Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  In his areas of special interest, including history, typography, etymology, and the rules of English usage, Williams was erudite. He loved maps and as a youth had been an apprentice at Stanfords, the London map company, before joining the Royal Engineers as a map draughtsman. He was an enthusiastic reader of non-fiction and poetry, but a stranger to bookshops and libraries. He read very few novels.

  He took enormous pains with everything he did. Having once been hurt by a critical letter from a member of the public, he arranged for a friend to drive him to the writer’s address, where he made notes, before being driven back to London. He then wrote an excoriating reply to the man, containing criticisms of his house and garden.

  Williams himself lived alone in a spartan, unwelcoming flat. He had, like Sherlock Holmes, a ‘catlike love of personal cleanliness’, and talking to Russell Harty in 1974 said he was revolted by ‘sludge’ under the soap. He sealed his cooker with cellophane to keep it clean and was very sensitive to mess and noise. Footsteps bothered him and when the occupant of the flat above disturbed him by moving about or playing music, he poured out his venom.

  In a gripping interview with Owen Spencer-Thomas on BBC London, Kenneth Williams expanded on his odd traits. He said he used to cry continually in moments of great adversity and sought refuge in mirth: ‘There is much in … life that is very frightening, and every now and again you very much need the sort of safety valve that laughter supplies.’

  He seemed content only when performing, and happiest, perhaps, when performing alone. He did this increasingly on chat shows, where he liked to show off his extensive and peculiar vocabulary, dropping words like ‘polity’ and ‘otiose’ with didactic precision. When asked on Just a Minute the archaic meaning of the word ‘let’ he explained without pause that it was ‘the old King James word for, “stop”’.

  Williams entertained very few visitors. Only those privy to his three-ring telephone code could get through, and those allowed into his flat were not permitted to use the toilet. He preferred to see his friends one, or possibly, two at a time and found it almost impossible to join in with groups. On holiday, beneath a searing Tangier sky, he refused to remove his tweed jacket and relax.

  After sporadic homosexual fumblings as a young man, his sexual encounters were almost entirely with himself. In his distinctively weird delivery he told Joan Rivers in 1986 that he was, ‘asexual … I should have been a monk … I’m only interested in myself and would regard any kind of “relationship” as deeply intrusive. Privacy is the most important thing in my life, and anything which invaded that would be a threat.’

  Despite the threat of adults, Williams took great pleasure in children, who adored him. He told Owen Spencer-Thomas: ‘There is a tremendously childish element in me’, and he found children ‘totally direct’, explaining: ‘They dress nothing up in any kind of sophistication or diplomacy.’ This was true of Williams himself — he could be appallingly rude. His sometime friend Gyles Brandreth said that in the end he gave up on him after he misjudged the social mood at yet another dinner party and went too far.

  Along with other traits, Kenneth Williams’ extraordinary perfectionism, solitude, anxiety, strange vocal delivery, limited eye contact, sensory peculiarities, directness, narrow special interests, uncommon vocabulary, liking for sameness, loneliness, emotionality, distaste for social touch, and inability to join in, can, I believe, best be understood as indices of Asperger’s syndrome.

  *

  I saw Jon from time to time. He had finished his post-graduate degree at the Slade and had decided to be a painter, using every moment of his spare time. He exhibited in Cork Street but to keep the wolf from the door he took a job teaching art and art history at a South London private school, where the sixth-form car park was full of Jaguars and BMWs.

  Bill had submitted his PhD thesis and asked me and Lea over to his Waterloo flat. We got there mid-morning and as usual the place was full of cigarette smoke. It was untidier than usual, with foil curry containers on the floor, in the wastebasket, in the sink. The ashtrays were overflowing and there were wine bottles everywhere.

  ‘Been having a party?’ I asked. Bill said he had a cleaner who came in every week, but it seemed to be getting on top of him. He lit a cigarette and invited us to his local pub to unwind. By midday he was so unwound that we had to help him home. As we left he was too out of focus to wish us a proper goodbye. He seemed lonely. ‘I’m worried about him,’ said Lea on the train home.

