Chapter One 

Does It Run in the Family?
 
I suppose every child regards its family life as normal. It’s only in adulthood that we reassess the things we took for granted. Certainly, nothing in my stable, effortless childhood prefigured the position I would find myself in as an adult—a single mother of three sons, two of them autistic.
 
I live in the house where I grew up. It’s an overgrown Sussex farmhouse with a large untidy garden. When my grandfather died, my parents moved in, on April 1, 1960—my first birthday. Thirty years later, I moved back there with my husband, Min, and George, then six months old.
 
The house hasn’t changed much since the 1960s; the externals of George and Sam’s childhood experiences are similar to mine. They sleep in the room I once shared with my brothers, and the dragons, sea lions, and goldfish painted on the walls by my aunts look down on them as they once looked down on us. The kitchen is still dominated by an inefficient Aga; the crumbling garden walls are still there for them to risk their necks, as my brothers and I used to. We walk through the same fields, splash in the same streams. As the boys lie in bed they hear the sounds I always heard, the creaks and rustlings of an old and drafty house, the train rumbling through the valley, the crooning of wood pigeons in the big yew tree outside.
 
Yet internally, their childhoods could hardly be more different from mine. George and Sam’s experiences are disparate, unconnected, a series of sensory impressions that don’t add up to make a pattern. When I lay in bed and listened to the train, I imagined dragons. I knew that dragons didn’t exist, but I chose to tell myself stories about dragons; I involved the painted dragons on the wall in these stories. I knew that the noise was the London train, the one my father took to work each day. There was no confusion in my mind between the real and the pretend worlds, and to me, both made sense. I’ll never know, because they can’t tell me, but I believe that, for George and Sam, neither makes sense. When you’re autistic, everything is experienced differently. The assumptions and explanations of the people around you are of very little help.
 
There were three of us children. Charles is two years older than me and Rowan two years younger. We were bookish and unsporty; Charles was quite tough and adventurous; Rowan and I were rather weedy. We went to the village primary school and brought friends home to play. We kept a great many animals. We made dens in the woods behind our house. We quarreled fiercely over Racing Demon, Pit, and Monopoly. When we weren’t fighting, we played elaborate imaginative games based on invented worlds. Rowan and I ruled jointly over the whimsically named Land of Nursery. Rowan’s responsibility was primarily for organizing building programs, controlling civil wars, and colonizing outlying regions with his Hornby train set, while I concerned myself with social and domestic dramas. Charles’s country, the United Moore Republic, was more austere. It was a military dictatorship with no female inhabitants.
 
These invented worlds were not retreats for us. They were shared. They were not a substitute for real life but an extension of life, a rehearsal for what would concern us as adults. We moved freely in and out of one another’s games, though we bickered as we did so. None of us, in other words, exhibited the autistic “triad of impairments”—of imagination, communication, and social interaction.
 
Play of this kind hardly exists for George and Sam. They have many toys, but few of them are put to their intended use. Their play is limited, end-stopped, and—above all—unshared. George, aged thirteen, went off to school this morning clutching three toy tank engines. He likes these engines, will move them about a bit and give them a few snatches of dialogue—lifted from his Thomas the Tank Engine videos—but he has no intention of inviting other children to join him in playing with them. If another child initiated a game, George wouldn’t know how to reciprocate. If anyone suggested that he was too old to be playing with tank engines, he wouldn’t know what that person meant. Sam’s play, such as it is, is even more private, because it’s largely nonverbal. It’s hard to tell, even, whether he is actually playing in an imaginative sense at all, or whether he’s just making movements and noises for their own sake.
 
For me, the life of the playground was by far the most important and interesting part of school; for George and Sam, outside “play” is just existing in fresh air. I was deeply involved in an ever-shifting network of friendships and alliances; my sons have no independent social life, nor do they appear to want one. Each day, they go to an autistic unit attached to a special-needs school in Hastings. George is interested in the other children, probably regards them as his friends, and has occasionally asked me to invite them home, but it would never occur to him to ring them up or invite them himself. Sam seems barely aware that the other children exist. As far as I can tell, neither of them imagines that they will not be at school forever. They have no ambition, no thoughts about their adult selves, no perspective on anything except the here and now. The contrast between my experience of being a child and theirs could hardly be greater.
 
When, after George and Sam had been diagnosed, Min and I needed to decide whether to risk having another baby, we went to the Maudsley Hospital for “genetic counseling.” It’s now generally accepted that autism has genetic causes, that it does “run in families.” The picture is somewhat obscured by the fact that, due to the antisocial nature of the condition, full-blown autists are much less likely than almost any other group to become parents themselves. In preparation for the consultation we were asked to note down any family members who were eccentric, depressive, obsessive-compulsive, schizophrenic, even dyslexic—and of course, any who were actually autistic.
 
My family has lived in the same place for a long time. They have always been great letter-writers and recorders of information, they have been socially stable, their lives have not been hugely disrupted by war or disaster, and none of them ever throw anything away. All this means that I can tell you a very great deal about my family for several generations. Don’t worry, I won’t—not much. But my report for the Maudsley was pretty comprehensive. I came up with some cases of mild depression, one obsessive-compulsive, no dyslexia. Lots and lots of left-handers—I’m not sure if that’s relevant. No schizophrenics, and no confirmed autists—and absolutely no one who wasn’t able to lead a normal life, if by that one means marrying, holding down a job, maintaining friendships, bringing up children.
 
There are eccentricities, as there probably are in most families. In my case, they cluster most markedly around my paternal grandfather, the one who died when I was a baby. Grandfather had extreme food fads. He abhorred fat of any kind and couldn’t bear people to eat butter or...