Published on 12, July, 2020
The second post from my blog about growing up with undiagnosed autism...
A Martian in the Closet
Before I started school, mum took a morning job at the shop on the corner of our road in Putney, and my widowed gran - who lived downstairs - used to look after me. She'd be downstairs doing her washing or something, and I'd be upstairs alone in our sitting room. One of my favourite places was the bay window in that room. It had a curtain that could be drawn across it, so I could get into that small space and not be seen. There, I would spend hours looking out of the windows into the street - at the people walking along, and the cars passing by on the Lower Richmond Road. I watched planes fly over. We were on the flight path between Heathrow and Europe, so they were often quite large and loud as they passed overhead. I used to pretend that I was a pilot, and that window was my cockpit. The glass had some small kinks or bubbles in it, and if I lined one up with someone in the street, they would suddenly look very fat, which always amused me. Many years later, I read Jane Eyre, and had a spark of memory early on with the scene where Jane does the same thing - hiding behind a curtain in a window seat, to read a book.
I used to push the dining chairs under the table and lie on my back under there. I got hold of some chalk and drew a screen (with stars and planets on it) and a control panel, and hid out in my "spaceship" for hours
strange, cos I am actually pretty claustrophobic, but I always felt safe under there!