“Do you want to look at my jugs?” Or possibly an adventure in Asperger Syndrome? With help from Mungo Jerry and The Grateful Dead!
Date posted: Tuesday 14th April 2015
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I’ll never forget the first time I went to Jessica’s house. We were 16 and her parents weren’t at home. Jessica – “Don’t call me ‘Jessie’, I don’t like the sound of it” – and I first met at the local church ‘encounter group’ for teens. We hit it off immediately, and the next day she phoned me up and invited me round for a cup of tea and to inspect her jugs. That was certainly an offer I wasn’t going to refuse, but I was a little startled when I was immediately ushered into her bedroom. “What about my tea?” (It was a hot Summer’s day and I had dashed over on my bike.) “Oh, you can have that when we’ve finished” Jessica replied, without batting, or even fluttering, an eyelid.
So Jessica took me up to her bedroom and I was immediately involved in helping her get her jugs out. They were small, delicate–looking and exquisite and reminded me of porcelain. But she wouldn’t let me touch them: (“I can’t trust you just yet, and anyway your hands look very sweaty and are shaking a bit.”) Just then I heard the sound of the front door opening and someone calling from the hallway, “Jessie! Are you at home?” I froze. I’d seen the likes of Sid James getting into scrapes like these in the Carry On films, where the male interloper usually hides in the wardrobe. I was just about to dive into Jessica’s clothes cupboard when I heard footsteps on the stairs.
“It’s OK Sally! I have a friend here called Michael and he’s trying to touch my jugs!”
Enter 20-year old big sister Sally. “Oh yes, I see you are involved in the ‘I’ve made a new friend and am showing him every single jug I’ve been collecting since I was toddler’ routine. Michael, can I have a word? Now. In the kitchen.”
I followed big sister guiltily downstairs. Over a cup of tea, I learned that little sister was ‘a lovely girl’ but a bit ‘vulnerable’ because, amongst other things, she took things people said to her ‘a bit literally’ and said things that certain people (i.e. me) might take the wrong way. It had already begun to dawn on me that Jessica was, to say the least, an unusual person. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Chinese Willow Pattern, Crown Derby and even a bit of Minton as much as any other 16-year old boy, but I wasn’t quite expecting to see 70 tiny receptacles for holding liquid, all individually wrapped in newspaper, with a tiny label on each handle noting the date and place of purchase. And the contents of her wardrobe were a bit startling. All her clothes were white (“I love wearing white, but Mummy says it’s a bit impractical, so I wear other colours for climbing trees, though I guess, like me, you’re probably thinking that white is not a true colour.” Jessica was a tree expert too, and loved the way that the wind blew through the leaves in tall poplar trees, making them look like they were dancing and sound like they were laughing. (“They are a bugger to climb though.”)
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Nice jugs
I liked Jessica. You never knew what she was going to say next. When she came downstairs to join us in the kitchen (she’d been arranging her jugs in date order, from the very first one she was given by Uncle Julian, to her latest acquisition) she announced, “ I like all things ‘jug’. Can you guess why I like Mungo Jerry and The Grateful Dead?” Amazingly, the connection leapt out at me straight away. “Elementary, my dear Jessica (This Sherlock Holmes reference had her in stitches), Mungo Jerry are what you would call a ‘jug band’. Mungo Jerry came to prominence in 1970 after their performance at the Hollywood Festival in Staffordshire.
Mungo Jerry ‘live’ on Italian TV!
“Their show was so well received that the organisers asked them to perform again on the following day. The band grabbed all the headlines in the UK music press as they stole the limelight from the festival headliners Black Sabbath, Traffic, Ginger Baker’s Airforce, Grateful Dead (their first performance in the UK) and even Jose Feliciano. Their first single, In The Summertime, entered the UK charts at No. 13 and the following week went straight to No. 1. Lead singer Ray Dorset had to ask his boss for time off to appear on Top of the Pops.”
The link to The Grateful Dead was proving to be more serpentine. “I’ll give you a clue,” teased Jessica, “It’s something to do with the band that their lead guitarist Jerry Garcia was originally involved with.“ Of course, why hadn’t I seen it? “Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions!” I shouted triumphantly, if a bit too loudly. Big sister rolled her eyes and muttered, “You two were made for each other.”
