Speaking With the Angel

by Nick Hornby

  SPEAKING WITH THE ANGEL

  Edited, and with an introduction by

  NICK HORNBY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction by Nick Hornby

  PMQ : Robert Harris

  The Wonder Spot : Melissa Bank

  Last Requests : Giles Smith

  Peter Shelley : Patrick Marber

  The Department of Nothing : Colin Firth

  I’m the Only One : Zadie Smith

  NippleJesus : Nick Hornby

  After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned : Dave Eggers

  Luckybitch : Helen Fielding

  The Slave : Roddy Doyle

  Catholic Guilt (You Know You Love It) : Irvine Welsh

  Walking into the Wind : John O’Farrell

  Editor’s Notes

  TreeHouse

  For Danny Hornby

  Introduction

  Soon after I had decided to ask some the writers I knew and admired to contribute to this book, I read an interview with Bono in the Guardian, in which he talked about the Jubilee 2000 campaign, aimed at reducing the Third World’s debt to the West. ‘It’s bigger than anything I will ever have anything to do with again as long as I live,’ he said. ‘So if I can open doors simply because I’m a celebrity, then I’ll use that for all it’s worth.’ So far, his efforts have helped to remove $100 billion from the tab.

  The interview brought me up short. I’m not Bono, of course, and I suspect that it would be considerably harder for me to open the door of the Oval Office than it was for him, but even so … Third World Debt! $100 billion! TreeHouse, the charity to which you have just donated a pound (unless you’ve been sent a review copy, in which case you can send some money using the form at the back of this book), is a small – at the moment, a very small – school for severely autistic children, and one of its pupils is my son. Luckily, I don’t have to justify myself to you, because all you’ve done is buy a book that you wanted to read, a book containing a dozen or so new stories by some of your favourite authors, and your donation was, I hope, incidental. But I certainly owe those authors an explanation, and so this introduction is aimed at them. You can read it if you like, but I don’t mind if you skip it. You’ll get your money’s-worth anyway.

  Perhaps I should begin by explaining that my son Danny won’t benefit from Speaking with the Angel. (I’ve pinched the title, by the way, from Ron Sexsmith, whose first album contains a song of that name which seems to me to be heart-meltingly relevant.) Danny’s fine, he’s sorted – which is one of the reasons why I wanted to put this book together in the first place. He is, in many ways (and if one excludes the huge slice of ill-luck that befell him in the first place), a lucky little boy, and though I am in a financial position to ensure that his luck continues, I am not able to spread that luck around, not as much as I would like to. Danny’s good fortune is located in his attendance at TreeHouse, and, at the moment, very few autistic children are able to do the same. Indeed, very few autistic children are able to attend any school designed to meet their needs: there is a catastrophic underprovision of places in Britain. A TES survey in 1996 found that there were three thousand specialist places for seventy-six thousand kids, twenty-six thousand of whom were classed as severely autistic.

  If you are a parent, then, your choices are unattractive. You can drive yourself mad by chasing after one of those three thousand places – a twenty-five-to-one shot, and almost certain to involve a move from one part of the country to another; or you can stick your child in a school that hasn’t got a clue how to deal with him (he’s probably male, your autistic child, for reasons that still remain obscure); or you can keep him at home and wait, while the precious months and years slip by and you know that all the research points to the urgency of early intervention. Over the last few years, distraught parents have begun to realize that the only response to all this is to found their own school.

  One could put a kind of let’s-do-the-show-here spin on this, and make out that founding your own school is fun, and self-improving, and so on, but of course it’s not any of these things, as you probably suspected. It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare of blackly comical bureaucratic buck-passing, and frantic worry. The parents who set up TreeHouse have done so with minimal help from local authorities – even though some of these local authorities now recognize the school as the best and indeed only alternative for their autistic children – and with no public assistance. (England’s hopeless and ill-advised bid for the 2006 World Cup was eligible for Lottery money, for example, whereas TreeHouse was not.) Danny’s school is now firmly established, but it needs permanent premises, and it needs to grow; we have a waiting list, and a duty to educate as many kids as possible.

  And how do you educate severely autistic children? How do you teach those who, for the most part, have no language, and no particular compulsion to acquire it, who are born without the need to explore the world, who would rather spin round and round in a circle, or do the same jigsaw over and over again, than play games with their peers, who won’t make eye-contact, or copy, and who fight bitterly (and sometimes literally, with nails and teeth and small fists) for the right to remain sealed in their own world? The answer is that you teach them everything, and the absolute necessity of this first-principles approach makes all other forms of education, the approaches that involve reading and writing and all that, look quite frivolous. Danny has to be shown how to copy, how to look, how to make word-shapes with his mouth, how to play with toys, how to draw, how to have fun, how to live and be, effectively, and TreeHouse utilizes a system that makes these elementary skills possible. Danny’s education began with him learning how to bang on a table when prompted to do so, a skill that took him weeks to master. (Table-banging is not a part of the national curriculum, and sometimes debates about what the rest of the nation’s young should study can seem to me preposterously refined.) What’s the point of that? The point of that is hidden in the phrase ‘when prompted to do so’: only when a way has been found to penetrate the autist’s world can any progress be made, and now Danny listens. He can’t understand everything he hears, but at least there is now a sense that for some parts of the day – and for most of the school day – he occupies the same world as his teachers and his peers.

