I developed an unexpected interest in 1986 when I was sent a book to review. It was a book called, When the Mind Hears, by Harlan Lane, and it was… and it portrayed the amazing history of deaf people and sign languages. I was upset when I saw how interesting and extraordinary this was, because I had... I still wanted at that time to write about Tourette’s syndrome, and I realised this was going to be shouldered and pushed aside by sign language and deaf people. But I was very excited by the book, and it precipitated a personal adventure for me; it and another book about how there had been a massive population... quarter of a population in Martha’s Vineyard, or part of Martha’s Vineyard, had been born deaf. And the title of this other book, which I read at the same time, was, Everybody Spoke Sign Language.

In Martha’s Vineyard in 1850, for example, a quarter of the population was deaf, but all the population signed, hearing and deaf, and given this, there was… the deaf were no longer singled out, they were just seen as farmers, scholars, uncles, husbands, teachers, like anybody else. I... I found this astounding, and I got into the car – had I had a motorbike I would have gone on the motorbike – I got into the car and I went to Martha’s Vineyard, and the... there’re no longer any deaf people there, but some of the oldest people in 1986 had still been native signers, and might themselves fall into signing when they were together. And this was astounding, seeing hearing, talking, people who in fact were signing to each other by preference. But these two books launched an adventure for me, which took me to the Gallaudet – the university of the deaf, many schools for the deaf, and it led to my meeting Ursula Bellugi who has been the great linguist of sign language, along with a man, now deceased, called William Stokoe, who was the first to realise, around 1960, that in fact the deaf were not gesturing or... or using pidgin English, but there was a… but Stokoe realised there was a genuine language with its own syntax and vocabulary.