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

tantrum. The pages of my books all had numbers on them and I felt happy encircled by them, as though wrapped in a numerical comfort blanket. Long before I could read the sentences on the pages, I could count the numbers. And when I counted, the numbers would appear as motions or coloured shapes in my mind.
    On one expedition up the stairs with my arms clasping a particularly heavy book I slipped and fell. The falling motion seemed to fill my mind with rapid flashes of bright and sketchy colour, like scattered sunlight. I just sat at the bottom of the stairs, dazzled and sore. I didn’t think to call for help but waited for my father to come and see what the noise was. I rarely if ever spoke unless spoken to. After that, my parents started hiding their larger and heavier books from me, afraid that I would fall again and hurt myself badly.
    There was a park close enough to the house to visit on foot so we went there most weekends. My parents tore up slices of bread for me to throw to the ducks. They usually took us early in the mornings when there were few people about. They knew that I was frightened by the presence of lots of people. While my brother ran around, I sat on my own on the ground, pulling up the blades of grass and picking the petals off the daisies.
    My favourite experience at the park was going on the swings. My father would pick me up and sit me down on the swing and push me gently. When he got tired and stopped pushing me I would shout ‘more … more’ until he started pushing again. There was also a roundabout, and I sat in the middle of it as my parents stood either side and slowly moved it round. As the roundabout spun I closed my eyes and smiled. It made me feel good.
    The road near the park was sometimes noisy as we walked back home. If a passing car made a sudden, loud noise – like a blaring horn – I would stop and throw my hands up and press them hard against my ears. Often the noise was more sudden than it was loud. It was because it was unexpected that it seemed to affect me so much. It is for this reason that I hated balloons and would cower if I saw someone holding one. I was frightened that it would burst and make a loud and violent noise.
    After our move to Blithbury Road, until the age of five I continued my nursery at a local school called Dorothy Barley, named after a sixteenth-century abbess who lived in the area during the reign of Henry VIII. We were often given paper and coloured pencils by the nursery assistants and encouraged to draw and colour in. I always enjoyed this, though I found it difficult to hold the pencil between my fingers and would grip it with my palm. I liked drawing circles of lots of different sizes. The circle was my favourite shape and I drew it over and over again.
    The nursery had a box in the corner full of lots of things to play with. My favourites were the coloured beads I found; I would hold them in my hands and shake them to watch them vibrate around my palms. If we were given cardboard rolls to play with (to make binoculars or a telescope, for example) I would drop the beads through the roll, fascinated that the beads dropped through one end and fell out of the other. If I found a tub or jar I would drop the beads inside and then empty it and begin again.
    On one wall was a shelf with a selection of books. My favourite was The Very Hungry Caterpillar . I loved the holes in the pages and the bright, round illustrations. There was a reading corner nearby where the children sat on a large mat around the assistant and listened to a book being read to them. On one such occasion, I was sitting near the back with my legs crossed and my head down, absorbed in my own world. I didn’t hear a word of what was being said. Instead, without realising it, I began to hum. As I looked up, the assistant had stopped reading and everyone was staring at me. I stopped humming and put my head back down and the reading resumed.
    I don’t remember feeling lonely at the