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

inseparable. I wouldn’t leave the house without one. I spent hours in the evenings lying on the floor with the books in my hands, looking at the colours and shapes in the illustrations. My parents were happy to leave me to my obsession with the Mr Men characters. For the first time I seemed happy and peaceful. It also proved a useful way of encouraging better behaviour. If I could go a whole day without having a tantrum they would promise to buy me a new Mr Men book.
    We moved to our first house when I was four. It was at the corner of Blithbury Road. The house was an odd shape with the staircase accessible only from a separate narrow hall adjacent to the living room. The bathroom was downstairs, a short walk from the front door. Sometimes when a family member or friend was visiting they would be surprised by drifting bathtime steam clouds as they entered the house.
    My parents’ recollections of Blithbury Road are not positive. The kitchen regularly suffered from damp and the house was always cold in winter. Even so, we had good neighbours, including an elderly couple who took a particular shine to my brother and me and gave us sweets and lemonade when we were in the garden.
    At the front of the house, my father busied himself at weekends with a vegetable garden, which quickly became filled with potatoes, carrots, peas, onions, kohlrabi, tomatoes, strawberries and rhubarb. On Sunday afternoons we always ate rhubarb and custard for dessert.
    I shared my room with my brother. It was small, so to conserve space we had a bunk bed. Though he was two years younger than me, my brother had the top bed. My parents were worried I might get restless in the night and fall out otherwise.
    I had no strong feelings towards my brother and we lived parallel lives. He often played in the garden while I stayed in my room and we hardly ever played together. When we did, it was not mutual play – I never felt any sense of wanting to share my toys or experiences with him. Looking back, those feelings seem somewhat alien to me now. I understand the idea of mutuality, of having shared experiences. Though I sometimes still find it difficult to open up and give of myself the feelings necessary to do so are definitely inside me. Perhaps they always were, but it took time for me to find and understand them.
    I became an increasingly quiet child and spent most of my time in my room, sitting on my own in a particular spot on the floor, absorbed in the silence. Sometimes I’d press my fingers into my ears to get closer to the silence, which was never static in my mind, but a silky, trickling motion around my head like condensation.
    When I closed my eyes I pictured it as soft and silvery. I didn’t have to think about it; it would just happen. If there was a sudden noise, such as a knock on the door, it was painful to me, like a shattering of that experience.
    The living room downstairs was always filled with books. My parents were both dedicated readers and I can still remember sitting on the floor and watching them with their books, newspapers and magazines in hand. Sometimes, when I was good, I was allowed to sit on their laps while they read. I liked the sound of the pages as they were flicked over. Books became very special to me, because whenever my parents were reading, the room would fill with silence. It made me feel calm and content inside.
    I started hoarding my parents’ books, carrying them one at a time in my arms up to my room. The stairs were difficult for me and I would negotiate them one step at a time. If the book I was carrying was heavy or large it could take me a full minute to climb a dozen steps. Some of the books were pretty old and smelled of must.
    Inside my room I sorted the books into piles on the floor until they surrounded me on all sides. It was hard for my parents to come into the room for fear of knocking one of the piles on top of me. If they tried to remove any of the books I would burst into tears and have a