by Tom Cutler
Under a passive stubborn surface he is an anxious and very emotional young fellow. When he was little I used to take him every day to infant school. As we approached he would become silent and withdrawn, and as I tried to hand him over he would cling to me and cry in desperation. He was unusually distressed and it never got better over the years. I was told that once he was there, in the very structured environment, he gradually calmed down. But dropping him off every day was hard. Afterwards, I remember, I used to sit quietly in the car for a minute or two to recover.
‘I sometimes wonder about my son,’ I say. I mention that Jake’s strangeness reminds me, and other people, of my brother Paul, also a musician and also odd in a way that’s hard to pin down. Like Paul, Jake is a ‘present-dweller’ who finds planning hard.
‘Keep an eye out,’ says Sarah, ‘It’s very heritable, autism. Runs in families.’
She arranges her things, which I recognise as a signal that the session is coming to a close. I take a draught of water from the glass with the tiny bubbles.
‘Well,’ says Sarah Hendrickx, rising from her chair, ‘I’ll email you a complete report next week.’
‘I won’t shake hands,’ I say.
‘Of course you won’t,’ she says, as she sees me out into the street with a smile.
I walk down the road in the spring sunshine. I feel like the man who has finally gone to the doctor because he keeps falling over, and the doctor says, ‘But you’ve only got one leg. Didn’t you notice?’ I’ve been falling over socially and in other ways my whole life — at school, with my family, at work, down the pub — but it never occurred to me that there might be some reason for it, something that explained why I was the way I was and that maybe there were other people like me who processed the world rather as I did. Perhaps I wasn’t, as I’d thought, mad; perhaps I wasn’t, as I’d thought, alone. I had unwittingly been autistic, an Asperger, my whole life.
*
A lot of water seems to have flowed under the bridge since I last saw Odette Pinard, but she has suggested a final meeting, to catch up. The room is bright and cheerful as I sit down and I feel rather chipper, as if I have just discovered the lost manuscripts of Johann Sebastian Bach down the back of the sofa. Odette is looking over my anxiety and depression form.
‘You seem about as anxious as usual,’ she says, ‘but you’re reporting no depression. A complete change from your previous forms.’
‘It’s gone,’ I say. ‘I’ve been depressed to a greater or lesser degree, I suppose, since about 1973, but since my diagnosis it has lifted entirely. It’s very strange. I feel, well, not exactly buoyant, but hopeful. Some days I feel almost normal. For the first time in a long time I’m actually looking forward to tomorrow.’
‘Well, zat is good news,’ says Odette so exuberantly that her French accent pokes for a moment above the surface. ‘Let’s hope it continues.’
‘It will,’ I say, ‘I know it.’
Odette puts her chin in her hand and looks at me sideways. ‘I don’t think there’s any need to continue with the rest of this session, do you?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘I think the discovery we’ve come upon together has made a real difference to you, Tom.’
‘It has,’ I say as I stand up, wondering exactly how the royalties for this joint discovery should be split.
As Odette sees me out she gives me a warm smile, which I return. There is nothing Pan Am about it this time.
In the waiting room I pass the usual collection of ‘frequent-flyers’. On the stairs the sun is striking the jazzy painting, giving it a summery, cheerful appearance. I walk home through the park, where laughing children are at play.
A few days later an email headed ‘Autism Spectrum Assessment’ arrives from Sarah Hendrickx. The niceties are explained and there is a brief outline of the screening tools. On the Autism Quotient the average person scores about 17. Eighty per cent of those with a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome score 32 or more. My AQ Score is 37. On the Empathy Quotient typical people score around 45. Eighty per cent of diagnosed Aspergers score 30 or less. My EQ score is 20.
The overall assessment takes into account a spread of other characteristics:
Tom is a concrete thinker, with difficulties in reading people and social signals, which results in social awkwardness and difficulties in understanding the emotional perspectives of others. He has some lifelong intense interests (including road signs and type). Tom’s experiences of anxiety and depression could be related to this atypical cognitive profile and its impact on a sense of ‘fitting in’. From the test scores, observation, and information provided Tom could meet the diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Condition (Asperger Syndrome).
Here it is in black and white: ‘Tom could meet the diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Condition (Asperger Syndrome)’. I note the use of the self-protective conditional tense and the amusingly mild term ‘atypical cognitive profile’. The report is at once commonplace and revelatory. I know in my bones that after more than half a century of fumbling I’ve got a hat that fits. No longer do I feel neurotic, stupid, or mad. It’s all come a bit late. But better late than never.
Now that I understand myself, I can plan. I can explain myself to people. Maybe I’ll see a change in their expectations. Perhaps allowances will be made. Perhaps some of my curious behaviour, my confusion and exhaustion in society, will be understood, or at least acknowledged. All the same, I don’t want to indulge in unrealistic expectations. I will see how it goes. It has been five-and-a-half decades since the autism fairy landed on my cot and uttered her malediction. It will probably take a bit of time to unpick the threads of her spell. There is so much I want to tell Lea.
