Philly
Once I’ve had a rest after lunch, I go down to the room leading off the kitchen that Kendra uses as a makeshift study.
I suppose it must once have been used as a formal dining room, although now we eat our meals sitting at the round kitchen table, the doors propped open to the patch of garden beyond, which contains a few ancient fruit trees and that large trampoline Finn was bouncing on in the wee small hours.
The sea breeze is pleasant, cooling the summer heat, carrying with it the faint sound of the waves breaking on the beach beyond the dunes.
As I enter, Kendra is typing on her computer.
I don’t think she notices me standing there in the doorway because she takes off her glasses and rests her chin on her hand for a moment, gazing towards the window.
Her expression is one of complete exhaustion.
Then she suddenly realises she’s being watched and turns to smile at me.
As she does so, she is transformed, although the tiredness is still just visible behind her calm blue-green eyes, even as they shine with their customary warmth.
She reminds me so much of Ella again, with her honey-blonde hair and heart-shaped face.
‘Did you have a good rest?’ she asks. ‘I hope Finn’s bouncing didn’t disturb you last night? I can ask him not to, while you’re here.’
‘No, please don’t do that. I’ll only hear him if I’m already awake anyway.’ It’s a polite lie, of course, meant to ease the burden of anxiety that is evident behind those eyes.
‘It helps him, you see,’ she says. ‘He has bad dreams. I think it brings him some relief from the anxiety he feels.’ There’s a defensive edge to her voice, as if she’s expecting criticism.
I nod. ‘It can’t be easy, having a brain that active. He’s a bright boy.’
She sighs. ‘He finds transitions hard. Any changes. So even something as simple as waking up can be overwhelming for him. The jumping is a way of dealing with the feelings it triggers.’ She hesitates, fiddling with a pen on her desk, setting it perfectly straight alongside the tape recorder and notepad she’s using to jot down my story.
I sense she’s reluctant to talk about Finn to others she thinks may not understand.
I suppose it must be something she’s come up against a lot.
She glances up at me and I nod, recognising her need to talk.
I can’t do much these days, but at least I can listen.
‘Even falling asleep used to be hard for him,’ she continues, encouraged.
‘It’s another transition, you see? He’d fight it, frightened and anxious about giving up control, but now he takes a pill to help him drop off.
The minutest of changes can be terrifying for him – the fear of the unknown, I suppose.
’ She laughs and shakes her head. ‘We learned that the hard way, which is the way we learn most things, come to think of it. He hates surprises, you see. So even something that’s meant to be fun, like a wrapped gift, can trigger panic.
I took him to another child’s birthday party when he was about five and they were playing a game of Pass the Parcel.
You can just imagine how that went down for him.
In the end, we had to ask the hosts if he could take over being in charge of the music rather than playing the game – he liked that, feeling in control of something.
Of course, it made him seem even more strange and antisocial to the other kids. ’
‘Hmm. Well, socialising can be a complete minefield at the best of times,’ I say.
‘Yes, but for a child it’s so important.
We’ve struggled with it for Finn, walking that tightrope between what he can and can’t manage.
I’ve pretty much given up now. We’ve had to learn to change in the context of Finn’s life, to be with him in his world instead of making him fit into ours, to create an environment where he doesn’t feel he’s being punished all the time for simply being himself.
Basically, that means being confined to home.
So I think we’ve all become more isolated.
Ironically, we’re not alone in our isolation, if you see what I mean.
So many families live with autism nowadays, desperately in need of help when there is none.
You just have to get on with it as best you can. ’
‘It must be a worry,’ I say. ‘Thinking about what the future may hold for him?’
For a moment, I think she’s going to cry.
I worry I’ve overstepped the mark. But she regains her composure, her expression determined, holding it together, and I guess that must be something she’s learned to do out of all-too-frequent necessity.
‘Of course. We worry constantly about how he’ll cope with things like work and relationships, navigating life .
.. And what happens when we’re not here.
But most of the time we’re just trying to get through each day as best we can, dealing with the curveballs that seem to come out of nowhere whenever something affects him.
