by Tom Cutler
I had always wanted to play the banjo and was a fan of a man named Earl Scruggs, who I heard playing the theme tune to a television show called The Beverly Hillbillies. One day my father came home with a nylon-strung guitar, which seemed like a related thing, so I asked for lessons.
I was taught a fingerpicking style in which the right thumb plays an alternating one–two on the bass strings while the fingers of the same hand pick out the melody. I remember the feeling of triumph the day I mastered the technique, which enabled me to tackle Elizabeth Cotten’s Freight Train, a tune I play to this day. Fingerpicking became my new enthusiasm and for the next three years every spare minute was spent practising away in the corner. But I couldn’t join a band. I was always a soloist. It was a case again of other people.
Our junior school teacher Mr Sturn had been a prisoner of the Japanese and showed us how to clean our teeth without toothpaste. He said things like ‘rattling good yarn’ and ‘ruddy nuisance’, and encouraged Jon and me in our studies of modern art, though he disliked Picasso and found Cézanne ‘too plain’, preferring soft-focus pink flowers in a nice frame. I looked down my nose at his taste in a priggish, unpleasant way.
It was soon time to move up to the local senior school, which had been a grammar but which, by absorbing the next-door secondary modern, had recently become a comprehensive. The whip-like deputy-head, who played the bassoon and wore a gown during assemblies, was dismayed by the influx into his school of secondary modern boys, and now girls, who slammed desks and broke wind into the reverberant canvas-and-metal chairs during assembly. He left to become headmaster of a famous school in North Yorkshire.
My new school produced few notable alumni. There was a quiet young man who became Britain’s first black police chief constable, a fellow who sparkled briefly as a boxer before fizzling, and a sad weed of a boy who finished up behind bars as one of the country’s most notorious child murderers.
I was terrified of being late for school so I would arrive very early and as soon as the doors were unlocked I would help arrange the chairs in the hall. The task was repetitious and systematic. Nobody spoke. This regimentation calmed me down. Things were under control.
They had put me in the top stream but it wasn’t long before the trouble started. My maths teacher Mr Bird found it impossible to accept my profound inability to grasp the basics. After a week of long division we had a test. I just couldn’t do it.
‘But we did this yesterday,’ shouted Mr Bird. I was too dismayed to reply.
At home, I tried to explain to my father: ‘As soon as I’m onto the second bit I’ve forgotten the first bit. And the numbers look as if they are jumping about.’ My dad looked at me strangely.
Temple Grandin says that despite her brilliance in other subjects her brain’s ‘math department’ is ‘trashed’. I couldn’t have put it better myself. There is actually a fancy name for this: ‘dyscalculia’. I shan’t be using it again.
The problem, which nobody understood, including me, was that the maths bucket of my brain was actually a sieve: strong on the slow sifting and qualitative analysis of information — finding likenesses and differences, identifying weaknesses, spotting fundamentals — but extravagantly weak at rapid filling and storage. My short-term memory was lousy. Maths just wasn’t my thing, and shouting ‘We did this yesterday’ was not the answer.
Mr Bird demanded my demotion to a lower stream but several of my teachers objected. IQ tests were done on me and I scored lower than expected. Mr Bird felt vindicated.
‘The boy is not very bright,’ he said.
‘Have you spoken to him?’ responded my biology teacher in disbelief.
Hans Asperger himself coined the term ‘autistic intelligence’, which he said had distinct qualities and was the opposite of conventional learning and worldly-wise cunning. It is difficult to measure the IQ of an autistic person, who may well not want to communicate, or cooperate, or either, skipping questions that do not appeal, or spoiling the ballot paper by answering arbitrarily.
This general disinclination to comply is profound in autism, and extends from the meal table and school classroom to adult employment, where otherwise technically adept Aspergers are likely to find jobs and bosses so difficult that they become deeply miserable and sometimes unemployable. This fact is shockingly unappreciated by many schoolteachers, examiners, university interviewers, and employers, who insist on dismissing fish who fail to run, while neglecting to test their swimming ability.
