We had kept in touch with Dr Blank. That spring he suggested we get Elly a record-player, a 45-r.p.m. with a thick spindle a small child could handle easily. Of course that was not necessary: the first day we got the machine, a conventional one, Elly changed the records alone and meticulously returned each record to its proper album, keeping track of them, I suppose, by the colours of the labels and the configurations of printing they bore. I had intended to wait until next day to show her how to switch the machine off and on. After all, Elly had mastered the light-switch only recently, and one could not expect her to learn much at a time. But while I was still downstairs I heard the record-player going up in Elly’s room and found she had needed no teaching. As often, it seemed a question of values - what thought important, she was able to learn as fast as any normal child.
That year, music was important. In part her experience of it was discouraging; it had that same obsessive character that we had observed take over all her new skills. She played The Threepenny Opera every day for two solid months; I was thankful she had picked music that could wear well. But the obsessiveness was not everything. We soon realized that her new ability to sing was not one more repetitive and closed autistic activity. It was providing an unexpected avenue to communication.
We had laid the groundwork for this a year before, quite without knowing it. My husband and I both sing readily. We have always sung to our children. We sang to Elly — more, perhaps, because we talked less. We have always made up little songs to fit recurring situations; like many parents, we had a good-night song, and others of which we were scarcely conscious. One of these was a car song; to the simplest of tunes, we sang.
In this little verse, we could substitute for ‘mama’ the name of any member of the family who happened to be along, and we imagined that this might help Elly learn them, although she gave no sign that this hope was anything but empty. But one never knows what buildings will rise on one’s foundations. Elly was nearly five before she learned anyone’s name, but ‘Riding in the car’ was one of her first songs. Surprisingly, she sang it first not when riding in the car, but one day after I had merely spoken the words. This was the beginning of a curious and encouraging development; what we came to call Elly’s leitmotifs. We became aware that this strange child who could not take in the simplest word could absorb a tune and make it do duty for an idea.
Tunes became words for Elly. ‘Ring around a rosy’ was the first. She was three and three quarters that spring, and she had been playing the game for many months. Now her new musical alertness picked up the tune. As soon as it did, she extended it spontaneously to a picture of children in a ring, then to a garland of flowers, and finally to the unadorned figure of a circle. The song — shortened to its first few notes — for more than a year remained her word for ‘circle’ and the cluster of ideas around it, functioning far more reliably than any of her actual words.
Other leitmotifs followed. ‘Happy birthday’ equalled cake and, by extension, candles and fire. ‘Rockabye baby’ went for any rocking motion. The ascending and descending notes of the scale indicated stairs. We found we could increase our communication with her by ourselves suggesting new leitmotifs. She could pick these up easily, as she had never been able to pick up words, and she retained them. ‘London Bridge’ became a bridge motif; the dwarfs’ song from Snow White did duty for ‘dig’. We noticed that though she now sang many songs freely, she never sang her leitmotifs at random or for their own sake as songs. Nor did she sing them musically, like the others, but rapidly, schematically, functionally — only just well enough for them to do their job of communication. Music was serving as her avenue to words, for of course inside each leitmotif was a germ that was wholly verbal. She had first responded with the car tune when I had spoken, not sung, the words. The one musical motif whose verbal content seemed totally to lack connection with its characteristic situation turned out, when at last we understood it, to illustrate the verbal content of Elly’s music more strikingly than any of the others. For years we did not guess why Elly, at four, had sung ‘Alouette’ when we combed her hair after washing. It was not until she was over six, and speaking much more freely, that we discovered the connection: ‘Alouette’ equalled ‘all wet’ — words which at four she had neither said nor appeared to understand. Clearly, however, she had registered the sounds, and made through music a connection which she was unable or unwilling to make verbally.
And through music I could sometimes gain an insight into her mind that I could not as yet get through words. I transcribe one remarkable event as I recorded it in my diary at the time. It breaks the chronology a little, but not much: Elly was four and a half.
Today I heard Elly thinking. It was exactly as Wagner uses his leitmotifs; Brunnhilde is singing, and beneath her voice can be heard in the orchestra the Valhalla motif and we know she is thinking of Valhalla though she is singing of something quite different.
Elly and I were walking on the college grounds. We arrived on the bicycle and left it parked against a shed. We walked some way and started to return. As we passed a branch-off in the path that would have led back to the bicycle, I decided to prolong the walk by going a different, slightly longer way. As we passed the branch-off, Elly murmured (to herself, not me) a bar or so of ‘Riding on the bike’. She was, I feel sure, wondering about how we’d get back to the bike by this new path. I told her we’d find the bike in a minute and she continued cheerfully on, seeming to have understood. A few minutes later she asked the first question in her four and a half years: as we walked and made a turning, she said (not sang) an unformed series of sounds clearly in the rhythm of ‘Riding on the bike’, and ending in a pronounced rising intonation such as I had never heard her use. It was as if she had asked me when we would arrive at the bike. I told her again we’d soon be at the bike and she remained cheerful until we were.
Only those who have lived with a walled personality can realize the impact of such an expansion of the possibilities of communication, rudimentary as it may seem (and rudimentary as it remained, month after month). It was as if the barrier that Elly maintained against words had been lowered for music. This mattered. For what had we to work with but the faith (like many faiths, it was at first no more than a hope) that the lowering of any barrier must help with all the others?
It was little enough. Of all Elly’s inabilities, the hardest to affect was the inability to speak and comprehend. We could progress slowly towards bodily adequacy and specific skills. We could work to expand visual perception. But auditory communication was more important than these. Speech is an open gate. The personality who cannot speak is in prison, the personality who will not lives in a walled fortress. Who knows which is which, or if there is really any difference — at two, at three, at four years old?
We could work on other things, but speech was crucial. It was, in the current state of knowledge, the only indicator of the future. Kanner had written that if autistic children did not develop useful speech by the age of five the prognosis for them was very bad. We did not have to be told what ‘very bad’ was; we knew that a significant proportion of Kanner’s cases had been institutionalized as functional idiots. Obviously we must not think statistically when the number of recorded cases was so few. Obviously — even more obviously — it could do no good to think in terms of deadlines. It could do harm. Yet deep in our minds, as far back as we could push it, remained the number five.