Unspoken Stories
Beverley Samways
Pavilion Publishing, 2026; £24.95 print;
free to download from https://pavpub.com
Below is an edited extract
It’s taken me a while to find Owen since arriving today, but here he is in the sensory garden.
Owen walks gingerly out of the gate, head swinging slowly from side to side, as if curious about the world he is entering. I step back to give him some distance and say, “Hiya, Owen, it’s Beverley.”
The words come out of my mouth and fall to the ground, as he neither acknowledges me nor registers me speaking. I have said the words to no one and, with nowhere to go, they echo back at me in my own head: “Hiya, Owen… hiya, Owen.”
I feel self-conscious, foolish, and I catch a look pass across the staff member’s face that seems to say, “What did you expect?”
Becoming aware
He feels his way carefully over the pebbly path towards the back door. I fall in step behind him and say to the staff member, “I’m Beverley. I’m here to observe Owen until around four.” “I’m Emma,” she replies.
Though Owen’s back is to us, I sense that Owen is aware of this short exchange. I am there to him somehow. And this feels new.
Emma and Owen go into the bathroom and then into his bedroom as Owen gets changed. I stay around the corner, out of sight, listening to his low-level soundtrack humming away, like a distant lawnmower.
Suddenly, he appears around the corner, striding towards me with purpose; there is no sign of Emma. He walks right up to me, and out of his happy humming come two syllables: “Hi-ya.”
It takes me a moment. The two syllables spoken in close proximity are not matched by the usual eye contact or body language that accompanies a greeting. They fall out of his mouth as if accidentally – and as if they too are expecting to hit the ground. So I nearly miss them. But, just in time, I catch the words and, as he begins to turn away from me, “Hiya, Owen,” I repeat with a smile.
For the first few months, when Owen used occasional words with me – “Yes” or “Hiya” and so on – he only did so when no one else was around to hear. I didn’t notice that he was doing this at the time. But I have reflected that Owen’s voice – when he did later use it in the hearing of others – did not appear to be “audible” to those around us.
On one occasion, I literally watched a staff member shake his head to shake the hearing of Owen’s voice out. It was as if Owen’s spoken words could not undo the truth in his file that he was non-verbal. So there was simply no space for him to speak and be heard. I have wondered if Owen only speaking in my hearing for the first few times was because a part of him knew this.
Diagnosis dictates
We cannot allow a diagnosis to dictate the terms for a person in a way that limits or caps them. We all change; we all learn new things and respond differently to different people. Rather than allowing the diagnosis to limit the person, we have to limit the bounds of a diagnosis, and allow space for a person to push beyond it, however and whenever they’re ready.
It was as if Owen’s spoken words could not undo the truth in his file that he was non-verbal. There was simply no space for him to speak and be heard
Whatever the definition or implication of a diagnosis, we have to remember: we are not our thinking minds; we are not our intellectual ability (nor disability); we are not the aggregate of our spoken words. We are very much more than this.