I clung on in the top stream but the maths never improved.
One thing I could do was draw. I would sit for hours engrossed by a human skull or piece of driftwood, whose fissures and ridges I would painstakingly transcribe in line. A large fearless boy called Mick was impressed by my drawings, and my ability to make him laugh with my strange sense of humour. ‘If anyone tries to beat you up,’ he said, ‘tell me and I’ll smash their face in.’ It was a reassuring relationship.
Mick’s mother ran a newsagent’s and once embarrassed herself by calling a customer whose name was Mrs Polly ‘Mrs Parrott’. His father had been a nightclub drummer and boasted of tapping out rhythms for the New York stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. He was the only man I have ever seen who shook curry powder on his food, like pepper. Mick left school early with the ambition of joining the army and, he told me, travelling the globe on a huge motorbike with a naked Miss World riding pillion.
I was never bullied at school, except by the occasional teacher. To deflect aggression I used avoidance first, and then, if necessary, humour. All the same, boys would yell out rude comments, because I often looked odd, in an old-fashioned way. I had long Pre-Raphaelite hair and, outside of school, habitually wore corduroy jackets and unfashionable footwear such as suede shoes, or sandals with socks, which unnerved my anxious sister Rebecca. Not so long ago I read that the writer and broadcaster Garrison Keillor had identified himself as being on the autism spectrum. I immediately remembered the peculiar sandals he insists on wearing.
*
One day my dad told me that there had been an outbreak of water pistols at the school where he taught. The teachers had confiscated them and as they were comparing differing models in the staffroom one of them idly squirted a colleague, accidentally on purpose. ‘That’s your game, is it!’ said the man, leaping behind a chair and flourishing his own weapon. Within seconds it was like The Battle of the Century, with teachers, male and female, screaming with laughter as they drenched each other with their confiscated firearms.
I was chuckling about this as I walked home for lunch. Unusually, my mother was in the house. She looked grave.
‘Your father’s been in a crash,’ she said. ‘He was hit by a car and he’s in hospital. They think his lung has collapsed. It’s touch and go.’
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Better eat my lunch.’
I loved my dad, but the emotion just didn’t come out, and my mother, full of understandable anxiety, was hurt and confused by my apparent lack of empathy for my dad, and for her.
From an evolutionary viewpoint it must be important for at least some group members not to go to pieces in a disaster, though more demonstrative people probably find this hard to admire.
I am reminded of an Aspergic teenager, the friend of a friend, who was nearly killed when a car hit his bike from the side. When my friend went to see him in hospital she found him plugged into various bits of kit, his face purple and black. He looked up at her with bloodshot eyes but didn’t smile or hold out his arms to greet her. Through swollen lips he said, ‘Do you have any questions you wish to ask about my injuries?’
My dad had broken several bones, one of which had punctured his lung, and his motorbike was a tangled write-off. But he came home after a bit and made a complete, very lucky, recovery.
*
They made us learn ballroom dancing at school. The man who
taught us was a grey cadaver named Mr Buerk, known to us as ‘The Berk’. To the accompaniment of The Blue Danube and the Radetzky March squawking out of an old record player, he would swirl Miss Swanepoel, the typing teacher, around the disinfectanty-smelling school gym while we uncoordinated teenagers shambled about in extreme embarrassment, holding our partners like bags of radioactive waste.
The Berk drove a Land Rover covered in wartime camouflage netting, and once took out a Luger pistol which he waved around, claiming to have taken it from the body of a Nazi soldier who he said he had strangled, commando style. On another occasion he handed out some foolscap posters bearing the logotype of the National Front and emblazoned with a slogan about ‘jungle bunnies’. ‘If anyone asks where you got them,’ said The Berk, sliding a dry palm across his Brilliantined hair, ‘say you found them in a telephone box. That’s the trick.’
Shortly after this, the corner shop run by Mr Singh received through its window a half-brick marked ‘NF’. When the police came knocking at The Berk’s nearby house, five pubescent boys were spotted escaping shirtless over the back fence and he found himself fairly smartly a guest of Her Majesty.
