"What am I anyway? A nobody, a nothing, a voice in the empty air."
David Ireland: The Chantic Bird

(This one's for Elgin, who wants me to.)

A Voice in the Empty Air

INTRODUCTION: What's online here must be a work in progress. It's a cautionary tale for adults on the autism spectrum. It's not written for the wider public. I have no interest in how non-autistic people choose to react if one or more of them decide to read it anyway. On legal advice, I've changed a small number of names in this version, largely to protect the guilty.

This autobiography is copyright. The only authorised English-language copy is at http://www.linds.net. No part may be quoted, abridged or otherwise, without my consent which you can request by emailing me at eldub@mm.st. I have not given my consent for any abridgement to appear in any wiki.

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I remember that in 1961, when I was fourteen, I walked into the home of a new friend only to be met with a glare from his mother. She had been an assistant at the kindergarten which I attended for eighteen months from the age of three. It's largely her memory of my time there which I rely upon now. She remembered me as someone who resolutely would not join in, and who screamed when made to do so. She said that I cried and screamed continuously and disruptively and that, additionally, I was not toilet trained. She felt that I needed psychiatric help and special schooling and said that she was surprised to see me in her house.

I may indeed have been all those things. I really don't remember anything of that kindergarten other than a few vague, disconnected images. What I remember better was that I liked the security of my own small room and felt out of place whenever I had to be away from it. Except, perhaps, in other parts of the house when that was necessary. The necessity of being off the property was not something I understood at all.

I finished there at the beginning of the holidays in September of the year I turned four and when they ended began my education at Brighton Grammar, an Anglican school for boys in Melbourne, Australia. Even if I hadn't been autistic, I would have started at a disadvantage by appearing when the school year was beginning to wind down. As it was, the day was a disaster which I still remember vividly. I couldn't understand why I was there. I couldn't understand who these people were or what they wanted me to do. I was in total panic and behaved accordingly.

"Anglican" means "Church of England". Brighton Grammar had originally been modelled along the lines of some British public schools and it showed. We sang "I Vow To Thee, My Country" (England) and "Jerusalem" the words for which come from the introduction to William Blake's Milton and have a distinctly British Israelite flavour, in that Blake canvasses the possibility that Christ may have been in Britain, and expressing the hope that Jerusalem might at some future time be built "in England's green and pleasant land". However the music is stirring and tribal. The tribe in question is the English ruling class and (by extension) that of Australia. There was a Jack o' Pop, a tradition copied from Eton. If staff left Australia, it was mostly to visit England. I'm sure the Anglocentricity has abated somewhat today but when I was there it was pervasive.

I remained at the beginning level for the following year as well. (In Australia, the school year runs from late January to mid-December with two-week breaks every nine weeks or so.) This meant that the boys I started with were ahead of me by one year all the time I was there. As I had got off to the worst start imaginable, the impressions these kids had of me were rock bottom and remained that way all the time I was at that school. Believe me, first impressions really do count.

I don't remember much of my home life at that time: I can remember going to family gatherings where the meals were something to look forward to weeks in advance. Everyone had a party piece except me. I can remember my grandmother urging me to fit in, but the sight of my cousins making fools of themselves by singing Scarlet Ribbons in cracked, off-key voices was pretty disgusting. One uncle always recited Kipling's Gunga Din. Another always sang On The Road To Mandalay. I learned quickly that scrumptious meals are almost always not free. There was no way that I could have stood up alone like that, with everyone looking at me. I wouldn't have been able to talk, let alone sing. I'd have been on the road to hospital. In most situations I've always felt comfortable being as inconspicuous as possible; just a face in the crowd. As a child, in the company of people I knew well and was very relaxed with, I gave my lunatic streak full rein. It's with me still and been a godsend in countless otherwise grim situations.

My paternal grandmother of the scrumptious meals was a harridan. She had a long list of people who belonged, in her view, to a group called "them" while people like herself, hard working white Anglo-Australian battlers, barely educated, belonged to the group she called "us". My mother, being both English and educated, was a "them". My father had met and married her in the UK after his war service and they were obliged to live in my grandmother's home in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg until a war service loan became available. That enabled them to build a house in Brighton which we moved into when I was around eighteen months old.

My father had to work hard after the war: at his carpenter's trade and also at college where he studied to become a surveyor. Grandma gave my mother hell at home; screaming abuse, banging on the bedroom door for hours, the list goes on. Suffice to say that my mother's stress levels were extremely high and all the time she was carrying me.

