FOR MANY years Vicky Biggs was haunted by the feeling that there was something wrong with her. She fell over a lot. She was useless at games or anything that required physical co-ordination. She had no friends. Yet from the age of 3 she could read fluently and, although her grades at school were often mediocre, she knew that there were many concepts she understood instantly where her peers struggled.
“It was very confusing because I knew I was different,” she says. “I knew I was clumsy, a bit antisocial, but the problem areas are very diverse so I was never able to work out what was wrong. It was like having a small volcano sitting inside me. Also, some of my better attributes, like the photographic memory, I assumed everyone had them. The realisation came in fragments.”
Her condition, dyspraxia, was not diagnosed until she was 15, and this was a liberating experience. Not only did she discover that her lack of physical co-ordination puts her in the bottom 1 per cent of the population, but a psychologist told her that her IQ, at 155, is in the top 1 per cent. Suddenly her behaviour made sense because she knew why she struggled to organise the way she moves: her brain isn’t wired like most peoples’ and when it tries to send messages not all of them get through. So she has poor balance and depth perception — she can reach for a door handle and miss, she can’t pour a drink without spilling, or walk upstairs without hanging on to something. She struggles to cross roads because she can’t judge the speed of traffic and, in spite of six years of weekly piano lessons, she has yet to reach Grade 1.
Having dyspraxia is, she says, like “lying diagonally in a parallel universe” and it feels like a cage. Or rather it did. Apart from reacting to the diagnosis by wanting to shout: “I’m not a freak!” Vicky rapidly became more confident. A clear sign of this is the book she has written, Caged in Chaos: A Dyspraxic Guide to Breaking Free, which is primarily a practical guide to living with the condition, but also a way of explaining herself to those who, for the first 15 years of her life, thought her stupid.
It is written with verve and a robust wit. In person she uses the same eloquent vocabulary and talks in structured sentences — even at 17 she doesn’t do teenage I-mean-you-know bumbling — but her shyness is more evident as she forces herself to make eye contact and holds herself very still, clutching a novel and a pencil — she calls it a thinking stick — like a security blanket. “Northanger Abbey, it’s a parody of the Gothic novel, ” she says gravely when we meet.
We sit in her room at the boarding school she attends in Lancashire where, after years of frustration and bullying, she has found acceptance. The room is in chaos, an upturned cuddly toy on the unmade bed, the floor a jumble of clothes and paper, but she knows where everything is, especially her books. In the past four days she has read five: the Jane Austen, Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally, The Pickwick Papers and the Communist Manifesto. “I just thought it was important so I should read it,” she says of the last one.
Vicky grew up in Saudi Arabia where her father works for an aeronautic company and her mother is a midwife; it was there that the bullying started and eventually became intolerable. “The bullying has pretty much always gone on. The only thing being I usually have my head in the clouds so I don’t notice if someone’s being horrible unless it’s pointed out to me. It’s only if people are pushing me around that I can tell.”
When she was 12 and moved to a new school in the Hijaz Mountains the taunts accelerated. She was called “Spaz,” “Reject,” “Retard,” and other names she will not repeat. Her books were stolen and torn, she was pushed down the stairs. “It was things like . . . they knew I had a phobia of spiders so there would be spiders in my desk, sand in my apple juice.
“There was this PE teacher, she was a particularly weak woman, and it was tug of war and I was happy to be doing it because it’s one of the few sports where you don’t need co-ordination. My team had too many people in it and she said, ‘Who do you want to vote off?’ Everybody was screaming my name so I said ‘Why does it always have to be me?’ She said, ‘It’s the decision of your team-mates,’ and she made me sit out. In some way teachers condoned the way people treated me and that made it worse.”
The cumulative effect of the bullying was that Vicky started to behave in self-destructive ways. She punctured her skin with her nails, and now knows that she had a borderline eating disorder. “I used to look at myself and think you’re hideous, fat, and so I’d be chained to the weighing scales. I never consciously made myself throw up but my body did that for me: I couldn’t hold anything down. Night times were awful because I was so tired but could never sleep.
When the bus got to school, I’ll never forget it, it feels like your lungs are closing up and stopping working. I went home one day very upset and my dad looked at me and said, ‘That’s it, you are not going back’.”
Her parents, she says, though puzzled by her problems, have always accepted her as she is, and she is grateful for that, as her research for the book made her realise that not everyone in the autistic spectrum is so unconditionally cherished. Her school was chosen for its proximity to her mother’s relatives, and in four years there Vicky has slowly learnt coping mechanisms and made friends who protect and support her. She doesn’t hide any more, she no longer feels isolated, she can walk in a crowded space.
“I used to go round the edge of the quad because I wasn’t ready to go in the crowd. Now I walk across the middle. I still get a few butterflies but the confidence is getting there. You have to force yourself to do it. Walking and talking is very hard because I tend to veer off at a tangent, can’t keep a straight line and speak at the same time, end up bashing into people. If I’m walking into town my friends will hold me to stop me doing that. That ’s nice of them.”
She uses a computer now, even in exams (she was among the top five English GCSE entrants in the UK) and reserves her slow, spiky handwriting for a velvet-covered book in which she records her achievements, and, with humour, her less dignified moments, like the lurch she made for the school stage when receiving an award for endeavour.
Her difference has even become a cause of celebration — she knows she has an unusual perspective but regards this as a sign of originality rather than inferiority. “I don’t believe I’m weird any more, I just do things on my own terms.” She hopes to take up the offer of a place to study English literature at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and looks forward to meeting similarly bookish people, as well as broadening her social horizons.
This is another hurdle to overcome because she is especially sensitive to loud noises and smells. “My sensory system has a major dislike of any overload and I find myself panicking and speaking Arabic for some reason because everything in my brain gets muddled up.” But, she says, a couple of friends took her to a birthday party recently, provided her with ear plugs and acted as a crowd control barrier. “And I enjoyed myself.”
Caged in Chaos: A Dyspraxic Guide to Breaking Free by Victoria Biggs, published by Jessica Kingsley, £12.95. Available for £11.95 (p&p free) from Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 116 Pentonville Road, London, N1 9JB; 020-7833 2307; post@jkp.com. Cheques payable to Jessica Kingsley Publishers Ltd.
