If more people visited Mayfield School the world would be a better place," declares Gay Eastoe, B. Sc, PhD., athlete extraordinary and author of "Asperger Syndrome: Reflections." This little volume, available at Lowes Court Gallery and Esoteric Dreams Bookshop, gives amazing insight into the autistic condition from which she suffers and is remarkable for several acutely observant studies of children she met in the very school she visits regularly.
Gay denies being a poet, disdaining the "neuro-typical rules of poetry writing", though perhaps unaware how many of our greatest poets disdain those rules, too. She uses poetry in her own special "Asperger Writing Style" to share her insight in which scientific observation is magically fused with a sympathy that allows her to know from the inside what a child is suffering. Consider this observation of a child at Mayfield, whose piercing screams are followed by uncontrollable laughter,
"Rocking backwards and forwards
Faster and faster
Then suddenly - bang!
His head repeatedly hitting the wall.
All the while, he stares
Unsmiling with a blank expression
Then as if by magic
He stops - all is silent."
Another poem observes a boy transfixed by the motion of the dancing blades of a windmill , detached in a world of is own. Gay, too, is
"focused,
But not on the windmill, on the boy
Oblivious to everything except the whirling blades"
and reflects, as Wordsworth does sometimes,
"All too soon it will end
As the real world emerges again."
The poetry as well as the science arises from the intensity of Gay's concentration on her subject.
Perhaps concentration is the key to her perception that Asperger Syndrome can be a gift as well as a disability. "I regard myself as not disabled but as differently abled." Since her diagnosis in 2002 at the age of 48, after a terrifying panic attack in the swimming pool, she has coped, with the dedicated support and guidance of her husband, Richard, who has the sensitivity to know that her driving force needs to be satisfied, and often runs beside her.
She has six times run the Langdale Marathon - "London Marathon's for softies," she assents gayly at my suggestion - got her feet wet in every tarn and climbed every peak in the Lake District. She was second woman in the 40 mile Kendal to Barrow race, and first woman in the race from Workington to Keswick. She is either cursed or gifted with a mentality that just will not give up. In physical agony caused by an adrenalin rush at a crowded start to a race, she had to run through the pain and finish the course. Driving her body unremittingly, she is somewhere in the North of Scotland in her bid to swim around Britain and back to St Bees, measured in lengths of Egremont Swimming Pool.
Such is her sense of being oppressed by other people that she actually slows down when she is running through populated areas. Though passionately eloquent when talking to a sympathetic listener she can barely articulate words in busy, potentially hostile places and has increasing difficulty in hearing as a consequence of the progression of her illness. Let no one underestimate the pain that she and other autistic people have to endure. But she would never give up the gifts of phenomenal energy and sympathy for fellow sufferers that are wrung out of her by her condition for the respite that neuro-typicality (being like the rest of us) might bring her.

Peter Watson