The Electricity of Every Living Thing, page 1
The Electricity of Every Living Thing:
A Woman’s Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home by Katherine May
First published in the UK in 2019 by Laurence King / Orion Publishing Group
Copyright © Katherine May 2019
Author’s Note copyright © Katherine May 2021
All rights reserved
First Melville House Printing: September 2021
Melville House Publishing
46 John Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
Melville House UK
Suite 2000
16/18 Woodford Road
London E7 0HA
mhpbooks.com
@melvillehouse
ISBN 9781612199603
Ebook ISBN 9781612199610
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940512
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
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For Bertie
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Prologue: The Isle of Thanet, November
PART ONE: Desolation Point
1 Minehead Sea-Front, August
2 Minehead to Foreland Point, August
3 Foreland Point to Ilfracombe, September
4 Ilfracombe to Barnstaple, October
5 Barnstaple to Appledore, November
6 Dover to Shepherdswell, December
7 Shepherdswell to Canterbury, December
8 Canterbury to Chartham, January
9 Whitstable to Seasalter, January
10 Chartham to Chilham, January
PART TWO: Hartland
1 Appledore to Clovelly, February
2 Hartland Point to the Eden Project, via Tintagel, February
3 Clovelly to Hartland Quay, February
4 Hartland Quay to Morwenstow, February
5 Chilham to Chartham, February
6 The White Cliffs of Dover, March
7 Morwenstow to Widemouth Bay, March
8 Widemouth Bay to Mawgan Porth, March
PART THREE: Outer Hope
1 Whitstable to Canterbury, May
2 Whitstable to Thornden Wood, May
3 London to Canterbury, May
4 The South Hams of Devon, June
5 The far tip of Cornwall by road, July
6 Devon, late August
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Walking Routes
‘The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.’
Eden Phillpotts, A Shadow Passes
‘…walking too far too often too quickly is not safe at all.
The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you.’
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
A Note on Chapter Illustrations:
The lines at the beginning of each chapter plot the shape of my walking route.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have always said that I hope this book becomes very dated, very quickly.
It hasn’t happened yet, but I am an optimistic soul. I wrote it because I struggled to find a reflection of myself anywhere when, at the grand old age of thirty-nine, I realised I was autistic. There were a few web pages that I read over and over again as if I might find myself somewhere between their glyphs. There were a handful of books in which I could recognise myself if I squinted. But the world, in general, seemed to think that autism was the domain of little boys who couldn’t speak for themselves. The idea that an adult woman might want to claim that label - particularly someone who, on the face of it, was coping perfectly well - seemed absurd to many people. Some even suggested that I was trying to steal care from those who really needed it.
That was only six years ago. Some things have changed since then, but not many. The sense of bewilderment that I describe in this book - the feeling of being lost in a desert of scant information - remains a common experience for late-diagnosed autistics. People like me can live entire lives wondering why everything is so hard for us. Doctors, teachers and mental health professionals are still routinely unable to spot our autism, and their knowledge is often agonisingly out of date. The invisibility endures. My book, sadly, is very much of the moment.
But a memoir is always a snapshot in time - unstable, imperfect, capturing meaning in flight. If I wrote this book again, there are things I’d do differently. I’m struck by how much my language has changed since then. I no longer use the term ‘Asperger Syndrome’, partly because of its origins in Nazi eugenics, but also because I refuse to separate myself from the broader autistic community in that way. As I was writing the book, the ‘D’ in ASD - ‘disorder’ - rankled, because it seemed to me that autism was a state of being, a neurological difference, and not intrinsically a deficit. At the time, I reluctantly accepted that I had to use the standard term. Since then, I’ve adopted the more neutral term ASC - Autism Spectrum Condition - and I invite you all to do that same. Language matters. Careful words foster change.
For me, that change has come from the astonishing autistic community that I’ve found online, who constantly urge me towards a more thoughtful understanding of my place in this world. Under their tutelage, I’ve become better informed, more critical, and probably more politicised, too. I have a far more intersectional understanding of how individuals experience their autism, and I’ve spent more time reflecting on the complex privilege of being able to mask and pass as neurotypical. Most of all, I’ve found a kind of awe at the way this disparate group of people bend towards compassion, fairness and beauty, even in the face of huge challenges. It is impossible to truly understand autism without understanding the luminous everyday of autistic lives.
There is no single, defining version of autism, but instead an overlapping multiplicity of minds. The term ‘spectrum’ is a poor way of capturing the sheer diversity of our experience - it’s too linear, too fixed. When I imagine us, I think of a constellation instead, or perhaps a galaxy: millions of different stars shining, each expressing their fire in a different way. I am just one way of living that experience. If you want to learn about autism, read as many perspectives as you can, and get ready to put aside all your preconceptions. We are not the blank, unfeeling automata so often portrayed in literature. We are funny, loving, hyper-empathetic humans whose brains function a little differently, and who often find the world painfully stressful. You rarely learn this from third-person accounts.
