By Jenni Balow

The unseen enemy that is Covid 19 has tested everyone's anxiety levels during lockdown, so imagine a lifetime of living with a mother who is constantly depressed and highly-stressed by undiagnosed autism.

Kent author Anna Wilson, 50, gives a painfully honest and often bruising account of a mental health disorder that escalated from her mother's need to find A Place For Everything, the title of the book, to a distressing end, suffering from mania and psychosis.

It was an experience that left Anna very much wiser about the response to autism, or lack of it, by the medical profession, until the crisis-hit family finally found help.

Anna logged her mother's over-the-top reactions in a diary she had written since she was at Tonbridge Grammar School and the sixth form at Sevenoaks School, little-realising when she was young, just how strange and serious that behaviour was, when she was punched, slapped and severely shaken for the kind of minor mistakes made by all children.

Her mother was a beautiful and brilliant Latin and Greek scholar, adored by her father, and with a lovely home in north Tonbridge and two daughters, but early on, she was regarded as anxious and 'a little eccentric' by friends and family.

Not only did everything have to be in its place but the children would be nagged as she furiously ranted that they were "bloody kids" and she would seek calm by 'mindful ironing' or focus on imagined physical illnesses.

When the girls left home, and Anna read French and German at Cambridge, before starting her career in children's publishing and then writing for youngsters, her mother's mental state started to deteriorate.

When Anna married, her mother became obsessed with the idea that she would die in childbirth, later she fixated on running out of food in the home, buying the same groceries over and over.

As the crisis approached, she was prescribed a cocktail of drugs, becoming paranoid, and in Anna's view "bonkers" but under the Mental Capacity Act, she still retained the right to refuse treatment.

With her father terminally ill in hospital, the family learned how to apply for essential Lasting Power of Attorney, under the guidance of Age UK, and a psychologist finally listened to Anna and her sister as they listed a lifetime of extreme behaviour.

In a breakthrough moment they thought would never come, he asked them: "Have you ever thought that your mother might be on the autistic spectrum?"

Anna writes: "Now nobody was telling us to just forgive her, or she's always been like this, or not to say nasty things about our mother, or to sweep it all into that mountain under the carpet."

The diagnosis was that she had Asperger's syndrome, or high-functioning autistic syndrome disorder.

They had unlocked the "mystery that was our mum" but it had taken 60 years to reach that diagnosis, despite GP consultations, and past psychiatric assessment.

The sisters soon learned that autistic people frequently come across as abrasive or rude when they don't mean to be. They find small talk difficult. Anxiety and depression are huge factors, including physical symptoms, predominantly gastric pain - "why did no one think to join up the dots?"

Her mother died two years ago, in a specialist home, Hazeldene House in Pembury, and Anna decided to write a book about her experiences, based on a blog she had shared with friends. It all poured out and was written within a couple a months.

Anna managed a successful writing career throughout it all, but she feels for women who might find themselves in her situation: "It is difficult because they are expected to drop everything and pick up the pieces."

She says that five years of her children's lives were overshadowed by the loss and drama of those events, and is due to speak about her experience on BBC Radio Woman's Hour on July 21.

Daughter Lucy is a medical student and son Tom is at university reading Natural Sciences, and is very interested in psychiatry and psychology.

She says that if her mother was alive today "she would not have minded staying in during the Covid lockdown because she would have been extremely anxious about catching the virus, and would have worried herself to bits about how far away we were living from her".

Anna's own escape is year-round swimming, walking, and of course, writing, often early in the morning.

She is due to publish her next children's book, The Wide, Wide Sea, about plastic pollution, next March, and her children's almanac 2021 Nature Month-By-Month, this September.

A Place For Everything - My Mother, Autism and Me is published by HQ. HarperCollins. Hardback £16.99. Also available in eBook and audio.

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