“What’s all the commotion?” asked Jamie, half out of bed to go and check what Dale was up to.
“Wait,” I told him. “That’s not commotion, it’s communication. Listen to all the language he’s using.”
We sat in bed, mesmerized by what was going on in the lounge downstairs. Dale was saying, in an uneven, sing-song style, “Henry puppy…Duck, puppy…That’s not good, puppy…Stop it, Henry…Duck, puppy…Give it to Dale.” All of this was punctuated with shrieks of laughter and little yelps from Henry as the two of them engaged in boisterous play together. We’d never heard our son play so verbally or joyfully before with anyone, either human or animal.
When we finally went downstairs, we didn’t care about the puddles and mess on the floor, or the new smell in the lounge. Henry had been paper-trained by Val, but he was only a little pup and accidents were to be expected in the short term.
We had a busy time keeping Dale and Henry entertained that day and then the usual bedtime battles in the evening, which thankfully didn’t seem to faze Henry at all—he just took everything in his stride. We had all bonded already with this gorgeous little bundle of joy, who had rapidly become a major part of the family. Both Jamie and I had seen a real change in Dale from the moment Henry had come into his house. He had suddenly been transformed from a lost and lonely child into a happy little boy, who at last had a friend to give him a sense of purpose. Our home had come to life in a sense we had not known before Henry crossed the threshold and began to work his special kind of magic. By the end of day two, we felt, quite simply, that we couldn’t do without him.
There was another benefit we hadn’t fully anticipated. Whereas Mickey, the Wellpark, and the wonderful Thomas the Tank Engine had taught Dale so much, suddenly here was Henry, the most amazing, living educational resource I had been given to date—and I was certainly going to embrace the opportunities this provided.
To allow the pup to interact with Dale wherever possible, we decided to give him the run of the house: nowhere was out of bounds, not even the sofa or our beds. We wanted Henry to feel free and comfortable in our household, and with this established, we began to teach Dale about his dog. We told him the names of the different body parts and Dale would sit with Henry, studiously informing him, “This is your nose…your paw. These are your ears…your eyes…and Henry has big teeth, too.”
Autistic children have problems with literal meaning. Just as Dale had thought broccoli was a tree, so he decided all animals’ feet were the same—to him, a horse’s hoof was a paw. It was very hard for him to understand that all animals were similar but different, but with a little time and his interest in Henry as motivation, Dale was eventually able to grasp this difficult abstract concept.
We wanted Dale to learn how to take care of his dog and ensured he was fully involved with all aspects of looking after Henry. We hoped that in addition to the benefits this would have for Henry, Dale might also learn some things about looking after himself in the process.
Dale had never previously shown any desire to wash his hands without prompting and constant supervision. Now, before we would start to feed Henry, we would wash Dale’s hands, and ours, and through time Dale was happy to apply this skill on his own because he was doing something for his dog.
Dale was also a bad eater, never hungry, whereas goldens, especially our Henry, are the world’s greediest dogs. As Henry grew, he quickly learned when his meals were due and would bark at “his” cupboard to remind us it was dinnertime. Each day, I would deliberately wait for Henry to do this, saying to my son, “Dale, what is Henry wanting at his cupboard? He is hungry.” This evolved to a point where Dale would tell me, “Mum, Henry’s hungry. It’s time for his dinner.” Eventually, Dale learned through this the concept of his own hunger and when it was dinnertime for him. I developed the trick of telling Dale that eating his food was good for him as it would help him grow big, just like Henry.
Again through Henry, we dealt with the concept of greed. “Henry, you’ve had enough to eat,” I would say. “Don’t be greedy.” Once Dale had learned this, I loved watching him tell Henry off for this very sin: “Henry, lie down, don’t be greedy,” he told his dog with real meaning, and then glowed with pride as Henry did what he had told him.
