Soon after my children had both passed
the age of 10 and their mother's absence was a settled fact, the
moment came when I had to tell them about their autism. Together with
the person who had mentored them for the two years since Magteld
died, I sat down and explained, gently, that there were some things
they were good at and other things they found difficult, and that the
common root of all these elements was autism. A few days later one of
them recapped the conversation, telling me that both he and his
brother had autism, before pausing and saying: “And what do you
have, Dad?”
Their mentor and I both laughed, but it
revived a question in me that I had been asking for the best part of
a decade, since my older son had been diagnosed. Though lots of
things have been put forward as the cause of autism, from vaccines to
refrigerator mothers, everybody agrees that it doesn't strike at
random. So where did my children's autism come from?
A boy runs across a lawn in a
sprawling herd of boys drifting towards a school playing field. He
holds his arms stiffly by his sides and traverses the grass in
pursuit of one of the teachers. If you look closely you can see he is
holding his shorts by his thumbs, and then you realise that he isn't
wearing the shorts at all, but holding them stretched across his
waist. This accounts for the sight of his butt-cheeks flickering in
the sunlight as he scuttles by on his spindly legs. He reaches the
teacher, stops and asks, panting: 'Sir, I couldn't find my gym
shorts; am I allowed to wear these?' The teacher looks startled,
gulps, then regains his composure and scowls at the boy. 'For God's
sake, yes. Put them on.' The boy climbs into his shorts and runs on,
alone, still confused – he is perpetually confused – but glad to
have solved another of life's puzzles. So many rules, so many ways to
break them: how old will he have to be before he knows them all?
It's strange to be diagnosed with
autism at the age of 43. It is at once a confirmation of something
you long suspected and a revelation. It changes nothing at all, apart
from the entire course of your life history. It forces you to look at
yourself in a different light even though you're still fundamentally
the same person.
An example: a common characteristic of
autistic people is what's known as stimming: the rocking movements
and nervous tics and little grunts that are often deployed to quell
the constant sense of discomfort. I'd never considered myself to be a
stimmer, but shortly after my diagnosis I saw someone on Twitter
describe how he would screw up his eyes and wince in something
approximating pain after socialising, usually in a private moment
such as driving home. And then I remembered the yelps that escaped
from my mouth, to my wife's alarm and distress, as an awkward social
encounter replayed itself in my mind with jarring intensity. The
incessant drumming with my fingers; how I could spend an hour by
myself in a room, throwing and catching a ball off a wall. The way I
used to walk along streets fixed on my feet and the task of
distributing the steps equitably: first left-right, then right-left;
then right-left-left-right;
right-left-left-right-left-right-right-left;
right-left-left-right-left-right-right-left-left-right-right-left-right-left-left-right;
and so on until either my memory hit its limit or I tripped over my
own feet.
The boy holding his shorts in the
anecdote is, as you've probably guessed, my eight-year-old self. As a
child I was constantly told I lacked common sense. When I started at
boarding school I was assigned a guide, and at break times faithfully
trudged a few paces behind him wherever he went, until he stopped,
turned round and asked why I was following him like a goat. 'You're
my guide,' I replied with a straight face. Once I wet myself in class
because there was a queue at the teacher's desk, but you weren't
allowed to leave the room without asking permission, and while I
stood waiting my turn my bladder gave way. Teachers berated my
laziness – if I could manage Latin composition but let the contents
of my pencil case go astray, it could only be because I was indolent.
As a result I was consistently marked down for effort, which only
deepened my confusion: if I was getting the answers right, what was
the point of trying harder?
Games afternoons were mostly spent
shivering on the edge of a football field, hoping nobody would be
cruel enough to pass or kick the ball in my direction. My
co-ordination was atrocious; I could barely throw a ball, still less
catch one, and the intervention of a stick or racket just magnified
the problem in the same way that children who struggled with
arithmetic were destined to be bamboozled by algebra. On
cross-country runs I would jog along at the back of the field with
the fattest boy in the class until the other children were out of
sight, at which point we would slow to a walk. Actually I didn't so
much walk as shuffle, like an injured duck, my feet splayed, and
stared down at my shoes as the laces unravelled (that particular
problem was solved when an alert maths teacher realised I was
inserting an extra twist before tying the bow).
