Great and Unfortunate Things

Chapter One: A Different Timescale

Overview

Twelve years of life without language cannot be described without language, leaving every memory distorted by the very words meant to capture it.

Growing up for almost twelve years without language leaves early memories as diffuse images and sensations rather than events, because words are what anchor memories. Two core images endure. In Giff's kitchen, tethered to her back or perched on her hip, the child watched her cook Ghanaian light soup, bread, cakes, and biscuits; Giff stretched one pan of soup over four or five days, and the smell of her cooking saturated the air. The other is room 3 of the local health center, a blank, antiseptic space with beanbags, a window, and a table of blocks and shapes, where the child spent hours and hours.

Key Takeaways

• A childhood without language survives not as a story but as raw sensation, because words are the scaffolding that turns experience into rememberable events.
• Of the near-total blank of those twelve years, only two places remain solid: Giff's kitchen, thick with the smell of bread and soup, and the bare clinical calm of the health center's room 3.
• The book's "different timescale" is a bodily one: the child's days were paced by a single pan of Ghanaian light soup stretched across four or five days, not by hours or appointments.

Prologue

Overview

An entire inner world can be vivid, alive, and full of color yet remain completely invisible to everyone outside it. The harder others try to reach in, the more the gap between perception and expression seems to widen, and the child is left watching it happen.

After a Cambridge professorship interview, the train carried him to his Clapham childhood home. Speech therapy began at four, three days a week for nearly ten years, after the autism and developmental-delays diagnosis that left him nonverbal; sounds carried no meaning. His mother Giff (never Mum) soothed him with her left hand's keloid scar and transfixed him with a five-pence piece at the clinic door. Therapist Katrina's optimism curdled over months of failed sessions until she shook him violently; he laughed, then felt her fingers pinch. Wordless, he could not report her, but he knew it was wrong. Words eventually came, on a different timescale.

Key Takeaways

• Silence is not the same as absence of understanding, as a child who could not speak still judged his therapist's violence to be wrong.
• A diagnosis can name a child's condition without predicting his timeline, since words arrived on a schedule no one had set for him.
• Caregiver comfort operates through touch and ritual as much as through language, and a scarred hand can be as reassuring as any sentence.
• An adult's frustration in the face of a child's slow progress does not excuse what it produces; some failures are moral rather than clinical.

Chapter Two: Intrinsic Worth

Overview

A childhood of overcrowded rooms, persistent mold, and the constant threat of violence might seem to be a story of deprivation, yet the author insists he was rich. The puzzle is what kind of wealth this could be, and how it survives conditions that should erase it.

Giff was the author's safe haven and fiercest champion. Her arms, strengthened by pounding banku and fufu with the Banku Ta, held him while she read and carried him to the carpet before hand-washing the laundry. His father, Joseph, worked fourteen-hour days as a head chef, ironing his white toque before dawn; "A job worth doing is worth doing well" was his mantra, and the author's work ethic comes from him.

The family's yellow-brick council house, first occupied in 1985, was among the last built before the Thatcher government defunded social housing. It remained cramped, damp, and moldy.

Diagnoses

Giff noticed that JJ, her one-year-old, neither spoke nor clapped nor pointed. Clinics dismissed her; a Ghanaian doctor listened in Ga and referred JJ. JJ was diagnosed with autism at three and a half, and the author was tested a year later, at three. His labels included classic autism, later Asperger's syndrome, and global developmental delay. Doctors called him "dumb" and "slow" and wrote him off.

Autism had entered the DSM only in 1980; a decade earlier he would have been labeled with childhood schizophrenia. The manual's vocabulary of "deficits," "restricted behaviors," and "impairments" judged autism from outside. In 1980s South London, the refrigerator mothers theory persisted, and Giff was blamed for speaking Ga.

Sankofa

Grief came first: months of tears. Then she followed the Sankofa, the Ghanaian bird that looks backward to move forward. Her dispersed childhood after her parents' divorce had built adaptability and strength. Her faith told her God does not give a burden too great to carry. She stopped listening to the experts and made "I don't accept that" her refrain, believing both sons had intrinsic worth. Just as God's invisibility never proved his absence, the claim that there was "no one in there" did not make it true.

Key Takeaways

• A child who misses early milestones like speaking, clapping, or pointing can be dismissed by clinics, so a mother's insistence on being heard is often what finally secures a diagnosis.
• Diagnostic labels such as "dumb" and "slow" record what a child cannot do from the examiner's outside view; they never settle what the child is worth.
• Grief for the lost expected child and acceptance of the actual child are not opposites; looking back at past hardship can supply the strength to carry both.
• The claim that a child is "not in there" is no more refuted by a diagnosis than God's existence is refuted by invisibility, and rejecting it can become a deliberate, sustaining refrain.

Chapter Three: Sequence and Sameness

Overview

When the only person who understands you is the one who cannot always be there, every ordinary crossing becomes a crisis. What happens to a child who depends on absolute sameness when the world insists on change?

His brother Simon, born when he was four, read and wrote fluently while the author stayed wordless. Tests at five found profound deafness in his left ear; a hearing aid changed nothing. Without words, frustration surfaced as rocking, humming, and head-banging, stimming behaviors. Giff learned restraint worsened meltdowns, so she cushioned him.

At school

School demanded sequence and sameness: same cartoons, same Weetabix at the same temperature, same clothes in the same order. Any change triggered collapse, and separation from Giff terrified him. Teachers restrained him against her advice, then phoned her. She cupped his face and held his gaze. When an Arndale trip left Giff unreachable, he split his head open and was segregated into a solo classroom.

The clinic

The hospital clinic compounded the damage. Clipboard-wielding adults made him match shapes and endure recordings of car noises and slamming doors. According to the book, autistic brains receive more sensory input than neurotypical, forcing shutdown. Autistic people differ: JJ loved LEGO; the author did not. Giff insisted they were different and needed different treatment. The sessions taught him to go numb, and that numbness persists.

Key Takeaways

• Routine was a coping scaffold, not a preference; breaking the sequence triggered collapse even when no obvious threat existed.
• Meltdowns were not behavior problems to be punished; restraint made them worse, while a trusted adult's quiet presence could contain them.
• Autistic people differ so profoundly that the same label covered a child who loved LEGO and one who avoided it, so any universal explanation or treatment was doomed.
• Clinical exercises in matching shapes and enduring harsh sounds trained him to go numb, and that numbness stayed with him long after the sessions ended.
• His worst crisis came not from sensory overload alone but from losing access to Giff; her unreachability mattered more than the surroundings.