Along with many other children with autism, Dale was lacking in sequencing and organizational skills. The fact that young Henry needed three meals a day gave us plenty of opportunity to practice, and I would break down the process of preparing Henry’s food into minute steps. So once we had established that it was Henry’s dinnertime, I would say, “Dale, open Henry’s cupboard door. What do we do next? We need his bowl,” thereby reinforcing language and the task sequence stage by stage. To help increase his comprehension, as this precedes spoken language, I would talk in a basic, concise way, always at Dale’s eye level, emphasizing the word I wanted him to learn. Once he appeared to understand, I would try to get him to respond. So if I had said, “Dale is pouring the food into Henry’s bowl,” I would then try a question: “Now we add some…?” And with luck Dale would say, “Water.”
This entire process of getting Henry’s food could take up to half an hour, not least because as well as the fact that I was trying to teach Dale to communicate, I was also hoping to develop his fine motor control. His tripod grip (the ability to hold a pencil between his thumb and first two fingers) was poor and he had only just got the hang of the more basic palmer grip, meaning he would grip the pencil in his fist, so these sessions were invaluable. Poor Henry, however, would drool so much in anticipation of his dinner that he would flood the floor and often one of us would skid as if we’d stepped on a banana skin.
Perhaps slightly unkindly, I told Dale that Henry’s favorite TV program was Ready Steady Cook and of course Dale took this literally. He would shout to his dog, “Henry, come here. It’s your favorite TV show,” and they would settle down to watch. If Henry had not been happy with the choice of show, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had changed the channel himself just by barking, he had eaten that many remote controls.
5
The Voice
It is by muteness that a dog becomes for one so utterly beyond value; with him one is at peace, where words play no torturing tricks…Those are the moments that I think are precious to a dog—when, with his adoring soul coming through his eyes, he feels that you are really thinking of him.
—John Galsworthy
Only three weeks after Henry’s arrival, staff from both the PSLU and Hillend Nursery commented on the change in Dale. The minutes of their meeting record how he had “had a particularly happy spell recently” and was now mixing well with the other children. All of his skills were showing progress, and his key worker at Hillend had “noticed a considerable difference in him.”
When I spoke to friends and work colleagues about the change in Dale and how Henry was helping him, their reaction was one of confusion: “How can you use a dog to do this?” Quite naturally, they all took the ability to communicate for granted, and it was very hard for me to explain the difficulties involved in communicating with a child with severe autism. But whether they understood or not, what mattered to me was that involving Dale in the minutiae of Henry’s care was getting results.
Due to an occasional “puppy-pee stench,” Henry had become used to having a bath and seemed to enjoy it. One day, he and Dale had been playing in the back garden, and Dale came in covered in mud from top to toe—it was in his hair, his ears, everywhere. He refused to get in the bath as it was daytime and he only had a bath when it was dark outside. A further obstacle was that he would never get in the bath until all of his trains had been placed round its perimeter, one at a time, in the precise order he wanted. Dear Henry came to the rescue again. I simply popped him in the bath first and, amazingly, Dale followed, during daylight hours and without the need for the bath to look like Clapham Junction. The two of them had a wonderful time, even if my bathroom resembled a disaster zone. On later resuming Dale’s usu
al nighttime bathing routine, with Henry sitting beside the bath rather than in it, the ring of trains reappeared. But by giving Henry a quick scrub, too, I was able to give Dale the same without the kind of battle that had always ensued in the past.
Dale’s aversion to having his hair brushed was reduced by adopting the same approach. I would take the brush to Henry, saying, “Dale, why do we have to brush Henry’s fur?” I would then pause to try to prompt a response, but if none came, continue, “To take out the tangles, like when we brush our hair.” I could eventually leave Dale grooming Henry, and he could see that, far from being frightened, his dog was enjoying the experience. Henry would finally fall into a deep, contented sleep, with Dale still talking to him and brushing him lovingly. We used to get so much fur that I would laugh and say, “Dale, we can make another puppy from this,” or, “Look, Dale, a tiny Henry.” I took any opportunity to introduce a new word.
