Again and always, it helped that we had other children. More often, parents of autistic children are less lucky; the disorder seems, like many others, to pick out the first-born. But we had watched three different children learn to talk in their three differing ways, and we had learned how to talk to little children. Little normal children, that is — obviously it could not be the same for Elly, who heard almost nothing that we said. But it could not be so very different either — after all, the range of what one can reasonably say to very small children is not great. With Elly the range was all downward towards zero. Yet it was plain that it must never reach there. We must not chatter to Elly, for a constant background of noise is more easily ignored than single, occasional sounds — and to Elly, all speech was noise. But whether or not she seemed to hear us, we must talk.
We tried to talk simply and directly, waiting, if possible, until Elly was already looking in our direction. We spoke as clearly as we could. We avoided long sentences. We used her own vocabulary as far as possible, little as she appeared to comprehend it. We tried not to use more than one term for the same thing. We were faithful in naming objects that Elly used or played with or merely focused on, at the moment of focus, although months turned into years and she acquired only a pathetic fraction of the hundreds we named. Deliberately, we introduced our games and activities by words; in fact, at four, the bulk of her thirty-one-word ‘vocabulary’ consisted not of simple object-words, but stock responses to familiar activities, like the noise she made for ‘there she is’ in peekaboo, or the ‘whee’ as she went down the slide. We experimented with varying loudness and softness - a loud sound, close b
But what is ‘really’? ‘You have to admit,’ I said, ‘that if she can do things like that, it's striking that she doesn’t understand anything you say.’ And of course she had shown no signs she knew Joann was in the room. She heard me rarely enough; she almost never seemed to hear a stranger.
But Joann was no ordinary stranger. She knew things I did not - the techniques she had had to find to break through to her sluggish, defective little son, who was apparently so different from our deft Elly. Joann was highly coloured, gay, vivid, aggressive, larger than life. She shouted at Elly — not words, but nonsense syllables: Ba-ba! La-la! And Elly heard her. Instead of shrinking, as perhaps should have been expected, she looked at her and laughed. Months after, she was still saying ‘La-la!’
But speech is not the only kind of meaningful sound. There is also music. One of the best arguments against genuine deafness in Elly was that early on she had shown signs that she could hear music. The ninth entry on her vocabulary list (age two) was a word only by courtesy. It was a sound, and it had a consistent referent, but it was in fact ah imitation of music. When I sat down at the piano, Elly would say ‘daddle-addle-addle’ and move my hand to C #. It was by that that I understood her; I would not otherwise have caught on to the idea that ‘daddle-addle- addle’ represented the two repeated notes in the left-hand part of Mozart’s C-major Sonata, the almost-trill that provides the background when the second theme comes in. But as so often with Elly, nothing came of this early response. She abandoned the word and lost interest in the music, to which she had in any case been attracted not by the pretty theme but by the repetitive notes. Nor did she take an interest in anything else I played. It was not until the summer she was three, a full year later, that I noticed any response to music again.
As with Joann’s syllables, this was something she did not learn from me. Though I sang to her regularly, and though some of her own sounds were not unmusical, she had never herself sung any tune I could recognize. But on a visit to friends-it lasted a week and was a distinct break in Elly’s usual routine — their teenage daughter sang to Elly ‘Row, row, row your boat.’ She made of it a rocking, pushing game that pleased Elly, who continued to sing it for a few weeks after her return home. She sang it all the way through — we could even recognize the word ‘row’. Then it joined Mozart in limbo. We still sang it, of course, and rocked and played the game, but as far as Elly was concerned it was gone.
We got a folk-song record that fall, simple, direct songs a child would enjoy, and Elly seemed to like it well enough. We played it often; it had about twelve songs on it. That January, when she was three and a half, I thought — I was almost sure — I heard her singing one of them, a Scottish folk song, ‘Three Craws Sat Upon a Wall.’ To reinforce and encourage, I began softly to sing along with her. I should have known better; I knew well enough from other experience how important it was not to seem to notice when Elly made a step forward. Elly stopped at once as I began to sing.
But my helpful meddling had delayed her singing, not destroyed it. After six weeks she sang it again all through, I not being so foolish a second time. A new readiness was on its way. By March of that year she was singing five distinct songs, including one tune she had invented, and she had reactivated ‘Row, row.’ She sang them well. Even her first ‘Row, row’ six months before had been as good as the best of her siblings at her age; now, as she sang more freely, her intervals grew exact, her rhythm perfect. And as a year earlier she had begun to acknowledge the simple desire for food, now she found a way to acknowledge a more subtle one. Not by speaking, of course, or by singing herself — instead she would put a gentle hand on my lips to indicate she wanted me to sing. Which was progress as thrilling as the song itself.
We had kept in touch with Dr Blank. That spring he suggested we get Elly a record-player, a 45-r.p.m. with a thick spindle a small child could handle easily. Of course that was not necessary: the first day we got the machine, a conventional one, Elly changed the records alone and meticulously returned each record to its proper album, keeping track of them, I suppose, by the colours of the labels and the configurations of printing they bore. I had intended to wait until next day to show her how to switch the machine off and on. After all, Elly had mastered the light-switch only recently, and one could not expect her to learn much at a time. But while I was still downstairs I heard the record-player going up in Elly’s room and found she had needed no teaching. As often, it seemed a question of values - what thought important, she was able to learn as fast as any normal child.
That year, music was important. In part her experience of it was discouraging; it had that same obsessive character that we had observed take over all her new skills. She played The Threepenny Opera every day for two solid months; I was thankful she had picked music that could wear well. But the obsessiveness was not everything. We soon realized that her new ability to sing was not one more repetitive and closed autistic activity. It was providing an unexpected avenue to communication.
We had laid the groundwork for this a year before, quite without knowing it. My husband and I both sing readily. We have always sung to our children. We sang to Elly — more, perhaps, because we talked less. We have always made up little songs to fit recurring situations; like many parents, we had a good-night song, and others of which we were scarcely conscious. One of these was a car song; to the simplest of tunes, we sang.
In this little verse, we could substitute for ‘mama’ the name of any member of the family who happened to be along, and we imagined that this might help Elly learn them, although she gave no sign that this hope was anything but empty. But one never knows what buildings will rise on one’s foundations. Elly was nearly five before she learned anyone’s name, but ‘Riding in the car’ was one of her first songs. Surprisingly, she sang it first not when riding in the car, but one day after I had merely spoken the words. This was the beginning of a curious and encouraging development; what we came to call Elly’s leitmotifs. We became aware that this strange child who could not take in the simplest word could absorb a tune and make it do duty for an idea.
Tunes became words for Elly. ‘Ring around a rosy’ was the first. She was three and three quarters that spring, and she had been playing the game for many months. Now her new musical alertness picked up the tune. As soon as it did, she extended it spontaneously to a picture of children in a ring, then to a garland of flowers, and finally to the unadorned figure of a circle. The song — shortened to its first few notes — for more than a year remained her word for ‘circle’ and the cluster of ideas around it, functioning far more reliably than any of her actual words.
Other leitmotifs followed. ‘Happy birthday’ equalled cake and, by extension, candles and fire. ‘Rockabye baby’ went for any rocking motion. The ascending and descending notes of the scale indicated stairs. We found we could
