The Dumb House (4 page)

That was when the idea of the experiment began to form in my mind. For the first time, I understood the possibility of making something abstract into a real event. I had no clear plan, but the sense of freedom was unexpectedly powerful. It was like a religious conversion: suddenly the hypothesis, the shadow, the distant image, had become a presence, as tangible as flesh and bone. It would have been easy to mistake this sensation for a thing of the moment, a sudden and spontaneous decision, but the idea of the Dumb House experiment had been waiting to form all my life. Even when I first heard that story, I recognised its importance. Maybe at first it was just the image that attracted me: a house in the desert – a palace really – silent, luxurious, filled with crazed or ecstatic children, locked into a world that was permanently mysterious, a whole world of things that they could not describe or define. When God made Adam, he told him to go into the garden and give names to the trees and the animals, and when Adam returned, God saw that these names
were good. Presumably the names had not existed before Adam created them. So the children of the Dumb House knew the world as God did: their Eden was always newly-created, as it was in the beginning.

On the other hand, what if the names Adam had chosen were exactly those that God had used, when he summoned the rocks and trees and creatures of the world from nothingness? If that were so, these names would be the nouns of an original language, something that was lost after the Fall, and if those nouns could be rediscovered, they would give a new meaning to the world. Everything, then, would be inviolate, and inviolable. Peace would return to the earth. There had been people who believed this in every age, just as Akbar had believed that language was learned. There was a story about James IV of Scotland, who kept a child in a lonely hut, away from the court; according to Herodotus, the Pharaoh, Psamtik I, had conducted a similar experiment, deciding that the children he had deprived of language were capable of speaking the original tongue, the innate speech upon which Akbar's counsellors had founded their faith.

As far as I was concerned, these stories were misleading and childish. But the story of Akbar and the Dumb House held my attention; I formed images, not only of the house itself, but of those who had initiated the experiment, those who had to live with its consequences. The story does not tell us what happened to the children, and we know nothing of how the counsellors responded when they heard that their faith in the innateness of speech had been undermined, but I could picture a tidy and ordered world crumbling around them. It is easy to understand why they wanted language to be indicative of something divine, an essential and transcendent soul. They had only to look around at the sheer number of people in the world
to know that grace, or art, or power – any of the achievements of any one individual – would be insignificant, in the context of that mass of humanity, unless there was something more to reckon with. For religious reasons, their tendency would be to link the soul with the intellect, and the single most significant indicator of intellect is the ability to speak. They might even have believed that thought and language were interdependent, that a being without language would be incapable of thinking. Akbar's answer to the question, and his proposed method of proof, must have struck them as an unimaginable horror – they must have been confident that the Mughal would be proven wrong. So later, when the children were found to be incapable of speech, the counsellors must have considered themselves responsible, in some part, for an appalling act of torture, as they witnessed the infants, empty-minded and soulless, wandering helplessly in an unnamed world. They must have asked themselves what kind of world that was – how terrible, how beautiful, how frightening in its autonomy, in its refusal to be defined. In the end, they must even have regretted the experiment for their own sakes. For surely their faith must have foundered on the outcome. Perhaps it would have decayed slowly, over months, or even years of lingering doubt, but eventually it must have died. It would have been a personal tragedy for each of those men to be parties to an act whose consequences they did not understand.

Yet what they accepted as the final outcome was not a conclusion at all, but a new beginning. That was what Mother had made me see. She had shown me the horror of the children's predicament, through the counsellors' eyes; at the same time, she had let me understand the beauty of the experiment, through the image of the Dumb House itself: perfect, inscrutable, shining in my mind, like a proposition in geometry, or one of those
logical paradoxes that, by itself, can open up a whole new field of thought.

For the first few days after I stopped travelling, I worked in the garden and thought about what I wanted to do. I had left the iris beds and rose borders to fend for themselves ever since Mother's death, and the whole place was untidy and overgrown. Now, as I worked, the plants reappeared, complete with their names – and with them emerged my basic plan. I would begin by collecting all the information I could about language learning and deprivation. I would research speech disorders, elective mutism, the wild boys and wolf children of legend, the creators of secret languages and scripts. I would add to the body of research myself, perhaps, trawling through specialist publications and the general press for case histories, anecdotes, hearsay – anything that would help me find what I was looking for – and I would place an advertisement in the local paper asking for personal, previously undocumented experiences. I would leave the wording deliberately vague, to encourage a wide response.

Naturally, though, I still felt something was missing. I knew that the only way to test the hypothesis was to repeat the experiment and, from the beginning, that was my true intention. Nevertheless, I telephoned the
County Herald
and placed an advertisement. I deliberated for some time on where it should be printed, but in the end there was no alternative but to put it in the personal columns, among the Tarot readings and lonely hearts, the exclusive massages and the appeals for information about people half-met in palm houses and tea rooms. There was something about the Personals – something in the language used – that suggested autumn: I had probably read too many books where the lovers come splashing through fallen leaves in scarves
and winter coats. It is always Sunday afternoon, there is always a lamp burning in the middle distance, probably even a smell of toast and warm butter, or the sound of a violin being played in some rented room in the backstreets. I liked the idea of my clinical, tersely-worded piece appearing there, as a form of rebuke, a cold, sharp instrument amongst the love hearts and the bad poems.