  And he loves his schoolwork. He loves being set small and achievable tasks – to begin with, tasks like touching his nose or sitting down, and then, as he became better attuned to what was required of him, more complicated commands – and he loves the praise (and the crisps and biscuits) that accompany his accomplishments. And my guess is that he is grateful for these assaults on his insularity. He doesn’t want to live the life that he would choose if left to his own devices, with its endless repetitions and routines and patterns – he wants and needs someone to come along and stop him from watching Postman Pat and the Tuba for the one thousandth time, or from doing the same simple jigsaw puzzle fifteen times in an hour (these figures are approximate, of course, but they are not exaggerated). And his mother and father want someone to come along and stop that, too. All parents of autistic children know the terrible cycle of guilt and apathy that comes with the territory: our kids are capable of entertaining themselves for hours at a time if we let them (and sometimes we do, because we’re tired, and maybe despondent), but we know that the entertainment of choice – spinning round and round, lining things up, watching the same videos over and over again – is not healthy or productive. But few of us have the energy to do what Danny’s teachers do. We cannot create scores of different activities each and every day, all of them designed to equip our children to cope better with the lives they are living now, and will live in the future.

  TreeHouse is
unique: its children receive an education unlike anything else that is offered in the UK, which is why those of us involved with the school are so passionate, so evangelical about it. We want TreeHouse to become bigger, and we want other schools like TreeHouse to start sprouting up all over the country, and the only way that’s going to happen is if some of us start shouting. I’m not much of a shouter by nature, but Speaking with the Angel is my way of at least raising my voice. I can see that what is being provided for the majority of these seventy-six thousand children is hopelessly inadequate, and I want to give other parents the same opportunities that Danny has had – or at least help to create a climate wherein these opportunities are regarded as important.

  This probably sounds like a bland if laudable desire, and if so then I have failed properly to describe the difference a school like TreeHouse can make, so let me put it this way. Somewhere in London – somewhere everywhere, but TreeHouse is in London, so that is the place I’d like you to locate this vision – there is a child who slept for maybe five or six hours last night. (He sleeps five or six hours every night, in fact, which means that if he can be kept awake until, say, nine, then he will wake up at two or three.) He is upset and frustrated, so he screams, and his parents, who have maybe slept for three or four hours, feel a mixture of exhaustion and depression and panic – they live in a small flat, and the walls are thin, and they know that they are not the only ones who are disturbed on a nightly basis. It is six hours until one of them starts work (the other would like to work, but in the absence of any suitable school place for the child, it is not possible), by which time the child will have attempted to hurt himself by hitting himself hard and repeatedly on the head, and maybe thrown some food around, and refused to use the toilet and ended up soiling a carpet, and demanded in the only language he has at his disposal (one word, repeated with increasing force and volume) to go out to the park, even though it’s pitch black outside … and then daylight comes, and because the local authorities don’t as yet have a suitable school place for your child (although they’re working on it, they promise, and even right now they are having meetings about possibly starting up a school which may well be open by the time your child is seven or eight or ten), then you’re looking at another ten or twelve or fifteen hours of the same thing, alleviated only by the prospect of the child falling asleep – sleep he shouldn’t really be having, because it will make things worse the next night, but it’s your only time off in the whole day. And there’s nowhere to go, and no one to complain to, and there’s no money in the bank that can be used to buy some respite care, because you’re down to one income anyway …

  And of course, of course, there are other charities, and other problems, some of them worse than this, if such things can be quantified in that way, and other autistic organizations that would kill for the money that this book is going to raise. But I can’t worry about any of that. All I can say is that this book will change a family’s life for the better – a real, specific family, a family currently living the life described above, and if you want, you can write to me c/o Penguin Books and I’ll write back with the name of that family. As a result of Speaking with the Angel, TreeHouse will be able to expand, which means that there will be a couple of extra places for children living precisely the kinds of lives outlined above. And because the teachers there know what they are doing, and have at their disposal ways to make these children happier, more expressive, more confident, less frustrated, then the awful worry and exhaustion of bringing up an autistic child will be made a lot easier for a few lucky parents. Oh, I know it’s not much. But nothing’s much, if you look at it like that, and all that any of us who care about autistic kids can do for the time being is to try to carve a few school places out of nowhere.

