Quand un chat errant a commencé à visiter son jardin, la dernière chose dont Julia avait besoin était un autre ajout à sa maison. Car Julia avait déjà les mains pleines avec son fils George, qui souffrait d'autisme. Calme et renfermé, George, dix ans, semblait perdu dans son propre monde, bouleversé par le moindre changement dans sa routine et incapable de se faire des amis parmi les autres enfants.
Mais George n'a pas eu peur du petit visiteur en noir et blanc ; au contraire, son visage s'est illuminé à sa vue et, peu de temps après, George était inséparable de son nouvel ami Ben. C'était le miracle que Julia avait espéré ; George a commencé à jouer avec Ben et à créer des histoires sur leurs aventures ensemble, les racontant avec enthousiasme à l'heure du thé. Pour Julia, c'était une façon magique de communiquer avec son fils, et Ben avait rendu cela possible. C'est pourquoi, lorsque Ben a disparu, Julia a su qu'elle devait faire tout ce qui était en son pouvoir pour le ramener à la maison...
Captivant, édifiant et génialement touchant, A Friend Like Ben est une histoire vraie et remarquable sur la dévotion et l'empathie extraordinaires entre un petit garçon et son chat, et la détermination d'une mère à rendre son fils heureux à nouveau.
"Vous voyez, Ben n'est pas seulement un chat - il est la fenêtre de George sur le monde, la clé de la porte qui le déverrouille. Traitez-moi d'idiot, mais Ben est comme mon deuxième fils, alors j'ai dû le retrouver quand il a disparu. Parce que sinon, j'avais plus peur que je ne peux dire que je ne verrais plus jamais la lumière dans les yeux de George. Il n'y avait qu'une seule façon de s'assurer qu'elle reviendrait : Je devais ramener Ben à la maison".
Je viens de lire un article très émouvant d'une maman qui a écrit un livre sur l'arrivée d'un chat errant au sein de sa famille, félin qui a permit à son grand fils autiste de s'ouvrir au monde extérieur :
Spoiler :
One of the family: Julia Romp holds the family's beloved cat Ben. The moggie helped George, centre, to communicate with the world after his autism made it difficult for him to show his emotions
Boy trapped in his own world refused to even smile... until a stray cat changed his life
By Jenny Stocks
20th November 2010
Glancing out of the window, Julia Romp spotted a flash of black and white disappearing into her garden shed. The cat was back, a skinny stray covered in dried blood that had been prowling around her lawn for a few days. It was hungrily tucking in to the food she’d left out for it, but hissed and clawed at her if she went near.
It certainly wasn’t the best first impression. But over the next four years, this cat would become a beloved family member and transform the life of Julia’s autistic son.
Ten-year-old George, who could barely hold a conversation or even smile, would learn to communicate, laugh and show affection for the first time, thanks to his relationship with the cat he named Ben.
‘Ben changed our lives for ever,’ says single mother Julia, 37, who now works for two cat rescue charities in her home town of Hounslow, South-West London.
‘While George will always struggle in many ways, I believe the love he has for Ben — and the way it helped bring George and me much closer together — saved us both.’
So how could one underfed stray have this effect on a boy who couldn’t even connect with people? Julia will never know why, but George, now 14, began to speak to Ben in a way he never had before, telling stories and sharing his thoughts and worries.
But life unravelled when the cat suddenly vanished last year. It took Julia three months of constant searching to finally get Ben back and reconnect with her son.
As Julia will admit, by the time Ben arrived in their lives four years ago, she desperately needed help. When she fell pregnant at 22, becoming a single mother to an autistic child was far from the life she planned for herself.
She had a boyfriend, Howard, a local gym instructor, but he told her he wasn’t ready to settle down to family life. They split but Julia decided to continue with her pregnancy.
For a young girl on her own, parenthood was tough from day one. ‘George was born screaming — but unlike other babies, he didn’t stop. He went rigid when I tried to hold him.’
