by Tom Cutler
Like Enoch Powell and Alfred Hitchcock, he has a knack for children, which you might not guess from his demeanour in the library, where he spends so much of his time. He was greatly loved by those he taught, and this was partly because of his eccentric methods, such as stomping across the class on top of the children’s desks.
One weekend, years ago, he took me into his empty school, a place of varnish and echoes. At the front of his classroom, a child’s desk had been connected to his own by several strands of wool, carefully taped there by the troubled little girl whose seat it was. ‘What do you think that means?’ he asked, lifting a rhetorical eyebrow.
Good though he is with youngsters, my father has never been quite so adept with adults. He managed the formalities of parents’ evenings perfectly well, but ordering in a pub or talking to a tradesman or to neighbours he is, like my mother to a lesser degree, ill at ease, and does not seem quite sure how to relate to other human beings. I used to put this down to his cloistered upbringing, but I have recently come to the conclusion that his strange social behaviour is a sign that he shares with me more than a scintilla of Asperger’s syndrome.
It is common for the parents of children with Asperger’s to display signs of it themselves. Sometimes these signs are frank but often they are subtle. In the case of my own father there are several tantalising clues to the possibility that my autism springs from family DNA, though these can fade like ghosts if you turn the light on them.
My dad has a number of ‘special interests’. The trouble is that these may not be autistic; they might be ordinary human enthusiasms. Since his retirement many years ago, he has, for example, made a deep study of international jurisprudence. But this could just be an uncommonly intellectual hobby. Perhaps the most intriguing of his enthusiasms is the one he has for a certain brand of weatherproof clothing, which he sometimes wears indoors, and which he will tell you about in great detail at the slightest provocation. This is certainly an offbeat interest, but has it crossed the line into autistic perseveration?
My father’s dress sense is somewhat whimsical, veering towards the nerdish. He can look perfectly smart in a conventional lounge suit or Harris Tweed jacket, and tie, but his trousers and shoes often appear ungainly and strangely matched. At home, unlike anyone else I have seen, he habitually wears his shirt collars unturned-down, the points poking upwards into his chin.
Like me, my father does not like to be touched. He will surrender to a handshake but will not initiate one, and seated next to another person he looks uneasy. Of course, this may just be his English reserve or his austere upbringing, but I have a feeling that he shares with me the Asperger’s ‘keep clear gene’. He is not a hugger. Watching him say goodbye to some visitors recently, I took care to observe his behaviour. First, he stood up, rigidly, with a confused smile on his face. People were leaving and it was clear to him that he was expected to react. As his daughter-in-law embraced him he attempted to reciprocate, but it was an action involving the arms only, he remained stiff as a tree. He circled her waist but kept his fists closed, bumping his knuckles rhythmically against her back.
When saying goodbye, I myself go through a repertoire of uncomfortable movements similar to my dad’s, which make me look and feel gauche. Many have remarked on it, and it is only with children, and with very affirmative or vigorous people who override my apparently disdainful spasticity and just grab hold of me, that I relax slightly and can return the embrace in a more normal way.
Being essentially a formal, non-social, and non-reciprocal enterprise, teaching was an ideal job for my dad, as it often is for those with Asperger’s. The absent-minded professor, a classic Asperger’s caricature, is in his or her element in the one-way environment of the classroom or university lecture hall.
*
Between 1959 and 1966 my parents produced a new child nearly every year. Several of us were touched in our cradle by the finger of autism, but it left its print more sharply on some than on others. Until my diagnosis, I’m sure the idea of autism in the immediate family had never occurred to my parents, or to my siblings. Apart from me, none of us has had a formal assessment or diagnosis. Perhaps now they might.
