Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (4 page)

The duration of my excessive crying – lasting well into my first year – is unusual, even for colicky babies. Recently, researchers studying the development of children with a history of prolonged crying in babyhood found that it may be a sign of future behavioural problems. Compared to children who cried normally as babies, at age five, children who had cried excessively were found to have poorer hand-eye coordination and to be prone to hyperactivity or present discipline problems.

Fortunately, my development was fine in other areas: I was walking and saying my first words not long after my first birthday. One of the criteria for a diagnosis of Asperger’s is the absence of any significant delay in language (as opposed to more severe forms of autism where language can be considerably delayed or even non-existent).

There followed a series of recurring ear infections, for which I was given antibiotics. Because of the pain caused by the infections, I remained a cranky, sickly and crying child well into my second year. Throughout all this time my parents, though frequently exhausted by me, continued to swing me in the blanket and rock me in their arms every day.

And then, amidst the constant crying and illness, my mother discovered she was pregnant. My parents applied to the local council for a larger home and we subsequently moved to a flat close by. Lee, my brother, was born on a Sunday in May and he was the complete opposite to me: happy, calm and quiet. It must have been an immense relief to my parents.

My behaviour, however, did not improve. At age two I began to walkup to a particular wall in the living room and bang my head against it. I would rock my body backwards and forwards, striking my forehead hard, repeatedly and rhythmically, against the wall. Sometimes I would bang my head with such force that I got bruises. My father would pull me away from the wall whenever he heard the familiar banging sound, but I’d run back and start all over again. At other times I went into violent tantrums, slapping my head over and over with my hand and screaming at the top of my voice.

My parents called in the health visitor. She reassured them that head banging was a child’s way of soothing himself when he feels some kind of distress. She suggested that I was frustrated and under-stimulated and promised to help find a place for me at the local nursery. I was two and a half at the time. My parents were relieved when they received a phone call a few weeks later telling them that I had been accepted at the children’s nursery centre.

With the new arrival, my parents had to reshape the daily routines that they had worked out together over the previous two years or so. Nursery became a big part of that change. Their days no longer revolved almost entirely around me. I was always a light sleeper, waking several times a night, and was invariably up very early in the mornings. Come breakfast time, my father fed, washed and dressed me while my mother took care of my baby brother. The ride in the buggy to the nursery was an intricate mile long, past the Quaker cemetery where the nineteenth-century prison reformer Elizabeth Fry is buried, and a group of large flats, before coming to an archway leading onto a footpath and a series of street corners.

The nursery was my first experience of the outside world and my own recollections of that time are few but strong, like narrow shards of light piercing through the fog of time. There was the sandpit in which I spent long periods of the day picking and pulling at the sand, fascinated by the individual grains. Then came an obsession with hourglasses (the nursery had several of different sizes) and I remember watching the trickling flow of sand over and over again, oblivious to the children playing around me.

My parents tell me I was a loner, not mixing with the other children, and described by the supervisors as being absorbed in my own world. The contrast between my earliest years and that time must have been vivid for my parents, evolving as I did from a screaming, crying, head banging baby to a quiet, self-absorbed, aloof toddler. With hindsight, they realise now that the change was not necessarily the sign of improvement they took it to be at the time. I became almost too good – too quiet and too undemanding.

Autism as a complex developmental disorder was little known among the general public at this time and my behaviour was not what many assumed then to be typically autistic – I didn’t rock my body continuously, I could talk and showed at least some ability to interact with the environment around me. It would be another decade before high-functioning autism, including Asperger’s, would start to become recognised within the medical community and gradually better known among the public at large.

There was something else, too. My parents did not want to label me, to feel that they were holding me back in any way. More than anything else, they wanted me to be happy, healthy and able to lead a ‘normal’ life. When friends, family and neighbours invariably asked about me, my parents told them that I was very ‘shy’ and ‘sensitive’. I think my parents must also have been afraid of the possible stigma attached to having a child with developmental problems.

Another of my memories from my first months at nursery is of the different textures of the floor – some parts were covered in mats, others in carpet. I remember walking slowly, my head firmly down, watching my feet as I trod around the different parts of the floor, experiencing the different sensations under my soles. Because my head was always down when I walked I sometimes bumped into the other children or the assistants at the nursery, but because I moved so slowly the collision was always slight and I would turn a little and carry on regardless.

When the weather was warm and dry outside, the supervisors would let us play in a small garden that was attached to the nursery building. There was a slide and some swings as well as a sprinkling of toys on the grass: brightly-coloured balls and percussion instruments. There would always be plastic-coated mats placed at the bottom of the slide and under the swings, in case any of the children fell. I loved to walk barefoot on those mats. In hot weather my feet became sweaty and stuck to the mats and I would lift my foot up and put it down again to recreate over and over the sticking sensation on the soles of my feet.

What must the other children have made of me? I don’t know, because I have no memory of them at all. To me they were the background to my visual and tactile experiences. I had no sense at all of play as a mutual activity. It seems the workers at the nursery accommodated my unusual behaviour, because they never tried to make me play with the other children. Perhaps they hoped that I would begin to acclimatise to the children around me and interact with them, but I never did.

My father would always drop me off at the nursery and sometimes pick me up too. He would come straight from the factory, often still wearing his work clothes. He wasn’t self-conscious at all. He was necessarily a man of many talents. After arriving home, he would change and then make a start on supper. He did most of the cooking; I think it helped him to unwind. I was a picky eater and mostly ate cereal, bread and milk. It was a fight to make me eat my vegetables.