Meanwhile, I began visiting the reference library in Weston, to collect what information I could not find in books from Mother's study. The historical evidence was apocryphal. The earliest language experiment I could find was that recorded by Herodotus: in his second history he describes how Psamtik gave two new born babies to a shepherd, to keep hidden among his flocks. He told the man that no one should utter a word in the presence of these children, but they should live by themselves, in a lonely place. It was the shepherd's task to keep them fed, and ‘perform the other things needful'. Psamtik commanded these things, said Herodotus, because he desired, when the babes should be past meaningless whimpering, to hear what language they would utter first. One day, after two years had passed, when the shepherd went into the children's house, they fell down before him and cried
becos
, and stretched out their hands. The shepherd brought the king to see the children, and they repeated the word
becos
which, in Phrygian, means bread. Herodotus concludes his account by saying that the Pharaoh was forced to accept that the Phrygians were the oldest race on earth, and not the Egyptians, as he had previously maintained.

It was an amusing story, but it was pure fairy tale. Other accounts were similar, for example that of James IV's Hebrew-speaking child. In some cases, the children did not speak, or they simply died from loneliness and neglect, as in the experiment conducted by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. None of these
accounts had the simple beauty of the Akbar story, but it was interesting that the theme had fascinated historians throughout the ages. There were cases of wolf-boys, calf-children, infants raised by gazelles, pigs, bears and leopards. The stories came from as far afield as Japan and Germany, India and Ohio. The two best-documented contemporary accounts – the cases of Genie and the Kennedy twins – were utterly contradictory. Genie had been kept isolated in a small room by her parents, who thought she was retarded. Her father had built her a chair, a little like a commode, which allowed her to be kept confined all day, without doing herself harm. At night she was strapped to a bed. She existed like this for the first thirteen years of her life. As far as anyone could tell, she had never been exposed to language and, most of the time, she had been alone.

When Genie was discovered, the linguists and grammarians were very excited. The accepted wisdom – the Lenneberg hypothesis – stated that a child deprived of language between the age of two and puberty would never learn to speak grammatically. They might learn individual words, but they would not be able to string them together to form meaningful sentences. Considerable resources were expended in teaching Genie first, sign language, then speech, but she never progressed to sentence formation, and, for legal, rather than scientific reasons, the experiment ended in confusion, with Genie confined to an institution.

As far as I could tell, the problem with the Genie experiment had been as much a lack of history as a lack of control. From the first, the researchers must have known that they could never collect enough useful data on Genie's early life to support a hypothesis: the very name they chose for her gave them away, for what was Genie but a creature who emerged, fully-formed, from the darkness? She had been sealed in a bottle for years,
but nobody knew what had happened inside the bottle; nobody knew if she was subnormal, as her rather had claimed, or even how far she had been exposed to language. In her thirteen years, she must have heard something. Nobody could say why she had never developed speech: they assumed that, because she had been kept in isolation, she'd had no opportunity to do so. Yet, when Grace and Virginia Kennedy were found, after being confined for several years (for the same reason as Genie, because their parents had considered them retarded), they had created their own, relatively sophisticated language, even inventing names for one another. They called themselves Poto and Cabenga. Was it because they had each other; was it the case that what mattered wasn't so much exposure to language as the possibility of a listener? Did Genie fail to talk because she'd heard almost no speech in her formative years? Or was it because she had nobody to talk to?

The few examples I found of Poto and Cabenga's speech fascinated me. The language they had invented was strangely beautiful, and I studied it carefully, convinced it was authentic. However, the books in the library contained only fleeting and tantalising references to these histories. In each case, the children themselves disappeared into a kind of limbo, where I could not follow. The Kennedy girls were probably in their early thirties, if they were still alive. Genie was discovered in 1970, at the age of thirteen. What happened to them? And how many more children might there be, hidden away in damp rooms, shackled to their beds, or strapped into homemade commodes?

For the first week after I placed the advertisement, I heard nothing. Then, when replies did start coming through, they were mostly irrelevant, or sarcastic, sometimes even obscene. But there was one that looked promising. I remember the
letter clearly, the pale-blue paper, the deliberate, overly ornate script. It came from a woman who lived nearby with her seven-year-old son. The boy was mute, she said, but there was no physiological cause; the woman had been to doctors, speech therapists, psychologists – she told me all this in that first letter – but it had made no difference. To begin with, I was suspicious. There was something in the tone of her letter that suggested she imagined I was offering a cure of some kind; a solution, or at least an explanation. But after a while I understood that all she wanted was to tell somebody else her story, someone who had never heard it before. She gave an address, but no telephone number; she lived in Weston, just twelve miles away. She suggested I call on her, on any weekday evening, between five and eight thirty. Her name was Mrs Olerud; her son's name was Jeremy.

I tried to picture the woman from her letter. I supposed the name was Scandinavian; certainly, there was something about the way she wrote – an openness, combined with an odd formality – that suggested a foreigner. I read the letter several times; it ran for several pages, and was mostly a history of the boy's life, his illnesses, his school grades, the minor accidents he had suffered. Each doctor he had seen was mentioned by name, as if she expected me to be familiar with his specialism and methods. There was no mention of the boy's father; it occurred to me that the man might disapprove of her opening up to a complete stranger like this, or perhaps he was simply unaware that she had written to me. Whenever she talked about the boy, I had a distinct impression of distaste or unease. It was if she was afraid of her own child; or of someone else whose view of the child differed from hers, someone who was looking over her shoulder all the time. There was too much respect. Yes, that was it. She never used pronouns in her descriptions of the boy; she always referred to him by name. There was a kind of awe
that overwhelmed her whenever she mentioned her son. I think it was this, as much as anything else, that roused my curiosity. I wanted to see this child. I wanted to see him because the letter had suggested to me that his mother was afraid of him, and I wanted to know why a grown woman would be afraid of a seven-year-old.