  Anthony had become a postman and was responsible for delivering to Soho and Theatreland. He started early and finished at three, when he would return to his flat to paint, or watch Ealing comedies.

  Lea and I wanted to buy our own place and found a garden flat close to the station in a seaside town where the prices were lower than in the capital. Moving from our bit of London with its little shop that ground its own coffee, its Art Deco cinema, and its green spaces, was a wrench, but I had always loved the sea. And the commute to London was hardly longer than the rattly Tube journey in on the Northern Line.

  Our newly converted flat had a patch of mud described in the particulars as a ‘west-facing rear garden mainly laid to lawn’. We spent weekends clearing it of Victorian bottles, lumps of a corrugated air-raid shelter, and what appeared to be the skeleton of a medium-size dog. It was a terraced house so we were obliged to push the rubble through the flat in a wheelbarrow. We tore down a gnarled climber that appeared to be dead before a neighbour told us it was an old rose tree that flowered beautifully every year.

  We went on holiday to the West Country and had ham and eggs in a tiny pub. Driving back to the rented cottage we bounced between the dry-stone embankments of the narrow lane. As we rounded a corner an owl took off from a post, spreading its wings in the headlights. We were miles from anyone but in the silence of the night a strange noise woke us. Out in the black someone was coughing. I sat up, every nerve alert, my catastrophising mind imagining a swarthy Thuggee squeezing through the kitchen window, strangling cloth between his teeth.

  In the morning we flung open the curtains. The sky was blue and there was nothing to see for miles: only the thirsty meadows and a sprinkling of sheep. As we scanned the landscape one of the flock began producing a repetitive rasping cough. It bore none of its nocturnal menace.

  *

  On Monday nights I would visit the Magic Circle, tucked away in a Bloomsbury side street. Close-up magic is an ideal concern for a mechanically adept but socially inept creative person. When an Asperger performs a close-up trick, he holds all the cards: an apt metaphor. There are no surprises for him. He is in charge. He alone knows what is going to happen next, and for once it is not him but everybody else who is taken by surprise by the unpredictable turn of events. This reversal of the social roles can be very satisfying for an autistic person, who is so often the one who feels at sea in social assignments.

  On my first night at the Circle I was introduced to a magician called Terry. He was a naturalistic technician of the highest water and a wonderfully entertaining performer. Whatever he did he did superbly. After I had known him for a while I heard him suddenly play the piano one night, and was astonished by his technique and artistry. Whatever he did he had taught himself. My Aspergic desire for the highest quality in everything was rewarded just by knowing Terry. Others didn’t know what I was on about, yet as Sherlock Holmes observed: ‘Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognises genius.’

  I noticed that the members of the Magic Circle were quite often as odd as me. The British mentalist Derren Brown has said that, ‘magic does seem to appeal to creative and often quite isolated [people]’. I watched them around me at the club, performing for guests or delivering monologues to each other on the minutiae of their special interest. There is, I now realise, a pinch of autism in many of them. The best are wonderful entertainers; the worst are inward-looking bores. How interesting that sleight-of-
hand magic is an enterprise enjoyed almost exclusively by boys and men.

  *

  The good thing about my publisher–boss was that after showing me the editorial ropes he left me to my own devices. As well as the mechanics and structure of English I became increasingly interested in the production side of publishing, so as well as my editorial responsibilities I organised the switchover from paper-and-paste and hot-metal printing to computer-assisted design and manufacture. I learned while I earned.

  Though the boss led with a light rein, something was amiss. One day he called me over. ‘You see all these unopened letters,’ he said. ‘This is what I do with them.’ He lifted the front of his desk and a mountain of paperwork slid onto the floor, where he began pushing it into several wastepaper baskets. For a moment I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t.

  A week later I walked into the office to find him holding his head in his hands. ‘It’s the tree in my garden,’ he said, giving me a haunted look. ‘It’s growing. What am I going to do …?’ He was not really addressing me; he sounded frankly mad.