Further warning signs began to emerge, but doctors denied there was a problem. George’s eyes wouldn’t focus on anything and every time Julia leaned over his cot, he struggled and cried.
‘He didn’t want me near him,’ Julia says. ‘I loved him so much, but he would tense up every time I touched him. It broke my heart. I worried that it was my punishment for being a single mum.’
As the years passed, George’s behaviour got more strange. He hid behind the sofa when the news came on television (he thought the newsreader was staring at him).
He wouldn’t eat food if it was touching another item on his plate. When he began to talk at the age of four, he would merely repeat words over and over. And he was aggressive towards other children.
‘I got so upset by people’s nasty comments — if George lay on the floor, or said something inappropriate — that I stopped going out. I couldn’t go to work as George was my full-time job — we survived on so little money. My mum bought us furniture and my brothers and sister helped out, but I felt so alone. I locked myself in the bathroom to cry so George couldn’t see.’
When he started school, his teachers assumed he was deaf, as he didn’t understand commands or respond when his name was called. But his sight and hearing tests came back normal.
Slowly, during psychiatric assessments carried out over the next five years, Julia discovered that George was autistic, and suffered from severe learning difficulties, hypersensitivity to sounds and smells as well as paranoia.
‘It was a relief, but I also felt a deep sadness,’ says Julia. ‘If I had picked it up sooner, would things be better for George? At ten he couldn’t read, write, laugh, smile or look people in the eye.’
Medication failed to help. But, just when she needed it, Julia’s miracle arrived in the summer of 2006.
Bond: When Ben arrived, George started to use his imagination and communicate with his mother using a 'cat voice.' Now as he gets older he is starting to use his real voice - and the pair are still inseperable
The black and white stray that wandered into the garden of their two-bed semi was a straggly mess, but Julia took pity on it, leaving out food and water and letting it sleep in her shed.
George named the cat ‘Ben’, but Julia was determined they wouldn’t keep it — she knew from experience that he quickly got bored of pets. (They had previously owned a rabbit called Fluffy and a budgie called Polly that failed to move George at all).
But six weeks later, after she had taken the cat to the vet to recover, everything changed. ‘The vet invited us to come and see the cat, and George called out “Benny-boo!” in a high sing-song voice I’d never heard before.
He then said, looking straight into the cat’s eyes: “Is you feeling better now? Is you well?” I worried that it would scratch him, but it rubbed up against him. Instead of pulling away, George stroked it and grinned, something I’d hardly ever seen.’
So they took the cat home and to her delight, George’s conversations with Ben continued, getting more imaginative every day. He began to tell Julia about the colourful lives Ben had lived before. According to George, Ben had met Superman, been a jet pilot, fixed the roof, built a rollercoaster and jumped out of a plane.
Julia worried whether she should be encouraging George’s stories and ‘cat voice’, but it was the first time she had known her son to use his imagination in ten years. She also noticed, through his interaction with Ben, that George had picked up things she’d taught him over the years, from historical facts to lessons about manners.
‘He would recite word-perfectly the stories I’d read to him, and tell me that Ben should wash behind his ears. He had been listening after all.’
Julia soon discovered that if she used a ‘cat-voice’ like George’s, she could have real back-and-forth conversations with him.
Ben thrived off George’s attention.
The cat sat in the sink while George had a bath, never scratched him if handled too roughly and loved nothing more than being bounced 3ft in the air on the trampoline — even jumping back on if Julia tried to rescue him.
Not only did George’s personality change at home, but at his special school, too. He made his first real friend, a boy called Arthur, and became affectionate towards Julia.
‘One night, George had been playing with Ben when he climbed up next to me on the sofa and rubbed his face into me, the way Ben did with him. When I quietly asked what he was doing, he said he was “showing me love” like Ben did. I was so overwhelmed — I didn’t even think he knew what love was.’
