Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (14 page)

Another favourite subject at secondary school was History. Since I was very small I have loved learning lists of information and my history class was full of them: lists of names and dates of monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers were of particular interest to me. I much prefer non-fiction to fiction, so reading about and studying many different facts and figures from key events in history was immensely enjoyable for me. I also had to analyse texts and attempt to understand the relationships between different ideas and historical situations. I was enthralled by the notion that a single, seemingly solitary event could lead to a sequence of many other events, like a row of dominoes. History’s complexity fascinated me.

From the age of eleven, I began to create my own world of historical figures, such as presidents and prime ministers, and imagined complete and intricate biographies for every one of them. The various names and dates and events would often just come to me and I spent a lot of time thinking through the invented facts and statistics of each. Some are influenced by my knowledge of real historical people and events, while others are very different. I continue even to this day to ponder my own historical chronologies and to add to them with new individuals and events over time. Below is an example of one of my created historical figures:

Howard Sandum (1888–1967),
32nd president of the United States of America

Sandum was born to a very poor family in the Mid-West and fought in the First World War before being elected as a Republican to the House of Representatives in 1921 and to the Senate three years later, aged just thirty-six. He became a state governor in 1930 and was elected President of the United States in November 1938, defeating sixty-four-year-old Democrat incumbent Evan Kramer. Sandum served as wartime president, declaring war on Nazi Germany and Japan in December 1941. He was defeated by Democrat William Griffin (born 1890) in November 1944 (presidential elections occurring every six years) and subsequently retired from national politics. Sandum wrote his memoirs in retirement – they were published in 1963. Sandum’s only child, his son Charles (1920–2000), followed his father into politics, serving as a congressman from 1966–1986.

There were school subjects that I really hated and struggled in. Woodwork, for example, was one that I found boring and couldn’t apply myself to at all. My classmates were happy enough to cut and sand and construct with various pieces of wood, but I found it difficult to follow the teacher’s instructions and often lagged behind everyone else in the class. Sometimes the teacher became impatient with me and came over and worked the equipment for me. He thought I was being lazy, but the truth was that I felt in a totally alien environment and I didn’t want to be there.

The same was true of Physical Education. I enjoyed activities that didn’t require interaction with others – trampolining and high jump were activities I really liked and looked forward to. Unfortunately, most lessons were spent on the field playing games such as rugby and football that required lots of teamwork. I always dreaded the moment when team captains were picked. They then selected their team mates one by one until there was only one person left standing on their own – that person was almost always me. It was not that I could not run fast or kick a ball in a straight line. I just could not interact with the other players on the team; I didn’t know when to move and when to pass and when to let someone else take over. During a match there was so much noise around me that I would switch off without realising it, and not know what was going on around me until one of the players or the coach came and stood over me and told me to ‘pay attention’ or ‘get involved’.

Even as I got older, I still found it very difficult to socialise with my classmates and make friends. In the first months after starting secondary school I was fortunate to meet Rehan, a British Asian whose family had moved to the UK from India fifty years before. Rehan was tall and skinny with very thick, black hair that he combed frequently with a brush he kept in his schoolbag. The other pupils at the school teased him because of his unusual appearance – his two front teeth were missing and his upper lip was scarred from a childhood accident. Perhaps because he too was shy and nervous and – like Babak – something of an outsider, we became friends and spent a lot of time together. Rehan was the person I would always sit next to in class and the one I would walk around the school corridors with, talking about things that interested me, while the other children played in the field and playground outside at breaktime. Sometimes Rehan would recite poetry to me; he read a lot of poetry, wrote his own poems and was very interested in words and language. It was something else that we had in common.

Rehan loved London and travelled regularly around it on the Underground, frequenting historical parts where famous poets had once lived and worked, and visiting his mosque in Wimbledon for Friday prayers. He was surprised to discover that though I had lived in London all my life I had hardly seen any of it apart from the streets around my family home. So, at weekends, Rehan would occasionally arrange to take me with him on his travels on the Underground to see such attractions as the Tower of London, Big Ben and Buckingham Palace. He would buy my ticket for me and walk with me down to the platform where we waited for the train. It was gloomy and humid and I remember looking down at my feet and noticing a burned out match and a crumpled cigarette packet with the words: ‘Warning: Smoking can seriously damage your health’ on it.

As we sat together on the train, Rehan showed me the map of the different Underground lines and stations: yellow for the Circle line, blue for the Victoria line, green for the District line. The train shook a lot as it travelled, as though it was sneezing continuously. I did not like central London – it was full of people and noise and different smells and sights and sounds – and there was too much information for me to mentally organise and it made my head hurt. It helped that Rehan took me to quiet sites away from the crowds of tourists and sightseers: museums, libraries and galleries. I liked Rehan a lot and felt safe whenever I was with him.

Throughout secondary school, Rehan was often ill and was increasingly away from class. I gradually had to learn to cope without his company while at school, which was not easy and I became vulnerable to my classmates teasing me over having no friends at all. When the school library was closed, I spent break-times walking round and round the corridors by myself until the bell rang for the next class. I dreaded group activities in the classroom, where previously I would have worked happily with Rehan. Instead the teacher would have to ask in a loud voice: ‘Who can do me a favour and team up with Daniel?’ No one would want to, and I often had to work on my own which suited me fine.

