My Brother Dave 




DAVE AS A CHILD: 
Dave suffered with huge frustration as a child, in a world that didn’t understand him and couldn’t or wouldn’t accommodate him. Very occasionally his pent up frustration hit record levels and he would resort to banging the side of his head repeatedly against the wall,  or slapping the side of his face with a hand balled into a tight fist. Only able to express that level of frustration and rage by physically turning on and attacking himself. 

Once he expressed his sadness and despair by ceremoniously piling all  his prized possessions on the stair landing outside his room. Choking on his tears, insisting in a sobbing voice, that he no longer wanted his teas maid, his money box,  the Dr Who memorabilia. Everything he loved and cared about discarded there on the stairs. 

 Dave was treated as “other” as different and was systemically set apart by the 1960’s society into which he was born. The Local playgroup in Cannington village wouldn’t let him attend.   For a while he wasn't able to go to school.  He was considered sub-normal and in-educable (those are the word used by the medics at the time to describe him, they are not mine) 


When Dave was around 7 years of age. It was suggested to Madeleine (his Mum) that she might like to put him into a Hospital where they had a school for children like him. Madeleine refused this suggestion she “Gave Dave up” in her words “I knew he was settled at home and wouldn’t have been happy”  

In the 1960’s and 70’s Parents were actively encouraging to hand their disabled kids over and to hide them away from the rest of society.  It was accepted practice. Madeleine was later to work in the hospital and see the school and what she had saved him from first hand. It has changed now, but back in the 1970’s was more of a holding space,  than a school where special needs children were taught anything.  His eventual school years at Penrose are detailed by both Stuart Dove and Bruce  who was his teacher. 

 With his love of routine and ritual and autistic traits Dave could so easily have been institutionalised. Peter who Dave lived with in the Blue house as part of  “shared lives” spent his childhood raised in a hospital rather than a family setting. 

 There seems to be a common thread when talking to people who knew him well, since his death. that “Dave led a good life” It is said as  a matter of fact observation. In the words of Jon Shirley his key worker for around 20 years:  “Anyonewho judged that dave was restricted in his lifestyle and interests didn’t know him” Jon who was with Dave 5 days a week, and knew him better than most.

By remaining in the family setting Dave fundamentally altered the trajectory of his parents lives. Stuart Dove pointed out that Madeleine would not have become a psychologist if it hadn’t been for her desire to understand and help her son, and Peter would not have re-trained as a social worker.  Dave allowed me to see first hand the false notion that society is a meritocracy, offering the same opportunities to everyone. There is no level playing field, everyone is differently-abled. 


TEENAGE DAVE: 

Dave was never quiet.  Noise was his constant companion. You could track his progress through the house by the sounds of clapping and slapping of hands,  or loud muttering. When in close quarters he was a terror for grinding his teeth.  

There was always noise.  His TV still blaring out after he had fallen asleep or more often his voice, rambling, reminiscing, re-enacting parts of a film or TV programme or a real life conversation that involved a swear word or two.  Dave was both actor and audience combined. 


Dave would regularly fall asleep fully dressed in front of the telly.  Upon someone entering his room he would wake up shouting “I was watching that” and insist he had been awake all along.  This also happened when he came to London. On his first visit, we found him fully dressed on his bed in the morning as he didn’t realise the TV went on all night and dosed of in the early hours  whilst waiting for it to finish broadcasting.  Another time he heard the birds singing. Which happens all night due to light pollution. Dave took this as a sign that although it was dark, it was not really night time.


When I was a teenager living in a room beside Dave’s  in the early hours of the morning. Sounds of bombing and machine guns emanating from Dave’s room would wake me up. 
“Turn it down”
“Alright” Dave would shout back in an irritated tone. 
Then thud thud thud as he waked over to the TV but no sound of thudding back to bed.   He would stand there with his hand on the dial and after a minute or so the sound would start coming back as he turned the volume dial slowly back up.
“Turn it down”  I would shout and the same thing would be re-enacted 4 or 5 times with each of us getting increasingly enraged. I would bang my fist on the wall. The frustration was tangible on both sides. Fran and Rachel, at “the Blue house” came up with the simple solution of putting it on a timer but for some reason this didn’t occur to us.