Life kept getting better: George progressed at school, starting to grasp reading and writing and Julia organised a dream holiday to Egypt so George could swim with tropical fish. But, two days into the trip, in September last year, disaster struck.
A call came through from George’s dad Howard, who had been housesitting. Although he and Julia split before he was born, he has always supported George financially and spent time with him. ‘He said: “Julia, the cat’s gone.” Ben had disappeared the night before, and Howard, my mum, brothers and sister had all been searching in vain.
‘I got off the phone and burst into tears. I had to tell George what had happened. His face dropped and he walked off, then reappeared a minute later with his packed suitcase and said: “Take me home”.’
They returned on the first flight, but George refused to speak to his mother. His only words to Julia back home were: “I hate you.”
Saviour: Julia has admitted that when Ben arrived four years ago she desperately needed help to cope with the difficulties she was having with George
‘My happy boy had disappeared along with Ben. I worried about our cat, that he was cold and hungry or, worse, dead, but I was also desperate to get my child back. I had to watch him get ready for school, tears rolling down his face. Nothing I said helped.’
Determined to find Ben at any cost, Julia began a relentless search. She posted pictures of Ben on missing pet websites and printed out thousands of leaflets to hand out at local shops and schools, and leave on parked cars, despite a threat of prosecution and some angry reactions. She says the police laughed at her, and a private detective turned down her plea for help. She searched the river near her home, and received hundreds of calls and emails, many of which were hoaxes (one particularly nasty call claiming to have thrown Ben off a high-rise block).
The lowest point came after almost three months, when she was called out to a nearby road where a black-and-white cat had been killed by a car. It wasn’t Ben, but she felt he’d suffered the same fate.
George still asked every day whether she had found the cat, so she decided to tell him Ben was dead. But, before she had chance, just three days later on December 21 the phone rang.
‘A lady from Brighton said she had found the cat. I thought it was another hoax, but she told me she’d got my details through Ben’s microchip. Her daughter had found him shivering in their garden.’
Brighton was under 7in of snow, but Julia left George with his dad and set off. After a difficult five-hour jouney, she finally reached the snow-covered house, brightly lit with Christmas decorations. ‘I had palpitations as I knocked on the door at midnight. The family greeted me with a smile, but all I wanted was see my cat.
‘Behind a table, I saw a black nose poke out, and he came running into my arms. It was Ben — the same white bib and white stockings on his back feet. I sat on the floor crying and hugging him.’
At 4am, Julia burst back through her front door with Ben in her arms.
‘I yelled up to George: “It’s him, Ben’s back! He’s been in Brighton.” George appeared at the top of the stairs, and said, in that voice I hadn’t heard for three months: “I know, he wanted to try the best fish and chips in the world.”
It was like flipping a switch — George was back. I felt like the whole thing had been a bad dream, and I’d finally woken up.’
Julia will never know how Ben could have travelled 70 miles to Brighton, she suspects he was put in a van as a cruel joke, but is just thankful to have her cat and George’s spark back.
As George gets older, he uses his cat voice less and his real voice more, although he and Ben are still inseparable. He can now read, write and has made friends at school. He still tells Julia he loves her all the time. After her public hunt for Ben, Julia has fallen into a role as a local pet detective, and is currently hunting for a tabby called Samba after a plea from the owners.
But, as we all know, cats don’t live for ever, even magic ones, so what will become of George when Ben dies?
Julia says: ‘I worry so much about it, but I already have a plan to introduce Ben’s “baby” into our home. Hopefully George will form a bond with that kitten, too. But for the time being, we’re enjoying being a family.
‘We had years of sadness, but now we have enough laughter to make up for the years we lost. Ben isn’t a magic cure for George’s autism, but I can’t imagine life without him.’
A Friend Like Ben by Julia Romp (HarperCollins, £14.99) is out now. Julia will be signing copies at Waterstones, Hill Street, Richmond, today at 12pm.
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