The Siege

increase our communication with her by ourselves suggesting new leitmotifs. She could pick these up easily, as she had never been able to pick up words, and she retained them. ‘London Bridge’ became a bridge motif; the dwarfs’ song from Snow White did duty for ‘dig’. We noticed that though she now sang many songs freely, she never sang her leitmotifs at random or for their own sake as songs. Nor did she sing them musically, like the others, but rapidly, schematically, functionally — only just well enough for them to do their job of communication. Music was serving as her avenue to words, for of course inside each leitmotif was a germ that was wholly verbal. She had first responded with the car tune when I had spoken, not sung, the words. The one musical motif whose verbal content seemed totally to lack connection with its characteristic situation turned out, when at last we understood it, to illustrate the verbal content of Elly’s music more strikingly than any of the others. For years we did not guess why Elly, at four, had sung ‘Alouette’ when we combed her hair after washing. It was not until she was over six, and speaking much more freely, that we discovered the connection: ‘Alouette’ equalled ‘all wet’ — words which at four she had neither said nor appeared to understand. Clearly, however, she had registered the sounds, and made through music a connection which she was unable or unwilling to make verbally.

And through music I could sometimes gain an insight into her mind that I could not as yet get through words. I transcribe one remarkable event as I recorded it in my diary at the time. It breaks the chronology a little, but not much: Elly was four and a half.

Today I heard Elly thinking. It was exactly as Wagner uses his leitmotifs; Brunnhilde is singing, and beneath her voice can be heard in the orchestra the Valhalla motif and we know she is thinking of Valhalla though she is singing of something quite different.

Elly and I were walking on the college grounds. We arrived on the bicycle and left it parked against a shed. We walked some way and started to return. As we passed a branch-off in the path that would have led back to the bicycle, I decided to prolong the walk by going a different, slightly longer way. As we passed the branch-off, Elly murmured (to herself, not me) a bar or so of ‘Riding on the bike’. She was, I feel sure, wondering about how we’d get back to the bike by this new path. I told her we’d find the bike in a minute and she continued cheerfully on, seeming to have understood. A few minutes later she asked the first question in her four and a half years: as we walked and made a turning, she said (not sang) an unformed series of sounds clearly in the rhythm of ‘Riding on the bike’, and ending in a pronounced rising intonation such as I had never heard her use. It was as if she had asked me when we would arrive at the bike. I told her again we’d soon be at the bike and she remained cheerful until we were.

Only those who have lived with a walled personality can realize the impact of such an expansion of the possibilities of communication, rudimentary as it may seem (and rudimentary as it remained, month after month). It was as if the barrier that Elly maintained against words had been lowered for music. This mattered. For what had we to work with but the faith (like many faiths, it was at first no more than a hope) that the lowering of any barrier must help with all the others?

It was little enough. Of all Elly’s inabilities, the hardest to affect was the inability to speak and comprehend. We could progress slowly towards bodily adequacy and specific skills. We could work to expand visual perception. But auditory communication was more important than these. Speech is an open gate. The personality who cannot speak is in prison, the personality who will not lives in a walled fortress. Who knows which is which, or if there is really any difference — at two, at three, at four years old?

We could work on other things, but speech was crucial. It was, in the current state of knowledge, the only indicator of the future. Kanner had written that if autistic children did not develop useful speech by the age of five the prognosis for them was very bad. We did not have to be told what ‘very bad’ was; we knew that a significant proportion of Kanner’s cases had been institutionalized as functional idiots. Obviously we must not think statistically when the number of recorded cases was so few. Obviously — even more obviously — it could do no good to think in terms of deadlines. It could do harm. Yet deep in our minds, as far back as we could push it, remained the number five.

7. Willed Isolation

As I describe, I articulate. I divide into parts, I imply relationships, I put one thing first and not another. I cannot avoid doing this; I must articulate to write things down at all. I must analyse, and as I analyse I falsify. Experience as analysed is no longer experience as lived. Weakness, blindness, deafness, isolation: I have divided one thing four ways, but it is still one thing. This chapter will deal explicitly with Elly’s remoteness and the methods we devised for affecting it, but it is a new chapter, not a new subject. Elly’s inability to relate — to use the psychological jargon I have had to learn the knack of — has been implicit in all the phenomena I have described so far. If I say Elly was reluctant to use her hands, or if I say she used other people’s hands as tools without regard to their existence as human beings, I am giving two alternative descriptions, but of a reality that was not divided but single. Elly did not see, but most of what she did not see was people. She did not hear, but most of what she did not hear was people’s voices, most of what she did not under-stand was their words and their concerns. She did not speak; it would have been extraordinary if she had. A child reluctant to use even her hands as a tool is hardly likely to trouble to acquire the master tool of speech, which has its inception in an acknowledgement of other people — of need, of contact, of interdependence.

Of all Elly’s inabilities, which should be taken as primary? Should we do what seems natural and emphasize the most striking symptom, the isolation-in-self which gives the autistic condition its very name? Or do the phenomena call for deeper scrutiny? Should we posit some defect profounder than all these which would explain them all — some inability of the brain, perhaps, to decode its perceptions or render them usable? Might the new individual, faced with a world in which an unreadable welter of impressions obscures even the distinction between objects and human beings, wall itself up as a defence against the anarchy outside? Psychologists formulate the question in their own language: which is primary, disorder of affect — roughly, feeling or emotion — or dysfunction of cognition? But even for psychologists the answer is years away.

It is fortunate, then, that one needs no answer in order to go to work. Which is primary? It is an analytical question. In the living whole, nothing comes first. Work done on any one of Elly s inabilities affected the others. Every game we played, every exercise we devised to extend Elly’s use of her body, her eyes, her ears, her voice, her mind, worked in addition to breach that jealously guarded isolation which for those who lived with her remained the most obvious and the most terrible aspect of her condition.

Other children are paralysed, deaf, dumb — not in effect merely, but in very truth. But these children feel, react, relate. Whatever their disabilities, some force within them drives them outside the wall raised by their handicap to make contact with the world. If blind, they explore with their fingers, if dumb, they grab for what they want or push out some inarticulate cry. What is one to think, feel, and do when confronted by a two- year-old — one’s own — who makes no exploration or approach, who expresses neither hostility nor anger, and who wants nothing?

The autistic child is complete in itself. Its every action — or inaction — functions to keep it that way. Elly’s consciousness seemed empty, her responses simple or nonexistent, her activities rudimentary. Yet as we lived with her at that time of her most extreme withdrawal, what impressed us was not, as one might expect, the inadequacy of this child, but rather the extraordinary degree to which her environment was within her control. Having found ways to keep her world one that she could cope with, she was the most undisturbed of ‘disturbed children’.

A normal two-year-old experiences in a day more of anxiety and frustration than came to Elly in a week.

Elly’s inabilities operated to tailor the environment to her needs. If you decide, at eighteen months, to spend the rest of your life sitting in the middle of the rug, who has problems?Certainly not you. When you take the risk of getting up, walking, wanting things, attaching yourself to people, exploring the world and acting in it — in short, assuming your humanity — then you have problems. As we all have. Perhaps we are naive to be surprised at Elly. Perhaps we should rather be surprised that the normal baby creature meets this tough world with such ready welcome.

But surely we are talking metaphor, not fact. At thirteen, fifteen, eighteen months, what could Elly have decided? To speak of a baby’s decision is preposterous. Yet as we lived with our baby,