Not long after I was born I was diagnosed as having a condition known as "infundibular pulmonary stenosis", a heart valve problem which at the time could not be corrected. I was therefore expected to live until perhaps puberty, no more. Nobody was more devastated than Grandma, who believed that this defect had been caused by the high levels of stress to which she'd subjected my mother. I share that belief. To make up for it as best she could, Grandma spoiled me rotten for several years and insisted that I be treated with kid gloves as "special". Grandma ruled. When I started school, my father dutifully told the staff that I was special and if he'd said that just once might have got away with it. Unfortunately, he said it many times, to anyone who would listen.

Everyone was bored witless. The school staff treated me as special all right, but not in the way my father had in mind. The students already knew. To add to the fun was the fact that indeed I was different, both at school and at home. Those differences years later came to be labelled as autism. My classmates didn't care but my family did, because the behavioural differences I had been manifesting from earliest infancy couldn't be put down to stress as a fetus but to something made the more sinister for their inability to label it. "Neurotic" was about the best they could do at the time.

The dominant figure in my life until his death from Hodgkin's lymphoma was my father. We were as different as cheese and chalk. He was outgoing and had been athletic. He was one of the boys and an active, proselytising Freemason. All I wanted was to be left alone in my room, or, perhaps better, just to be left alone. I spent so much time in my room because I had the best chance of being left alone there. If I could have been as sure of being left alone outside it, then I would have spent more time outdoors. Later in childhood I grew to be very sick of well-meaning people saying to me: "You need to get out and about more, young Weekes."

At school, being left alone was what I wanted above all. By and large, my classmates obliged. The only group I could say that I belonged to was the collection of children who caught the bus each morning and afternoon. This was something I did from my second school day until I was around seven. After that, I biked almost wherever I had to go. Many of the children on the bus, which was a regular public service, went to Brighton Primary and those few who did travel all the way with me were tolerant enough. To get to and from my home to the bus stop, I had a ten-minute walk diagonally through Dendy Park which was then mostly wild grass. It was a nice way to start the day and relaxed me after school.

Sometimes some of the older boys, especially in the year above me, devoted quite a lot of their play time to getting me going. When they found out that I couldn't stand prolonged loud noise, they liked to trap me behind a door and kick on it until I started to scream. It was clear from the things they said that they thought of themselves as human and of me as an aberration. It was their opinion that I came to accept and which I'll never fully shake. Many years later a doctor told me that I had no place in contemporary society and I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying: "Well, I've known that since I was five." However, being an aberration only means that you're outside society and that confers both freedoms and insights which I'll talk more about later. Suffice to say for now that seeing society from an outsider's perspective provides a great deal of clarity into the workings of that society, and I'm not sure I ever want to change that.

Once, aged around 6, I had to use the toilets. These were simple cubicles, without doors. It was usual to ask a friend to stand guard against marauders who would pull you off the toilet, inspect the contents and generally trash you. Asking someone didn't seem like an option to me so I took a chance. Major error! I never used the toilets at school again but instead those in a public recreation oval across the street. In those days, teachers were always in their staff room. Playground duty for staff was unknown, the ethos prevailing at that time was to let children sink or swim, and the sooner they learned to swim the better equipped they would be to deal with the world.

Consequently, it was easy to leave the school premises. A couple of other boys took to doing the same. It took me ten years to get revenge on the person, two years older, who led the marauders onto me. As I was biking home one evening I saw him alone and was able to come up fast behind him in the twilight and jump him. His face hit the concrete footpath hard and skidded about 2 metres. I didn't think that was enough revenge so added a little more damage. The thing I remember most about him is his expression of quizzical stupidity.

A few years ago I saw him again as he was crossing a railway line. Although over forty years had passed, we recognised each other straight away. He had the same quizzical expression. I was waiting for just one smirk, one flicker of a sneer. I would have left him unconscious on the tracks. No sneer came, no smirk, but I'm still sorry I didn't listen to my impulse to leave him lying there for the next train to run over.

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Back in early childhood I had some sensory processing problems and I still have some of them today. It was worse as a child. If I absorbed too much data at a high level of awareness, or became stressed, then my brain simply began to shut my senses down.

What this meant was that my vision became very distant, like seeing the world through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, and unless I backed off, that is, physically removed myself from the source of input, then my vision fragmented. At the same time, my hearing lost its selective focus and I became acutely aware of every noise occurring within my range of hearing: bird noises, bus noises, speech, footsteps, chainsaws, the wind rattling two palm fronds together; the list was endless.

