Talking To My Daughter About the Boeing 737

Kids went back to school this week. One of them was mine. I wrote this about the unique challenges of fathering a 14-year-old with autism.

Gideon Haigh

Ethiopian Airlines, the flag carrier of Ethiopia, has a fleet of one hundred and forty seven aircraft.  These include twenty-nine Boeing 787 Dreamliners, thirteen Boeing 737s and twenty Airbus 350s, with a further fifteen on order.  It serves more than 150 destinations.  Its premium class is called Cloud Nine.

Interesting, huh?  Well, it is to me, because it has lately interested my daughter, C, now steadily reading the Wikipedia entry of every airline in Africa. This jag commenced a couple of weeks ago when I received from her a late night text: ‘The Boeing 737 is the oldest passenger plane still in use today, its first flight was in 1967.’  I actually did know this, and texted back that there was an excellent documentary we could watch about it.

Two weeks on, we’re right in the weeds.  We’ve surveyed the civil aviation titles on my shelf.  We’ve studied histories and liveries, route maps and cutaway diagrams, even visited airlinemeals.net, where people post photos of in-flight meals from all over the world.  And having watched Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, I listened to C regale my mother with a fluent account of how the MCAS system on the 737 Max 8 led to terrible disasters at Lion Air and Ethiopian - which is what, I assume, started us poring over African airfleets, airports and even fares.

C was last year diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, which rendered official what her parents had already intuited.  As a little girl, she counted cars on the road, classifying them by type.  She carried a book of baby names to populate stories in which the characters were described in great detail.  She would invent and delineate fictional nations: one of the tables we designed ran the length of the kitchen.  She was also the child at the fringe on kids’ parties, taking a long time to warm up, only wanting to get involved as they ended.  Then, of course, as it was for so, so many children, COVID lockdowns were an unmitigated disaster.  I watched her social and physical confidence, nurtured so carefully through her first four years at school, being sacrificed for the furtherance of Dan Andrews’ putrid personality cult - and don’t start me on that because I might never stop.

About one in 150 Australians has been diagnosed with ASD.  But the numbers are growing as awareness expands, and once you’re part of this in-crowd it doesn’t take long to find company.  In the last week I’ve met couples with a son obsessed with taxidermy and a woman whose teenage daughter has read nothing but Russian literature for the last five years. We compared, groaned, laughed - because you must.  I remain unsure of the correct nomenclature.  C has autism?  But it’s not like it’s a disease.  C suffers autism?  Yet in some ways she thrives.  She struggles with anxiety about entering new environments and trying new things; she can miss social cues and misread gestures; not everyone is as fascinated by Ethiopian Airlines as she is, and her dad can be if required.  On the other hand, for a fourteen-year-old, she’s astonishingly well-informed about world affairs from daily perusal of country guides on the BBC website, and can burn through a quiz of all the world’s flags in a few minutes.  And from seeing things through her eyes, I’ve learned important things.

Never had I grasped, for instance, the inadequacy of schools for anyone even slightly different.  For all its rainbow hues and diversity dogma, the education system is still a dreary, slow-moving, small-thinking, one-size-fits-all machine geared to the perfunctory delivery of painless minimums.  And its affectations of stimulating imagination are, for C, entirely pointless.  As her mother observed, telling C to ’imagine what it was like to be a Roman gladiator’ might as well be in another language. C likes facts.  They give her a feeling of mastery over the universe.  Perhaps that’s why autists passed unrecognised in educational days of yore: they were the nerds and brainiacs who, before memory was outsourced to Google, thrived on learning by rote. 

A big, bright, noisy public high school where kids flit from subject to subject and teacher to teacher remains a huge challenge to someone who warms up gradually and prefers staying long.  In C’s case, timetable tinkering made things worse rather than better, confusing her as to what she’s needed to be doing: in the middle of last year, this curious, intelligent and articulate child who loves learning was in danger of losing her way.  Though she fought back bravely, part of me dreads her return to school this week as much as she does.  

Perhaps it’s worth explaining a little on what it’s been like to jog alongside an autist who is now also an adolescent - how her mind works, how I have tried to fit mine.  For instance, I have a sideline in true crime, so it’s probably not surprising that one of the activities that first bonded us was murder, especially if surrounded by mystery.  

For this, You Tube has been a fathomless resource.  We’ve watched hours of videos, debated and discussed the crimes, rejoiced especially in Buzzfeed Unsolved, whose Saturday morning drops we used to await with the excitement others reserve for the release of Harry Potter books or Taylor Swift tickets then watched over and over again - autists enjoy repeated viewings and experiences.  Now and again we’d have C’s friends join us, until one ended up with nightmares from watching us delve into Jack the Ripper; after that it seemed like a pleasure best consumed a deux.  

