It was a bitterly cold January morning in East London. My mother, Jennifer, by then heavily pregnant with me, was sitting and gazing out silently from the only large window in the flat over the narrow, frozen street below. My father, Kevin, a habitual early riser, was surprised to find her awake as he walked in with the day’s paper from the local shop. Worried that something might be wrong, he quietly approached and held her hand. She seemed tired, as she had for the past several weeks, and remained motionless, her gaze fixed and silent. Then slowly she turned to him, her face etched with emotion as her hands hovered gently over her stomach, and said: “Whatever happens, we’ll love him, just love him.” My mother began to cry and my father squeezed her hand in his and nodded silently.
She had always considered herself an outsider as a child; her earliest memories had been of brothers too old to play with her (they had left home while she was still small) and of her own mother and father as quite often stiff and distant. Undoubtedly, she had been loved, but had rarely felt it growing up. Her childhood recollections continued to bristle with emotional ambiguity even thirty years later.
My father had been devoted to my mother from the time he had first met her, through mutual friends, and following a whirlwind romance, they had made a home together. He had little to offer her, so he had thought, but his devotion.
As a child, he had brought up his younger brothers and sisters single-handedly while his mother, divorced from my grandfather, worked away from home for long periods at a time. At the age of ten, my father had taken it upon himself to look after them when the family moved into a hostel for the homeless. There had been little time for school or for the usual hopes and dreams of childhood. He would later recall the day he met my mother as the happiest of his life. Though very different people, they had made the other feel special and, for all the difficulties in their own upbringings, they had wanted nothing less than the same for me.
Days after their emotional conversation, my mother went into labor. Arriving home from work that evening, my father found her wracked with pain. She had waited for him, afraid to go to the hospital without him. He phoned for an ambulance and, his clothes still caked in oil and grease from his sheet metal work, he rushed with my mother to the hospital. The delivery was swift and I came into the world weighing just under six pounds.
It is said that the arrival of a baby changes everything, and my birth certainly changed my parents’ lives forever. I was their first child, so it is perhaps natural that they had invested so much of their hope for the future in me, even before I was born. My mother had spent the months leading up to my birth eagerly combing the advice columns of popular women’s magazines for baby care tips and together with my father had saved specially for a crib.
Yet my mother’s first days with me at the hospital were not as she had imagined them. I cried constantly for hours at a time. It didn’t seem to matter that she held me close to her, stroking my face gently with her fingers; I cried and cried and cried.
The flat where my parents lived was small and I was to sleep in a crib in the corner of their single bedroom. After my arrival from the hospital my parents found it impossible to lay me inside it; I would not sleep and I continued to cry incessantly (my crying remained continuous). I was breast-fed for the next eighteen months; not least because it was one of the very few methods my parents found to help quiet me.
Breast-feeding has long been known to be good for babies, helping to enhance cognitive development and sensory skills as well as the baby’s immune system. It is also thought to be beneficial to the emotional development of children on the autistic spectrum, providing a special opportunity for close physical and emotional contact between mother and child. Research indicates that autistic children who were breast-fed are more responsive, socially adjusted and affectionate than their formula-fed peers.
Another means my parents found to relieve my crying was to give me the sensation of motion. My father regularly rocked me in his arms, sometimes for more than an hour at a time. It was not uncommon for him to have to eat his meals with one hand and hold and rock me with his other arm. He also took me in a carriage for long walks in the street after work, often in the early hours of the morning. The moment the carriage came to a stop I began to bawl again.
It soon didn’t matter whether it was day or night, as my parents’ lives quickly began to revolve around my crying. I must have driven them to distraction. In their despair they often put me in a blanket, my mother holding one end and my father the other, and swung me from side to side. The repetition seemed to soothe me.
That summer, I was christened. Even though my parents weren’t churchgoers themselves, I was their firstborn and they thought it was the right thing to do. All manner of relatives, friends and neighbors attended and the weather was warm and clear. But come the service I cried and cried, drowning out the words spoken during the ceremony. My parents were deeply embarrassed.
My mother’s parents visited us and wondered why it was that I was such a difficult baby. They suggested that my mother not pick me up when I began crying. “He’ll soon wear himself out,” they said. But when my mother followed this advice my crying just became louder and louder.
My parents called the doctor out on many occasions, but each time he would say I was suffering from colic and that I would get better soon. Colic is often referred to as “unexplained crying” where the baby cries longer and louder than average and is harder to console. About one in five babies cry enough to meet the definition of colic. Doctors and scientists have been trying to find the cause behind these babies’ excessive crying for decades. The most recent idea is that most forms of colic are developmental and neurological, arising from the brain, rather than—as many parents assume—the baby’s digestive system. For instance, colicky babies tend to be unusually sensitive to stimulation and are likely to be vulnerable to sensory overload.
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 such excessive crying may be a sign of future behavioral problems. Compared to children who cried normally as babies, at age five children who had cried excessively were found to have poorer eye-hand coordination and to be more likely to be hyperactive 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 severely delayed or even nonexistent).
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 second 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 behavior, however, did not improve. At age two I began to walk up to a particular wall in the living room and bang my head repetitively 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 over. 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 a specialist. 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 understimulated, and she 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 center.