It’s relentless.’ Her gaze travels to the trampoline in the garden.
‘A bit like being on that and never, ever being able to get off.’
I realise Kendra and Dan are as trapped by autism as Finn is.
Imprisoned by the fear and the endless second-guessing, the walking on eggshells as they try to navigate their way through the minefield of emotions, the constant questions, the fragility of his brilliant but intricate mind.
I see the tears well up in those sea-green eyes of hers, but she blinks them away once more, then readjusts the already perfectly aligned pen, grasping at some semblance of agency and order in a world where such things are scarce.
She’s giving her life to help her son. So I reckon giving her my story is the least I can do.
‘Are you ready to continue?’ I ask, and she smiles and nods, reaching for her pen and notebook. ‘Remind me where we got to last time,’ I say.
She scans her notes. ‘You’d just finished your ATA training ...’
‘Ah yes.’ I settle into the chair, easing the perpetual ache in my muscles as I stretch out my good leg, and pick up where we left off.
I’ll never forget the morning I walked into the mess hall at White Waltham, reporting for my first proper stint.
My new uniform felt scratchy and uncomfortable, but I felt so very proud to be wearing it at last. It was a foggy day, so flights were grounded, and the canteen was full of the hissing of the tea urn and the chatter of the pilots, who were lounging around waiting for the cloud to clear.
I was attempting to conceal my nerves and appear relaxed and confident as I met my new colleagues, but then my jaw dropped at the sight of none other than my heroine, Amy ‘Johnnie’ Johnson, sitting there drinking tea alongside a couple of the other girls.
She was still the epitome of glamour. By the time she’d joined the ATA she was divorced, had become a journalist and had modelled for the Schiaparelli fashion house, lending her an even greater aura of sophistication.
Seeing me standing there, goggle-eyed and awkward on my first day as a new recruit, she got to her feet to say hello, pulling up a chair for me at the table.
‘You’re Philly Buchanan, aren’t you? I met your brother, Teddy, at the Astor Club in London the other day. Small world. It turns out he and your other brother were at school in Edinburgh with my ex-husband. He told me to look out for you.’
I was utterly astounded that my idol knew my name!
You’d have thought someone so famous would have been a bit standoffish, but Amy was the opposite.
She was natural, warm, and down-to-earth.
I’ve never forgotten her kindness, nor how she and the other girls welcomed me and made me feel an equal.
Even though I was a lowly Third Officer, they readily accepted me on the basis that we were all ferry pilots together and would be facing the same duties and dangers.
We were a motley crew. As with most of the trainers at Luton, the men were pilots who were deemed either too old or too unfit to fly in combat.
There was a long-standing joke elsewhere in the RAF that the letters ATA stood for ‘Ancient and Tattered Airmen’ and now that other substandard category was included too: women.
The press loved us. They called us the ‘Attagirls’ and published photographs of the more glamorous among us in the papers.
Especially Amy, of course. Volunteers had joined up from across the world, so I rubbed shoulders in the mess with pilots from Canada, South Africa, the Netherlands.
One of the girls was from Poland and we used to exchange a few words in her native language.
I hadn’t had much opportunity to use my Polish in Scotland, of course, but a few phrases soon came back to me.
‘ Dzi? jest ?adna pogoda ,’ I’d say to Agnieszka. The weather is nice today. By British standards, it probably was.
And she’d laugh and reply, ‘ Nie, pogoda jak zwykle okropna. ’ No, the weather is awful, as usual.
When I asked her about her homeland, her expression would grow serious, and I could see the sadness in her eyes.
Like so many of her fellow Poles, she’d fled when the Nazis invaded her country, coming to England to join the fight under General Sikorski’s government-in-exile.
Her parents hadn’t managed to get out, though, and she was desperately worried for them and the other members of her extended family who’d been left behind.
So I’d try to distract her by asking her to speak Polish to me, and was surprised by how much I understood, even if it was a struggle to think up the words with which to reply from the depths of my childhood memories.
With practice, though, I began to get a little more fluent.