I wrote Electricity in the white heat of transformation, flooded with new self-knowledge. I’ve learned a lot since then. I have realised that I was trying to crowbar myself into a life made for someone else, not me, and that it was frequently making me sick. I have accepted, finally, that I need to take better care of myself, because I cannot be fixed or reformed, and I don’t want to be. Those insights - that deep, embodied learning - are what I poured into my book, Wintering. They have helped all kinds of people, but they are rooted in my neurodivergent perception of the world. Wintering is what you come to know if you are autistic, and you learn to survive. This book shows the painful process of getting there.
Katherine May,
June 2021
PROLOGUE
The Isle of Thanet, November
Late afternoon in November, and it’s dark already. I’m driving. To my left is the sea at Westgate; to my right, the low sweep of Pegwell Bay. Not that I can see either of them in the gloom, but I know this stretch of road well. The land feels spacious when the sea’s nearby, and this is the furthest tip of Kent, the jutting hound’s nose where you’re suddenly surrounded by water.
I’m late. I hate being late. I switch on the radio for company. A man is interviewing a woman. She is talking about the intensity of everything around her; the way all her senses are heightened to light, noise, touch and smell. They make her anxious. I turn on the windscreen wipers and clear myself two arcs in the drizzle. She finds people hard to understand; she would prefer it if they said what they meant. Too true, I think. Good luck with that.
Then the interviewer says that his son is on the autism spectrum too, and he needs to write everything down or else he won’t be able to take it in, and I think, Yes but I’m like that, too. I hate plans made on the hoof; I know I won’t remember them. I can’t ever recall names unless I see them in writing. Mind you, I can’t remember faces, either. People just fade in and out of the fog, and I often have no sense of whether or not I’ve met them before. My life consists of a series of clues that I leave in diaries, and address books, and lists, so that I can reorient myself every time I forget.
It’s like that for everyone, though. We’re all just trying to get by.
‘All autistic people suffer from a degree of mind-blindness. Is that true of you?’ asks the interviewer.
‘To some extent,’ says the woman. ‘I’m better at it than when I was young, because I’m more conscious of it as an issue. I’m constantly searching for clues in people’s faces and tone of voice and body language.’ Thank God for my social skills, I think. Thank God I can get on with anyone. There’s a twinge of discomfort there, as I push away the sense of what that costs me, of how artificial it all feels. I am go
‘By and large, do you tend to think visually more than you think in language?’ he says.
‘Yes,’ says the woman, ‘I have an eidetic memory.’
I certainly don’t have one of those. Although I suppose I do remember whole pages of books sometimes, like an imprint on my eyelids. At school, my French teacher laughed as I recalled pages of vocabulary: ‘You’re cheating!’ she said. ‘You’re just reading that from the inside of your head.’ And me, at thirteen, squirming in my seat, because I couldn’t work out if this was a compliment – in which case, I should laugh along – or an accusation.
‘Were you interested in other children, as a child?’ says the man.
‘No, I just didn’t see the point. When I got a bit older, I would try to play with other people, but I wouldn’t get it right. By the time I got to seventeen I had a breakdown, because I couldn’t deal with all the stuff that was going on.’
The memory surges up of those blank days when I thought I might just give up talking for ever, because the words seemed too far away from my mouth; of the red days when I would hit my head against the wall just to see the white percussive flashes it brought; of the sick, strange days when the drugs made everyone else say I was nearly back to my old self again, but I could feel them in my throat, tamping everything down so that it didn’t spew back up…
‘One cliché about autism is that romantic relationships are very, very difficult,’ he says. ‘You’re married. How did courtship work for you?’
…And I find myself nearly spitting at the radio, saying, out loud, ‘How fucking dare you? We’re not completely repellent, you know…’
And that word, we, takes me quite by surprise.
PART ONE
DESOLATION POINT
1
Minehead Sea-Front, August
We arrive far too late in Minehead.
We meant to leave Whitstable at 5.30 a.m., and this was accompanied by a whimsy that we would wrap the boy in a blanket and bundle him, sleeping, into his car seat. He would awake, by our reckoning, just as we were approaching Bristol, and we would stop somewhere stylish and enjoy a picturesque family breakfast. I would have my feet on the South West Coast Path by lunchtime.
I’m not sure when we will learn that planning is futile in our household. We are awoken at eight by Bert yelling DAAAAAADDDDDDDYYYYY from his bedroom, and quickly realise that we neglected to set that five o’clock alarm. We finally leave at nine after a great deal of bickering, just in time to catch the worst of the August Bank Holiday traffic. Everyone, it seems, is heading down to the West Country for a last hurrah before school starts. There is little for us to do but to queue bad-temperedly, and make numerous stops at service stations along the way.
