Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  This was the first family party I had been to since my diagnosis. I was my usual slightly distant and ‘aloof’ self, but this time I understood more, and was able to recognise my feelings, to interpret them, and to moderate my awkward inwardness — at least a little. I managed to say hello to everybody, I did not drink too much, and I smiled more than usual. I was no longer a complete stranger in my own country. I now had a guidebook. I am learning to speak the language, though still with an accent, which gets stronger if I am tired, especially anxious, or overstimulated.

  One way in which an assessment, or diagnosis, or ‘label’ can help an autistic person is to allow him to moderate his behaviour. I try hard to quell my tendency to be critical of everything and to let my discontents be my secrets. I don’t know if anybody at the party noticed, but I was pleased with my performance. Anyway, it was a start.

  We were driven home by a friend, who was telling us about an occasion when his horse rolled on top of him, doing him some damage. I felt Lea banging me in the ribs with her elbow. Afterwards she explained: ‘You interrupted David with your own story before he had finished. As usual. And you were speaking much too loudly again.’ Plainly I must try harder.

  Autumn was about, and the carotenes were causing a red and purple riot in the leaves. Prickly horse chestnuts fell from their twigs, their splitting pulp exposing conkers like gorillas’ eyes. The weather had been dry and hot for weeks but now it was getting close. Giant thunderheads towered above the South Downs. A grumbling storm was approaching.

  I thought about other people from my past. ‘Auntie’ Mary, who had taken it well when I shouted bugger through the library letter flap, was living in a nursing home; ‘Uncle’ David, who in his rainy shed had first interested me in magic, had long since gone to his reward; Jon, my oldest friend, had retired from teaching and now painted all day in his house in Wales, or in the hills beyond. We spoke on the telephone most weeks. Strawberry blonde Alice I knew was married with three grown-up children; Anthony had retired from his job as a postman and spent his days painting or making prints. He told me that one day before his retirement he had delivered a packet to the offices of a Soho advertising agency. The boss, a tall dark man, stepped out to sign for it. ‘Guess who it was,’ said Anthony. I had no idea. ‘Bob Scotland!’ — the student who had painted a four-foot wide black stripe over everybody’s marks in the futile first-year exercise at the university, a quarter of a century earlier.

  ‘Did you speak to him?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think he recognised me,’ said Anthony.

  I remembered Bob in the all-male Starley Hall, striding across the muddy quad from the refectory, two breakfasts in his arms — one for the young woman he was quite illegally keeping in his room, and servicing nightly. Everyone knew but he didn’t care. Though I disapproved of the rule breaking, I took my hat off to his flouting of mere authority. Plumbing the bowels of the World Wide Web I tried to pin down Anthony’s recollection but could find no reference to Bob Scotland.

  The story was different for Bob Strange, the student who had shown me the pamphlet about the stigmatic Padre Pio. I found an internet photograph of him in 0.37 seconds. He was perched on top of a scaffold tower, holding a palette bigger than a dustbin lid, painting a religious mural in a Catholic church.

  My editor Dan was no longer a scampish-schoolboy but juggled millions as the UK head of a multinational publishing company. Royalties were still coming in for the book I had written for him more than a decade before.

  Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger had died in the eighties, within a year of each other. But there was a shock in store. In her 2018 book Asperger’s Children, historian Edith Sheffer confirmed suggestions that Asperger’s relationship with the Nazis had been much closer than generally thought. Using documents from the time, Sheffer made a persuasive case that, although Asperger had protected children he considered intelligent, he knowingly referred others to a ‘child euthanasia’ clinic in Vienna. This is an appalling revelation, but it is one which I maintain does nothing to detract from the usefulness of his work on the syndrome that has borne his name since Lorna Wing explained it to the world. Others disagree strongly with my view.

  Jock Kinneir, co-designer of those beautifully clear and powerful traffic signs, died in 1994, but, at the time of writing, Margaret Calvert is still alive. Her water-clear slab serif character set has been introduced in a gigantic size on the platforms of Tyne and Wear Metro: a joyful and vividly effective bit of design. She was also type and pictogram consultant for the Moscow Metro’s superb new signage system. One day my friend Louise, who runs a gallery, told me that she had commissioned Calvert to make a print of her Woman at Work painting in a limited edition of twenty-five. Woman at Work resembles her famous men at work sign, but instead of the silhouette of a male labourer ‘wrestling with a big umbrella’ it features a digging woman. I knew at once that I must have one of these so I crossed Louise’s palm with silver. Quite a lot of silver. When the print arrived it was accompanied, to my delight, by a charming letter in Calvert’s own hand, addressed ‘Dear Tom’ and signed simply ‘Margaret’. Louise had told her of my lifelong enthusiasm. I felt like a teenage girl getting a personal note from the pop star over whom she has been mooning for years. I don’t think I have ever received such a giddying letter.

  *

  It was unseasonably muggy. People in roadside cafés wafted themselves with menus as I walked over the bridge to check on the progress of the new flood defences along the river. The navvies were pouring bottled water over their heads as a vast hydraulic driver vibrated miles of sheet piling into the riverbed.

  Tracking the progress of civil engineering projects fills me with geekish glee. I stand and watch, like a supervisor, for minutes at a time. I seem to have turned into the man at parties I used to warn myself about. Over the years I have assembled a large album of photographs of pylons, canal bridges, and a few rather nice gridded drain covers. As a boy I was fascinated by gyroscopes and since that time I have put together a collection of small spinning tops. Whenever I see one I like I buy it, and it adds a pinch of amused enjoyment to my odd hobby to have learnt of the autistic fascination for spinning things.

  I am now eight years older than my maternal grandfather was when he died. No longer the haunted schoolboy, ‘lost in a world of his own’, I have become the grey-snouted man who is offered a seat on the Tube.

