Elly’s speech is much improved. The psychiatrist says so, and so does everybody else. We can never be sure, however, that she would not have progessed further had we made the other choice — to let Elly find her own patterns, to speak English to Elly and wait for her to understand and imitate it. The teacher at Dr Fenichel’s school told me, ‘I always speak normally to them — they get it eventually.’ Perhaps Elly would have got it eventually, and got it better. With time at our backs, however, we chose for her a meaningful world sooner, even if worse.
We were more comfortable in our choice because Elly was of course in contact with other people who spoke naturally. She heard daily all degrees of speech between pidgin and English. Each person in the family spoke differently; we did not want an imposed uniformity. Since they wanted to be understood the children also spoke pidgin to her, but less carefully than I. Her father too was less in contact with the day-to-day expansions of her language; he spoke simply but with a wider vocabulary and in more conventional patterns. So did the mother’s- helpers. The teachers at the nursery school talked to her in the same language they would use to any three-year- old. My hope was that what she learned from my simple conversation would aid her to make sense of the wonderful variety of sound around her; others could build on my foundations.
The foundations have risen. Elly at eight comprehends much of what anyone would say to a four-year-old. But though she speaks better pidgin than she did, she speaks pidgin still. I cannot know whether I have accelerated her progress towards speech or retarded it. I am sure, however, that I accelerated her comprehension. And it was through comprehension, even more than speech itself, that she must move into the world.
‘I endowed thy purposes with words that made them known,’ said Prospero to Caliban. How little have we wished to play Prospero to our small daughter! How far from our ideal of education is this supplying of conventional patterns into which thought, which above all in a child should be spontaneous and free, is to be poured. But we have seemed to see a choice between a moderate and increasing range of conventional, suggested patterns, and a much slower rate of increase. We have chosen not to wait for a spontaneity which may never come.
The process has not snowballed, as one might expect of a child who, people still tell me, has ‘normal’ intelligence. But it has at last begun to acquire its own momentum. Our hope has been that what Elly learned to understand and say with our guidance would make it easier to absorb the language of the world at large. And it has done so. Though she picks up much less, much more slowly, than a normal three-year-old, she does pick things up untaught, and every month she picks up more. We can now, perhaps, look forward to the day when we can retire from her learning process.
Meanwhile, she moves forward. Recently I sat and listened to her chatter, cheerfully and comfortably, for two minutes without a pause. It would have seemed a miracle, I suppose, if I had not experienced every step that went into its making. I set her words down here as I transcribed them — only a bit of the pronunciation has been rendered more intelligible. The reader will assess it for himself.
‘Go Roger’ house. Ha’ little Christmas party. Come back go bed wake up ha’ Christmas open stocking. Jill come back. Jill come
Suiting the action to the word, we move to the doll-house. Now Elly astonishes me; she speaks the very words that not two months ago, when I began this chapter, I wrote that she had never said. ‘Nice, pretty room.
14. Ideas of Order
As we assemble for dinner, Elly surveys the table. ‘Only five for suppertime! Six minus one equal five! Sara? Sara?’ Anxiety is sharp in her voice. ‘Sara went to baby-sit,’ we say, and Elly repeats ‘Sara go baby-sit.’ The words help her come to terms with the situation, but she is not really satisfied; she asks again, and once more after that. Then she goes and gets a doll to set in the empty chair, and peace is restored.
Another day her uncle, aunt, two cousins come — the house is full. Elly is delighted: ‘Ten for suppertime,’ she informs us — restive, however, until we all sit down and make her prediction true.
My mind shifts back two years. People are in the living room, sitting, standing, moving in and out; there are a lot of us. Elly is uneasy. We must sit down, all of us, side by side, in rows around the room before she is satisfied. A few minutes of that and we are free again. It was one of her more inconvenient obsessions. Like all her obsessions, it had held sway for a time, and passed. I had forgotten it. Yet here it is again, refined, verbalized, numeralized, so to speak — another instance of that passion for arbitrary order which we had lived with so long that we had to remember to realize how strange it was.
