This time there were no tantrums. For one thing I was older, ten, but the programme itself was what fascinated me. It was beautifully visual, the children surrounded by various richly coloured landscapes as they made their way across the magical land. Several of the series’ characters – keepers of the life force – were painted from head to toe in bright colours of purple, orange and green. Then there was the huge talking mouse and the giant caterpillar. In one scene, snow-flakes fall from the air and are caught in the children’s hands, magically transforming into letters which form words (a clue to help the children find one of the missing life force pieces). In another, stars in the night sky light up into shining road signs for the flying dragon Gorwen. Scenes like these fascinated me because the story was told primarily in pictures, which I could relate to best, rather than spoken dialogue.
Watching the television at home became a regular part of my after-school routine. My mother recalls that I always sat very close to the set and became upset if she tried to make me move back a little to protect my eyes. Even in hot weather I always kept my coat on after coming home from school and wore it all the time that I was watching the different programmes, sometimes even longer. I thought of it as an extra protective layer against the outside world, like a knight and his suit of armour.
Meanwhile, the family was growing. My parents were not at all religious, they simply loved children, and always wanted to have a large family. A sister, Claire, was born in the month that I began school, followed two years later by the arrival of my second brother Steven. Shortly afterwards my mother discovered she was pregnant again with her fifth child, my brother Paul, and it became necessary for us to move to a larger house. I had little reaction at first to the growing band of siblings, sitting and playing by myself in the quiet of my bedroom while my brothers and sister shouted and played and ran around downstairs and in the garden. Their presence did ultimately have a very positive influence on me, however: it forced me to gradually develop my social skills. Having people constantly around me helped me to cope better with noise and change. I also began to learn how to interact with other children by silently watching my siblings playing with each other and their friends from my bedroom window.
We moved in the middle of 1987 to Hedingham Road, number forty-three. Interestingly, all three of my childhood addresses were prime numbers: 5, 43, 181. Even better, each of our next-door neighbours had primes on their front doors too: 3 (and 7), 41, 179. Such number pairs are called ‘twin primes’ – prime numbers that differ by two. Twin primes become rarer the higher you count, so for example finding prime number neighbours with door numbers starting with ‘9’ would require a very long street indeed; the first such pair is 9,011 and 9,013.
The year of our move was also marked by rare severe weather. January saw some of the coldest weather in southern England for over a hundred years, with temperatures falling to minus nine degrees in some places. The cold brought heavy snowfall and days off school. Outside the children were throwing snowballs and being pulled along on sleds, but I was content to sit at my window and watch the snowflakes falling and fluttering from the sky. Later, when everyone else had gone indoors, I ventured out alone and piled the snow in the front garden into identical pillars several feet high. Looking down from my bedroom they formed a circle – my favourite shape. A neighbour came over to the house and said to my parents: ‘Your son has made Stonehenge in the snow.’
1987 was also the year of the great October storm – the worst to affect the south east of England since 1703. Winds reached 100mph in places and eighteen people died as a result of the storm damage. That night I went to bed but found it hard to sleep. My parents had recently bought me a new pair of pyjamas, but the fabric was itchy and I kept turning in bed. I woke to a breaking sound – tiles were being ripped from the roof by the wind and thrown down onto the street below. I climbed onto the windowsill and looked out: everywhere was pitch black. It was warm, too, unusually for the time of year, and my hands were sweaty and stuck to the sill as I pulled myself off. Then I heard a creaking noise coming towards my room. The door opened and in came a trembling, orange light atop a thick, long white candle. I stared at it until a voice, my mother’s, asked me if I was all right. I did not say anything because she was holding the candle out in front of her and I wondered whether she was giving it to me, like the bright red candle on a cake she had given me for my last birthday, but I didn’t want it because it wasn’t my birthday yet.
‘Do you want some hot milk?’
I nodded and followed her slowly downstairs to the kitchen. It was dark everywhere, because the power had been cut and none of the light switches worked. I sat up at the table with my mother and drank the frothy milk she had prepared and poured into my favourite mug – it was patterned all over with coloured dots and I used it for every drink. After being led back upstairs to my room I climbed into bed, pulled the covers over my head and fell back to sleep.
In the morning I was woken by my father and told there would be no school that day. Looking out of my bedroom window, I could see broken roof tiles and dustbin lids scattered over the street and people talking in small groups and shaking their heads.
Downstairs, the family was crowded in the kitchen looking out on the garden at the back of the house. The large tree at the bottom of the garden had been ripped out of the ground by the storm’s winds, its branches and roots splayed across the grass. It was several weeks before the tree could be sawn up and removed. In the interim I spent many happy hours alone climbing around the tree trunk and hiding among its branches, invariably returning indoors covered in dirt, bugs and scratches.
The house in Hedingham Road was just across the street from my school. I could see the teachers’ car park from my bedroom window, which made me feel safe. Every day after school I would run to my bedroom to watch the cars drive away. I counted them one by one as they left, and remembered each number plate. Only once the last cars had gone did I climb down and go downstairs for supper.