Dave had many of the distinctive asperger personality traits. He would immerse himself in a subject, get to know it in huge detail and talk endlessly about that topic for years. 
As a teenager it was Nuclear power and Margaret Thatcher aka “the iron Lady” as he called her. Mum and Dad took him – repeatedly - to Hinkley point the local nuclear power station visitor center. The Tour guides often became quite anxious at his in-depth questioning and detailed knowledge.  Dave also got to go on a nuclear submarine. It felt like Dave’s interests - verging on obsessions  - went on for ever.  Some never changed but after a decade or two interest in nuclear power finally waned, it shifted quietly into an interest in sustainable energy.  


Fascination with the weather never left him. As a 4 year old child he would potter up the lane breaking the ice on the puddles with a tiny pick axe. As an adult he would talk at length about the isobars on the TV weather forecast and cold and warm fronts moving across the country. This understanding of the weather was self-taught. Jon spotted that this extended into an interest with the season cycles. With particular emphasis on the effects for farmer’s. When the Enterprise centre went out in the minibus on day trips, Dave would often muse aloud wondering if the farmer had got the timing right and hay that had been cut could be safely baled before the rain came. He would also express concern if a crop had been sown at the right time or a little late in the season. 

Each and every birthday for 20+ years, Dave suggested  enthusiastically that I might “want a barometer.?” Through a process of attrition there was a barometer installed in most places where Dave spent time. Anywhere a barometer could be found Dave would greet it with a ritual 2 or 3 finger tap on the glass front. Peering short sightedly right up against the glass front he would start explaining what was ahead weather wise. irrespective of whether anyone was in the room to hear him. On entering his bedroom you would always hear the tap the glass  barometer front. 


Such was Dave’s faith in the barometer he would wear his coat with his hood up mid summer if his barometer had been pointing to rain.  I can remember attempts to reason with him to at least take the hood down resulting in an agitated argument followed by a refusal to leave the car.  On that occasion the rain didn’t come and Dave didn’t get out of the car. Stubborn, dogged, persistent, resistant, are all words that could be used to describe his behaviour and response to things.“Don’t torment me” was the phrase he used throughout his 20’s and 30’s whenever we went over old ground and tried to reason with him. In my mind it was to try and make him see sense or to be a bit more flexible. In his mind it really was a torment to revisit something he had made his mind up about.


Throughout his life, in Winter the conversation would often turn to the runnels, which were dug to drain water from the lane into a ditch. Dave would worry about how water might be building up in the lane just outside his family home.  He would repeatedly express this concern to Peter and suggest he go and check on them. Dave was one for suggesting other people do things but ducking out of any physical activity himself. 


Dave’s interest in the external world and Weather fronts and systems went beyond Earth and far out into space. He could talk at length on the different atmospheres surrounding the 8 planets in our solar system.  Space really fired up his imagination. Possibly because he was a big fan of Dr Who or possibly because these idea of aliens and other beings chimed with his own sense of being other and different, somehow set apart. The tribute by Stuart Dove (Deputy Head of his Primary school) details Dave’s interest in the weather/space developing into him becoming an armchair environmentalist later on in his life. Stuart also talks about Dave’s schooling pre-teens as does Ceri's wonderful eulogy. 


Dave felt like a “fish out of water”  He felt out of place, and that was mirrored back to him by how he was dealt with in wider society. Please read Peters account of hostility towards Dave at a swimming pool.  In “ A major incident”  When Dave was 19 and and I was 13 I stumbled on the idea o making money by selling cream teas in the front garden as a summer job. Dave would always  go round the back make himself scarce, whenever there were customers in the front garden. Anti-social you might think. When I quizzed him about why he was changing his route he said “Because I make people feel uncomfortable”

Dave’s deep love of Swans and signets is  in part because he identified with the ugly duckling in the children’s nursery rhyme. The ugly duckling who others called to get out of town. Eventually the outcast became a swan. A bird of beauty that was able to  move easily between the elements of land, water and air.  Dave believed the myth that it’s wings were so strong it could “break a mans leg” So it was not only  a creature to admire as it glides through water so elegantly. With it’s warning hiss and powerful wings it was also a dangerous force to be reckoned with.

