My son’s autism was the least of my family’s traumas
Anne Atkins tells Peter Stanford that after a tumultuous two-decade hiatus, her son proved the inspiration for her new novel
It has been quite a case of writer’s block. Two decades have passed since Anne Atkins, Thought for the Day regular, agony aunt and controversialist, published her last novel. “It’s been long and really painful,” she reflects, “and I’ve been trying, oh my goodness I have been trying.”
And, finally, succeeding. An Elegant Solution, the fourth novel by this former actress and vicar’s wife, is out this week. The key to getting going again turned out to be near at hand. “When you’ve had horrendous writer’s block, you need to make life as easy as possible coming back in. So it makes sense to write about someone you know well, and are passionate about.”
She is referring to the middle one of her five children, her only son Alex, 32, who is sitting next to her at the dining table in his south London home. Alex has Asperger’s syndrome, though he prefers, as we talk, to refer to himself as “aspergic”.
“I don’t attach such emotional baggage to these things,” he muses, tall, thin, fair and wearing a brace on his leg after coming off his bike on the way to work that morning, “so I use whatever words I like. I just see Asperger’s as different, overall no better or no worse. Worse in terms of fitting in to an environment where everyone is a certain way, and you’re a different way.”
Not that he has let being different stop him graduating from Bristol University, or building a successful career, first in a tech start-up – “we did for tutors what Airbnb did for holiday rentals” – and now as a computer programmer at the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Alex is the model for Theo Wedderburn, a PhD student at Cambridge, and one of the central characters in the pacy tale of terrorists, crypto-currency and dreaming spires told in An Elegant Solution. “We’ve been in constant discussion since she started writing it,” he says, “at least every scene that had Theo in. She would phone me and say, ‘What would Theo do?’”
Anne is smiling as he talks. Mother and son are obviously close. Alex has the best relationship with their mother of all five Atkins offspring, his older sister Serena has already told me when she lets me into the house the siblings share with her Norwegian husband, their baby son, Samuel, and a frenzied cocker spaniel.
“I’ve learnt to get on with my mother,” Alex agrees, “and then I try to treat everyone like they are my mother. That is how I learnt social skills. But it doesn’t always work. Not, for example, with my girlfriend.”
That might be, among other reasons, because his mother is a bit of a one-off. Anne Atkins made her name 22 years ago by unflinchingly telling things as she saw them, when she used Radio 4’s Thought for the Day slot to question her own Anglican Church’s bishops over supporting a celebration of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement – deploring it as a commemoration of “20 years of gay sex”.
She has maintained that plainspeaking persona since, first as an agony aunt in this paper until 2000, then on her television series The Agony Hour, and subsequently as a regular guest on shows such as Question Time and Newsnight.
“Some people have called me a controversialist,” she concedes, “but I was brought up in Cambridge [her father, David Briggs, was head teacher of King’s College School, also in the novel] to see debate as a great thing, something that makes life interesting, that you can disagree with loved ones.”
No surprise, then, that the new novel comes with a challenge – to the public stereotype of those with Asperger’s. Its release coincides with the publication of the world’s largest ever study of gender differences in the brain by Cambridge University researchers. The findings draw parallels between male personality traits – notably being less good with feelings – and autism, which it suggests may be an extreme version of “male brain” that makes it hard to read others’ emotions.
The senior academic behind the survey, Professor Simon Baron Cohen, director of the university’s Autism Research Centre (and a cousin of Sacha, the comedian), is a friend of Anne and Alex, and has publicly endorsed the novel. But the character of Theo in An Elegant Solution, and by association of Alex Atkins, is surely at odds with the findings since both are, or seem, impressively emotionally literate.
So is the survey wrong? “No, but it is about generalisations,” says Anne, “and how useful are generalisations? I’m not sure I care. People are people.”
Alex is more diplomatic. “A mother’s view is a little more rose-tinted,” he suggests, “but it is true that when you’ve met one aspergic person, you’ve met one aspergic person. Nothing more. Everyone is different.”
He points, by way of example, to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, later a successful stage play. “Generally it was helpful in terms of educating the public about autism, but it reads to me as if he has got to know half a dozen autistic people well, and then taken all their traits into one character, who is internally inconsistent. Whereas in Theo, Anne has written about just one person, and not a representative of all autistic people.”
Listening to the articulate Alex, you might conclude his road to adulthood has been smooth sailing. But at school he was bullied for being different – not by other pupils, but by the staff. “Their reaction to a pupil being strange was to punish the pupil, and if the pupil didn’t conform, then to punish more.”
He still won a place at Cambridge, but left after just a year, unable to manage the intensity of the demands in its very short terms and given too little of the support that had been promised. This is a family, it is becoming clear, that has had its share of traumas. Which brings us back to Anne’s writer’s block.
During those 20 years, she was battling the education system on behalf of Alex. Then there was his sister Bink’s severe anxiety disorder [Anne has come straight from visiting her in the Priory].
“And,” she adds, “us being homeless for five years. I slowly began to realise that I didn’t have enough energy left over to love my characters.”
The appearance of An Elegant Solution, therefore, signals something of a new dawn for the Atkins clan. While Bink is still suffering – “I’d much rather you said she was mad because I don’t like PC,” Anne urges me, directing me to the daily Bink Bonkers blog on her website – Alex is thriving, damaged leg notwithstanding, and that period without a family home has ended.
In 2004, Shaun, Anne’s husband, who sits at the opposite end of the room as we talk, accepted a job in a parish in Oxford, but the promised home, suitable for a family of seven, never materialised. “We were homeless,” says Anne, “and the only reason we weren’t on the street was that we had friends who put us up.”
The resulting dispute with the parish council dragged on for five years, tipped Shaun into a breakdown, and ended up in court. They were awarded compensation to buy their own home in Bedford, where until earlier this year, Shaun worked as a school chaplain.
“Of the three traumas, Alex was definitely the least,” says Anne. “Autism does sometimes go hand in hand with disability, but not in Alex’s case. If he was French, in England and spoke no English, and the English spoke no French, does that make him disabled? No, he is just French.”
The only “disability” he has to live with, she insists, has been other people’s intolerance of those with Asperger’s. “Who he is, as far as I am concerned, is a privilege, not a disability.”
‘We were homeless, and our friends were the only reason we weren’t on the street’