But the people I loathed most at school were the games masters. There was a rotund unmarried homunculus called Robbins who smelt of carbolic soap and had a forest of hair growing out of his ears. He would come into the changing rooms and viciously flick naked boys with a wet towel. Then there was Mr Nundy, a muscle-bound dunce who used to throw into the mud any boy not thoroughly filthy after a game of rugby.
I hated sport but found myself volunteered into an after-school judo club, a frightening world of rubber smells, squeaks, shouting echoes, special clothes that made my skin crawl, and other people touching me. I lasted one session.
The school was on the site of an old farm and on its outskirts was a decaying barn to which we were often ordered to run during PE lessons. One day on the way to the barn I found myself being overtaken by the fattest and slowest boys. Soon they had rounded the building and were on their way back. I was achingly fatigued, panting hard, and spitting a fiery yellow substance. I realised I wasn’t going to make it and turned back, the rest of the boys passing me on their return journey, yelling jovial insults as I stumbled exhausted back to the changing rooms.
I had been feeling rotten for some time. I was losing weight, had a constant dry-mouthed thirst, and was getting up to pee several times a night. My mother took me to see Dr Armstrong.
‘I’m going to issue a carbohydrate challenge,’ he said. ‘Go away, eat a whole packet of Jaffa Cakes, and come back in an hour.’
Back in the surgery he performed some alchemy on my urine, dropping a fat tablet into a test tube, where it fizzed for a minute before ominously changing colour.
‘It’s diagnostic,’ he said to my mother. ‘Diabetes.’
‘We’ll get you into hospital this afternoon,’ he told me, ‘You’ll be on insulin for the rest of your life.’
I have now had type-1 diabetes for nearly half a century and have given myself something like 45,000 injections, but though this has been a huge part of every one of my days it is a story for a different book. All I will say is that having Asperger’s syndrome as well as diabetes has been the greatest blessing. No two conditions could be better matched. My non-stop nit-picking and rigid focus on detail and rules have made me monitor my blood glucose and insulin levels so vigilantly that I have managed to avoid the serious complications that visit havoc upon the lives of many longstanding diabetics.
The other thing is that my Aspergic resistance to complying with advice from unimaginative and occasionally silly nurses and doctors has allowed me to invent my own eccentric but effective ways of dealing with the condition. My endocrinologist once asked me how I kept my diabetes under such good control.
‘I don’t pay any attention to my doctors,’ I told him.
‘That’s it!’ he said. ‘We want people to take control themselves.’
Control has always been a big thing for me.
*
In the summer holidays of 1975, I spent a season with the National Youth Theatre in London. The NYT was the brainchild of the writer and sometime schoolteacher Michael Croft, a big man with an appetite for plays, grub, life, and booze. Someone called him a Falstaff with a family of Prince Hals and he certainly had a way with young men, who often found themselves invited back to his pad in North London for a glass of something.
Each year Croft put on three or four plays at the Shaw Theatre in St Pancras, with a company of aspirant actors. Something like three thousand youngsters auditioned each season, but unlike most of the hopefuls I didn’t want to act, I wanted to do set design, which might be how I got in.
The actors were based at the theatre while those of us doing the sets had to travel to a vast workshop and scenery store in St Katherine Docks near the Tower of London. I commuted daily from home and late at night there were often elderly tarts and other dodgy characters loitering around the dockers’ pubs or at Victoria station.
At fifteen, I was, I think, the youngest of the class of 1975. I was also the only one of the handful of us doing set design who was not secretly an actor who had failed his audition.
I was frequently sent to deliver things, or to measure stuff backstage in the silent theatre. I remember once coming out into the alley beyond the stage door, where a smelly old female tramp shouted ‘Arse’oles!’ at me. Being a prim little thing I was quite shocked. Another time I remember being overawed by the presence of the old music hall comedian and actor Max Wall, who had a show on at the theatre. He was sitting in the bar alone, with a face like a seaside town in the rain.