Sometimes poor Henry would even be “attacked” with the scissors to show there was no pain in getting a haircut, although Dale still had a lot of anxieties about the process and the fact that he had to go somewhere he found terrifying for the purpose. One of his teachers in the language unit, Paula, had been playing hairdressing games with Dale, using dolls, and because his fear and autism were so severe, she had taken him out in her own time to a barber’s shop. There, she had found a gentle, kind old barber called Charlie, whom Dale adopted as his personal hairdresser, refusing to let anyone else cut his hair until he was ten years old. I’m not sure we would ever have got him to that point if he hadn’t first observed Henry having a trim at the dog-grooming parlor.
One time, we went to collect Henry, and the grooming lady said, “You’ll have to wait a few minutes as he’s still in the dryer.”
Dale became highly anxious, telling me, “I don’t want Henry to spin round and round.”
I had to show him that Henry was sat in a heated box, rather than a tumble-dryer.
Another day, I remember going into Dale’s room to check on him as he’d been quiet for too long. There he was in front of the mirror, playing with the scissors and laughing at all the hair on the floor. Not only was I pleased his anxiety had been cured, but also immensely relieved to have caught him just before the point where the electric hair trimmers would have been needed.
We brushed Henry’s teeth and, together with the fact that the vet would also examine Henry’s teeth, this helped to reduce Dale’s fear of visiting the dentist and give him independence in caring for his own teeth. I remember many times overreacting to Henry’s halitosis, which gave lots of scope for fun and interaction with Dale. All future visits to the dentist or doctor were to prove straightforward as long as Dale had his Helpful Henry train in his hand and the real Helpful Henry waiting in the car.
Introducing Dale to dog stories and videos helped to lessen his need for Thomas, and his growing love of all things canine eventually led to a significant expansion of his social world in the form of his first ever trip to the movies.
Given Dale’s fear of the unknown, previous attempts to take him to the movies had resulted in tantrums before we even got beyond the foyer, and we had thought it would take years to overcome this. However, with the release of the new film Beethoven, about a large St. Bernard dog, we devised a plan, aided and abetted by my brother-in-law, Gerry, who fortuitously worked as the booth manager at the local cineplex. So, with a cuddly toy St. Bernard under his arm, Henry in the car, and a bag of candy from the kiosk, as well as enticing Beethoven posters everywhere, Dale visited the empty theater to see the giant television screen and sit in a seat. Gerry demonstrated the lights going out and also showed Dale the “giant video machine” in the booth. He then reserved two seats at the back near the door for us for the day in question.
When the momentous occasion arrived, with all necessary preparation taken care of and Dale entering the theater only at the start of the film, we watched in anticipation as he took his seat. He promptly shouted, “Gerry, switch off the lights!” and then sat through the story of Beethoven, generally happy, although a little anxious at times. By using the new obsession, we had managed to open another door and Dale became a regular cinema attendee thereafter.
When Henry grew out of his first puppy collar, Dale chose a new one—in “Thomas blue” of course—and Paula, his teacher, was able to remind him of this when she took him out to buy new shoes “to go walking with Henry.” She told him, “Your feet have grown, just as Henry has grown. And Henry didn’t mind his new collar, did he?” The result was so successful that Dale insisted on taking his new shoes to bed with him.
A whole new world opened up as we visited dog shows and went for regular walks with Henry. When people stopped to pat Henry and comment on him, this only served to increase Dale’s interest in his dog, as well as dramatically improve his socialization skills.
One day toward the end of May, Dale was being assessed in the PSLU for starting school. It came to the point where he was to demonstrate his pencil control and imagination and Paula gave him a blue felt-tipped pen. Aware that he would have difficulty as he still used a palmer grip, she asked him, “Dale, can you try to draw me a good picture?” She left him to do his best and when she returned was amazed by the result. She sent home the little picture, with a note in his diary: “Nuala, I think getting Dale the dog is going to be really good for him. Please see the enclosed drawing—his first ever attempt to recreate an image.” I carefully took out the piece of paper and there was the image, a definite picture of a “Henry dog,” with a big, happy grin, fan-shaped tail, and water and food bowls.