My most vivid memory of that house is of washed nappies drying on the fire and of babies on my parents’ laps crying for milk. A year after the move my mother gave birth for the sixth time, to twins. Maria and Natasha were a welcome addition to the family for my mother, who with four sons and only one daughter until then had been very much hoping for girls to help even out the gender ratio. When my mother came back from the hospital she called me downstairs from my room to see my new baby sisters. It was July – the height of summer – and I could tell she was hot because some of the hairs at the front of her brow were stuck to her forehead. My father told me to sit down on the settee in the living room and to keep my back straight. Then, slowly, he collected the babies in his arms and brought them over to me and placed them carefully so that I held one in each arm. I looked down at them; they had fat cheeks and tiny fingers and were dressed in matching pink tops with little plastic buttons. One of the buttons was undone, so I did it up.
The size of our family brought its own set of challenges. Bathtime was always a rushed and crowded affair. Every Sunday evening at six o’clock my father would roll up his sleeves and call the boys (myself and my brothers Lee, Steven and Paul) to the bathroom for our weekly ablutions. I hated bathtime: having to share the bath with my brothers, having hot soapy water poured from a jug over my hair and face, my brothers splashing each other, the heat of the steam that filled the room. I often cried but my parents insisted that I bathe with the others. With so many people in one house, hot water was at a premium.
So, too, was money. With five children under the age of four, my parents both stayed at home to help raise the family. The absence of a wage-earner put a lot of pressure on my mother and my father; arguments over what and where and when to spend became more and more common. Even so, my parents did everything they could to ensure we children were never without such things as food, clothes, books or toys. My mother made bargain hunting in the local charity and secondhand shops and markets into an art, while my fa
ther proved himself very handy around the house. Together they made a formidable team.
I stayed away as much as I could manage from the daily hubbub; the bedroom I shared with my brother Lee was where my family knew to find me, no matter what the time of day. Even in summer, when my brothers and sisters were running around together in the sunshine outside, I remained seated on the floor in my room with my legs crossed and my hands in my lap. The carpet was thick and lumpy and clay-red; I often rubbed the back of my hands against its surface because I liked the feel of its texture on my skin. During warm weather the sunlight poured into my room, brightly tingeing the many specks of dust swimming in the air around me as they merged into a single pattern of freckled light. As I sat still and silent for hour after hour, I diligently watched the wash of different hues and colours ebb and flow across the walls and furniture of my room with the day’s passage; the flow of time made visual.
Knowing my obsession with numbers, my mother gave me a book of mathematical puzzles for children that she had spotted in a second-hand shop. I remember this was around the time I started primary school, because Mr Thraves – my teacher – told me off if I brought the book into class with me. He thought I spent too much time thinking about numbers and not enough time participating with the rest of the class, and of course he was right.
One of the exercises in the book read like this: There are twenty-seven people in a room and each shakes hands with everyone else. How many handshakes are there altogether?
When I read the exercise I closed my eyes and imagined two men inside a large bubble, then I imagined a half-bubble stuck to the side of the larger bubble with a third person inside it. The pair in the large bubble shook hands with each other, then each with the third man in the half-bubble. That meant three handshakes for three people. Then I imagined a second half-bubble stuck to the other side of the larger bubble with a fourth person in it. Then the pair in the large bubble needed to each shake hands with him too, and then the half-bubble men shake hands with each other. That would make six handshakes between four people. I continued in this way, imagining two more men in two other half-bubbles, until there were six in all and fifteen handshakes between them. The sequence of handshakes looked like this:
1, 3, 6, 10, 15 …
And I realised that they were triangular numbers. These are numbers that can be arranged to form a triangle when you represent them as a series of dots, like so:
Triangular numbers are formed like this: 1+2+3+4+5 … where 1+2 = 3 and 1+2+3 = 6 and 1+2+3+4 = 10 etc. You might notice that two consecutive triangular numbers make a square number e.g. 6+10 = 16 (4 × 4) and 10+15 = 25 (5 × 5). To see this, visually rotate the six so that it fits into the top right corner above the ten.
Having realised that the answer to the handshakes puzzle was a triangular number, I spotted a pattern that would help me to workout the solution. First of all I knew that the first triangular number – one – starts at two people, the fewest needed for one handshake. If the sequence of triangular numbers starts at two people, then the twenty-sixth number in the sequence would coincide with the number of handshakes generated by twenty-seven people shaking hands with each other.
Then I saw that ten, the fourth number in the sequence, has the relationship with four: 4+1 × 4/2, and this held for all the numbers in the sequence; for example fifteen, the fifth triangular number, = 5 + 1 × 5/2. So the answer to the puzzle is equivalent to 26+1 × 26/2 = 27 × 13 = 351 handshakes.
I loved doing these puzzles; they stretched me in a way that the maths I was taught in school did not. I spent hours at a time reading and working through the questions, whether in class, the playground or my room at home. Within its pages I found a sense of both calm and pleasure and for a while the book and I became inseparable.