  If there were a button I could press to abolish my Asperger’s syndrome, its pains, but also its quirky gifts, would I press it? Would I? There is a famous quote from Rilke: ‘Don’t take away my devils, for my angels might flee too’, but I wonder if the devils of anguish, confusion, exhaustion, and constant loneliness are really worth the angels. I asked my juggling friend Gary if he would press the button. He said no.

  The web of our lives is of mingled yarn, good and ill together, and circumstances unfold so capriciously, so unjustly, that our happiness seems to have been no part of the plan. Some see this through the window of faith, others through the window of doubt, but we are all, in the end, obliged to make our own meaning.

  *

  Shortly before this book was due to go to print, I decided to let my family know about my diagnosis. I rang my sister Ruth first.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Asperger’s. Thanks for telling me. It’s hardly surprising, of course; Dad’s dad was autistic.’

  ‘You what?’ I said. I felt as if I’d been hit.

  ‘Yes, didn’t you know? It’s one of the reasons Granddad left his family so abruptly.’

  My mouth was hanging open; I was stunned. Why on earth had nobody ever mentioned this vital family fact? How different might things have been had I known?

  *

  The rain had begun falling in big drops, which spread into ink blots on the paving stones. The tang of petrichor filled the air, and then ozone as a sudden flash of lightning split the sky, attended by a thunderclap so lo
ud it made a yellow dog and her owner jump. I darted into a café as the rain became a drumming torrent, pouring down windows, bouncing off canopies and pavements, and sweeping great beavers’ lodges of leaves and litter along the gutters, deep down into the drains. The thirsty earth swallowed the lot.

  Then, as quickly as it had started, the deluge stopped; people came out from under dripping awnings, shaking umbrellas. Away to the north, between the storm clouds and the distant hills, blue-grey smears of rain were still visible. On the horizon a rainbow had appeared.

  A fresh breeze was blowing up from the front, jiggling the water droplets that hung from a traffic sign. ‘NEW ROAD LAYOUT AHEAD’ it announced. On a low wall, a bird was fluttering spray from its plumage and nearby a young mother was laughing loudly as her child splashed in the gullies. There is only one happiness: to love and be loved. As I stepped out of the café the sudden sun caught me full in the face, stretching my shadow along the shining pavement behind me. Dodging the puddles I crossed the car park, heading for the bridge that would take me over the river, across the water, towards home.

  Acknowledgements

  It takes more than one person to make a book and I would like to thank the following people who helped me with this one.

  I am especially grateful to Scribe’s Publisher-at-Large Philip Gwyn Jones, who commissioned the title and remained my cheerful and astute companion throughout the journey, guiding me gently this way and that. He indulged my foibles, made useful suggestions, and, with the kindness, as it were, of a much-loved family doctor, strangled at birth my bad ideas, my tendency to go on a bit, and my foul-ups with Latin infinitives. Molly Slight, who took up the editorial scalpel, was likewise a model of sharp-witted good sense all the way, euthanising some accidentally offensive passages, and a rash of pointless commas. She also saved me from embarrassment by alerting me to several major goofs. Any remaining blunders are my own. Scribe’s Laura Thomas also deserves my thanks. She is the designer of many stylish books, and made this one look as good as it does.

  Praise is due, as always, to my ever-smiling agent Laura Morris, who supplied steadfast encouragement through thick and thin, driven by an iron-hard conviction that this book should see the light, and that the game really was worth the candle.

  Linguist David Crystal generously answered my early queries about the propriety of coining the term ‘Asperger’, which he thought was ‘okay’, though he warned me that my newly minted adjective ‘Aspergic’ might be confused with an aspirin product of a similar name. He pointed me towards ‘Aspergerian’, but I objected that the Aspergerians were surely creatures from Star Trek or Doctor Who.

  I salute those who read bits of this book in draft and gave me their opinions, expert and otherwise. From the start, the National Autistic Society’s Autism Access Specialist Chris Pike, and Culture and Features Media Relations Manager Louisa Mullan, went out of their way to be helpful. The same was true of Sarah Hendrickx, who, after formally identifying me as being on the autism spectrum, proved a fount of information and never tired of answering my questions.

  West Sussex libraries and the British Library were obliging in tracking down various books, some of them rather out of the way. Of general interest I particularly recommend Adam Feinstein’s definitive A History of Autism: conversations with the pioneers (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes: the legacy of autism and how to think smarter about people who think differently (Allen & Unwin, 2015), both of which I turned to from time to time.

  When I wanted to examine Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert’s original road sign maquettes the staff of St Bride Library took pains to make things easy for me, and were only too keen to expand on their curatorial history. I likewise thank Anna Kinneir of the Jock Kinneir Library for some fascinating conversations, and Margaret Calvert, who troubled to write me a charming letter.

  The road traffic signs which appear at the head of chapters and on the front cover of this book are Crown copyright; I am grateful for permission to use them. I am obliged also to the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge for responding positively to my request to reproduce the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, on page 93, and the scatter plot, on page 104. The ARC is an excellent resource for anybody interested in reading some of the most illuminating and useful recent research into the autism spectrum, including Asperger’s syndrome. Their policy of using language ‘understanded of the people’ means that any moderately intelligent person can get to grips with their work.

  I am particularly grateful to my friends and family for their forbearance over the years, as I am not the easiest chap to get along with. I decided that almost all of those I mention in the book would prefer to remain unidentified, so the names I have given them are mostly not their own.

  Finally, of course, I thank ‘Lea’: the most wonderfully patient, kind, ebullient, protective, understanding, humorous, apt, and lovely non-autistic woman any Asperger could hope for. Without her I seriously do not know what would have become of me.