As the first child, I had the undivided attention of my mother until the birth of my sister Esther, at home, twenty months later. I was naturally resentful of the impostor, who, as she got older, seemed increasingly haughty. Though Esther could laugh and smile as well as anyone, she could also look disapproving. Even today she retains the forbidding habit of clasping her arms unsmilingly around herself as you talk, watching you expressionless like an eagle owl ready to strike. At times, she can appear injudicious or tactless in her comments, seeming to scoff. But this is not her intention and never has been, because, of course, Esther is exhibiting her personal variety of my own Aspergic critical severity, and, as with my own apparent aloofness, any offence is unintended.
Esther’s all-engulfing interest is in music making, and she is a superb teacher of music to children. She will enlarge on her subject at length, with enthusiasm, expertise, and great warmth, with whatever personal news you might bring into the conversation being quickly swept along by the rushing musical tide.
In 1961, we were living above a working-men’s club in Plymouth and my parents, who were both teaching, were looking for someone to take care of me and Esther during the day. Opposite us were some post-war prefabs and it was in one of these that they found a lady called Mary, whose two sons were growing up and who missed having young children around. I took to Mary and her quiet good sense at once, christening her ‘Auntie’. When my baby sister stuck a doll’s eye up her nose and my parents were not sure what to do Mary administered pepper. Simple, effective, and loud.
Auntie Mary was married to David, a jeweller, and in due course they became my godparents. Auntie told my mother that I insisted on them endlessly marching with me round the coffee table. It was little surprise when a bemused neighbour, unable to see me below the level of the window, asked Auntie why she and her respectable husband incessantly circled their sitting room like prisoners on exercise.
I had a persistent interest in Auntie’s oven door, which I would open and close repeatedly. I also liked to wrap myself very tightly in the curtain and then spin round and round as it unwound. Was this interest in the oven door, this circling and spinning, normal childish behaviour or was something else going on here?
My language acquisition was going according to expectations and Auntie took me on trips to the library. In this hushed temple of learning, her two sons encouraged me to shout ‘bugger’. We were sent outside, where they made me shout ‘bugger’ louder, through the letter flap. Auntie took it well.
I always liked strong flavours and still do: fermented Baltic herring, horseradish, smoky Scotch whisky with a smack of the medicine cabinet. The first taste I remember is liquorice. My mother was standing by a sunny window eating a stick of something dark and aromatic. Bending down from her immense height she handed me a tiny piece of the black stuff. As I tried it I looked up at her and asked how old she was. Thirty she said. This seemed tremendously ancient. I must have been about three.
Though very shy and anxiety-prone, I was an inquisitive child. One day my pet tortoise died and I have never forgotten the solemn ceremony of interment, led by my father in the back garden. Life was full of new things.
Sometimes ‘Uncle’ David would show me magic tricks. I remember sitting in his musty shed, the rain drumming on the corrugated roof as he passed a coin magically through the table. From that moment, magic became my intense preoccupation. I tried to imitate the tricks I saw but without success. The simple mechanics hadn’t occurred to me. I never lost this enthusiasm, and as a teenager I used to sit alone for hours in my bedroom, practising, practising. Whenever I perform today I try to produce in my audience that same feeling of wonder at seeing real magic, which I felt so powerfully as a little boy.
But my father’s
life was still darkened by the baleful penumbra of my impossible grandmother, who, though now in a distant town, would make unannounced visits. My dad told me that as a child he had once squirted her with a water pistol and that she had turned on him. So he let her have it with both barrels, at which she completely collapsed. ‘I learnt that this was how I had to treat her,’ he said. When sent to fetch the silver-topped cane with which she intended to beat him he began to refuse, instead hiding under the table, where she was unable to reach him because of her girth. Now, though, she was wilder, weirder, and more unhinged than ever. My father decided that to protect his growing family and save his own mental health decisive action was needed: he must do something drastic to escape his mother’s destructive sway.
One dark night I was woken and put into my dressing gown, my baby sister Esther was bundled up, and my dad closed the front door. I am often at a loss to know why people are behaving as they are, though I have always been highly sensitive to mood. Even at the age of three, the hushed voices and urgent whispers told me that something momentous was afoot, though I didn’t know what.
