An autistic woman has claimed to “deeply relate” to Roald Dahl’s Matilda – despite still having to count on her fingers.
Freya Emerson, 26, from Beeston, Cheshire, declares that she “really sees herself” in Mara Wilson’s portrayal, because: “She was a child prodigy. As was I.”
“Freya, weren’t you, like, in bottom set maths?” Her childhood friend Sarah Harrow, 27, said.
“She was always reading. I was always reading,” Livingstone argued. “She was doing complicated long division in her head. I was… trying to.”
“Freya had an exceptional vocabulary from a young age,” Former schoolteacher Mrs McHodge, 50, told us. “We called her the human dictionary. Yet when it came to numbers, the girl was completely bamboozled. We had to put her in a special class with a boy who liked to sniff glue sticks.”
“Fortunately I could move things with my eyes.” Livingstone told us. “So I made the projector fall down on him.”
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