  My son has a friend now, a little boy in his class called Toby, whom he loves, and enjoys seeing and spending time with. There are some autistic kids who get no particular pleasure out of seeing or being with their parents, so a friendship of this kind is remarkable, unexpected, a constant joy to those who witness it. And he’s generally calmer, especially in social situations, and he’s beginning to play with his toys, and he’s finally learning how to use a toilet … None of this would have happened if he hadn’t been able to attend this one, particular, special school. So, Robert, Melissa, Giles, Patrick, Colin, Zadie, Dave, Helen, Roddy, Irvine, John: thank you, and I hope this introduction helps you to understand just how much you have done. As for the rest of you: like I said, I’m hoping that you’ll feel you’ve done nothing charitable whatsoever, so never mind all this. Turn the page and get on with the book.

  Nick Hornby, 2000

  PMQ

  ROBERT HARRIS

  PRIME MINISTER: With your permission Mr Speaker, I wish to make a statement to the House regarding certain incidents of a personal nature. Some of these incidents have, in the past few days, entered the public domain in a lurid and garbled form, and a number of my ministerial colleagues have urged me to take the first available opportunity to set the record straight. This, with the indulgence of the House, I now propose to do.

  Incident at the Greenford Park Service Station

  At approximately five o’clock last Friday afternoon I left No. 10 Downing Street as usual to travel to the Prime Minister’s official country residence at Chequers for the weekend. The party consisted of two cars. The advance car contained myself, a duty secretary from the Downing Street staff, a driver, and a protection officer from the Metropolitan Police. The back-up vehicle contained three additional protection officers.

  For several years it has been my practice to take advantage of long car journeys as an opportunity to work. Among the documents which had been prepared for my attention on this occasion was the weekly digest of press coverage compiled for me by my Chief Press Secretary.

  I have arranged for a copy of this document, which carries no security restriction, to be placed in the Library of the House. Honourable Members who consult it will see that it conveys frankly, and with detailed quotation, the whole spectrum of press comment about myself as it had appeared in the previous week’s newspapers. The comment was, as usual, robust; some might say robust in the extreme. However, I have always taken the view that a free press is an essential element of a free society, and that, if you are in public life, you must, as Kipling has it,

  ‘… bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

  Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools …’

  The route taken to Chequers is frequently varied for security reasons, and it is not official policy to disclose it. Therefore I shall not do so now. Suffice it to say that the traffic heading west out of London on this particular evening was unusually heavy, even for a wet Friday evening in the pre-Christmas period, and that, after an hour of travelling, we had managed to proceed only as far along the A40 as the Greenford Roundabout, a distance of some seven miles.

  It was at this point – that is, at approximately 6 p.m. – that I began to feel unwell. The principal symptom was one of acute nausea, brought on, no doubt, by the effort of trying to read in a car which was repeatedly stopping and starting. I needed fresh air. Unfortunately, for security reasons, the windows of my official car are not designed to open. I put aside the press digest and directed my protection officers to pull in to the next available service station, informing them that I needed to use the lavatory. This request was radioed to the back-up car and a few moments later we turned off the A40 on to the forecourt of what I now know to be the Greenford Park Service Station.

  I must emphasize that the responsibility for what followed is mine, and mine alone. No blame should be attached to my protection officers, who behaved throughout in their usual exemplary and professional manner. Having checked that the gentleman’s lavatory was unoccupied, and having secured the area immediately in front of it, it was on my express orders that they remained outside whilst I went inside, locking the door behind me. Nobody else was present.

  Several newspapers have described what fol
lowed as a ‘moment of madness’. It would be more accurate, Mr Speaker, to describe it as a series of small but logical steps, whose cumulative effect was to prove fateful. On entering the cubicle I noticed that behind the lavatory basin was a window. This window was slightly open. By standing on the lavatory seat, I discovered that it was possible to open the window fully. I was thus able to bring my face into contact with some much-needed air. Only then did it occur to me that the aperture was, in fact, just large enough for the insertion of my head and shoulders. As the air was having a beneficial effect, this prospect seemed appealing. Unfortunately I then made what was to prove a regrettable miscalculation with regard to my centre of gravity. Questions have been asked about the failure of my protection officers to hear the noise of my exit via the window, but I can assure the House that the roar of the nearby traffic on the wet road was more than sufficient to drown out any sound I may have made.

  I left the lavatory in a head-first position and it was this, rather than any subsequent event – and contrary to reports in the media – that produced the slight bruising and abrasions still visible on my face and hands.

  It may be that I was rendered temporarily unconscious by my descent. I cannot recall. If I was, it was certainly only for a few moments. Upon rising to my feet, I found myself in a small area, enclosed by walls on three sides. To my left was a gap leading to an automatic car-washing machine. Honourable members will understand that, given the time of year, it was now quite dark. I had also lost a contact lens. Finding the space in which I was standing claustrophobic, and feeling slightly groggy from the effects of my fall, I ventured out along the side of the car wash. As the various diagrams printed in the press have shown, I was now invisible from the forecourt, and it was this route which, as chance would have it, led me away from the garage and out on to a neighbouring street.