So we were back to specifics again: what to do with Elly, how to fill her empty days, how to encourage such spontaneous play as she originated, how to supply new and usable experiences where she originated none. As before, I learned best by watching. Twice the analyst came to our house — further evidence of her flexibility, for many children are treated by people who never see them at home. She was thus able to check out some ideas of her own in a direct way that would otherwise have been impossible. She could satisfy herself that Elly’s fastidiousness did not reflect compulsive orderliness at home (one look at the living room took care of that!), and that her low performance was not a reaction to the inappropriately high standards of a middle-class family. And while she observed, I was able to watch her play with Elly. It was an impressive sight, for she was one of those people who could involve her in action without making demands on her. Most people tried to talk to Elly. This therapist, though highly articulate, was an expert in nonverbal communication. She played the piano for Elly. She got out the cups and saucers she had brought and got her to play tea- party. She sat down on the floor beside her to paint. Elly, used to my drawing sessions, tried to get her to do the drawing herself. She did not refuse, but kept her markings as crude as Elly’s own, so they could set no unattainable standard. A year before, when I had begun drawing with Elly, I had deliberately made my drawings as realistic as I could to aid her uncertain recognition. The technique had had considerable effectiveness,but I could now see its drawbacks. Elly was more likely to draw for someone else than for me.
The analyst had brought a flower pot. She tried to interest Elly in filling it with earth. She had little success beyond satisfying herself that Elly could take dirt or leave it, but I saw something that might be usable later. As I watched the therapist I had the impression of an enormous reservoir of skills, most of them as yet inapplicable to this very simple system, yet still something I could learn from for the future. I wished I could watch her with other children. That was impossible, but she was willing to tell me about some of them. The children she described seemed much less severely afflicted than Elly; even those who didn’t talk had shown that they could. I tried to imagine Elly playing, like the little girl I was hearing about, with the contents of my pocketbook, and in the process revealing tensions and hostilities invisible on the surface. I couldn’t. If I gave her my pocketbook what would she do but ignore it, or at best lay the objects out in rows? I put the idea away for the future. One day, I hoped, she would reach that degree of complexity.
She was growing all the time. We led a quiet life in England; inside the walls and fences of our neat suburb children played, but there was no way I knew to get Elly near them. Even at home, on the open lawns full of children, she had done no more than run beside them. Here, except for her own siblings, there were no children to run with. Yet I sensed a frail new readiness. I often took her to the village green, where she would swing unseeingly among strong wiry boys and girls who paid her no more attention than she paid them. But one day, as a squad of children marched out of the adjoining school yard, she did an unexpected thing — she suddenly shifted direction and ran directly among them. I reported this to the analyst, and other incidents that tended in the same direction. It was then that she made the move that has benefited Elly more than any other single thing that has been done for her. It was she who made the contacts that made it possible for Elly to go to nursery school with normal children. That Elly, from that time to this,has been able to go to school is largely due to the intelligence and devotion of the teachers at the extraordinary school the analyst found for her.
They too were professionals. The school was no plushy private foundation, but run with tight public funds as a demonstration school for the local teacher’s college. The analyst did not think a place would be found there for Elly — our best hope was that the principal would see her and recommend some tiny, mother-run class where Elly could at least see other children. We were foreigners. We did not even live within this school district. There was every administrative reason to send us on our way and none to welcome us. Yet the principal took us in — both of us, for the way she found to reconcile regulations with need was to invite me to come in with Elly, so that her status could be that of a guest, not a pupil. And as a further dividend, I could watch the work of teachers who were such subtle masters of their calling that no one could say, in this school, where teaching ended and therapy began.
For we were not the only waifs welcomed here. Elly was not even the most severely handicapped child in the school; she functioned far more ably than the overgrown, affectionate Mongoloid who moved clumsily about among the toys. I learned later that parents who wanted a place for their normal children in this fine school enrolled them at birth. Not that it was a school for misfits; normal children formed the great majority. But for children whose need was severe enough this principal would somehow find room. Whether their trouble was physical or emotional in origin, caused by deprivation or by family upheaval, they became contributing members of the school, even if like the little Mongoloid all they could contribute was their helplessness. More fortunate children, imaginatively treated, could learn much from that. Here imagination and competence bound waifs and healthy children into one thriving community, where by a miracle daily renewed fifty small people ranging in age from near babyhood (the youngest two and a half) to almost five were not only taught and fostered, but given their main meal of the day. The staff consisted of the principal and two teachers, helped by a student trainee and a pleasant woman who ran the kitchen. The school kept a seven-hour day, although Elly, as a guest, came only for an hour and a quarter twice weekly. American administrators, I suspect, would think this impossible. I wish they could, as I did, see it done.
My hours there were lessons in resourcefulness. Nothing seemed to escape these people. They observed Elly as closely as if they had nothing else to do. The analyst and I had been occupied for some time with Elly’s tub and basin obsession, which had lasted now for some months. The principal had needed no more than the bare mention that Elly liked to play with water; the first time Elly came to play, tub, cups, kettles, and waterproof apron were set out for her. No better introduction could have been chosen. Elly was delighted; she made loud, cheerful birdlike noises, she sang. Soon, however, a little boy came up. He wanted to play too. Elly, of course, had never in her life played except by terms she herself had set, and never with a child her own age. Rarely, indeed, had she appeared even to see another small child, although she now often focused on her siblings and on adults. She saw this child well enough, however. She warned him off with edged, anxious noises. Other children gathered. She did not mind them; they were not using the water. The little boy took the kettle and poured. Elly squealed, shrieked, jumped up and down, made the rhythmic intonation that I knew mimicked our ‘that’s enough!’ Calmly the principal kept on with the game. While another teacher suggested new activities for the watching children, Miss J. found a new washing activity that Elly and the little boy could share. Elly calmed down a bit and the little boy drifted away. Everything was fine then, naturally, but when another child came and she began to shriek, Miss J. gently explained that Elly had not learned to share yet, and let her have the tub alone. The rest of the session was dominated by water. Elly tired of the tub and, leaving the playroom, found a faucet she remembered from her first interview at the school, with a large bucket beneath it. It was no toy — children did not ordinarily play in this room, which combined the functions of clean-up room and toilet,equipped with large washtubs, four tiny toilets separated from the room by half-open curtains, and four tiny basins. Here Elly was allowed to play apart from the other children, who came and went on their own errands. Elly filled the bucket and emptied the heavy, awkward burden (weak Elly!) into one of the little toilets. She filled it too full and spilled some on the floor and on her tights. She wept furiously — a sound quite different from her former anxious shrieks — but when the water was mopped up she returned to the bucket. The next time, and all subsequent ones, the water level was exquisitely adjusted to avoid further spills. Except for an excursion into the playroom to get a doll to perch on the bucket and another to watch the assistant run water into the washtub she played in hermetic isolation until her time was up. She left with reluctance; her last act was to return to the bucket and empty it in the toilet. Miss J. said, ‘Bye-bye, Elly.’ No response. She leans down, puts her face close in front of Elly’s. Elly doesn’t see her. She kisses her. Elly’s face is expressionless. We go.