Auntie was there in the darkness. In her strong Devon accent, she whispered that Mum and Dad and Esther and I were going away. She had made a tray of toffee for me to take with me. I looked down at the golden squares, separated by strips of greaseproof paper. I didn’t want to leave Auntie. I loved her. It was all very mysterious.
We were driven to a railway station and my parents squeezed the four of us into a sleeping car. Brisk goodbyes were exchanged in the dark and the train pulled out. Auntie was waving from the platform, the tray of toffee still in her hand. I sometimes think wistfully of that un-given present.
My father had prepared carefully, telling not even his brother and sister of his intended departure, and erasing from the record all evidence of our new location. Only one or two friends were in the know and they had been briefed to keep quiet. It would be decades before my father’s siblings could track him down; he never spoke to his mother again; she ended her days in the locked ward of a Scottish lunatic asylum.
*
We spent the next three years in a leafy Hertfordshire town, where my father had got himself another teaching job. I learnt to swing conkers, and made friends with a girl who came to play in our back garden. She told me that her father’s birthday was the same as mine. I argued that this was impossible, as he was much older than me. How confusing the world seemed.
In the afternoons Dad would arrive home from work and post chocolates through the front door, before going round to the kitchen to be greeted by my mother as I investigated the contents of the crumpled paper bag. Mum peeled apples, letting the long spiral of skin fall to the floor. At bedtime she used to sing me to sleep. She had an excellent voice and enjoyed the folk songs made popular by Kathleen Ferrier: ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ was a favourite. Then there was a ditty in French, ‘Dominique’, an unlikely top-ten hit about St Dominic, written and performed by the ‘Singing Nun’. Whenever I hear the song today, I am swept back to my childhood, tucked up tightly in bed, with my mother singing me softly to sleep.
I always wanted heavy blankets on top of me, and still do. A light covering feels unpleasant, like a wind blowing over rustling leaves. This is not an uncommon foible among people with Asperger’s syndrome, and when my father recently came to visit he too asked for heavier blankets. I remember reading that the poet W. H. Auden felt the same way. He piled blankets, curtains, and, once, a weighty stair-carpet on top of himself, and slept under those. On another occasion he went to bed underneath a heavy oil-painting.
This reminded me of Temple Grandin, one of the best-known autistic speakers in the USA. Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University and a livestock industry consultant with an eerie understanding of the way cattle think and behave. As a student, she noticed that the simple machine used to hold the animals motionless had a very calming effect on them, so she tried it on herself, with success. She then built her own prototype ‘hug box’, a version of which is now available for autistic people to use.
W. H. Auden displayed plenty of other features of Asperger’s. He had a gawky gait, collected hats, dressed strangely — wearing carpet slippers in public — and spoke in a rather monotonous voice somewhat reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s. A year before his death, he appeared on BBC Television’s Parkinson show revealing several giveaway Asperger traits, the most immediately obvious being his marked lack of eye contact with the interviewer.
In 1964, my mother produced a second son, Paul, my only brother. Paul was a bright boy, but as he grew up he became known for his peculiar ways. When tired or excited he would rock rhythmically backwards and forwards. ‘Why does your brother do that?’ people would ask. I didn’t know. Nobody asked why I touched various ‘significant’ lampposts on my way to school, jiggled my teeth compulsively from side to side, or bounced my legs rhythmically under the desk. They didn’t ask because I did it discreetly, as I still do.
Though we didn’t know it, Paul’s rocking and, I now believe, my own jittering and object touching, were examples of autistic ‘stimming’.
In time Paul’s rocking faded, as did his charming naivety, and he developed the ability to tell disablingly funny stories about his own frequent mishaps. He is truly terrible at following directions. Pointing him towards my local station once, I told him: ‘Go up to the end of the road and turn left’, patting his left arm for emphasis. I watched him walk up to the junction and look around abstractedly, before turning right.
