer, my mother took me into the town centre to buy my first school uniform: a black blazer and trousers, white shirt and black and red striped tie. My father tried to teach me how to put a tie on, but after repeated attempts I was still no nearer to being able to do it by myself, so he suggested that I simply loosen and re-wear the same knot through the week. I fidgeted a lot as I tried my uniform on – the blazer was made of a thick fabric and felt heavy on, and the new black leather shoes were tight-fitting and squeezed my toes. I also had to have a bag to take the various books into school, and an assortment of classroom equipment: pens, pencils, notepad, sharpener, eraser, compass, ruler, protractor and sketchbook.

The school was Barking Abbey (nearby is the church of St Margaret where Captain James Cook married in 1762). My first day there started with my father helping to knot my tie and do up the buttons of my shirt cuffs. We travelled by bus to the school gates, where he told me to be brave, that the first day at a new school is always a big challenge and that I should try to enjoy it. I watched him as he walked away, until he had disappeared from view. Then, hesitantly, I followed the other children being led into the nearby gymnastic hall where the headmaster was due to address the new pupils. The hall was just large enough for all the children to sit down on the floor, with several teachers standing against the walls. The floor was dusty as I sat down at the back just as the headmaster – Mr Maxwell – asked for silence and began to speak. I found it difficult to concentrate and listen to what he was saying, so I looked down at the floor, rubbed the tips of my fingers through the light dust and waited for the assembly to end. We were assigned class numbers and the name of our form tutor and asked to proceed quietly to our classrooms. I was excited to discover that my class was next door to the school library. After registration, we were given a timetable for the week’s lessons. Each subject was taught by a different teacher in different classrooms in various parts of the school. Moving from one hour to the next, from subject to subject, classroom to classroom and teacher to teacher was one of the hardest things for me to adapt to in the transition from primary to secondary school.

There were few familiar faces in my form class from my old school, Dorothy Barley. Babak, my one good friend from there, had gone on to another school in a different part of town. I felt extremely nervous and did not speak to anyone in my new class, not even to introduce myself. Instead, I kept looking at the clock and wanting the hands to rotate faster and faster and bring the day to a close. With the noisy ringing of the bell, the children piled out into the playground. I hung behind, waiting for the other children to leave, afraid of being pushed or jostled as they scrambled out of the room. I walked next door to the library, pulled an encyclopaedia from the reference shelves and sat at a table alone and read. I timed myself using the library’s clock on the wall, as I did not want to be late for the return to class. The thought of walking in and seeing the children already sitting, all looking up at me, was terrifying to me. When the bell for lunch rang I made the short walk to the library once more and read at the same table.

At primary school I had eaten packed lunches prepared the night before by my mother. However my parents were now keen for me to eat my lunch at school, because coming from a low-income family I qualified for vouchers against the cost of the meal. After a half hour of reading I made my way round to the entrance of the dining hall. The queues had dissipated and I was able to take a tray up to the counter on my own and select the food I wanted. I pointed to the fish fingers, chips and beans. I was hungry, so I put a doughnut from the dessert section on to my tray. I walked over to the till and handed my voucher to the woman as she pressed the various buttons. The voucher was not enough to include the doughnut and she told me that I would have to pay the extra. I had not expected this to happen, felt myself redden and became very anxious, feeling as though I would burst into tears at any moment. Noticing my distress, the woman told me not to worry as it was my first day at the school, and to keep the doughnut. I found an unoccupied table and sat down. The hall was half-empty but I ate my food as quickly as possible, before anyone could come and sit at the table with me, and then left.

At home time, I waited for the scrum of children to pour out into the streets before making my way to the bus stop I recognised, because it was the one that I had got off at that morning. It was the first time I had ever had to use public transport by myself and I did not realise that I had to get on the bus going in the other direction for it to take me towards home. When the bus arrived I climbed on and stated my destination, something I had rehearsed over and over again in my mind. The driver said something but I did not hear him clearly and automatically put my money out for the ticket. He repeated what he had just said, but I could not process the words in my head because I was concentrating so hard on not panicking at being aboard a bus alone. I stood there until finally the driver sighed loudly and took the money. I pulled off the ticket and sat in the nearest empty seat. As the bus moved off I waited for it to turn around at any moment to go in the direction of home, but it did not and carried on taking me further and further from where I wanted to go. I became anxious and ran over to the door and waited impatiently for the bus to stop and the doors to open. Realising my mistake, I jumped off and walked across the road to another bus stop. This time, when the bus arrived and I gave the driver the name of my destination he did not say anything other than to state the price for the ticket, which I already knew, and I was relieved to be on the right bus – even more so when, twenty minutes later, I saw my street from the bus window and knew I had returned home safely at last.

With time and experience, I was able to travel alone by bus to and from school. It was a short walk from the house in Marston Avenue to the bus stop and, as I could remember all the times from the bus timetable, I was never late except, of course, when the bus itself was late.

Each school day began with registration in the form class, followed by the lessons scheduled for that day in different rooms and buildings around the school grounds. Unfortunately, since I haven’t any natural instinct for direction, I get lost very easily, even in areas I have lived in for many years, except for routes that I have specially learned by sheer repetition. The answer for me was to follow my fellow pupils to each of the lessons.

Maths was naturally one of my favourite subjects at school. On the opening day of term, each pupil had had to complete a maths test from which they were graded according to ability and allocated a place in sets one (the highest), two, three or four. I was placed in set one. From my first experience in the class I noticed that the lessons moved much more quickly than those in primary school. Everyone in the classroom seemed engaged and interested and there were a wide range of topics taught. My favourites among them were numerical sequences such as the Fibonacci (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 …) where each new term in the series is derived from the sum of the two preceding, data handling (such as calculating the mean and median of a set of numbers) and probability problems.

Probability is something that many people find unintuitive. For example, the answer to the problem ‘A woman has two children, one of whom is a girl. What is the probability that the other child is also a girl?’ is not 1 in 2, but 1 in 3. This is because, knowing that the woman already has a girl and therefore cannot have two boys, the remaining possibilities are: BG (boy and girl), GB (girl and boy) and GG (girl and girl).

The ‘Three Cards Problem’ is another example of a probability question producing an apparently counterintuitive solution. Imagine there are three cards: one is red on both sides, one is white on both sides, and the third is red on one side and white on the other. A person puts the cards into a bag and randomly mixes them together, before pulling one out and putting it face up on the table. A red side is showing – what is the probability that the other side is also red? Some versions of this problem point out that as there are only two cards with red sides, one with a second red side and the other with a white side, the odds would appear to be 1 in 2, i.e. the other side of the card is equally likely to be red or white. However, the actual probability that the other side of the card is also red is 2 in 3. To picture this, imagine writing the letter ‘A’ on one side of the card with two red sides, and ‘B’ on its other side. On the card with one red side and one white side, imagine writing the letter ‘C’ on its red side. Now consider the situation where a card is drawn showing a red side. The possibilities are that it is red sides ‘A’, ‘B’ or ‘C’. If ‘A’, the other side is ‘B’ (red), if ‘B’ the other side is ‘A’ (red) and if ‘C’, the other side is white. Therefore the odds of a red side under the one showing are 2 in 3.