The Siege

"Yes, the mother wrote it at a time when autism was not at all known. It was one of the first such accounts and it influenced me greatly because it gives such a detailed and truthful description of the everyday life of an autistic child. Now there are quite a number of biographies written by parents. For a researcher they are rich sources of information. You can’t replace that kind of information by just observing a child for a few days. I have always been influenced by what parents say about autism. For example, in the case of Ellie, the little girl described in this book, she was both incredibly learning-disabled and incredibly intelligent. How can this be explained? This question has fascinated me ever since I started learning about autism. Ellie had an amazing and very different sense of time, space and colour. And she is now actually a rather good artist. When she was little, she had no speech and couldn’t understand anything that was going on around her. She grew up in an extremely loving family and that fact alone was extremely important to be brought out. In those days some influential people thought autism was due to rejection by the mother. In the 1960s when I did my PhD this idea badly needed to be debunked. There was so little known about autism."