Over time, C developed a consuming interest in poisons, then in cults and conspiracies, which appealed to her taxonomic instincts.  And after we watched a video about it, C grew obsessed with the Emu War - that bizarre interlude in 1932, where the Australian army was sent to exterminate the emu population of Western Australia’s Campion district only to prove embarrassingly ineffective.  We researched it together, to the extent of tracking down the nonagenarian daughter of the commanding officer, Major Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith. She told us the family joke: that when Meredith was later awarded the OBE, he said that it stood for ‘One Bloody Emu’. 

After You Tube there was Spotify.  C has an exquisite singing voice, but that is not the only reason for her partiality.  Over and over again - a hundred times, maybe - we’ve watched the movie School of Rock, in which born-to-lose Jack Black turns a class of students at a buttoned-down private school into a rock band.  The scenes which most piqued C’s interest were those in which Black introduced the kids to the history of rock, mapping the web of influences on the blackboard.    It occurred to C that here was another body of knowledge to master, and her dad could be of use.  She liked Molchat Doma; maybe she’d like to listen to Joy Division.  She was big on Will Wood and the Tapeworms; how about XTC?  Would she like to watch a documentary about The Ramones, or the New York Dolls, or the MC5?  Yes, and again, and again.  There’s something very rewarding when your daughter hums along to Bonzo Goes to Bitburg, knows the words to ‘The Killing Moon’, disntiguishes the the Brian Jonestown Massacre from The Dandy Warhols, and in turn has introduced me to Melt Banana, Guerre Froide and The KVB.  I bought a poster that mapped rock musicians and bands onto an amplifier circuit diagram so as to exposit their genres and generations; who are these Stooges and Velvet Underground who had such a musical impact?

I should probably be rushing her off to music lessons, or tennis coaching, or Saturday morning sport.  After all, the internet is a briar patch for young minds.  But C’s capacity for turning information into repeated amusement has become a source of fascination to me.  Herewith a few examples…..

• The Trivago game, where we choose a world city at random and compare the prices and facilities of hotels; 

• The Google Earth game, where we spin the globe so as to land on a city or town whose history, features, population and ethnic composition can be contrasted with others;

• The abebooks game, where we count the number of countries where dad’s books are on secondhand sale; 

• The IMDB game, where we pick someone out in the credits of a movie and check out in what else they have appeared or on what else they have worked;

• The Ancestry game, where we construct vast fictional families, everyone born in a different place, delivering multiple children in further different places, and in so doing populating the world.  

This last led in due course to proper genealogical work, on her family tree, and on the family trees of her schoolfriends, my friends and our family friends.  I flatter myself as having a good memory; C’s is something else again.  ‘No, dad, he’s not that Edward Hookham; he’s the other Edward Hookham.’ And she’s always on the case, so that I’m accustomed to late night texts: an alert to an anniversary on Ancestry; a photo of an old headstone from Find-a-Grave; a picture of an  steamer explained as being the ship on which somebody went to war according to their service record on National Archives; a personals ad for a wedding or an obituary from newspapers.com or Trove providing salient dates.  Now and again I’ll insist on us ordering a document, just so there’s some delayed gratification - exciting as it is to find things straight away, not everything should be obtainable at a keystroke.  That inquest from New Zealand might take a couple of weeks, but it will give us something to look forward to, won’t it?  

Above all was there the cat.  C wanted a cat.  OK, but this was a serious task.  No, we did not want the first one we saw, cute as it was.  It had to be right.  We would go here; we would go there; we would go back and check.  We’d find out about cat care and maintenance.  We’d commit to extensive patting duties.  And the name: that was C’s job.  Long deliberation ensued.  Finally, from the pages of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which she’d been reading, came Samsa.  On my lap as I write this.

I won't pretend that C’s autism does not at times pose immense difficulties, because it does, for her, and for her parents.  When it’s tough, it’s really tough.  When school fails her, I feel like taking up arms.  When she’s holding in her emotions because of some seemingly trivial setback, I struggle with mine.  C has been lucky in her friends, who are all lovely, and often neurodiverse themselves; but not everyone in life will adjust for her initial affectlessness and inflexibility; not everyone will know; not everyone will understand.  One degree either side of C’s interests, and you miss her; yet life contains many insuperably boring things that are also important.  But sufficient unto the day, y’know.  And part of me does relish knowing about Ethiopian Airlines, that its first jet aircraft were Boeing 720s, that it has a minority stake in Malawi Airlines, that it remains state-owned.  It’s interesting, and I’m into it, because we both are.