Child genius
The moving story behind Britain’s brightest boy
Page 26
The floor is strewn with boy detritus: a skateboarding T-shirt, train timetables, back issues of The Beano. Discarded on the table, between The Daily Telegraph’s Diabolical Sudoku and some Terry Pratchett novels, is a well-thumbed copy of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in
the 21st Century.
Have you read it, I ask the bedroom’s occupant, dubiously; the only adults I know who have picked it up are still struggling through the weighty tome, which was published last year. “A few times,” nods Thomas Frith, thoughtfully. “It’s impossible to escape inequality whether in a capitalist or a totalitarian system, but I do think that sometimes a benign dictatorship is preferable to a turbulent democracy.”
Thomas is 12 years old. The Beanos are a red herring; they belong to his six-year-old brother, William.
Thomas, the blond, energetic stand-out star of Channel 4’s Child
Genius series, with a mind-boggling IQ of 162 (Einstein and Stephen Hawking could only manage 160), prefers Simon Singh’s maths and science books to comics. He’s read
Ulysses, but that was way back when he was at primary school; having taught himself to read when he was two, he has a lot of time to fill while the rest of the world (almost) catches up. But now that he can play the piano, cello, trombone and bassoon to grade five level, he doesn’t get so bored. Then, of course, there’s his passion for double chess (where a player engages in two games simultaneously) and football, table tennis and rugby. He cooks, too.
“Thomas lives life at a tremendously fast pace,” says his mother Deborah, 44, a warmly charismatic primary school teacher who seems bemused, amused and quietly protective of her son’s childhood. “When he was two he woke up at some ungodly hour to tell me he’d just counted to 503. I told him to go back to bed and do it in French. Then, when he’d done that, to do it backwards in German.”
Genius is an overused epithet these days. Mensa accepts those with an IQ of 130 or above, which represents 2 per cent of the general population. Those with an IQ over 160 comprise just 0.003 per cent.
In Child Genius, where children are pitted against one another in tests from general knowledge to logic and reasoning, Thomas is off the scale; one rival parent is heard to mutter in disbelief that he’s “a machine”. But the programme is as much about the tiger parents as their clever cubs. It’s hard for those of us with more typical children not to wince at their apparent pushiness as they thrust their youngsters into this hugely competitive forum. Deborah disagrees.
“Most of these children are by nature highly competitive, but they seldom have anyone to compete with at their level,” she says. “Thomas’s main motivation in taking part was meeting other kids like him, who ‘got’ him and with whom he could play chess and have fun.”
Certainly on the programme, which has its gripping final on Tuesday, Thomas has proved to be TV gold. In person he is sunny, funny and philosophical. As far from the stereotypical image of a maths geek as it’s possible to be, he has inherited his mother’s social skills and wry humour.
His extraordinary intelligence comes from his physics graduate and computer programmer father, Peter, who died of leukaemia two months before Thomas’s second birthday. Viewers had no inkling of this poignant backdrop until Deborah let it slip in last week’s episode; she has refused to let early bereavement define Thomas’s life. “Thomas had a difficult start; at my 20-week scan we were told he might have Down’s syndrome and that there was fluid on his brain,” recalls Deborah. “We were asked to think about a termination, but there was no way anyone was touching my precious bump.”
In the event, Thomas was healthy, but eight weeks premature. Then, just as Deborah and Thomas were finally on an even keel, Peter was diagnosed with leukaemia. “For the next 18 months Peter was mostly in hospital. My friends established a babysitting rota and Thomas was looked after by so many people, but being a placid, happy baby, he loved it.” Peter died in November 2004. By then Thomas, at 22 months old, was talking and expressing grief that his daddy had gone away; but now he has no memory of his father. “I find that the saddest thing to bear,” says Deborah, wiping away tears. “He is so like his father, yet he never knew him.” Right from his birth, she kept a journal of her son’s milestones. It makes for extraordinary reading; his achievements were by no means limited to the academic. Long before his second birthday Thomas was able to politely catch a waiter’s attention and order a hot chocolate in a café. As a three-yearold he memorised the times tables on a Father Christmas flight to Lapland. “My friend who was with us turned to me and said, ‘This is a bit odd, Deborah’,” she chuckles. “But all I could reply was, ‘He’s happy’.”
Later, having devoured encyclopedias and textbooks on the Tudors and Ancient Egypt, geology and science, Thomas usually knew as much about the subjects as his primary school teachers. In Year Five he got an A in his maths A-level but, because he was one mark away from an A*, he resat it on the grounds that “I may as well, Mum”.
Meanwhile, in 2008, Deborah married Nicolas, 49, a civil engineer with three children, whose own wife had died of breast cancer. A year after tying the knot, the couple had William. Home is a 19th-century cottage with a large garden and an allotment, tucked up a country lane on the outskirts of Leeds.
“We’re not a blended family, we are a family with five children,” says Deborah. “Each of them has their own talents and interests and they accept that Thomas is – Thomas.”
At his state school, Thomas dips in and out of lessons with the sixth form. He especially enjoys mechanics and further maths; his proudest moment is his Junior Olympiad gold medal.
It’s something of a miracle that he has none of the jarring superiority so often displayed by gifted children – although, as his mother says, “let’s see how it goes; his teenage hormones haven’t kicked in yet”.
We are talking about books at one point when he says, with striking wisdom: “Separating the world into facts lacks truth. Just stringing facts together doesn’t describe the world as people know it and experience it.”
He’s right (of course). And by that self-same token, defining this child by his IQ would fail to reflect that he is so much more than the sum of his parts. I confidently predict the world will be hearing from Thomas Frith again before too long.
Child Genius is on Channel 4, Tuesday at 9pm