Sometimes people ask me just what I mean when I talk about my hearing or vision fragmenting. It means that instead of hearing or seeing coherently, I hear and/or see as though I'm tuned to forty channels at once. I'm old enough to remember when people talked about some of the psychedelic effects of LSD and thinking: "So what, I can do that whenever I want to. Mostly, when I don't want to, and it's a nuisance."

In addition, I also became hypersensitive to touch; at this point, all touch was unpleasant, whether I anticipated it or not. It was not a repellent feeling or a slimy one, more a subtle source of awareness of the nerve endings in whatever part of me was touching the person or object. Whether you call this a heightened sense of touch or a deadened sense of pain, the experience is unpleasant. Have you ever lain awake in bed and been aware of your nerve-endings firing, or known that an apparently smooth muscular movement was actually a series of very fast jerks? There's nothing painful about this, but it didn't do anything to lower my hyper levels of anxiety.

I found that the best way of dealing with this was to reduce all sensory input to a minimum; to darken the room, tune the TV to an unused channel so that the white noise would drown out all other noise, and go to bed.

These days, this process of shutting down happens very rarely, because I have learned not to expose myself to continuous sensory bombardment at a high level of awareness.

When I was a child, however, this process happened more often, but usually at the first sign of my vision distancing I would panic and start screaming. Often, the screaming saved me, first by providing a form of white noise and secondly because the process of screaming in itself usually meant that I was quickly removed from the source of overload. That is, I would be allowed to lie down for a while, while my puzzled and exasperated parents or teachers wondered what had set me off this time.

Additionally, I also reacted badly to dogs, vacuum cleaners, sudden events and quite a few other things. When I was about five or six, I used to often go to a house a few doors away where a middle-aged couple had an old wind-up gramophone/Victrola which just totally enthralled me. Although they had a large collection of old records, only one interested me, (Al Bowlly singing Goodnight Sweetheart) and I liked to play it, ignoring the words, just listening to that reassuring voice, again and again, sometimes letting the gramophone wind down so that the sound would slow and I would have to wind it up to make the sound fast again.

And always in the same places, faster here, slower there, over and over.

Although these were tolerant, obliging people, they naturally had their limits, and when these were reached, all they had to do was to produce their vacuum cleaner and I would run screaming back home. Until next time.

Not only was the sound of the vacuum cleaner unpleasant, in the end just the sight of it scared me off. Does any of this sound familiar? I could also be set off by not knowing what was happening, or not knowing why I was at a given place at a given time, or not knowing what was expected of me on a particular occasion or not knowing how long that occasion would last.

I also had a vision processing problem, in that it took me about four times longer than most people to recognise a face and, if that face had changed, for example, by the addition of a hat, or makeup, or hair of a different colour, or a beard, it took me longer still. This had obvious social deficits. I still have this problem today.

I've mentioned that the boys in the year above me made it clear that to them I was an aberration but an additional reason for me to agree with that was that I felt different from my own classmates. While most of them were dismissive, some were not but I had no sense of camaraderie, not even of sameness, with most of these people. Here's an example: in my first year at school, the teacher said that the next person to talk would be smacked. I was the next person. I thought that this was outrageous, because she had been talking to them, and nothing that she said to them applied to me. I knew it. My classmates knew it. Why didn't she know something so obvious?

I say "most" because some classmates were unfailingly humane, thoughtful people. David, Marty and Clive were a trio of polite, interested people as were Wayne, Roger, Phil and HP. Most of them are in the class picture taken in year one which is here. Front and centre in that picture is Leigh Bridgart who, as James Ryan O'Neill, is Tasmania's longest serving prisoner, having raped and murdered two small boys. He's wanted in Victoria for similar offences. As a small child he was arrogant and quick-tempered but there was no hint of the serial killer to come. (Not that any of us would have known one if we'd seen one.) I believe the impulses which led him to commit those crimes generally appear at or soon after puberty and by then I'd lost all contact.

I was adopted in the playground by a boy who had an intellectual disability but looked a lot sillier than he was. Obviously, few of the others wanted anything to do with him and so he took to following me around because I didn't chase him away, simply ignored him. Eventually I became so used to having him around that when he wasn't there, I noticed.