We finally roll into Minehead at three. ‘Are we in Devon yet?’ asks Bert, and I say, ‘Yes,’ because I can’t be bothered to introduce him to a whole new county this late in the game. We are actually in Somerset, but he already knows Devon, and if everything goes to plan, I will cross the border tomorrow afternoon.
‘We are in Devon,’ I say, ‘and it’s beautiful.’ I perch on the edge of the open boot of my car and lace up my walking boots. I can see Minehead Butlins across the grey shingle beach. I wonder if this will be my path, the one I’ve been craving, the wild one. I can’t imagine it somehow. Maybe this is a misstep; maybe this isn’t what I want after all.
A giant metal map in a pair of giant metal hands marks the start of the path. I pose for a photo with Bert, and then flick through the pictures on my phone, meaning to post one on Twitter with something jaunty, like Here I go! But I’m too appalled by how fat I look, and I post one of Bert instead, grinning impishly from between the folds of the map. Always better to post pictures of him than me these days, I find.
‘I’ve really got to make a start,’ I say to H. ‘I’ll never get there.’ I can feel the first threads of agitation winding around me. I need to get going. Everyone else is alarmingly slow, and I am running on fast time today.
‘Go on then,’ he says. ‘Where do you need to go?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I just follow the coast. Keep the sea to my right.’
‘Can’t go far wrong,’ he says. ‘Even you.’
‘Even me.’
‘We’ll see you on your way.’
We dawdle along the sea-front, past a pub and a cafe and an ice-cream shop. Bert wants a lolly. H is looking for a public toilet. I am getting increasingly irritable. It feels like we could all just wander endlessly around the outskirts of Minehead, and I’ll eventually have to accept that this was a stupid idea that was never going to happen. I’ve got nine miles to cover before the sun goes down, and I have no idea whether I can even walk nine miles anymore.
But then Bert gets distracted by a playground and I am suddenly ahead of them both, and I turn back to say, ‘Bye! See you in Porlock Weir!’ and I am off, alone, on the South West Coast Path, on my own two feet.
* * *
—
The South West Coast Path is a difficult, craggy and bloody-minded walking route that hugs the coastline between Minehead in Somerset and Poole Harbour in Dorset, taking in the seaboards of North and South Devon, and the entire perimeter of Cornwall along the way. I call it bloody-minded because it exhibits a wilful refusal to provide any kind of short cut, even where it’s obvious that any sane person would take one. Walkers routinely find themselves climbing perilously down into a cove, only to make a steep ascent immediately afterwards, and often with a far more sensible, level path in full sight.
Such is the brutal glory of the SWCP. For its entire 630 miles, it clings as close to this island’s crinkled edge as possible; so close, in fact, that chunks of it regularly fall into the sea. There are moments when it feels as though it was designed with mountain goats in mind, rather than humans.
Its original users – before the path had a name and a nifty set of acorn-embossed waymarkers – were coastguards, who created a series of routes that allowed them to check for smugglers in isolated coves. This perhaps justifies the exhausting pattern of rise and fall, but I detect something more in its design, too. There is a kind of landscape geekery embedded in the SWCP. Whenever I walk it, I get the sense that someone else understands my urge to know the full extent of my world; to trace its boundaries with my feet; to take the longest, hardest way round.
It may not be obvious from what I’ve said so far, but I adore the SWCP; I crave it, particularly the stretch between Bantham and Start Point in the South Hams of Devon. It has seen my best of times and worst of times; I have kicked back in Devon at the most triumphant moments of my life, and scuttled down there in terror when my life was in shreds. It always seems to replenish me.
I first discovered the SWCP on honeymoon, after secretly getting married in Maidstone Registry Office. Our plan was to run away to a West Country thatched cottage, and to send out a set of breezy postcards to proclaim our matrimonial status to our friends. This wasn’t the only misjudged part of the plan. When we arrived, we were greeted by an elderly woman bent double over a walking stick, who told us that her previous guests were ‘something of a mystery’ as they had disappeared in the middle of one night, never to be seen again. The reason for this soon became clear. The bathroom smelled of stale urine, spiders abseiled from every surface, and, every time we turned off the lights, an unnerving scuffling would start up in earnest. We endured it for two sleepless nights before throwing ourselves on the mercies of the Kingsbridge Tourist Information Office.
The woman behind the counter tutted and said, ‘These awful old cottages!’ Then she picked up the phone and, after a short conversation with an unknown third party in which we were described, enticingly, as a ‘lovely young couple’, announced that we were extremely lucky to have found anywhere at this short notice, but that she thought we’d be happier there.
We drove over to Salcombe – a town we didn’t know – in some trepidation, working over a plan to simply give up and go home if the B&B turned out to have nylon bedspreads and portraits of Jesus on the walls. What greeted us instead was a vision of perfection: a high Edwardian villa with pale walls, seagrass flooring, and a wonderful landlady who spent the rest of the week pointing us out to passers-by as we sat on our balcony, and squealing, ‘These two have eloped! To my place! I’ve got two proper runaways!’