Bedtime was always a struggle – I often ran around or jumped up and down and it took a long time for me to settle down to sleep. I would insist on the same toy – a small red rabbit – to sleep in bed with. Sometimes I wouldn’t sleep at all and cried until my parents relented and let me sleep in their bed with them. When I did fall asleep, nightmares were common. One example remains with me to this day. I woke up after dreaming of a huge dragon standing over me. I was tiny in comparison. The same dream recurred night after night. I became petrified of falling asleep and being eaten by the dragon. Then one night he was gone as suddenly as he had appeared. Though I continued to have nightmares, they became gradually less frequent and less frightening. In a way I had vanquished the dragon.

One morning on the usual route to nursery, my father decided to take a different turning. To his surprise I began howling in my buggy. I wasn’t yet three, but I had learnt every detail of the journey from home to the nursery centre. An old lady walking past stopped and stared and then remarked: ‘He certainly has a good pair of lungs.’ Embarrassed, my father turned back and went the usual way. In an instant my crying ceased.

Another memory from my time at the nursery centre is of watching one of the assistants blow bubbles. Many of the children stretched their hands out to catch them as they floated over their heads. I didn’t put my hands out to touch them, but stared at the shape and motion and the way the light reflected off their shiny, wet surface. I particularly liked it when the assistant blew hard and produced a long string of smaller bubbles, one after another in quick succession.

I didn’t play with many toys at the centre or back at home. When I did hold a toy, like my rabbit, I would grasp it rigidly at the edges and move it from side to side. There was no attempt at hugging or cuddling or making the rabbit hop. One of my favourite pursuits was taking a coin and spinning it on the floor and watching it as it spun round and round. I would do this over and over, never seeming to get bored.

My parents remember me striking my mother’s shoes repetitively against the floor, because I liked the sound they made. I even took to putting them on my feet and walking gingerly around the room with them on. My parents called them my ‘clip clop’ shoes.

On one of my father’s walks down the street with me in the buggy, I called out as we passed a shop window. He was reluctant to take me inside. Normally when my parents were out they never took me inside a shop, because on the few occasions they had done so in the past I had burst into tears and had a tantrum. Each time they had had to make their apologies, ‘He’s very sensitive,’ they would explain, and leave in a hurry. This time my cry seemed different, determined. As my father took me inside he noticed the large display of
Mr Men
books. There was the bright yellow shape of Mr Happy and the purple triangle of Mr Rush. He took one and gave it to me. I wouldn’t let go of it so he bought it. The next day we walked past the same shop and I called out again. My father went inside and bought another
Mr Men
book. This soon became a matter of routine, until he had bought me every character in the series.

My
Mr Men
books and I soon became inseparable. I wouldn’t leave the house without one. I spent hours in the evenings lying on the floor with the books in my hands, looking at the colours and shapes in the illustrations. My parents were happy to leave me to my obsession with the
Mr Men
characters. For the first time I seemed happy and peaceful. It also proved a useful way of encouraging better behaviour. If I could go a whole day without having a tantrum they would promise to buy me a new
Mr Men
book.

We moved to our first house when I was four. It was at the corner of Blithbury Road. The house was an odd shape with the staircase accessible only from a separate narrow hall adjacent to the living room. The bathroom was downstairs, a short walk from the front door. Sometimes when a family member or friend was visiting they would be surprised by drifting bathtime steam clouds as they entered the house.

My parents’ recollections of Blithbury Road are not positive. The kitchen regularly suffered from damp and the house was always cold in winter. Even so, we had good neighbours, including an elderly couple who took a particular shine to my brother and me and gave us sweets and lemonade when we were in the garden.

At the front of the house, my father busied himself at weekends with a vegetable garden, which quickly became filled with potatoes, carrots, peas, onions, kohlrabi, tomatoes, strawberries and rhubarb. On Sunday afternoons we always ate rhubarb and custard for dessert.

I shared my room with my brother. It was small, so to conserve space we had a bunk bed. Though he was two years younger than me, my brother had the top bed. My parents were worried I might get restless in the night and fall out otherwise.

I had no strong feelings towards my brother and we lived parallel lives. He often played in the garden while I stayed in my room and we hardly ever played together. When we did, it was not mutual play – I never felt any sense of wanting to share my toys or experiences with him. Looking back, those feelings seem somewhat alien to me now. I understand the idea of mutuality, of having shared experiences. Though I sometimes still find it difficult to open up and give of myself the feelings necessary to do so are definitely inside me. Perhaps they always were, but it took time for me to find and understand them.

I became an increasingly quiet child and spent most of my time in my room, sitting on my own in a particular spot on the floor, absorbed in the silence. Sometimes I’d press my fingers into my ears to get closer to the silence, which was never static in my mind, but a silky, trickling motion around my head like condensation.

When I closed my eyes I pictured it as soft and silvery. I didn’t have to think about it; it would just happen. If there was a sudden noise, such as a knock on the door, it was painful to me, like a shattering of that experience.

The living room downstairs was always filled with books. My parents were both dedicated readers and I can still remember sitting on the floor and watching them with their books, newspapers and magazines in hand. Sometimes, when I was good, I was allowed to sit on their laps while they read. I liked the sound of the pages as they were flicked over. Books became very special to me, because whenever my parents were reading, the room would fill with silence. It made me feel calm and content inside.

I started hoarding my parents’ books, carrying them one at a time in my arms up to my room. The stairs were difficult for me and I would negotiate them one step at a time. If the book I was carrying was heavy or large it could take me a full minute to climb a dozen steps. Some of the books were pretty old and smelled of must.

Inside my room I sorted the books into piles on the floor until they surrounded me on all sides. It was hard for my parents to come into the room for fear of knocking one of the piles on top of me. If they tried to remove any of the books I would burst into tears and have a tantrum. The pages of my books all had numbers on them and I felt happy encircled by them, as though wrapped in a numerical comfort blanket. Long before I could read the sentences on the pages, I could count the numbers. And when I counted, the numbers would appear as motions or coloured shapes in my mind.