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 sandbox in which I spent long periods of the day picking and pulling at the sand, fascinated by the individual grains. Then came a fascination with hourglasses (the nursery had several of different sizes) and I remember watching the trickling, grainy 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 realize 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 behavior 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 recognized 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 neighbors 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 stepped 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 colored 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 behavior, because they never tried to make me play with the other children. Perhaps they hoped that I would begin to acclimate 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 miss a turn. To his surprise I began howling in my buggy. I wasn’t yet three, but I had learned every detail of the journey from home to the nursery center. 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 center 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 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 center or back at home. When I did hold a toy, like my rabbit, I would hold 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 favorite 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 he 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 colors 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 to them. It also proved a useful way of encouraging better behavior. 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 neighbors, including an elderly couple that 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, tomatoes, strawberries, rhubarb and kohlrabi. 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 share 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 surrounded 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 colored shapes in my mind.
On one expedition up the stairs with my arms clasping a particularly heavy book, I slipped and fell. The falling motion seemed to fill my mind with rapid flashes of bright and sketchy color, like scattered sunlight. I just sat at the bottom of the stairs, dazzled and sore. I didn’t think to call for help but waited for my father to come and see what the noise was. I rarely if ever spoke unless spoken to. After that, my parents started hiding their larger and heavier books from me, afraid that I would fall again and hurt myself badly.
• • •
There was a park close enough to the house to visit on foot so we went there most weekends. My parents tore up slices of bread for me to throw to the ducks. They usually took us early in the mornings when there were few people about. They knew that I was frightened by the presence of lots of people around me. While my brother ran around, I sat on my own on the ground, pulling up the blades of grass and picking the petals off the daisies.
My favorite experience at the park was going on the swings. My father would pick me up and sit me down on the swing and push me gently. When he got tired and stopped pushing me I would shout “More . . . more” until he started pushing again. There was also a merry-go-round, and I sat in the middle of it as my parents stood on either side and slowly moved it along. As the merry-go-round spun again and again I closed my eyes and smiled. It made me feel good.
The road near the park was sometimes noisy as we walked back home. If a passing car made a sudden, loud noise—like a blaring horn—I would stop and throw my hands up and press them hard against my ears. Often the noise was more sudden than it was loud. It was because it was unexpected that it seemed to affect me so much. It is for this reason that I hated balloons and would cower if I saw someone holding one. I was frightened that it would burst suddenly and make a loud and violent noise.
After our move to Blithbury Road, until the age of five I continued my nursery at a local school called Dorothy Barley, named after a sixteenth-century abbess who lived in the area during the reign of Henry VIII. We were often given paper and colored pencils by the nursery assistants and encouraged to draw and color. I always enjoyed this, though I found it difficult to hold the pencil between my fingers and would grip it with my palm. I liked drawing circles of lots of different sizes. The circle was my favorite shape and I drew it over and over again.
The nursery had a box in the corner full of lots of things to play with. My favorites were the colored beads I found; I would hold them in my hands and shake them to watch them vibrate around my palms. If we were given cardboard rolls to play with (to make binoculars or a telescope with, for example) I would drop the beads through the roll, fascinated that the beads dropped through one end and fell out of the other. If I found a tub or jar, I would drop the beads inside and then empty it and start over.
On one wall was a shelf with a selection of books. My favorite was The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I loved the holes in the pages and the bright, round illustrations. There was a reading corner nearby where the children sat on a large mat around the assistant and listened to a book being read to them. On one such occasion, I was sitting near the back with my legs crossed and my head down, absorbed in my own world. I didn’t hear a word of what was being said. Instead, without realizing it, I began to hum. As I looked up, the assistant had stopped reading and everyone was staring at me. I stopped humming and put my head back down and the reading resumed.
I don’t remember feeling lonely at the nursery, probably because I was so absorbed in my books and beads and circles. Slowly I think the feeling was creeping over me that I was different from the other children, but for some reason it didn’t bother me. I didn’t yet feel any desire for friends; I was happy enough playing by myself.
When the time sometimes came to play social games, such as musical chairs, I refused to join in. I was frightened by the thought of the other children touching me as they shoved one another for one of the remaining seats. No amount of gentle persuasion by the supervisors would work. Instead I was allowed to stand by one of the walls and watch the other children play. So long as I was left to myself I was happy.
The moment I came home from the nursery I would always go upstairs to my room. Whenever I was feeling tired or upset I would crawl into the darkness under the bed and lie there. My parents learned to tap quietly at the door before coming in to see how I was. My mother always made me tell her about my day at the nursery. She wanted to encourage me to speak, because I was so quiet so much of the time.
My room was my sanctuary, my personal space where I felt most comfortable and happy. I spent so much of my day there that my parents took to coming up and sitting with me in order to spend time with me. They never seemed impatient with me.
As I sit here now and write about those early years, I’m amazed to think how much my parents did for me even as they must have gotten so little back at the time. Hearing my parents’ recollections of my earliest years has been a magical experience for me; to see for myself in hindsight the extent of their role in making me the person I am today. In spite of all my many problems, all the tears and tantrums and other difficulties, they loved me unconditionally and devoted themselves to helping me—little by little, day by day. They are my heroes.