My father taught me how to play chess when I was thirteen. One day he showed me the chessboard and pieces that he used when he played with friends and asked if I wanted to learn. I nodded, so he demonstrated how each of the pieces moved on the board and explained the basic rules of the game. My father was self-taught and only played occasionally to pass the time. Even so, it was a surprise to him when I beat him in our first game together. ‘Beginner’s luck,’ he said and put the pieces back in their starting positions and we played another game. Again, I won. At this point my father had the idea that I might benefit from playing socially at a chess club. He knew of one nearby and told me he would take me to play there the following week.

There are many mathematical problems involving chess; the most famous and my personal favourite is known as the ‘Knight’s Tour’, which is a sequence of moves by a knight chess piece (which moves in an ‘L’ shape – two squares vertically and one horizontally or one square vertically and two horizontally) where each square of the board is visited just once. Many famous mathematicians have studied this problem over the centuries. A simple solution uses the ‘Warnsdorff Rule’, according to which at each step the knight must move to the square that has the lowest degree (the degree of a square is the number of squares to which the knight can move from that square). Below is an example of a successfully completed Knight’s Tour:

The club I played at was a twenty-minute walk from my home. My father took me each week and collected me at the end of the evening. The club met at a small hall next to a library and was run by a short man called Brian, who had a wrinkled face like a prune. Inside the hall were sets of tables and chairs and elderly men sat hunched over chessboards. It was very quiet while the games were being played, except for the noise of pieces being moved and clocks ticking and shoes tapping and the hall’s fluorescent lights humming. My father introduced me to Brian and told him that I was a beginner who was very shy but keen to learn and enjoyed playing the game. I was asked if I knew how to assemble the board at the start of a game. I nodded and was asked to sit at an empty table with a chess-board and a box of pieces, and to take each piece and put it on the correct initial position on the board. Once I had finished, Brian called an elderly man with thick glasses over to sit opposite me and play a game with me. Brian and my father both stood back and watched as I nervously moved each piece until a half hour later my opponent pushed his king over and stood up. I didn’t know what this meant until Brian came over and said simply: ‘Well done – you won.’

I liked going to the club each week to play. It wasn’t noisy and I did not have to talk or interact very much with the other players. When I wasn’t playing chess at the club, I was reading about it at home in books I had borrowed from the local library. Soon, all I could talk about was chess – I even told people that I wanted to be a professional chess player when I got older. When Brian asked me if I wanted to play competitively for the club against players from other clubs in the area I was excited, because it meant I could play even more chess, and I agreed straight away. Matches took place on different days of the week, but each player in the team was asked ahead of time if they were available to play. Brian would collect me in his car and drive me, sometimes with another member of the team, to the evening’s venue. These games were played more formally than those at the club and each player had to write down the game’s moves as they were played on a sheet of paper provided before the start of play. I won most of my games and so quickly became a regular member of the club’s match team.

After each match, I would take my sheet of paper home with me and replay the moves on my own chessboard while sitting on the floor of my bedroom, analysing the positions reached to try and find ways of improving. It was advice I had read in one of my chess books and it helped me to avoid repeating mistakes and to become familiar with various common positions during a game.

The hardest part of playing chess for me was trying to maintain a deep level of concentration over a long game that could often last two or three hours. I tend to think deeply in short and intense bursts, followed by longer periods when my ability to concentrate on something is much reduced and less consistent. I also find it hard to switch off from small things happening around me and this affects my concentration: someone exhaling noisily across the room from me, for example. There were games where I would play myself into an advantageous position and then lose my concentration, play a weak move or series of moves and end up losing. That was always very frustrating for me.

Each month I read the latest chess magazine at my local library. In one issue I read an advert for an upcoming tournament not far from my home. It read in part, ‘Entry Fee: In advance – £5 off. On the day – £20’. I tend to read things very literally, and I was not at all sure what ‘off’ meant here and guessed that it was an abbreviation of ‘offer’. I asked my parents if I could participate and they agreed and gave me a postal order for the amount I thought I needed to send: £5. Two weeks later I arrived at the hall where the competition was being held and gave my name. The man looked through his notes, and then said that I must have misunderstood because I still owed an additional £15 (because I was paying on the day, I had to pay the full fee). Fortunately, I had some extra money with me and paid, still feeling very confused about the whole situation.

The games were timed and I started my first match confidently and played quickly. Soon I had a strong position on the board and a big time advantage against my opponent as well. I was feeling very positive. Then suddenly my opponent made his move, pressed the button on the clock and stood up quickly. I watched him as he paced up and down the hall while he waited for me to respond. I had not expected him to do this and found that I could not concentrate well while he walked up and down, his shoes squeaking on the hard, shiny floor. Totally distracted, I played a series of poor moves and lost the game. I felt thoroughly disappointed, but also unable to go on with the other games because I just could not get my concentration back. I walked out of the hall and went home, deciding that tournament play was not for me.

I continued to play regularly by myself with a chess set on the floor of my bedroom. My family knew not to disturb me when I was in the middle of a game. When playing by myself, chess was soothing, with its fixed and consistent rules and repeated patterns of pieces and positions. At sixteen I created a game of 18 moves and sent it to the chess magazine I read avidly on my regular library visits. To my surprise, it was published several months later as the lead item in the issue’s letters pages. My parents were so proud that they had the page framed and hung it on my bedroom wall.