It is as if Elly were more comfortable with an image of herself that could not do things. Her inabilities seemed not only willed but jealously guarded. I remember her at four, after considerable progress of the kind described here, getting ready for her bath. She cannot yet undress herself, but for some weeks she has been taking off her shoes once I untied them. Today she refuses, laughing at me. (Learning to tease shows of course great progress in human contact, but that belongs in a later chapter.) I wait, resisting the temptation to assist her. The shoe is on so loosely that it falls off. Elly, who ‘cannot’ put on her shoes, sizes up the situation. Instantly and expertly she puts the shoe back on. She was not going to take it off and she didn’t!
Whatever it was that held Elly back from using her hands also inhibited her use of her body. The extreme physical caution that had made it possible for us to ignore the dangers of stairs and edges when she was small did not abate. We could only infer that she was capable of balancing and climbing like other children, as we had inferred that she could walk. For three years things on upper shelves were safe; if Elly could not reach them, she would not push over a chair and climb to get them. For more than four years she was lifted in and out of her crib. As time went on I kept the sides down and set a chair beside the bed. Elly would tentatively put her legs over the side on to the waiting chair and draw them back again. Yet we remembered a strange disturbed night a year before when the older children, left to baby-sit for an Elly who, because of guests, had been put to sleep in a playpen in an unfamiliar room, had had to call us home because Elly had got out three times. How had she done it? The playpen sides were higher than the crib’s. Nobody knew; she hadn’t, of course, performed in public. When I returned and put her back in the pen, she stayed there. Naturally; she couldn’t climb, could she?
It was the same with stairs. One day in November — she was almost two and a half — she gingerly descended the stairs of a local museum, erect on her two feet. The stairs were wide and shallow, easy to manage. It was April before she walked down the taller stairs at home. Years passed, her legs got longer, but still she descended like a two-year-old, both feet touching each step. She was six before she went down like a normal child, foot below foot.
Hesitation, caution, unwillingness to interact with the physical world. These sound like the shapes of fear, and perhaps they were. Yet she did not seem afraid. It was as if she had found a way to make fear unnecessary. She did not have to be afraid; she had found a way to protect herself from the challenges of her environment. Ignore them and you will not have to avoid them. If something is there to push, do not push it. Do not pull, twist, open, lift, balance, kick, climb, throw. Attempt nothing. Then there will be no failure and you can remain serene. This was not fear in any recognizable form. If it was fear, it lay so deep it never showed itself. There was visible only a tight, closed caution. We could work on it, gradually lead her through tiny steps, each unthreatening, each well within her ability, to the experience of small successes — and hope that she would begin to acquire the ordinary child’s taste for mastery of the forces of the physical world. But the process was inconceivably slow. We waited for the point when one success would generate another without our intervention, when Elly would move ahead on her own from skill to skill as other children do. But it did not come. For year upon year, the initiative remained with us.
5. Willed Blindness
A normal child develops almost automatically. It needs no officious overseers to assist it in the use of its senses. It is sufficient that it find itself in a world that can be touched, heard, seen. If babies had to be taught to reach, to focus, to listen, to interpret, the human race would never have survived. The most gifted pedagogue could hardly hope to programme the speech development that takes place spontaneously in a dull normal two-year-old.
But Elly was not a normal child. She was not spastic or paralytic, yet we could not take for granted that she would use her body. It was the same with the more abstract abilities — with hearing and with sight. We could not take them for granted either. Elly was not blind, but sight is more than images on the retina. The organism must record, but it must also interpret before it can be said to see. As eighteen-month-old Elly flipped the pages of her coloured picture books, what did she see? Did her mind integrate the reds and browns and blacks and blues and greys into a kitten or a car? I could not say. I could only observe that she flipped the pages rapidly, steadily, with never a pause. Once — once only — she had shown she recognized a picture, of a blue teddy bear like her own. That was at seventeen months. Months passed, one year, another, and never did Elly give another sign that she could see a picture.
Negative abilities are harder to spot in proportion as they are more abstract. With all the other things Elly did not do, it was only gradually that we began to think about how much she did not seem to see. We knew, of course, that she could look right through a person. She usually did. It was some time before we became conscious that she was blind to more than human beings. But when we began to think about it, it seemed that Elly saw little that was farther than three feet away.
I have said that she did not point. After a while, no more did we; it was impossible, by gesture and of course by speech, to get her to look at anything at a distance. The significance of this might be dubious; it was, after all, impossible without a Machiavellian strategy to get her to do anything at all. If she did not see a dog when we pointed at it there was no cause for surprise. Yet as impressions piled up, it was impossible not to be struck by her imperviousness to visual stimuli of all sorts.
A car would draw up within three feet of where she was playing. She would not look at it. A dog ran past. She seemed to register nothing. She was over three before she looked up and saw a bird. Not until she was well past four did she respond in such a way that we could be sure she had seen a cow across a highway, twenty-five feet away.
I am myopic; mine is the simple but severe nearsightedness that closes in at age six to eight, when a child begins to read. Naturally it occurred to me that Elly might be suffering from an early onset of the same thing. Without my glasses, I cannot see a cow across a road either. Yet I could not think that Elly lived in the haze that envelops me when I take my glasses off — Elly who never fumbled, never fell. She was perfectly oriented to her environment. When we went for a walk she knew every turning. I could lag behind her and she would lead me home. Unless she enjoyed some sixth sense (and I have thought of that too), she must, I reasoned, have registered the positions of trees and buildings as she passed; she must, therefore, have seen them.