I wonder: have I got good autism radar? I think about some of the people I have known and a new light is cast upon a few of them. There was awkward Azif, who flapped his hands when excited. He was an editor at a listings magazine before he left to work on timetables for a bus company. He wore plastic shoes, was an authority on pub signs, and subscribed to a magazine called Modern Railways. I recall a boy at school: handsome, withdrawn, incredibly bright, an expert in many subjects, though very passive. He was regularly set upon by bullies but refused to defend himself, though he was quite big enough. Instead he would quietly take it, emerging at the end dripping blood onto his white school shirt. There is the fantastically anxious Donald, a retired BBC engineer and computer nerd of astonishing pedantry, and clever Linda, strangely dressed, with a masculine haircut and dark hair on her arms. She loves vintage motorcars and talks about them in a monotonous stream. Then there’s Gary, the solitary, loping 3D-map maker who looks at the table while he’s talking to you and wears bowler hats and frock coats in the street. He is a world-famous juggler, the proprietor of a flea circus, and a superb instrumentalist on anything you care to name from the euphonium to the penny whistle. His father was an engineer. Tiny temple bells are tinkling. These are fellow travellers, in whom I recognise something shared.
I decide to get some fresh air. As I shut the front door the familiar wetland tang drifts up from the salt marshes along the river. I pass through the churchyard, where a wagtail is twitching in the crook of a branch. As the clock chimes four a blackbird launches itself from behind a clump of rosemary, rising in a helix around the tower of the church. A gentle breeze flutters the flowers beside the graves and specks of pollen drift among the sunbeams. I am Tom Cutler. It is an absolutely glorious day.
Chapter 3:
Loose chippings
The child is father of the man
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
I was born in the maternity wing of a Welsh hospital on a blustery November Thursday in 1959. Food rationing had been over for five years, Mack The Knife was topping the charts, and people had never had it so good.
Within weeks of my birth, my dad moved us to Plymouth, a town he knew well. It was the place where h
e and my mother had met. I was their first child, and if my Welsh birth didn’t mark me as an outsider something else did: my parents were Roman Catholics.
My dad was born in London, in 1931, one of three children. His father was an engineer and was well enough to do, owning a house, and a large black car against which the family posed for photographs. But there was more to this man than met the eye: he was a serial bigamist, who left in his wake a string of baffled wives and children in countries as far flung as England and Australia.
If having a bigamist father was not enough for my dad, there was also something seriously wrong with his mother. This woman cast a sombre shadow, beating her children with a stick, chattering insanely, and writing letters to the Pope. ‘She was out of this world,’ said my dad, ‘quite out of it. I think she was mad, in the old sense of the word.’
One day, when my father was a young boy, my grandfather walked out, unwilling any longer to deal with his profoundly damaged wife. ‘Your father’s gone,’ said his mother, without ceremony. Of course, walking out on a wife and children was his thing, but in going he removed a vital footing from this house of cards. ‘When Dad left,’ my father told me, ‘things went haywire.’
My father’s mother being judged incompetent to care for him, he was put into a Catholic boarding school, where he spent the first part of the Second World War. Here he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, then still a killer, and on D-Day, 6 June 1944, as the first paratroopers leapt into the unknown over the high cliffs of ‘Omaha’ beach, an old surgeon was brought out of retirement to cut the tubercular glands from my father’s neck. Afterwards, he was dispatched to convalesce in a hut in the grounds of a Catholic convent. During this time, and though he was just twelve, his mother refused to visit him.
The convent gardener, a kindly and shrewd conscientious objector, recognised in this lost child a soul in grave need of stability and care. He tipped off the staff at Blackfriars School, Laxton, a sort of junior seminary run by the Dominicans, a religious order of preaching friars.
Named after St Dominic, and known as the ‘Black Friars’ for the dark cape they sometimes wear over their habit, the Dominicans took my father under their wing, feeding, accommodating, and indoctrinating him, with a mixture of practical charity, Dominican intellectualism, and boarding-school rice pudding, to which, along with cricket, rugby, and the austere Latin liturgy, he retains an attachment to this day. The Dominicans not only sheltered my father from his disordered mother, but for six years they really looked after him.
In his time at Laxton, my dad was being prepared for the priesthood and on leaving school he spent a probationary year as a novice friar at Woodchester Priory in Stroud before moving to Hawkesyard Priory in Staffordshire for a further three years’ study. In family albums from this time there are snaps of him in his white habit, looking like a young Gregory Peck in a film about the Ku Klux Klan.
My father was nonplussed by some of the men attracted to the religious life. They included a chap who, as he lowered a coffin into a grave, forgot to feed the webbing through his hands and ended on his stomach with his arms stretched down into the hole, and another who, he said, used to fart under his habit, whispering, ‘It stinks worse than Jerusalem.’ These peculiar events, though seldom mentioned at the dinner table, supplied the soft background music to my growing up.
Since the thirteenth century, the Dominicans had operated a religious community and theological study centre as part of Oxford University. And so it was to Blackfriars Oxford that my father went for the final stretch of his bookwormish journey to the priesthood.