  *

  A national newspaper was running a column featuring obscure and arcane questions from readers, to which other readers sent in serious or funny replies. The questions varied from, ‘Are floppy disks corrupted by being placed near the floor on tube trains?’ to ‘Why is water wet?’

  I couldn’t resist it and over the next few years I sent in numerous carefully considered and artfully composed replies. All were entirely bogus, some ludicrously so. To have a letter published you needed to sound authoritative and be sufficiently detailed, brief, and quirky. It was also important to use the right sort of address and the right pseudonym. My favourite pen name, of many, was, Anan Abegnaro, who I made sound like an African academic, though it was really just, ‘orange banana’ backwards. These spoof letters took up quite a bit of my spare time and were, I suppose, my latest special interest. It was deeply pleasing to fool editor and reader alike. Almost all of my contributions were published, first in the paper and then in a series of books. Nowadays, owing to the instant checkability of everything via the Web, this would be so much less likely to succeed without even more care and preparation. But it could be done …

  *

  Over my time at the Pimlico publishers I got to know the area well. One day, walking in Longmoore Street, I noticed a faded painted notice on the yellow brickwork. ‘PUBLIC SHELTERS IN VAULTS UNDER PAVEMENTS IN THIS STREET’ it said in white capitals on a black square. There were more in Lord North Street near the river, and in Brook Street, Mayfair. These were wartime signs showing the location of makeshift bomb shelters. Their functional lettering had a great beauty and I went in search of others in St James’s, Deptford, and Bermondsey. None had the allure of the Westminster signs.

  One pleasant evening, Lea and I were sitting on the lawn where long ago the patch of mud and dog bones had been. The kitchen phone rang. It was Bill’s mother, a wonderfully old-fashioned middle-class English lady.

  ‘Tom, you’re ex-directory, I’ve been trying to get hold of you.’ I knew at once what she was going to say. ‘Bill died last week. He was staying with friends and they couldn’t wake him. I’ve got him here now. He looks asleep.’

  I could see the picture of Bill, laid out on the mahogany table of his mother’s Reigate mansion, his beard brushed — for once.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said.

  ‘Nobody does,’ she replied with admirable stiff upper lip. ‘I shan’t say more because I’m finding it difficult to keep my emotions in check.’

  She was a remarkable example of that distinctive type, of which there remain very few: the upright English matron.

  We went to the funeral with Anthony.

  ‘Was it a heart attack?’ he asked.

  ‘Too much beer, too many fags, and a diet too rich in curries,’ I guessed.

  At the wake, a large dog had defecated on the lawn. I felt awkward, standing there clutching a cucumber sandwich, unable to talk to anyone. Lea smoothed a few introductions and oiled the gears all round. Unlike me, she inspires confidence in people, and, being the least autistic person I have ever met, has become my praetorian guard in social situations.

  The best partners for Aspergers seem to be either people like themselves — who share the same behavioural constitution and similar emotional needs — or stark complementary opposites. My inward-looking personality and Lea’s outward-looking one augmented each other.

  ‘Let’s go to the pub,’ said Anthony.’

  ‘It’s a shame Bill’s not here,’ I said. ‘He’d like a pint now.’

  *

  Our son Jake was born. He was small and monkey-like. We needed more space so we let our flat and took a house further up the road. One day I saw a young woman picking rosemary from the bush in our garden. She rang the bell. ‘Hello,’ she smiled. ‘I live on the corner. Celia who was here before you always let me take some rosemary when I needed it.’

  ‘Help yourself,’ I said. She had put me in the position where I could hardly refuse.

  ‘Where’s your wife?’ she asked, coming into the sitting room.

  ‘Taken the baby for a walk.’

  She held the rosemary to my nose. ‘It’s got a lovely perfume,’ she said. I sniffed the herb and as I did so she picked a thread from my sleeve. We discussed the weather, the neighbours, and her boyfriend.

  ‘Celia went to a wife swapping party,’ she said suddenly, giving me a quirky smile that I didn’t understand.

