Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant Read Online Free Page B

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 sandpit in which I spent long periods of the day picking and pulling at the sand, fascinated by the individual grains. Then came an obsession with hourglasses (the nursery had several of different sizes) and I remember watching the trickling 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 realise 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 behaviour 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 recognised 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 neighbours 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 bumped 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-coloured 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 behaviour, because they