The Grateful Dead at Newcastle Under Lyme: The shots of some fans reading the newspaper might fill you with foreboding, but stay with it to hear some hot licks and witness some crazy dancing!
And in some senses we were. I was as fixated on rock and pop as Jessica was. I was ‘into’ Agatha Christie novels (I’d read 25) in the way that she was fascinated by Jane Eyre. I had all my back copies of New Musical Express and Disc under my bed in date order (is there any other way to store them?) while she had her jugs and white clothes. I had given up climbing trees on my 13th birthday, but was prepared to resurrect my passion for it, if it meant being able to connect with Jessica. And she had such beautiful eyes, except that while I was always trying to gaze into hers, she didn’t seem so keen to look at mine. (Who was it who described his girlfriend’s eyes as being like ‘limpid pools’? D.H. Lawrence probably. Or could it have been A.E. Houseman, G.K. Chesterton, or E.M. Forster? Jessica would have known, as she had a ‘thing’ about British Edwardian writers with two initials in front of their surname.)
Trips to the cinema were not a success, however: “Stop trying to put your arm round me. I’m concentrating!” The visit to the pub on my 17th birthday was a disaster, (To the barman: ”It’s Michael’s 17th birthday today, so if you sell him a pint of beer then technically you will be breaking the law.”) This led us to have an argument on the pavement, outside The Swan, to where we had been rudely told to sling our hooks. “But I don’t understand why you are so cross, Michael. I just didn’t want you to break the law. Can we go for a walk instead?” We did, and somehow Jessica turned the conversation, as she always did, to her favourite subjects.
It became clear to me that the writing was on the wall. Then we had a disastrous experience and Jessica’s parents got VERY angry with me and I didn’t see her at all after that (to find out more you’ll need to wait for the post to appear on my other site 1970s Mind, 21st Century Body, though please bear in mind that this site is a bit NSFW).
It wasn’t until 1981 that Asperger’s Syndrome came to the attention of people across the world working in the field of special needs. Even then, it didn’t click with me that maybe this was Jessica’s issue. Only when I read Tony Attwood’s brilliant book The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome did I see the possible connection between Jessica’s special interests and behaviour and Asperger’s Syndrome.
But hang on a minute… who’s to say that anyone has a problem like Asperger’s, particularly if the person making the link has an encyclopaedic knowledge of 1970s rock music, Agatha Christie’s work and likes to keep his magazines in date order? Have a quick read of Tony Attwood’s website and you’ll get a ‘feel’ that he has some pretty strong ‘special interests’ himself. The question has to be whether children, teens and adults who may or may not have Asperger’s Syndrome are able to channel their fixations into a field that is judged to be useful. And whether or not they are able to engage in relationships that provide them with the sense of wholeness and fulfilment that they, their partners and their children need.
Tony Attwood’s book may only have 10 pages on how Asperger’s Syndrome has a particular way of manifesting itself in girls, but this section is illuminating, because it helps us understand how girls may be able to ‘mask’ the condition. He suggests that their ability to adapt to social situations by copying other girls sets them apart from boys with the condition, whose social awkwardness may be spotted earlier. I find this observation very helpful, especially when thinking about girls who display high anxiety about social interaction, but don’t seem to have the classic profile we associate with Asperger’s Syndrome.
I always wondered what happened to Jessica after we last met. (Does she ever think of me at all and is her hair still red?) But I have a fairly shrewd idea of what she would have called her son.
Vintage Grateful Dead: A Touch of Gray
Take care out there.
Michael
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4xoxFrRA2Q
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As ever Michael, illuminating. Also great to see Newcastle under Lyme getting a mention
Thanks Lisa!!
By all accounts it was a strange festival, with several of the ‘heavyweight’ acts not really impressing the crowd. Still, it was the birthplace of Mungo Jerry, so we should be thankful for that. For a while after that there was a craze for men to have massive sideburns. Sideburns, like flares, seem to be well and truly a thing of the past.
I’m reading ‘Arthur and George’ by Julian Barnes, and a lot of that is set in Staffordshire (It doesn’t mention the Hollywood festival though)
Great to hear from you!
Michael xx