  ‘My uncle went to one of those and ended up with his own wife,’ I said, repeating a joke I had heard in 1975. I didn’t have a clue what was going on.

  The young woman’s smile vanished. I knew something had gone wrong, but I wasn’t sure what. She looked at me coldly for a moment, a flicker of contempt in her eye, before striking me down with a brusque smile and letting herself out.

  Life ticked over. We watered the garden, read books, and went to the shops in our unreliable Mini. Young Jake grew. My handlebar moustache grew, and was still unfashionable. Street urchins would throw orange peel and contumely in my direction as I passed. Three hundred and fifty years ago Samuel Pepys noted the same ‘absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at every thing that looks strange’. Lea took a media job in government. I stayed where I was. Sameness!

  A couple moved in next door. The man put his head through the hedge. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Fancy a pint?’ This was Mervyn, who was to become my staunch drinking companion over the next quarter of a century. He is positive, puts up with my strangeness, and keeps in touch even though we now live in different towns. He is one of my ‘normal’ friends, and is also happy to talk to me about typography or road signs.

  One evening, he knocked on the door. ‘Do you want this?’ he asked, flourishing a lobster. ‘The girls are in tears because I said I was going to drop it in boiling water.’ The lobster gesticulated in slow motion, its claws held shut by elastic bands. I told him I didn’t want to watch this handsome insect struggle and scream as it died in the pan.

  ‘We’ll stab it,’ said Mervyn. ‘Have you got a sharp knife?’ He put the lobster on the kitchen floor and I held it. Then he sank the knife in where he said it was supposed to go. Young Jake was fascinated.

  *

  The boss was becoming increasingly peculiar. His desk was now a garbage heap of unanswered letters and he wandered the corridors aimlessly, fretting about the finances and the tree in his garden. He turned to me one day with a frown: ‘If God made everything,’ he reflected, ‘who made God?’ This seemed to me one of the basic questions one ought to have come to a conclusion about before taking up a lifelong career in religious publishing. He couldn’t go on and retired early, being replaced by a new, prematurely bald man of emetic piety.

  Of all my bosses, the bald man was the only one who never noticed how uncomfortable
I felt around other people, and made no effort to accommodate my quirkiness. The neuroticism of his educated, more congenial predecessor was replaced by an offensive tactlessness. He thought it absurd that I drove a Mini, and frequently told me so.

  He was unencumbered by clue and ruled the office by fiat, which struck me as not only inefficient but wrong. After I began querying his arbitrary decrees on technical matters, about which I knew more than he did, he told me, ‘You have a problem with authority.’ As with much of his peevish analysis this was false. It is true that, like many Aspergers, I resist ‘mere’ authority, whereby people are given orders without appeal to the tribunal of reason, though I do accept that a competent mother, for example, must rule on bedtimes and stop her child running into the road. But authority should generally be viewed with great suspicion and challenged at every point. We call this attitude rational vigilance, not ‘a problem with authority’. My real ‘problem’, of course, was not with authority, but with the bald man. ‘He’s all piss and wind,’ said a colleague, ‘like the barber’s cat.’

  At a Tube station late one evening I was waiting for a train to come up on the indicator board when I spotted a blind man with a white cane feeling his way along the empty platform. He was gently drifting to the left and heading unwittingly for the platform edge. All at once his stick dropped into the abyss and he gesticulated wildly backwards, recovering himself just in time as a white-faced member of staff ran to his aid.

  This minor cabaret having finished, I absently examined the Tube map on the wall. Over the years this archetype of good design has sunk deep into my psyche and I am alert to every change or addition. The best I applaud but the worst infuriate me.

  Despite all the tinkering over the years the Underground map has survived essentially intact for nearly eight decades. It was the creation of a diagram nerd named Harry Beck, who in 1933 was encouraged by his dynamic boss Frank Pick to improve the bewildering traditional Tube map: a wormery of coloured lines confusingly superimposed on the surface topography of London’s streets.