‘Our hearts are broken.. the twins have autism but we’ll never stop battling for them'
It was 5.30am and rain was pelting down outside Paddy McGuinness and his wife Christine’s home. Their four-year-old daughter Penelope stood pounding on the patio doors, desolate, crying and frantic as one of her toys was outside getting wet.
Most parents would tell their child to calm down and go back to bed.
But Paddy, 43, star of TV favourites Take Me Out and The Keith and Paddy Picture Show, knew the only thing to calm Penelope was to rescue the toy.
“She was upset because it was one of her toy sets that she has to keep together,” he explains. “And, of course, it was raining and the sensation of rain distresses her.
“She was becoming more and more anxious, and when she is like that it can last for the entire day.”
It’s one of 100 small but exhausting daily incidents which now shape family life for Paddy and Christine – because Penelope and her twin brother Leo are both autistic. Earlier this month, Christine posted a poem on Instagram paying tribute to everything the children had achieved in the year leading up to their fourth birthdays.
It was the first time she or Paddy, who also have ninemonth-old daughter Felicity, had revealed publicly their twins have autism.
Now, they’re talking about it fully in the hope it might be some encouragement to other parents bringing up autistic children. And perhaps, one wonders, so they too might feel a little less alone.
The past four years were clearly a long, lonely struggle for the pair trying to understand their children’s difficulties, until November, when autism was mentioned for the first time. “We’d been to see a paediatrician and at the end she said quite casually, ‘I’m absolutely certain both the children have autism’,” Christine says. The couple were stunned. “I was so angry with her,” Christine, 29, goes on. “How dare she say that about my children, having only seen them for a few hours? I can say that because I’ve told her it since and she’s been absolutely lovely. But I was totally stunned. “It was the first I’d ever thought of them having autism – even if, looking back, it was obvious.” The pair returned home, crushed by what they’d heard. A formal diagnosis followed three months later. “The only way I can explain how I felt was a sense of grieving; grieving for my ‘normal’ children,” says Christine, who threw herself into researching the condition and how she could help her children. While the thought of them having a lifelong condition was devastating, finally having an understanding of their behaviour brought comfort.
“The twins were our first children and we’d never had any babies in our immediate family to compare them with,” says Christine.
“When they were little they would make funny noises and when they started to walk they were on tip toes.
“Their eye contact wasn’t brilliant and they had very delayed speech, but the health visitor would say it was just because they were twins.
“It’s only recently when I’ve looked back at home videos and done research that I’ve seen so many of the signs of autism were there but we didn’t realise.”
After having the children, Christine gave up her modelling career and threw everything into motherhood.
“I was with them all the time,” she says. “We never had a nanny or anything and Paddy was in the middle of filming, so he went back to work when they were four days old. So for