I showed the drawing to my mum, and we gazed at it with immense pleasure. Everyone had been working on the tripod grip, facial expressions, and imagination for years and had thought it would take several more before Dale acquired the requisite skills. Yet here at last was proof that he had understood what we had all been striving for so long to teach him, as well as real, tangible evidence of the impact Henry had had on his life in just a few short months.
This basic drawing, after years of nothing but the blobs and daubs of a toddler, acted as a catalyst for similar drawings over the next few weeks. Paula again sent home a very mature picture of a woman’s face, clearly Granny Dorothy, with hair, earrings, and more importantly a definite facial expression. Dale also drew a whole person, complete with arms and legs, and of course endless pictures of characters from Thomas the Tank Engine with various facial expressions, confirming he did at last understand them.
Progress such as this was especially heartening given that Dale was due to start school in August, although a particular worry remained: at almost six years of age, he was still not fully toilet-trained.
For years, I had continued to do all the usual things to try to get Dale out of diapers, but he simply didn’t understand; he seemed terrified of using the toilet. I didn’t realize until much later that he had a real phobia of the toilet process itself, in terms of the actual environment and the personal element involved.
An obvious downside to owning a puppy, apart from the constant chewing, has to be toilet-training. You need patience and vigilance to be able to catch the precise moment to put the pup outside, and it helps if you can tolerate the fact that your house will smell like a public toilet for a while. We went through the normal house-training routine with Henry, and as ever Dale was involved. So when Henry had an accident in the house, I would say as I cleaned up, “Dale, we don’t want to make the house all dirty and smelly.” When Henry got it right and performed in the garden, he would be rewarded with a chocolate drop as Dale looked on.
One day, after a successful pee from Henry in the garden, followed by his reward, Dale and I went back into the house. A few minutes later, I was astonished to be informed by my little lad, “I need a wee. Don’t want to make the house all dirty and smelly.” He did the necessary in the toilet and put out his hand, demanding, “Choccy drop.” I quickly found him a treat from his Thomas candy tin.
I never put a d
iaper on Dale again, as I felt that the occasional accident was better than confusing him now that he had at last understood the concept. I felt confident to do this because once the breakthrough had been made, Paula had similar success at the nursery. It still took months for Dale to overcome his fear of sitting on the toilet, and it used to worry me how he would hold on to a full bladder for as long as ten hours at a time, but eventually, with Thomas the Tank Engine posters in Dale’s “own” little bathroom and Henry the dog and Helpful Henry the train beside him, his confidence and independence increased.
Like all retrievers, Henry was a very sociable dog; if he wasn’t getting in our faces, then he would be in Dale’s instead. He was always looking for a dog biscuit or, with great excitement—duck toy in mouth, tail and whole back end wagging—nudging Dale for a game. On many occasions he would break into Daleyworld, or interrupt Dale’s autistic mannerisms such as staring or flapping his hands, and Dale didn’t mind. On the contrary, he would sit with Henry and show him his favorite trains—“Thomas train…Henry train…”—something he would never do with us.
Cutest of all was when Henry wanted just to snuggle up to Dale; being a true goldie, he could never get too much attention. His affectionate, outgoing nature was all too apparent when he gave what we came to call the “five-minute, five-year response.” That is, like most dogs—but especially retrievers—if you left him alone in the house for as little as five minutes, the welcome on your return was as though you had abandoned him for five years. This response made Dale really happy and worked wonders for his confidence and self-esteem.
Dale and Henry’s favorite activity together was the boisterous game of tug-of-war, and the longer this game continued, the more their excitement would escalate. As Henry tugged away at the toy, Dale would maintain complete eye contact with him without even realizing it. We also noticed that he was not afraid to look at the puppy’s unthreatening eyes when talking to him, which was something we encouraged in the hope that one day he would be comfortable enough to look at us and others in a similar way.
A Friend Like Henry Page 5