But in the end he did not become a priest, leaving Blackfriars in the spring of 1956, after only eight months. ‘I couldn’t stand it!’ he told me, ‘I didn’t know what I wanted to do.’ He had been seen as a safe pair of hands, a Dominican mover and shaker of the future, so when, after all those years of Greek, Latin, and hard theological graft, he dropped the bombshell, his mentors at Blackfriars were surprised and possibly hurt. ‘We thought you were one of the blessed,’ they told him. But, understanding and kind, they kitted him out with clothes, money, and their best wishes, and sent him on his way, out into the real world.
It was going to be quite a cold bath.
*
My father had a friend, Ralph, from his days at Laxton. Ralph was living in Plymouth with his new wife Kit, and knowing my dad’s need for a roof over his head, they invited him to live with them.
One day, Kit’s darkly attractive sister, Sarah, came to dinner. She had a flat on the Hoe, where Sir Francis Drake is supposed to have played a game of bowls before seeing off the Spanish Armada in 1588. No longer bound by vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, my father made his move.
But there was a complication. In 1956, conscription still had four years to run and my dad was required to do two years of National Service. The Cold War was hotting up and, along with a handpicked bunch of other oddballs, some of them heading for British spy organisations, my father was selected to learn Russian. It may be that his close-mouthed, solitary, studious character identified him as good spy material. In any case, he was sent to the remote Joint Services School for Linguists in Crail, a cobbled fishing village on the east coast of Scotland.
The JSSL course was notoriously tough, involving day after day of gruelling instruction from a jumble of eccentric Soviet defectors and White Russian émigrés. With the rudiments of Greek and Latin already under his belt, my father spent his days conjugating Russian verbs and memorising lengthy lists of vocabulary. He did this for an impressive five months, but his mind was elsewhere. The trouble was that Crail on the windswept Scottish coast was much too far from Sarah’s Plymouth flat.
*
My mother was born in Woolwich, the youngest of six daughters. One afternoon during the war, a German bomb meant for the nearby Royal Arsenal exploded in her street in Bexleyheath. It was a hot day and she recalled coming into the dining room in her knitted bathing costume, where the table had been laid for tea. There was a huge noise and everything went black. As the dust cleared the sunlight revealed the transmogrified tea table, covered in glass. Through the broken window my mother could see planes flying up the River Thames.
The family moved to Harrow on the Hill, on the opposite side of London. Here, they became members of the Catholic parish of Our Lady and St Thomas of Canterbury, where the priest was Father John Hitchcock, a cousin of the aforementioned Alfred Hitchcock. My mother got to know Fr John well. He was a frequent guest at the family home, where her father fed him Scotch whisky while he talked, rapid-fire, about locomotives.
‘He was a real train nut,’ said my mum.
I pricked up my ears.
‘Timetables, tinkering, or trainspotting?’ I asked.
‘Oh, all of it,’ she said, ‘He was always on the platform or the footplate. He just loved trains.’
In all my reading about Alfred Hitchcock I have never noticed anything more than a glancing reference to Fr John, and I had certainly never heard of a mania for trains. But knowing what I did about Hitch it immediately struck me as suggestive that his cousin should be a railway ‘anorak’. It was fascinating to learn in this personal way that in at least two members of the Hitchcock family there were signs of Asperger’s syndrome.
Not long after the end of the war, at the age of just fifty-two, my mother’s father took ill and died and my widowed grandmother moved her girls to Pimlico, close to Westminster Cathedral, the Catholic Mother Church.
To me, Grandma seemed the eternal widow, in true Victorian style. A huge black-and-white portrait photograph of her late husband hung on her wall until she died, well into her nineties. She used to say things like ‘God bless’ and ‘It’s five-and-twenty past six’, and she told me when I was little that there had been no aeroplanes when she was a girl, a story that seemed incredible. I wish I had been able to know her better, but I found her at once standoffish and silly. She
was an intelligent woman, but I think her deep anxiety caused her to miss out on a lot of life. Her idea of a good time was reading the Catholic newspaper The Universe over a Vesta dehydrated curry.
After my father’s demob in 1958, my parents were married by a friend who was a priest. Because my mother was the sister of the wife of my father’s friend Ralph, Ralph became one of my future uncles; his wife Kit one of my future aunts; and her sister Sarah my mother-to-be. It was like a music hall song.
Though they had paid for a wedding photographer, my parents decided it was going to cost too much to have the pictures developed, so I have never seen them. Money was tight and my intellectually minded father decided to train as a teacher. In this he was following in the steps of my mother, who had gone into teaching as soon as she finished school.
In the early days, my father taught in a private school in the Cotswolds, where Walter Rothschild had once ridden around in a carriage drawn by zebras. Here, he told me with obvious regret, and possibly recalling his own childhood, he used to beat disobedient pupils with a stick. On one occasion he ordered a naughty boy to stand on his chair.
‘Hands in the air!’ he demanded.
‘But, Sir, I’ve got a withered arm,’ explained the boy.
‘Then put your leg in the air!’ barked my father.
Though he can sometimes appear fierce, my dad is actually an enormously kind and thoughtful man who had every skill needed for teaching and caring for primary-school children, at which he became expert.