Chris and I were always teamed in sports events for the hopeless like the three-legged race or the egg and spoon race. The three-legged race was where my left leg and Chris's right were tied together and then we were supposed to run. I could never see the point of it but Chris always started to run and because he was bigger and much more determined, he dragged me along behind. The egg and spoon race was an event where the contestants were supposed to hold in their mouths a spoon containing a plaster egg and run fifty yards ( ~45 meters ) without the egg falling off the spoon. I never felt bad about coming last in this race; what made me feel bad was being forced to participate at all.

Whenever a child had a birthday, it was the custom to invite the entire class to a party on the nearest Saturday. My parents always insisted that I go to these, although in most cases I wasn't welcome and didn't understand what I was supposed to do once I got there. These were the same others I didn't mix with in the playground and, additionally, they were unfamiliar in casual clothes, socialising. Often, I just screamed the whole time, partly from bafflement, partly from fear of new surroundings and especially when some well-meaning adult tried to make me join in the party games.

I started swimming lessons at the City Baths when I was five. At first I was very wary of the sling which the instructor wanted to put around me until I could swim properly and support myself in the water, but I soon grew to like swimming and then to love it. As soon as I could swim on my own, my father made me a member of the long gone YMCA in South Melbourne and I kept going there until I was 18.

My father's standard for academic studies was excellence and fortunately I was able to oblige. At Brighton Grammar, students were taught basic literacy in kindergarten and in year one, work began in earnest. I found this work easy and it was no trouble to come at or near the top of the class. Although the work itself was easy, I considered most of it irrelevant. I mean, who cares that black soils in Russia are called chernozems or when the British Corn Laws were introduced or repealed? Or about "the aliquot parts of a pound"?

I'm looking at a photo of myself aged seven and trying to remember what I was like then. If you take as a starting point that there cannot begin to be a diagnosis of autism unless there are impairments in speech and socialisation with a compulsion for ritual and sameness, where was I then.

My first speech was actually German. My father learned it as an Aussie prisoner of war in Germany during world war two while my mother learned it in high school. For some reason, they tended to speak it whenever they said something they "didn't want the children to hear". Which must have been quite a lot. By age three I could sing Lili Marleen which became the marching song of the Afrika Korps and Es War Ein Edelweiss which had been a marching song of the Deutsche Alpenkorps during world war one. My father learned them on the long march from Crete, (where the Australians and New Zealanders had been abandoned by the British on the orders of Winston Churchill) to Bavaria.

I didn't make full use of speech until after I was four. From then on, there was no quantitative problem; it's always been hard to shut me up once I've got going, but a qualitative problem existed when I was seven and exists today, inasmuch as a lot of the nuances of speech escape me. It is not and never has been my natural medium of communication -- that has been the written word ever since I could write. What I do is think in ideographs or thought-pictures and then translate them into speech as I go, which normally gives my speech a slight hesitancy, and the degree of this hesitancy is a very good stress-gauge. When I am under a good deal of stress my speech becomes markedly hesitant, but when I am comfortable in a situation then the hesitancy is something that only I can notice.

I also have problems with body language and facial expressions: I can't always tell when I am boring someone or making them angry. Nor can I read people's eyes. What I see when I look at someone's eyes is a blast of personality which to me is rude and invasive, in the same way as most people would react to being touched on their genitals. Sometimes, I've found that professionals who should know better go out of their way to make searching eye contact and I don't understand why they do that. Are they attempting to make me look them in the eyes? Or do they just want to see what I'll do? Either way, when people who should know better do this to me, it's disrespectful. It takes me a long time to get to know most people and to me, something as intimate as eye contact is something that can wait until I know the person much better, if I ever do, or ever want to.

I often look at people's mouths. I find them quite expressive. Or at both ears at once, as doing this gives an illusion of making eye contact. This is a little trick I learned as a boy, courtesy of a stage magician I was watching on TV. I have even had people congratulate me on my use of eye contact while I was looking at their ears. And that tells me that if people mistake my fixed, rather glazed stare for eye contact then it can't be anywhere near as important as it's made out to be.

People sometimes tell me that ideographs are no good for abstract expression and sometimes that's true. Then, of course, I substitute the appropriate word. But mostly, it's possible to use ideographs. An angry face and the colour red denote anger, for example. An angry face and the colour purple mean indignation. An apologetic face and the colour pink for embarrassment. A wide eyed child's face for "innocence". An image of a brain for "consciousness" or an image of a brain with rapidly moving lines inside it for "thought". The list goes on. Thinking ideographically is also very fast, because I can visualise whole concepts at once. This means that I can actually process information very quickly, I think faster than most people seem to be able to, despite my sensory deficits.