One of the greatest sources of frustration for my parents was my obsessive collecting of different things, such as the shiny, brown conkers that fell in autumn in large quantities from huge trees that dotted a long road near our house. Trees were a source of fascination for me from as far back as I could remember; I loved rubbing the palms of my hands into the coarse, wrinkled bark and pressing the tips of my fingers along its furrows. The falling leaves formed spirals in the air, like the spirals I saw when I did divisions in my head.
My parents didn’t like me to go out on my own, so I collected the conkers with my brother Lee. I didn’t mind – he was an extra pair of hands. I scooped each conker up from the ground in my fingers and pressed its smooth, round shape into the hollow of my palm (a habit I have to this day – the tactile sensation acts as a kind of comforter, though nowadays I use coins or marbles). I stuffed my pockets one by one with the conkers until each was bulging full. It was like a compulsion, I just had to collect every conker I could see and put them all together in one place. I pulled my shoes and socks off and filled them with conkers too, walking barefoot back to the house with my hands and arms and pockets crammed full to overflowing.
Back at the house, I poured the conkers out onto the floor in my room and counted them over and over. My father came up with a plastic bin bag and made me count them into it. I spent hours each day collecting the conkers and bringing them back to my room and the rapidly filling sack in the corner. Eventually my parents, fearful that the weight of amassed conkers might damage the ceiling of the room below mine, took the sack out to the garden. They indulged my obsession, allowing me to continue to play with them in the garden, but I was not to bring them into the house in case I left any on the floor for my baby sisters to choke on. As the months went by, my interest eventually waned and the conkers became mouldy, until finally my parents arranged for them to be taken away to the local tip.
A short time afterwards came an obsessive interest in collecting leaflets, of all different sizes. They were frequently pushed through our letterbox with the local newspaper or the morning’s post and I was fascinated by their shiny feel and symmetrical shape (it didn’t matter what was being advertised – the text was of no interest to me). My parents were quick to complain of the precariously stacked piles that accumulated in every drawer and on every cupboard shelf in the house, especially as they poured out onto the floor every time a cupboard door was opened. As with the conkers, my leaflet mania gradually faded over time, much to my parents’ relief.
When my behaviour was good I was rewarded with pocket money. For example, if there were leaflets on the floor I was asked to pick them up and put them back in the drawer. In return, my parents gave me small value coins, lots of them, because they knew how much I loved circles. I spent hours painstakingly stacking the coins, one atop another, until they resembled shining, trembling towers each up to several feet in height. My mother always asked for lots of small change at the shops she went to, so that I always had a ready supply of coins for my towers. Sometimes I would build several piles of equal height around me in the shape of a circle and sit in the middle, surrounded on all sides by them, feeling calm and secure inside.
When the Olympic Games came to Seoul in South Korea in September 1988, the many different sights and sounds on the television screen, unlike anything I had seen before, riveted me. With 8,465 participants from 159 countries it was the largest games in history. There were so many extraordinary visuals: of the swimmers pulling at the glistening, foamy water, their goggled heads bobbing rhythmically up and down with every stroke; the sprinters racing down the lanes, their brown, sinewy arms and legs reduced to a blur; gymnasts springing and twisting and somersaulting in the air. I was engrossed by the television Olympic coverage and watched it as much as I could from the living room, no matter the sport or event.
It was a piece of good fortune when my teacher asked the class to write out an assignment based on the Games in Seoul. I spent the next week cutting and gluing hundreds of photos of the athletes and events from newspapers and magazines onto coloured cardboard sheets, my father helping me with the scissors. The choice of how to organise the different cuttings was made by a logic that was entirely vi
sual: athletes dressed in red were pasted onto one sheet, those in yellow were put on another, those in white on a third, and so on. On smaller sheets of lined paper I wrote out in my best handwriting a long list of the names of all the countries I found mentioned in the newspapers with participants in the Games. I also wrote a list of all the different events, including Taekwondo – Korea’s national sport – and table tennis, which made its Olympic debut in Seoul. There were also lists of statistics and scores, including event points, race times, records broken and medals won. In the end, there were so many sheets of cuttings and written pages that my father had to hole-punch each one and tie them together with string. On the front cover I drew a picture of the Olympic rings in their colours of blue, yellow, black, green and red. My teacher gave me top marks for the amount of time and effort I had put into the project.
Reading about the many different countries represented at the Olympic Games made me want to learn more about them. I remember borrowing one book from the library that was about different languages from around the world. Inside was a description and illustration of the ancient Phoenician alphabet. It dates from around 1000 BC and is thought to have led to the formation of many of the alphabet systems of the modern world, including Hebrew, Arabic, Greek and Cyrillic. Like Arabic and Hebrew, Phoenician is a consonantal alphabet, containing no symbols for vowel sounds; these had to be deduced from context. Whole words were usually written from right to left. I was fascinated by the distinctive lines and curves of the different letters and even began filling notepad after notepad with long sentences and stories exclusively in the Phoenician script. Using coloured pieces of chalk, I covered the inside walls of our garden shed with my favourite words composed entirely of the Phoenician letters. Below is my name, ‘Daniel’, in Phoenician:
Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant Page 6