The corridor outside was deserted. I streaked along it, sword in hand, came to a T-junction at the end, and turned round one of two corners towards the children’s wards before anyone saw me from behind. I had just a head start on them; they couldn’t know exactly which route I’d gone. Speed was the only thing that mattered now.
And then, ahead of me, coming slowly along the next corridor and blocking most of it, I saw a prostrate patient, quite covered by a sheet on a raised trolley being wheeled by two porters. Perhaps at first they thought the building was on fire. But then, noting my flying red dressing-gown, swordstick and my pace, the two men froze with their silent passenger, and just stood there, straight in the middle of the passage.
In mounting confusion as I approached, instead of pulling over to one side, they started to turn the whole trolley in the opposite direction, as if to beat a retreat. They ended by blocking the corridor completely, the trolley stuck between the two walls.
I simply had to vault it — which I did, clearing the white-sheeted figure in one leap, while the porters backed against the walls like ambulancemen on either side of a dangerous jump at a steeplechase. At least, I thought, they might hinder the others behind me even more. And I ran on again, elated by my success, the sudden physical activity pushing the adrenalin sharply through my veins. I had that strange, sure animal feeling again: that I was going to win.
The children’s ward was in almost complete darkness when I got there, only a single light coming from the far end where the four private rooms were. The children were nearly all asleep. Few of them were disturbed as I closed the outer door behind me and tiptoed quickly down to the far end.
Clare was awake again, I saw through the glass partition. A nurse was still up playing with her, and I remembered how difficult, long-delayed or irregular her sleeping could be when she was disturbed.
I opened the door. Clare looked up. But she looked past me, not at me. The nurse turned. Clare was sitting up by her pillows, constructing some elaborate edifice with delicately balanced plastic bricks on her bedside table. The nurse saw the swordstick and immediately stood up, as if to protect the child.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m Clare’s father. I’m taking her away.’
‘No!’ the nurse said immediately. ‘No!’ But she was too stunned to say anything else.
Clare didn’t speak either. Having looked up in my direction to begin, she now calmly returned to her bricks. I knew I had very little time left.
‘Look,’ I said to the nurse, keeping her back from Clare with the swordstick. ‘I can’t explain now. But I promise you it’s all right. I am her father. She’ll be quite safe.’
I simply took Clare then, quite unresisting at first, picking her up in her pyjamas, until she saw that she was being taken away from her bricks, when she screamed, a short sharp scream, so that I was forced to take away as many of the bricks as I could with me as well, stuffing them into my dressing-gown pockets. Then I made off with her, lifting her up under my arm like a parcel and carrying her out the door with one of the yellow bricks still clasped firmly in her hand.
She made no other sound as I ran with her towards the french windows at the end of the ward corridor, turning the key and wrenching the door open. Then I was out in the night.
It was difficult to move fast in the gathering darkness over rough ground, and I could hear the nurse shouting behind me now. But suddenly there was a light round a corner, above some builders’ huts where they were making extensions to the hospital. And beyond these huts, right at the edge of the car park, I saw the black Ford Fiesta. The engine was running, the door open, while I was still ten yards away from it.
They never caught us. We only saw a police car once, lights flashing, tearing along the high road between Banbury and Chipping Norton, while we were half a mile away, down in the valley beneath, moving with dipped lights in a parallel direction along a winding cross-country lane. Alice had done her homework well, travelling these minor roads three times, twice at night, since I’d left her.
In little over half an hour, driving fast, we’d skirted Stow and were approaching the back entrance to Beechwood Manor, from another small by-road. There was no lodge here. The drive led to the home farm behind the Manor and there was only a cattle-grid between the stone gateposts. Turning off the drive, on to a narrow lane, we were soon hidden by thick undergrowth on either side. And half a mile further on we turned again, away from the farm, along no more than a grass track that had once been a back avenue leading round to the manor house itself. But this soon petered out, narrowing into a defile of thick brush, old elder trees and hawthorn bushes.
And here Alice drove the car into the old cow-shed hidden in the undergrowth, the bushes scraping the roof over our heads, until the headlights came up against the back wall. Then she turned everything off and we sat there, elated, exhausted, in the darkness and sudden complete silence of the deep midnight countryside.
‘We’ll stay here till first light,’ Alice said softly. ‘Then we can move. I’ll open the gate in the fence for you. When you get through you’ll find yourself just at the head of the valley. The sheep pasture runs away to the left: the chalk quarry on top, and the stream runs down from there to the lake. I’ll come and see you tomorrow.’
She spoke softly because Clare was sound asleep in my arms, asleep at last. I told Alice then what had happened in the hospital. And finally she said, ‘Well done. I wish I’d seen it all. I really do.’ Then she kissed me gently — a sweet reward, I thought, for a crusader home from his first successful campaign.
Eleven
More than anything autistic children hate any change in the meticulous, often senseless routines they impose on themselves, with which they secure themselves to life, which makes life bearable for them. And I suspected Clare’s docile sleep that night was simply due to exhaustion: a calm before the storm.
I was right. When she woke in the car that morning, in the dark just before dawn, she struggled and screamed, and she screamed the louder when the sun rose and I carried her through the heavy dew up the edge of the long green sheep-pasture and then on down the stream towards the lake. She was like a howling tornado blowing about in my arms and had we not been at least a mile away from the home farm and nearly the same distance from the Manor I’m sure it would have been all over for us; someone would have heard her cries.
As it was she didn’t cease her pain until late that afternoon, out on the island in the little mausoleum, when she fell asleep, exhausted again. Even to remember those early days with Clare is painful; to write about it even more so. And several times then I was just about to pack it all in and give ourselves up.
But I knew that a return to hospital or to some special institution would only be worse for Clare. And I knew as well that, after nearly a year dealing with her problems, I was better fitted than anyone else to help her now. I had rescued her at last and I wouldn’t willingly desert her again.
In the last few weeks she had obviously become attached to one of the nurses in the hospital. And I wasn’t sure whether she even recognised me during those first few days. Of course I know that autistic children, in their bad times, intentionally refuse to recognise people. This is one of the hallmarks of their complaint. Since, generally, they cannot confront their own ‘self’, they will do everything possible to prevent any outsider recognising or promoting that same missing quality.