The wild boy
Brian Masters
GROWING UP SEVERELY AUTISTIC: THEY CALL ME GABRIEL by Kate Rankin Jessica Kingsley, £12.95, pp. 208 Do not be put off by the title. It is the subtitle which counts, for this is above all the portrait of an extraordinary person, at once exasperating and adorable, self- centred yet mysterious, and so skilfully is it crafted, so honestly and vividly presented, that we are drawn to know Gabriel almost as well as the author, his mother. This is pretty remarkable, for Gabriel ought in logic to be hopelessly unknowable.
He is, for a start, mute, He has never uttered a word. He eats soap or smears it over furniture and on windows. He defe- cates wherever and whenever it happens, standing or squatting, on the stairs or in front of the television (Mrs Rankin calcu- lates that she has changed 18,000 nappies from infancy to late adolescence). When strangers turn up, he sniffs them. He eats on the wing, grabbing food from anywhere or lapping up the dog's water, puts clothes on upside-down or back-to-front, then tears them off without notice, painstakingly unpicks carpets or pulls down curtains, jumps from the top of a wardrobe to the floor for hours on end, and can stay awake for two whole nights in a row, sleeps on the floor, has the attention span of a moth, and tears through the house day and night, always in top gear, turning on taps, fid- dling, twirling, fingers everywhere, itching to escape at every turn, to climb on to the roof or just disappear into the distance. 'I swear Gabriel can smell an open door,' says his mother wearily. The tension he creates is formidable, and when he suffers from it himself his remedy is to bash his head against the wall.
It all sounds like an unalloyed nightmare, and yet one's instinct, even as a reader, is not to berate the boy but to reach out and help him, to release him from his prison of detached busyness. Such hopes are vain, however. He resists all hugs, cannot bear to be touched, wriggles and squirms out of an embrace within a second. If he is in the same room as the rest of the family (he has one older and one younger brother) he sits in a corner with his back to them, twiddling alone. He appears to make no eye contact at all, but he will dart a furtive glance when he thinks nobody can detect it, thus using his eyes on his terms — he is possessive even of his glances. Once Mrs Rankin was so beside herself that she burst into tears in front of him, but to Gabriel this was only a funny noise she was making. Apart from an occasion when he spontaneously stroked a goat, and the horseplay he appears to enjoy as if he were himself a mere football, he has always been outside experience, aloof and alone, 'seemingly engrossed in watch- ing motes of dust in the sunlight'.
So where are the saving graces? Well, unlike virtually everyone else one might meet, he is entirely without malice, never lies, never cheats, never pretends. What you see is what you get, however frustrating the outcome. And whether he knows it or not (one suspects not), Gabriel has gener- ated a vast amount of unconditional love, itself a rare commodity.
This degree of autism is obviously relent- less, and Kate Rankin has expended much effort in trying to understand it not simply because it afflicts her son, but because it is inherently an interesting subject and he a worthy study. She notes the obsession with 'sameness', the ritual placing of objects in their accustomed spot, and the literalness of the autistic mind which cannot see the point of symbolic play or allusive connec- tions. She is alive to the philosophical implications of her cuckoo in the nest (not just metaphorically, for Gabriel was abnor- mally active even in the womb, banging and crashing with impatience to be born), and she worries about them. She also analyses the latest theories about autism, now recognised as a biological deficit leading to disorder of development, and no longer attributable to faulty upbringing.
What lifts this book far above the level of a solemn case-study is Kate Rankin's ability to see the world through the subject's eyes, which is after all the mark of a good biog- rapher. She enables us to feel something of what it must be like to be Gabriel, stuck within the 'dark, silent forces of autism', experiencing himself as 'caged', terrified of the intolerable intrusion of being looked at, ceaselessly twiddling and rushing about to prevent himself from thinking; for some sort of thinking is clearly going on, and the thoughts which assail him were one day so harsh that he uncharacteristically sobbed with grief. At such moments Gabriel is a literary creation as well as a tortured soul.
The author makes extensive reference to the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who walked out of a French forest in 1800 and astonished scientists by his feral, untutored isolation. I have myself written about this child, and to my shame it has never occurred to me before now that he was cruelly autistic and therefore beyond the scientists' ken. He and Gabriel are so perfectly matched in behaviour and responses, in their addiction to the earth, the sun and vegetation, their inability to keep still, that they could be brothers.
There is much to learn from this clear- sighted book as well, dare one say, as to enjoy, both for its warm humanity and its boastless courage.
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