Growing up with Asperger's syndrome,
by Larry Arnold part II
Court Jester to Warwick University
It is best skirted round how I got
to University, you need a lot higher
qualifications to get in now, than I had then,
but I was none the less considered to be
academically gifted and intelligent, even
challenging in my ideas.
Freshers
Year
- I spent my first term at University living at
home, and so did not socialise at all, beyond
attending lectures and seminars, however for my
second term I moved into Halls. I was at this
time particularly people avoidant in my spare
time. I took extraordinary lengths to avoid
meeting anyone in the corridor, or to enter via
the fire exit. It was such a strange place and so
many people. I am sure those who were on the same
floor may remember with amusement the way I kept
myself to myself I did not even meet the guy in
the next room until after I had left that
particular Hall.
I did not cook for
myself either but ate a monotonous diet at the
refectory. In the evenings I would often go out
to the small town up the road and drink in the
pub there. Never speaking to anyone of course.
beyond ordering my drinks. I did not know how to
initiate conversations so I just avoided them. It
was not like school at all where I had been with
the same class or group of kids for so long that
I was able to relate to them.
Aspie
obsessions ? - Well I still had my obsessional
interests, buses had passed over to architecture,
as I said, I would have liked to have been an
architect, but in the years between it had been
the organ music of Bach. I had to hear every
single piece he had ever written and collected
them on tape off records I got out from the local
record library. I hope the performing rights
society is not reading this, if they are I no
longer have the tapes, but I have the memory of
the music in my head. All of it.
So bored with that
I set about studying Gothic Architecture and the
Gothic revival of the 18th and 19th Centuries. I
mention that elsewhere on my site with reference
to William Morris, but I digress. If you obsess
about something you do it in a big way. I went so
far as to order rare first editions from the
libraries to read, and even confronted myself
with an original treatise in Latin. Didn't get
far with it but nice pictures though by
Wenceslaus Hollar. Today I have a fine book of
reproductions of those illustrations. Getting to
the University was handy because it gave me
access to more books on the subject and best of
all the complete works of William Morris.
I was undoubtedly
a bit of an oddity at the University, but there
were quite a few oddities then, so I would not
have stood out that much in my first year. I had
appalling dress sense though. I was a sort of
proto punk before punk became fashionable except
that I had hair down to my shoulders.
Pied
Piper
- At about this time, I first taught
myself to play the penny whistle and then the
flute as I also enjoyed folk music. One of the
legacies from my father, who had been a folk
singer in his earlier days and co- founded the
first folk club in Coventry.
I have an affinity with trees and I
never slept much. I would go out and about in the
various woodlands around the University at night,
and play my flute like the pagan god pan,
listening to the echoes which were particular to
those locations and totally losing myself in the
sound. I could make myself virtually invisible in
the woods I knew so well. The university being
close to where I was brought up. Other students
never found who it was, out there, look as they
might. They did not have my ability to travel
through the woods in total darkness have since
seen that other people on the Autism spectrum
have felt an affinity to Elfin kind, well that is
the nearest I came to it. Totally wild and free,
you cannot beat it.
So
striking must my appearance have been that the
following year, when I participated in a student
demonstration (against the then Labour education
minister Shirley Williams I recall) A
photographer saw fit to take a picture of me and
put it on the back page of the Guardian Newspaper
entitled "a musical face in the crowd"
I needed some
transport to get me around and so I brought a
scooter, and then another, and another. Yes you've
guessed it my next obsession. I learnt how to put
them together and everything about them the
complete history of Lambretta and Vespa.
My
extraordinary rise to prominence - Were it not for certain
events in 1975 I would have remained more or less
in obscurity at University in my self made world,
except for the fact that there was a mass
occupation of the University Senate House. I was
not uninterested in Politics as I was actually
studying politics (as well as the works of
William Morris, and Lambretta scooters)
I neglected to say
that my other hobby was photography, and that I
wanted to record this event for posterity.
Shall I just say
that my peculiarities eventually brought me into
contact with the rest of humanity and got me
noticed. My scooters certainly were. To some
people I actually became interesting. It was when
I had enough of the way the student politics were
run and launched my own manifesto, that everybody
got to hear of me. I am dyslexic and the bad
spelling on my manifesto and the unique way in
which I put my arguments made it stand out.
Then of course
came the crunch. I had to get up and speak in
public at the hustings. I did not know it at the
time but I was
a star in the making, my unique style of delivery,
was actually funny. People laughed. They listened
and they laughed. And I did not mind them
laughing. I then began to be parodied and
caricatured in the students newspaper. Everything
I did or said was reported on.
I was adopted by
the anarchist students, as you could not get any
more anarchic than I was, which actually bought
me into contact with other students, a lot of
them with way out ideas, who were very able to
accept me as one of them, and so began an actual
social life for the first time.
Newspaper
Columnist - Following on
that I was invited to write a column for the
students paper.
I didn't have the
faintest Idea what to write, so I wrote bizarre
parodies. Lots of stream of consciousness prose
and non sequiturs, alluding to the particularly
strange mental landscape I inhabited. And wonder
of wonders, they laughed, and asked for more. It
was the time of Monty Python and the raw
outpourings of my divergent mind actually caught
the mood of the times.
I learnt a great
deal in that short time about journalism and the
production of newspapers as it was a truly co-operative
effort. Everyone had a go at typing or laying out
the text. You could always tell my layouts
because being dyspraxic they were so crooked.
Down
to Earth - In retrospect
those were some of the best times of my life, for
although I did not pass my degree. There were no
accommodations available in the examination
process, and my lack of mathematical skills did
for me in the other joint honours subject which
was economics. I fitted in, in a society without
convention.
I even had women
who were interested in me!
Came the final
year, and I failed my resits and finals in
Economics, and it had to end. I had to buy a suit
and cut my hair and go looking for a job. Well
the next phase of my life was a return to my
former isolation. The real world as it were.
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