In the prop cupboard I recall a rack of stage champagne with a faint grey notice across its label: ‘This bottle contains LEMONADE’, and sealed containers of stage blood, known as ‘Kensington Gore’. It was a great delight to spend time in the quiet behind the scenes.
I was good at lettering and one afternoon Michael Croft spotted me backstage preparing a poster for Henry IV, part I. He asked me upstairs into his office above the auditorium.
‘Shut the door,’ he said.
I looked at him across the big room. He had an unfathomable expression on his face and I was immediately alert.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked, looking me up and down.
‘Thomas Cutler,’ I said, giving it to him in full in an effort to make myself appear larger.
‘How old are you?’
‘Fifteen.’
Croft smiled an inscrutable smile.
‘Go on. Off you go,’ he said kindly.
Naive, autistic, and passive as I was, I didn’t know quite what was going on, though I knew it was something.
Though I enjoyed my time backstage I have never been much good as a member of a theatre audience. It’s dark and there are people close to me, sniffing and twisting. I remember going to the Roundhouse in 1976 to see Peter Brook’s production of The Ik, where the throat clearing was worse than an outing of the National Pleurisy Society. It’s the same in cinemas and concert halls, where a cough, often as loud as a mezzo forte blast on the French horn, causes in me a battened-down fury out of all proportion. I prefer to watch films and listen to music at home, on my own.
My music teacher Mr George was a white-haired Scot with stubby fingers and a tweed suit. He had pushed a piano over the Cairngorms and claimed it was this, rather than his twenty-a-day Capstan-Full-Strength habit, that had given him heart disease. You could make up a tune, hum it to Mr George at the keyboard, and he would immediately harmonise it in whatever style you chose, from Bay City Rollers to Beethoven. He knew I played the guitar and encouraged me to study an orchestral instrument. I chose the double bass, which never really suited me. I got as far as The Elephant by Saint-Saëns, but found the close proximity of a lot of other people in an orchestra a recipe for high anxiety.
Discos and rock fest
ivals were always a terrifying idea, and indeed I have never been to one of either. I feared the darkness and the noise, the thumping music. The press of all those people disturbed me, like a Nuremberg rally. So it was strange that I should accept a ticket for Top of the Pops.
A BBC producer had asked a few of us from my school to contribute to a mild TV documentary and the Top of the Pops tickets were a thank-you. I have always been completely unaware of popular culture. I had no idea who was in the Rolling Stones or what was number one in the hit parade, and my growing record collection contained a lot of weird stuff, including fairground organs, musical boxes, and several sound effects records. Sound effects is still one of my enthusiasms. Visiting Top of the Pops I felt like an anthropologist examining an undiscovered tribe.
The show was recorded in a surprisingly small studio at BBC Television Centre, where the sets were noticeably grubby, torn, and dented, though on screen everything looked glamorous and twinkly. The performers on the night included Bryan Ferry, Nat King Cole’s daughter Natalie Cole, and a man calling himself Gilbert O’Sullivan, all miming to loud playback coming out of a plywood speaker that was rolled around on battered wheels.
Before the recording, the crowd was given a strict talking to by a man with a horrible face. ‘If a camera is moving towards you get out of the way because he won’t stop.’ In the event, this advice was academic, since striding in front of the camera came a bear of a man who simply pushed people aside. But the most important admonition seemed to be this: ‘WE DON’T WANT MEN DANCING TOGETHER. NO MEN DANCING TOGETHER. UNDERSTOOD? NO! MEN! DANCING! TOGETHER!’ After a while it sank in.
Since ballroom dancing with The Berk I have never danced, and find the idea disturbing. This has sometimes wounded my wife, as well as a couple of other young ladies who approached me at various weddings and things and resented being rebuffed. Thank God at Top of the Pops I wasn’t forced to. I positioned myself instead on the edge of the swarm, out of shot: the watcher in the shadows, assessing the expertise of the camera operators and other technicians and analysing the way the programme was being put together.