A haven from an unsympathetic world

Feb 25 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

So in 1968, with other local families, they formed a society dedicated to providing autistic people with their own home in sympathetic surroundings.

After much campaigning, they acquired Raby Hall, officially opened in 1979.

It is now a major organisation, employing 300 people. “About half our clients come from the greater North West and the rest from other parts of the country,” says Dianne Asher, 54, the chief executive.

She came here about a year ago from Henshaw’s Society for Blind People. Her predecessor was the much-respected Mike Hatton, who held the post for 25 years.

As Dianne speaks, Beryl, 75, breezes into the administrative office alongside the workshops used by the clients on an industrial estate on Grisedale Road, Bromborough.

In addition to the resident clients, these facilities are also used by 39 day clients. “We have a music workshop with musical instruments,” Dianne says. “Music is a good outlet for people, very therapeutic.”

The Society’s band, The Beathovens, will be playing at the party at the Duke of Westminster’s, where the G note on the piano has been retuned on the advice of the pianist. “It was not good enough,” he said.

“We do some wonderful art work,” says Dianne. “We have some very gifted people, who would be able to look at a room and then draw it in perfect dimensions.

“We also do horticulture and small animal husbandry. If the person with autism has something external to focus on, it stops them getting anxious about what is going on around them.”

The farm at Raby Hall presently has seven goats, 150 hens, three geese and two pot-bellied pigs.

There are cookery workshops and an IT centre. Before coming to Raby Hall, some clients were in mental hospitals. Others attended autistic schools.

Beryl already had another son, Tim, and daughter Vanda.

“Simon was a lovely little boy, quite beautiful, but he had the most bizarre behaviour,” says Beryl, widowed three years ago. “He would stand under a central point like a light-fitting and spin himself like a ballerina. He wore a hole in the kitchen floor and the hall floor.”

AFTER reading a book about autism, Beryl knew what was wrong.

“He had started to say a few words when he was 18 months, but one of his first words was Hallejulah,” she says. “He had been sitting in this little chair and I had the radio on. They were singing Hallejulah and it was on so loudly that it had alerted him.

“Simon deteriorated until he was six, but I just loved being mum. The diagnosis was quite poor. They said (at an autistic centre) that Simon would never know us as parents.”

Did he? “It’s sufficient to say that since my husband died, Simon has never asked after his dad. He does have language, albeit quite stilted. He did call us Mum and Dad after the age of six. He can read and write because of the symbols, and he is very good in that area, but he doesn’t really understand what he’s reading.”

Simon stayed with Tom and Beryl until he was 21 when he came to Raby Hall, where he loves cooking and keeps everything neat and tidy.

“One of the nicest things that has ever been said to me was when Vanda was nine and had been out with Simon. Some people had laughed at him and she came home and said, ‘you know Mum, I didn’t know Simon was different to anybody else until they started laughing’.”

The Wirral Autistic Society was formed by parents, bewildered and sometimes hurt by the ways of their children. But the love and the faith was strong. Now those children are adults themselves, sheltered from an unsympathetic world. And the original parents have grown old, knowing that their children are safe in the care of good people, who would always appreciate them for what they are – men and women, who feel and touch and see and smell and hear like all the rest of us under the big sun.

But, in some people, those senses were mixed a little differently. In the distance, the band plays their song, Hush, Hush My Little Baby.

davidcharters@dailypost.co.uk