We were all therefore astonished when, at the age of about thirteen, and long before the days of smartphone maps, Paul took the train to London, found his way to Sotheby’s, and nonchalantly joined in an auction of antique lutes.
He learnt to read music with no difficulty but found the reading of words and sentences onerous. My mother spent so long trying to show him the difference between ‘bed’ and ‘deb’ that she briefly made remedial teaching her speciality. Today, Paul is a talented musician and teacher, with a wife and grown-up children, but he is still likely to write ‘deb’ when he means ‘bed’.
You did not hear the word ‘dyslexia’ much in the 1960s and it wasn’t until the late 1970s that it started to become clear what was going on in my brother’s brain. Dyslexia, or ‘word blindness’, was first identified in Germany in the 1870s. It is a learning difficulty unrelated to intellectual ability, which chiefly affects reading, writing, and language. Like Asperger’s syndrome, it is commonly associated with quirks of short-term memory, slow processing speed, poor organisation and sequencing, and unusual time perception. Dyslexics seem to have a problem with a bit of chromosome 7 known as 7q31, an area that has also been linked to autism, and it is common for autism and dyslexia to be present in the same person, as they are in my brother.
Like Aspergers, dyslexics are often bright and articulate, though they may do badly at school. They frequently share Aspergers’ difficulty in maintaining attention and can ‘zone out’, daydream, and lose track of time. Uninformed and unimaginative teachers will see them as careless, immature, idle, insolent, uncooperative, or several of these. In many of these ways my brother and I are alike. The main difference is that he has trouble with written words and I have a facility with them.
*
One afternoon, when I was about five, I was standing at the kitchen door, looking into our Hertfordshire garden and preparing to take off my boots. My mother was playing with Esther and Paul, who were sitting in a tin pedal-car. My dad was at work. Ready to pull off the first boot, I braced myself against the doorjambs when all at once the wind slammed the door on my fingers. I next remember hanging over my mum’s shoulder, pouring blood down her white cardigan as she tried to decide what to do with me. We had no car and no telephone. Somehow she raised a neighbour.
We were driven to the hospital while the neighbour’s wife looked after my brother and sister. As a nurse removed t
he homemade bandage I could see that the top of the middle finger of my left hand was hanging off, attached by a flap of flesh. The bone had been narrowly missed so they gave me a local anaesthetic and sewed the hinge back on. Most of this time I was making loud noises of one sort or another.
I was bandaged up and taken to a sweetshop where my mother said I could choose anything I wanted. I went for a chocolate rabbit wrapped in brightly coloured foil. I had never been presented with such an enormous sweet. It looked about a foot high. I tried to peel back the foil but my injured finger, encased in a leather fingerstall, was in the way. When I finally bit into the chocolate I was dismayed to find it a hollow shell. The disappointment was huge, and the cynical deception of the manufacturers still bothers me today. This might seem an ungrateful overreaction, especially after all this time, but I now understand my sensitivity to this deceit as a typical facet of my Asperger self. The insight, a recent one, is a great relief, for to understand is to forgive.
When they cut the bandages off a few weeks later, the pale digit that emerged had an impressive scar running around its top. To this day, the end of this finger is slightly misshapen. Noticing it once, a friend said, ‘I’ve always wanted something like that.’
*
One Christmas morning, my father called me into my mother’s bedroom.
‘Come and look at this,’ he said.
I peered into the cot at the end of the bed.
‘Is it a baby?’ I asked.
‘Yes, she’s your new sister, Rebecca.’
There were now four of us: me, Esther, Paul, and Rebecca.
Having your birthday on Christmas Day seemed like bad luck, and maybe it was, as Rebecca’s trademark, like my mother’s, would turn out to be anxiety. Growing up, she would sometimes be overcome by sudden terrors, calling out ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be nothing’ before dissolving into tears. On one such alarming occasion in the car, my father said to her, ‘Remember, you were nothing once … and for a long time.’
