Ronald McGill
AUTISM
The devastating diagnosis.
Three Royal Terrace.
Three Royal Terrace was written through the eyes of my autistic son. He has no spontaneous language, thus I was "giving him a voice"! It conveys not only his challenges but also, the frequent anguish for his three siblings and his parents.
The wider picture:
The Expatriate.
The Expatriate centres on me and my young family's experience in Malawi. However, the first part gives insights into life as a private in the British Army. That culminates in Aden when the British were being pushed out. For many, the army can be a salvation.
It moves to the fight to enter, and the subsequent experience of, higher education: studying town planning for five years at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
The book includes a tribute to a magical corner of England; north-west Cumbria. I was in my late 20s, combining town planning and historic town centre renewal with new-build housing and conservation funding. It inspired my first journal paper. Ten years later, I would have stayed.
But wanderlust took hold! Eventually, London (with Taylor Woodrow) then internationally, in Malawi, Tanzania, New York (with the UN), Ethiopia, Kenya and finally, Uganda.
The professional side of The Expatriate is captured
in the book Institutional Development - later republished as...
The contemplative picture is from Addis Ababa in 2023, leading a GGGI study tour for four Ugandan secondary city mayors and their physical planners, to GGGI Ethiopia. The collective picture is marking my retirement from GGGI's ever cheerful Ugandan team in Kampala on 28th June 2024.
Meanwhile, it is the closing of Three Royal Terrace (p.205) that carries my son's autistic reality, now 31. 'He shall never live independently, have feelings of adult love as normally articulated and all the other attributes of a reasonable life'.
We remain in awe of the health and educational support for Roddy, through New York State, especially having just celebrated 25 years of living there! All six of us moved to New York on 4th July, 2001! A day later, I was in my new office....
On pages 138 to 140 of Three Royal Terrace, Dad started to imagine on my behalf...
The epistemology of autism has been turned on its head. The pleas for addressing the disorder through the nervous system’s contortions have been discovered. Treatments have been tested and confirmed as sound. The specifc drug becomes available on the market. I have been part of a ‘blind-test’ population. The experimental course of medication has been administered over two years... One morning, I come downstairs for breakfast and start talking. I have residual memory and therefore, am conscious of those nearest and dearest to me; Mum especially! Talking is one miracle. Education will be a slower revelation. I have to return to school and learn everything: reading, writing, arithmetic, computer skills, art and life... It took me six years to catch up: two years of intensive schooling and four years of college. Columbia was so fascinated with my case that they gave me a place on their…inevitably I suppose, psychology programme, with free tuition and additional financial support.
Such is the power of wishful thinking!
