history>‘D’). I put the books into boxes, with all the books in the correct order, and positioned them around the room for my brothers and sisters to browse and read. Whenever one of them wanted to take a book from the room, I would take the ticket out and put it in a jar and give them another piece of paper with a time on it for them to return the book by. During the summer holidays my parents allowed us to keep the books together in the boxes with their tickets, though at other times we had to remove all the tickets at the end of the game and help to put the books back on the different shelves and tables around the house.
Sometimes when I played with my brothers and sisters I would walk over to them and touch their necks with my index finger because I liked the sensation, which was warm and reassuring. I had no sense that what I was doing was annoying to them or socially inappropriate and it was only when my mother told me so that I stopped, though occasionally I would still touch a person’s neck if I became very excited and the sense of touch was a way for me to communicate that excitement to those around me. I found it difficult to understand the concept that people had their own personal space that was not to be entered and that had to be respected at all times. I had no idea that my behaviour could be irritating and intrusive and felt hurt when a brother or sister became angry with me for what I considered to be no reason.
There were lots of things that I found difficult, like brushing my teeth. The scratchy noise of teeth being brushed was physically painful to me, and when I walked past the bathroom I would have to put my hands over my ears and wait for the noise to stop before I could do anything else. Because of this extreme sensitivity I brushed my teeth only for short periods and then often only with the intervention of my parents. I was very fortunate that I rarely had toothache, probably in large part because I drank lots of milk and did not eat much sugary food. The problem continued for several years and led to frequent arguments with my parents who could not understand why I would not brush my teeth without them having to compel me and often brought the toothbrush and paste into my room, not leaving until I had used them. It was not until the start of puberty that I realised that I had to find a way of brushing my teeth regularly. In particular, my brothers and sisters and the children at school were noticing that my teeth were discoloured and teased me about it, which made me more and more reluctant to even open my mouth to talk because of the insults that would ensue. Eventually I tried putting cotton wool into my ears so that I could not hear the noise as I brushed my teeth. I also watched the small television that I had in my room at the same time to take my mind off the fact that I was using the toothbrush; otherwise it would make me gag. Together these small efforts helped me to clean my teeth from day to day. On my first visit to the dentist in many years I used cotton wool in my ears to help block out the sounds of the drill and other equipment. Nowadays I am able to brush my teeth twice each day without difficulty. I use an electric toothbrush, which doesn’t produce the painful scratchy noise that manual brushing does.
Learning how to tie my shoelaces was just as much of a problem for me. However hard I tried, I just could not get my hands to perform the manoeuvres shown to me over and over again by my parents. Eventually my mother bought me a toy – a large Mother Hubbard boot with thick, coarse shoelaces – to help me practise. I spent many hours practising, often until my hands were red and itching from prolonged contact with the boot’s laces. In the meantime, my father did my shoes up for me every morning before taking me to school. I was eight before I finally mastered my laces.
Then there was the problem of telling left from right (something I have to concentrate to remember to this day). Not only did my father have to tie my laces until I was eight, he also had to put my shoes on for me first. Sometimes I got frustrated when I tried to put the shoes on myself and would throw them in the heat of a tantrum. My parents had the idea of putting labels – marked ‘L’ and ‘R’ – on each shoe. It worked and I was then finally able to put my shoes on by myself and to understand simple directions a lot better than before.
When I walked, even out on the street, I always kept my head firmly down and watched my feet as they moved. Often I would bump into things and suddenly stop walking. My mother walked with me and kept trying to remind me to bring my head up, but even when I did it would quickly fall back down again. Eventually, she asked me to pick out a point – a fence or a tree or a building – in the distance and to keep watching it as I walked. This simple idea helped me to keep my head up, and over the following months my coordination improved a lot; I stopped walking into things and my confidence grew.
For the Christmas just before my ninth birthday I was given a bicycle as a present, as was my brother Lee. My parents put stabilisers on both bikes, though my brother was able to take his off very quickly whereas mine remained on for many months, even though Lee was more than two years younger than me. I had poor balance and coordination and found it hard to steer and pedal at the same time. I practised by sitting on a chair in the kitchen, holding a long wooden spoon in front of me while trying to move my feet in circles against the legs of the chair. With enough practice, I was able to ride with my brother around the streets close to our home. He would race me, going much too fast, so that I would panic and stumble. Falling off the bike was something I quickly got used to, along with the many scratches and bruises on my hands and legs.
My poor coordination also made learning how to swim a slow and frustrating process; I was the last child in my class to be able to swim even a width of the pool. I was frightened of the water, of being pulled under and of not being able to return to the surface. The pool instructors were sympathetic and gave me armbands and foam blocks to help me float safely, but my difficulty only helped to reinforce the sense that I was different and separate from my peers, who could all swim seemingly effortlessly years before I was finally able to make my first strokes. Only as I approached puberty did I finally and suddenly lose my fear of being in the water and found that I could float and move by myself, without my armbands. The sense of exhilaration was enormous and it felt as though I had taken a huge step forward. My body was finally beginning to do the things that I wanted it to.
It was in my final year at primary school that a new addition came to the class, an Iranian boy called Babak whose parents had fled the Khomeini regime. Babak was intelligent, spoke fluent English and was very good at maths. In him I finally found my first real friend. He was the first person to make any real attempt to look past the things that made me different and instead focus on what we had in common: our love of words and numbers in particular. His family was always very kind to me too – I remember his mother giving me cups of tea to drink while I sat with him in his garden and played Scrabble.
Babak had lots of confidence and he got on well with everyone in the class. It came as no surprise when he was picked to play the lead role in the school’s ambitious production of Sweeney Todd, a gruesome story of a murderous barber whose victims are used to make meat pies. Babak attended rehearsals every day for several weeks and invited me along to watch. I sat on the costume box in the corner, out of sight, and read the lines of dialogue as they were spoken. I attended each and every rehearsal with him. Then on the day of the production, Babak did not appear for the final rehearsal; he was ill and unable to come in. The teachers began to panic and asked if anyone else could fill his role. I realised that from my serial attendance of the rehearsals I had learned every word of the story, and nervously agreed to take part. Come the evening of the performance I recited all the sentences for the character in the correct order, only occasionally missing my place because I found it difficult to listen to the other people on stage and could not easily judge which lines were for the audience and which were for dialogue between the different actors. My parents, who were in the audience, later said I did not show much emotion and kept looking down at the floor, but I had made it to the end at least and that was success enough for them and for me.
6
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.
Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant Page 9