 DAVE THE MISCHIEVOUS ADULT
Dave’s horizons seemed to start to expand from his mid 30’s onwards. He  became prepared to try different things, became fluid in his way of doing things. Jon Shirley again:
 “When  I first met Dave he was sat in a chair with his arms folded. Everything was done in terms of the rota. I never realised that he would have such hidden depths. You had to put the work in. But as he got older he seemed to wise up to the way the world worked. He seemed to become less insular. He learned the more he opened up the better it would be”


Jon says that whilst at the centre Dave always referred to his parents as Mr and Mrs Thomas. And that Dave had Issues around John having a relationship with his parents and them collaborating and working on the same side. Took Dave a long time to adapt to that and realise it was not a collusion.

Dave showed a devious side.  Instead of delivering letters from the Enterprise Centre where he went each day. They would  be stuffed behind his wardrobe. None were ever handed over to his parents. When he went to Fran and Rachel’s at “the Blue house”  he carried on this routine. Possibly he felt there should be no communication between two separate spheres of his life? Home and work. We never got to the bottom of it. Never understood why.

Please look at the black and white photo from NYE 2000 for an example mischievous nature. Dave’s arms are being hugged against his body by his parents. This apparent loving embrace is so he can’t flick a v sign at the camera and gleefully ruin the photo. Dave hated being the focus of attention. He also had a cheeky irrepressibly naughty side. Harriett gives example of this in her writing abut Dave’s time at “The Blue House” where he spent the last 5 years of his life.

He loved to throw a spanner in the works, to fan the flames and make a disagreement ignite into something more. The energy of anger and rage - when he wasn’t consumed by it himself - fascinated and delighted him. One particularly gleeful event for him was deciding that his “New year’s resolution is to give up saying the C word” He would then use this as an opportunity to repeat in order to clarify what the C word was. Giggling and laughing uproarously. 

Yes he was difficult, obstinate, unyielding, uncompromising and in many ways difficult to live with. He used to wander back and forth and around the house stark naked as he got ready for his bath. This was a habit I tried hard in vain to break, as his Nephews and Nieces got older. Dave was also kind, he could bear a grudge but he was completely free of malice. He was both intentionally and unintentionally funny. Consistent, reliable as clockwork, predictable and yes thought provoking. 

Dave wasn't a law unto himself, impervious or indifferent to the feelings and needs of others.  He would try. Whilst he might not have grasped the social norms around nudity. He understood the importance of censoring himself and not discussing anything particularly goulash or violent or around the children. He was able to modify and change his chosen topic of conversation when reminded children were present.

DAVE AND POLITICS:
Part of Dave’s love of the Conservative party and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980’s may well have been because it allowed him to court controversy and ignite political disagreements between his Father and Grandpa Hallett who lived next door but one. Dave would go to see his Grandparent for a cup of tea and digestive biscuit on a daily basis. He never missed an opportunity to recount whatever  “liberal twaddle” (Maternal Grandfather’s phrase) his Dad had been “spouting” There was nothing he liked more than reporting gleefully about people “shooting their mouth mouths off”  and then reporting on the outrageous comment someone made in response  to the original incident and so it went on for as long as he could keep it spinning.

Mum used to say that if we had lived in the time of “Hitler youth” she was sure Dave would have shopped both his parents. Whilst Jon Shirley was aware that Dave would be straight off to the office “Almost matching the speed of the runner Linford Christie” to report on Jon on the odd occasion when he swore. Jon felt “ Dave could see the humour in what he was doing” Which interpretation is more accurate we cannot really judge. All are agreed that he loved to add fuel the fire of any controversy and wouldn’t miss an opportunity.  

Jon used to tease Dave about being “An Appalling Tory” Whilst Dave felt with some criminals “They should lock the door and throw away the key” which was a direct quote from Grandpa Hallett. Unlike his Grandpa, Dave didn't agree with the death sentence. It’s true Dave was a peculiar conservative. Jon Shirley talked about how Dave worrying that : “ It’s not very fair for the wheel chair people”  on more than one occasion. He was genuinely concerned about people who had challenges in their lives. He was perplexed and couldn’t understand why people had to live on the street. Every Christmas when asked by Madeleine how much he wanted to dontae to “Shelter” He  would ask “ How much can I give?  “I know what I stand for Jon Shirley” Dave would say when John teased him for “being a disgrace to the conservative party” 

Dave parent’s eventually stopped him going to the amusement arcade un-supervised after discovering he was regularly giving some teenager’s money.  Dave believed they asked “because they needed it” He wasn’t intimidated, merely took them at their word and wanted to help them out.