One sunny Saturday morning I went with Ross, a boy my age who lived next door and at the time went to the local primary school, to visit some of his schoolmates who lived just across the park from us. Once these kids found out that I went to the Grammar school, they asked me a trick question: "Do you think you're better than us?" Of course, I didn't spot it and answered truthfully as I had been taught both at home and at school: "Yes." The boy my age beat me up for that. I was too busy wondering what I'd done wrong to really do anything other than stand there. These kids came from a family who just happened to be red-hot socialists and fairly well-known trade unionists. I was never allowed to forget it....every time I saw them, right up until I left home, I was harangued about egalitarianism as only committed left-wingers can. The fact that later I went to the high school with them didn't help at all.

I think I've covered impairment in socialisation. Desire for ritual and sameness? Well, my day was structured from beginning to end and if that structure was broken without at least two days' notice then the result was chaos for me and a tantrum for them. I was then and still am fastidiously clean and my room has to be neat and in order. My father insisted on it and in this way we were as one. No wrinkles on the quilt. All books stacked in descending order of height, no dust anywhere, etc.

While neither of us would have chosen the other as father or son, we were not always at odds. He taught me to draw plans using a ruler, set square and fine pencil on large white sheets of paper. Occasionally, I liked to design structures but having no knowledge of the weight and consistency of materials, or of stress, I doubt they would have held up for long. My father also taught me to read plans and schematics. I found them simple, logical and easy.

His work involved enforcing the council's building regulations, something he did without fear or favour. Local builders derided him as "Rulebook Weekes". If a fence was built incorrectly, by the smallest fraction, or a vent installed in the tiniest non-regulation way he made the builder do it again. He explained this by saying "rules are rules; if I give them an eighth of an inch how can I stop them taking a quarter next time?" and if I'd been doing his job back then I'd have done it the same way for the same reason. I'd be no different today.

Structure was so important for me when I was seven. It was literally imperative when I woke up that I knew as far as possible (and that was very far) exactly what I was going to do on that day or things began to spin out. What had seemed the ordered world began to fragment and I would begin to panic. By the time I was seven, I had my day structured in stages. I got out of bed at exactly 6.30am and that was stage one. Before 6.30, I couldn't get out of bed. After 6.30, I couldn't stay in it. If I became blocked at a stage, then, if possible, I went and lay on my bed for the rest of the day. If I couldn't lay on my bed, then I just withdrew as surreptitiously as possible but often just got on everyone's nerves. That day had become lost. I would have to wait until 6.30 the next morning before I could resume life.

In 1956, when I was nine, my mother took my 5yo sister and myself to England to visit her parents. This involved a five-week ship voyage each way and during these journeys I unwittingly embarrassed my mother more than once. Little things, like forgetting to wear anything when walking from our cabin to the showers, or reading books while stashed behind the lifeboats on a deck reserved for adults, but apparently they gave me some notoriety.

We spent most of our time in the city of Nottingham, where there is still a castle but all that remains of the forest is a suburb called Sherwood. I did not have to attend school, which was wonderful. Instead, I rode on my own around the trolleybus system and became well-known to it's employees, who would often let me ride free. To them, I was just "that daft Aussie kid". Quite often, people would stop me to ask why I wasn't in school but went on their way as soon as they heard my outlander accent. "Wandering" was just another stage in the day, although a big one, often lasting from 10am to 6pm.

On formal occasions I had to wear my school uniform even though I was 16,000 km from my school. This was possibly the weirdest rule I ever had to live by and outdoes any kind of weirdness I've heard attributed to autistic people. A picture exists showing me sitting next to my sister on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, London, while wearing my Melbourne school uniform. The "formal occasion" was simply the fact that we visited this church.

By the time I was twelve, I had invented sub-stages. If I became blocked at stage 19, I could go to 19a or for that matter 19e, so my day was in fact choreographed from start to finish. One example was this: I became trapped downtown because of a train strike so I called my mother and asked her to come and pick me up. She refused, and told me to catch the bus instead. Pretty obvious alternative, isn't it? But because I hadn't planned for it, I couldn't do it. In the end, she came and got me and she was not happy. But after that, I did factor the bus in as an alternative so I appeared to be more flexible. But it was only an appearance. It's only been in the last few years that I have needed less structure.

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Chapter Two