At two and three it had been blocks in parallel rows or a deck of cards made to stand vertical in the cracks between the floorboards, each card a neat half-inch from the next. At four it had been configurations of washcloths and cookies, unerringly kept track of by a baby who had no words for number but who knew at once if any were missing, and how many. Elly could grasp an ordering principle with astonishing rapidity. She needed only to be presented with the opportunity to arrange objects by shape, colour, and size, and later, by kind and function, and she would do so. The classification exercises given in kindergarten pre-readers were obvious to her. She had no need to listen to the teacher’s instructions; she may not even have heard them. Associate the cats, eliminate the dog: the pictures themselves told her that. Elly could grasp without words what was wanted because that was what she wanted — an affirmation of formal order in a changing world.
It was not that Elly’s life was especially neat. We ourselves do not keep a particularly orderly household. Regarding Elly’s fastidiousness as pathology, we had not reinforced it, and we had tried to keep her routines from becoming sacrosanct. Elly’s room should not be visualized as an untouchable arrangement of toys on shelves, and Elly had no interest whatever in conventional tidiness. Her play consisted, as often as not, of dumping and scattering objects, or of mixing them and running them through her fingers. Her arrangements were little islands in the general disorder — configurations that seemed to come out of nowhere, give intense satisfaction, and then become binding for a time, so that the delight of their completion would be matched by the anxiety that arose if completion became impossible. But anxiety was in no sense primary or frequent; she made the arrangements because she liked to, and since they were in general easy enough to fulfil, they usually brought satisfaction. Once fulfilled, Elly learned to accept their disruption, since a new one could always be made. The real pleasure lay in the making. Obsessive, perseverative, it seemed yet a genuine delight, as if the mere keeping track of things were an activity in itself worth while.
In an ordered world, one keeps track of things in space, and events in time. In Elly’s sixth year, one of my helpers devised a simple calendar of different-coloured cards for the separate days of the week. Elly learned them easily, and we began to notice that without having been told she knew what things happened on what days. ‘Wednesday Mama go college!’ ‘Saturday no school!’ In one of the typical autistic reversals, relational time-words like ‘tomorrow’ and ‘soon’ were much more difficult because they had no exact denotation; Elly still does not really understand them. If she is disappointed because we cannot go shopping today, a promise of ‘tomorrow’ will not cheer her as ‘Friday’ will, even if Friday is days away. ‘Three o’clock’ works well, where ‘soon’ does not, and Elly will be on hand to remind us when Friday and three o’clock come.
As she grew, Elly could appreciate larger orders of time. At seven and a half, she produced a series of four nearly identical paintings; a little girl and her mother outside a house, the only variation in the pictures the colour of the simple landscape which surrounded them. Pale green, green, orange, white. ‘Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter!’ she told me — just like the seasonal pictures we had looked at together in her educational children’s books. As she neared eight she became interested in ages, her own and other people’s, in past and future as well as present. Number could order time and was a significant aspect of people as well. ‘You [read, of course, “I”] eight.’ ‘Becky fifteen.’ ‘Mama forty-two.’ With satisfaction she anticipated birthdays, making the necessary adjustments: ‘Ha’ birthday Mama forty-three!’ Events were located in a future ordered by number: ‘You fourteen see Rosemary!’ (For Rosemary, the last of our mother’s-helpers, had returned to England as Elly turned seven and none of us could contemplate not seeing her again. Elly had invented ‘fourteen’; we shall try to make her prediction come true. ) Elly’s numbers ordered a future in which, to our delight, she grew steadily bigger and more adequate. [27] Levelling her hand two inches above her head to show her future height: ‘You nine like that see mirror better!’ ‘You ten like that!’ ‘You nine.’sixty-seven,’ she said one day in 1966 — when, of