To an outsider it might seem sometimes that Dave was obsessed with conflictual situations. That he felt he lived in an inherently cruel, viscous, violent world. Full of threatening situations and people lacking in humanity. Sitting alongside this without any apparent contradiction was Dave’s inherent kindness. There is the love of kittens, puppies, and ballerina's.  Both aspects happily coexisted unproblematically in his psyche. 

Dave never missed an opportunity to turn an in-opportune phrase or expletive from Jon into an opportunity to secure himself a kit-kat. Jon recalls a couple of crisis moments where he needed to have a cigarette whilst at work. On these occasions when Jon mentioned  he really would appreciate if Dave didn’t say anything.Dave would reply “ Yes, hmm, ….maybe we could pop to the shop for a kitkat?” In a manner almost reminiscent of the Cray twins. Albeit non-threatening because ” there was a twinkle in his eye”,  Dave would openly describe the situation as “ I now have leverage” it was like a contractual obligation. Dave was in Jons words like “ The Evil genius without being evil” Dave got his extra ration of Kit-Kat. 


From his mid 30’s onwards Dave steadily gained in weight. Pete was constantly worrying about this. Which is why Kit-Kats were rationed and became an important bargaining chip.Eventually his parents got a special hidden magnetic lock for the cupboard door where Dave’s food was hidden.  It was hidden because if found Dave would help himself and tell you “You didn’t hide it well enough” Prior to the lock I Would often find Dad tiptoeing around kitchen trying to find a new hiding place for kit-kat’s, Jacobs crackers, digestive biscuits or Walkers Salt and Vinegar crisps.


His Dad (Peter) kept trying to get him to do some exercise. Peter used to take a stone and place it up near the quarry about half a km away and Dave - wearing a high visibility jacket - would go and bring it back. So proving he had been for a walk. Dave was always talking about the threat of inclement weather looming in the hope of the walk being cancelled.

When the weather got to bad in the winter, instead of “collecting the stone” He went up and down the stairs a set number of times. Pete would stand at the top chatting to him. Dave preferred this as Peter had other things he would rather be doing so it  went on for less time. It also gave him the chance to chat to his Dad and put the world to rights. Up and down he would go, always leading with his left foot. He had slight spasticity in one leg and it was a centimetre shorter than the other. It was not  noticeable, but meant he always led with his that foot.

Whilst Jon believes Dave could read situations and manipulate people. He was also infuriatingly insensitive and tactless.  Arianna aged nine, laboured over the course of a term in a pottery class to made him a clay figurine of Marine Boy as a Christmas present. Dave took one look and said “It doesn’t have hair. Marine boy has hair” Interestingly even at that early age, she knew as she made it that it was unlikely to pass muster with Dave and was ready for some sort of criticism.

My most infuriating moment with Dave, was during a minor car crash. I had gone to pick him up from respite care and as we waited at a junction another car went into the back of me. This was Mum's car so it wasn't a good situation.  I shouted aggrieved

“Did you see that!. ohh no, what’s Mum going to say?”
Dave “Oh NO .... NOW  I’m going to MISS MY PROGRAMME”  

 
Dave, is no longer here too point at the Elephant in the room and go on to discuss its size and shape at great length. I miss your take on the world. Being able to ring you up at election time or when something big happens in UK  or world politics. Our last converstation 2 days before you died was when I rang to find out what you thought about Boris (the Prime Minster) getting admitted to hospital with Covid 19.  You didn’t want to talk about it and closed me down, ending the conversation by saying you wanted to “not think about it” and “I just want to watch my programmes” It helps me enormously to know you ended our last conversation on your terms.


When in Somerset at the family home I often think I hear the gate click and you muttering your way along the path to the back door. I miss the noise. The incessant background noise or chatter that meant you were. Possibly out of sight but very present. Every time I see a swan I stop, do a swan salute with a raised arm and emit a hiss. I look like a Neo-nazi and I don't care because it connects me to you.

We have put a swan carving on your headstone, it is a carving rather than an inscription. So in a  100 years - possible less - it  will in all likelihood outlast the words and be the only thing visible on your gravestone. That feels fitting. A swan as a symbol of you. Able to navigate water, land and air. It may not look so graceful on land but you have to admire it’s  ability to hold its own and  just like you navigate very different landscapes.  You were appreciated and loved, and you appreciated and loved in return.  It was a life well lived.