The following extract is taken from the autobiography of a famous artist and writer who was born with a serious physical disability. In the extract the writer reflects on the fact that he is only able to express himself by painting or writing using his left foot. The Prison Walls I could now no longer run away from myself, I had grown too big for that. In a thousand ways, large and small, as each day went by, as the family grew up one by one and became – to me strange self-supporting adults, I saw and felt the limitations, the boredom, the terrible narrowness of my own existence. All around me were signs of activity, effort, growth. Everyone had something to do, something 5 to occupy them and keep their minds and their hands active. They had interests, activities and aims to make their lives an integrated whole and give their energies a natural outlet and a natural medium of expression. I had only my left foot. My life seemed just like a dark, stuffy little corner in which I was thrust with my face turned towards the wall, hearing all the sound and motion of the big world 10 outside, and yet unable to move, unable to go out and take my place in it like my brothers and sisters and everyone else that I knew. I felt as if I was merely moving along a groove, thinking the same things, feeling the same things, dreading the same things. I was shut in, cut off, bottled up. I was left with nothing but frustrated tryings and little narrow thoughts. Mother was always a tremendous well of inspiration to me, but now we didn’t 15 always agree with each other. We had many quarrels, the only thing I could say plainly and without any difficulty was 'go to hell', and I sometimes said it to mother when we were having one of our rows and I was in a temper. Speech was a strange, awkward thing with me, but I didn’t need any words for 20 mother to know what was going on inside me. I believe she could almost read my thoughts. There was a queer, almost uncanny sort of link between us that could make the one wince at what the other felt, as the two decapacitated limbs of a spider will move and jerk as long as life remains in either of them, though they be yards apart. 25 She knew I had growing pains, that I was feeling my own position in life more acutely as I got older, and she sought to soften the reality of it a little, to give me her own strength and spirit, if only by showing me that I wasn’t alone, that she knew. She was something more than a mother to me; she was a comrade in arms. I went on painting my little water-colours, painting things I had never seen, but 30 only imagined, like landscapes, village scenes, ships, trees beside a pond in a park, and so on. But now even painting had changed, like everything else. It couldn’t satisfy me any more. I still liked it, but I had ceased to love it. There was something in me, some new energy, some new need, that couldn’t be expressed by just putting bright reds and yellows and sombre browns on to paper and working them into 35 a pattern. I needed something else, some broader medium to speak through. My mind had become bigger and my scope in painting had dwindled to a mere pinpoint. Every day I became more desperate. I couldn’t speak with my lips, and now I found I couldn’t speak through painting either; I felt as if I was being slowly suffocated. I remembered how sad I had been as a child when I first found out that I was 40 'different' from other people. I thought the world had ended for me then. But only now was I beginning to feel the full significance of that 'difference', the true meaning of it. As a child I had cried bitterly when I became conscious of my own crippledom. I didn't cry now – I hadn't the comfort of tears. All my agony was inside.