“I put my difficulties engaging with people down to laziness and thought I just needed to try harder”
I called this blog Autistic Dad, and
not by accident. When my children were diagnosed I saw plenty of
familiar traits in their behavioural idiosyncrasies. At first I saw it as a way to connect with their autism, but the more I observed, the louder the echoes became. If I play a board game
with one of my sons his teddies must join in to make up the numbers,
just as mine did 30 years earlier. He sets out games systematically,
taking turns with his teddy bears in strict rotation, using a sheet
of paper to keep score; well into my teens, I played out a snooker
tournament on my parents' billiard table by myself, with 24 imaginary
players in three divisions, writing down the scores and keeping a
league table updated. When I finally took an interest in sport it was
athletics, a sport that runs on statistics. I learned world records,
European records and British records by heart. No effort was
required: they simply transferred from the television screen to my
head as if by osmosis. I pored over record books until I could recite
not just the record and the name of the holder but the date and
location of the historic event (this included the women's 200 metres,
at that time held jointly by two East Germans, Marita Koch and Heike
Drechsler, who had each run the record time of 21.71 seconds twice).
The first time I got seriously drunk my housemates marvelled at the
fact that even with my pubescent brain mired in a swamp of gin and
coke, I could reel off these facts without hesitation.
Interest in sport did at least motivate
me to improve my co-ordination and take up distance running as a
hobby that I still pursue today. It was a slow process, and I was
never going to break the concentration of a Premier League football
scout, but the outright clumsiness that plagued me in childhood is
largely gone. So, too, are many of the other outward signs of what I
now recognise as autism. I devised all kinds of camouflaging
techniques to get by. As a student I was the fastest drinker in the
pub, because putting the glass to my mouth exempted me from talking
to people. At work I thrived in roles where I could operate
autonomously, with the minimum of interaction with other people.
While most colleagues loathed the prospect of a day's court
reporting, I found it blissful to spend three uninterrupted hours in
a room where phones had to be switched off and all I had to do was
sit taking shorthand notes, to be condensed into a report during the
one-hour lunch break. The only downside was that nerve-wracking
moment at the end of the session when I would have to approach the
advocates for both parties, look them in the eye and ask them to
spell out their names for my notebook.
You might be wondering why on earth an
autistic person would try to make a living in journalism. Newsrooms
have a reputation as noisy, stress-soaked places where extroverts
prevail, not to mention gossips, manipulators, sociopaths and office
tyrants – all things that don't generally combine well with autism.
A lot of people who, like me, are propelled into journalism by
literary ambitions drop out because producing good hack writing under
pressure is a very different discipline, just as baking cakes for a
patisserie is nothing like cooking three-course meals in a restaurant
kitchen. But there are plenty of niches for quiet, industrious types
with a love of structure and attention to detail. These days, as
journalism has become an increasingly office-bound job, the
clattering phones have been mostly silenced by email and stories are
as likely to emerge from a pile of data as an off-the-record
briefing, it's arguably never had more opportunities for autistic
people. But for me, setting out as a cub reporter, it was a tough
baptism. Telephone interviews were especially strenuous and
frequently reduced me to a stuttering, shrivelling wreck. Somehow I
prevailed and got a lucky break inside a year when a job came up as a
district reporter with the Press Association. I worked mainly alone,
from home, spent as much time as I could scribbling away in
courtrooms, and no longer had the stress of colleagues overhearing my
phone calls. The great thing about agency reporting was that you were
valued more for your dexterity with the facts than your ability to
generate stories by cultivating contacts, which was the inverse of
regular reporting.
And so, after a fashion, I prevailed.
But it was tough and often draining work. I was driven by a need to
prove myself, to show I could fit in and deal with a regular job. I
put my difficulties engaging with other people down to laziness
(because doesn't everybody have to deal with unpleasant people
sometimes?) and that I just needed to try harder, as they kept
telling me at school. I was missing something other people had, some
magic key that got them access to parties and nights out in the pub.
This urge to graft the skills that others flaunted effortlessly, like
clicking their fingers (something else I've never been able to do)
even drove me into a brief, abortive career in stand-up comedy. If I
could stand on a stage and address a roomful of people without
blinking or hesitating – perhaps then, Geppetto, I would be
a real boy at last! On my fifth attempt the compere tactfully informed me
there was some good work to be had writing jokes for radio shows. I
took the friendly hint about being a better writer than performer and
retired from the stage.
One of the first benefits of a
diagnosis in my forties is that I feel liberated from this manic
compulsion for self-flagellation. I haven't suddenly become autistic:
I was always autistic, and the diagnosis is a prism that lets me view
my life differently. I don't feel ashamed of my social awkwardness,
or persist in the belief that it's a deficiency that I need to fix.
Instead I can look back and see that I've developed a system of quite
sophisticated coping mechanisms. I can reconcile myself to the fact
that some forms of interaction, like job interviews or networking
events, will always be difficult and forgive myself if I don't always
succeed. Instead of constantly trying to suppress or overcome my
autistic traits, I can concentrate on looking for ways to accommodate
them. In that sense I'm still learning. Most importantly, I finally
feel I can be a good role model for my children, because experience
has shown me that autism doesn't condemn you to a life spent feeling
isolated, unloved and miserable. There are some things you're good at
and others you find difficult; the trick is to learn to live with
them.