The daughter who taught me the meaning of love

For three years, Lady Astor ignored all signs her little girl was autistic. When it was confirmed, she wept for a week. Now, as Olivia nears 21, she pays moving tribute to . . .

WHEN I look back now to the early years of my second daughter’s life — wrapped up as I was in an impenetrable cocoon of joy — I realise I was being wilfully blind.

I refused to concede that there was anything wrong with my little girl.

Olivia was small but, in my view, perfect. She fed and slept well. I would not let anyone or anything mar the unalloyed pleasure I felt at being a parent again at 42.

The signs, of course, were there, but stubbornly I ignored them. When I overheard a friend observe: ‘If that was my child, I’d take her straight to the doctor,’ I quelled the impulse to ask what she meant. Instead, I ran for the bathroom and tried to suppress my indignation and anxiety.

But the remarks kept coming. Concerned friends commented that Olivia seemed ‘very young for her age’, when, aged one, she still failed to sit unaided and was incapable of engaging with anyone — even me.

By the age of two she was neither walking nor talking and was nowhere near pottytrained. But I continued to deny that anything could be wrong with her mentally and focused, instead, on the painstaking task of trying to teach her to walk. When my attempts to make her mobile failed, I realised medical help might be needed, so I took her to see a physiotherapist at Great Ormond Street Hospital.

There, she was fitted with knee supports which she had to wear several times every day for a few minutes to teach her to stand and lock her knees.

She howled in agony as she was made to stand like a toy soldier in a corner of the playroom so she didn’t fall flat on her face. I found it so unbearable, I had to run from the room and leave the torture to the nanny we had at the time.

But I still failed to see her symptoms as part of a bigger picture. I was her mother. I loved her. I suppose deep down I could not bear to entertain the thought that she might face a life of difficulty and hardship.

Instead, I concentrated on her achievements: when she finally walked, belatedly, at twoand-a-half, I considered it a minor miracle — after all, her physiotherapist had confided that when she had started treating Olivia she thought her co- ordination was so bad she would never walk at all.

But then there was another shock. When she was three, I tried to enrol Olivia at our local nursery school, yet they would not take her because — despite my concerted efforts — she was still not potty trained.

I was, moreover, horrified when the teacher said she thought she had special needs.

Then the word ‘ autism’ cropped up. Our doctor gently suggested Olivia might have the condition, but I brushed off the thought, feeling angry and hurt. I knew nothing about autism, other than what I had gleaned from the film Rain Man — but Olivia had no unique skill like its main character Raymond, who was a brilliant mathematician.

A seed of anxiety had, however, been sown, and even as it grew into a dense forest of fear, I rejected suggestions that my gorgeous Olivia was anything other than a late developer who would merely take longer than most children to prosper and thrive.

From the outset, Olivia’s life had been fraught with drama. I feared I would lose her when a miscarriage threatened at 11 weeks. But, six months later, she was born by emergency Caesarean section, apparently unscathed, despite the three knots that had formed in her umbilical cord.

I brought her home to our Kentish farmhouse to join our happy extended family.

My husband Johnnie, Lord Astor of Hever, has three daughters from his previous marriage; I have one from mine, and soon after we married in 1990, our beloved son Charles was born.

Johnnie works in the House of Lords during the week and always relished the happy chaos of our country home where our children had free-ranging access to woods, a swimming pool, ponies and a tennis court.

The arrival of Olivia four years into our marriage sealed our contentment.

I suppose, looking back, I was determined no setback would tarnish the idyll. My life with Johnnie was, after all, such a contrast to the unhappy one I’d endured as a divorcee living alone in my 30s with my first daughter in a flat in West Hampstead, working as a head-hunter.

Money had been a constant worry; the lonely weekends stretched out interminably. I’d been separated for seven years before I was introduced to Johnnie by our daughters, who were friends, and when we married I felt as if I’d stepped into a fairy tale.

SMALL wonder, then, that I did not want to acknowledge the truth about Olivia’s condition; even when our GP assessed her, aged three, and made her diagnosis of autism. I shudder to think how, in my ignorance, I resisted accepting the fact.

Instead, I insisted the doctor record, ‘a speech and communication disorder with a moderate learning disability’, as I did not want to jeopardise Olivia’s chances of going to a mainstream school.

It was a further 18 months before I finally conceded that the doctor’s verdict was correct: and when I did so I wept inconsolably for a week.

Having done so, I picked myself up and resolved to learn everything I could about the monster that had stolen my child.

I attended conferences and seminars on autism; I read up on it exhaustively. I discovered, too, that there were traits of the condition on both sides of our families: it helped to assuage my guilt that I had contributed to Olivia’s condition by having her at 42, following a complicated pregnancy and delivery.

I learned, too, that the cause of autism remains a mystery; that there is no cure and that everyone who has it is different. So I started to monitor Olivia closely; I studied how she learnt; what strategies worked for her and which ones failed.

Above all I wanted desperately for her to love me, for she never showed me — or anyone else — a scintilla of affection.

Indeed, if I left her for a day, or even a week, she would not register a flicker of emotion on my return, much less rush to me squealing with delight and smothering me with kisses as my son had.

So I tried different methods of inducing some rapport. I’d lie on the floor, hugging her tenderly, telling her repeatedly that I loved her and asking: ‘Do you love mummy? Do you?’ until one glorious, miraculous day when she was seven, she responded.

She ran into the house after a day at her mainstream school and cried out, ‘Mummy, Mummy where are you? I’ve missed you!’ but I could not see her for the tears of joy blurring my eyes.

Olivia spoke, and still does, in a soft mumble and gives us two — precisely two — chances to understand.

If we fail to do so she will give up because,

Olivia nev showed anyone an affection. The day s ran in say ‘Mummy, I’ve misse you’ I was blinded by

tears of joy

like many others with autism, she quickly slips into sensory overload as she cannot tolerate too much visual, aural or physical stimulation. She is also dyspraxic; even now, at 20, she has poor physical co-ordination — she cannot even tie back her hair — and she is unable to write at all.

Despite this, she can be wonderfully expressive. Like most people with autism, she takes language literally, but has learnt to love idioms and puns. When she was younger we could never comment that it was ‘raining cats and dogs’, because she would rush to the window in the hope of seeing them fall from the sky.

She can be disconcertingly frank, too, and when she was 14, and we interviewed a prospective helper, she looked at the young woman — who was so large her flesh spilled out over the sofa — and declared: ‘She’s very fat Mummy, isn’t she?’ (The poor girl turned scarlet and I couldn’t deny it, because I knew by then that Olivia would only have responded with the incontrovertible truth that she was very fat.)

Each phase of life with an autistic child presents hurdles to overcome, and, after four disastrously unsuccessful years in mainstream schools — where Olivia neither fitted in academically nor socially — we were delighted when she was offered a place, aged nine, at the wonderful Broomhill Bank School, near Tunbridge Wells, for young people with special needs. There she thrived until she was 18.

Meanwhile, I threw myself into fundraising for the National Autistic Society, became its vice patron and drew strength from a community that knew precisely and instantly the sort of problems we encountered daily.

But the demands Olivia placed on me during her childhood were relentless. For ten years I took her, weekly, to occupational, speech and language therapists to help her to walk, communicate and read.