Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  All this child production meant that my mother was either pregnant and working, or taking months off to nurse the latest infant, before starting the game all over again. With her hands full, it fell to my father to walk me to my infant school.

  One day we found ourselves approaching a dustcart. These things have always repelled me. I notice the reek of rotting rubbish long before anyone else. It’s the same in the supermarket, where the strongly unpleasant smell of hot bread hits you the minute you walk in — I’m told other people like it — and the powerful plastic odour of the electrical department and the stench of the fish counter are eye-watering. People say I make too much of smells, but I am very alert to them. They disturb me.

  As we passed the dustcart I must have made a face because two brisk nuns walking by remarked on it. They were coming from the school, where on my first day I had been so overcome with anxiety that I was shaking with tears all morning. At playtime I had been approached by one of those people who is in exactly the right job. She was, I suppose, a sort of classroom assistant, and I recall her warm pink cardigan and her blonde hair. She bent down, took my hand, and led me over to join some huge-looking boys who were playing a game. Though I wanted to join in I was dumb with fear.

  Back in the class, the uniformed nun who was teaching me told me to stop pulling the woollen bobbles off my jumper. ‘Only babies do that,’ she said, making a shape with her mouth that resembled the picture of an inflamed anus I once saw in Nursing Mirror. Though the word ‘logic’ was unknown to me, I knew at once that she had made a mistake; her proposition was impossible. A) Being five, I was not a baby, B) I was pulling bobbles off my jumper, therefore, C) It was false that only babies pulled bobbles off their jumpers.

  I was the only one of us children to be schooled by nuns, and though I recall the echoes and perfumes of the church, Christian metaphysics baffled me then as it does today. I love the language and crisp carpentry of the King James Bible, but the notion that the universe was constructed by a benevolent omnipotent deity who allows cats to torture mice and whose son was the supernatural offspring of a virgin impregnated by a ghost, is, in the first part, logically incongruous and, in the second, frankly unpersuasive. This story, concocted by tribesmen who didn’t know that everything is made of atoms, doubtless helped give meaning to the ups and downs of their lives, as it still does for many today. But now that we are all better informed we should stop teaching children too young to defend themselves that this metaphorical tale is a historical fact like the French Revolution.

  Today, the churchgoing in my immediate family has faded away, and quite what my father believes I have not asked, but like me he seems to hold in some regard the poetry and rigour of the Tridentine rite. However, neither he, nor my mother, nor any of us children belongs to any religious group.

  Catherine Caldwell-Harris, a psychology professor at Boston University, has found that a person with Asperger’s syndrome is twice as likely as a typical member of the population to tick the atheist or agnostic box. One reason, presumably, is that Aspergers, who are already less socially conformist than others, may also find the ‘warm and fuzzy’ social aspects of church not just unrewarding but positively repugnant. There is also the principle that in order to decide whether or not something is likely to be true you’ve got to look at the evidence. Compared with more typical people, Aspergers will be less inclined to embrace the notion of ‘faith’, which is a euphemism for the belief in something for which there is scant evidence. ‘Cold’ and ‘unemotional’ it may sound, but another word for it is ‘rational’.

  *

  In 1966, my father got a better job and we moved again, this time to the suburban outskirts of one of the New Towns carefully planned after the war as places to relocate bombed-out Londoners and other ‘overspill’. Halfway between London and Brighton, this town had been socially engineered in neighbourhoods, where media lawyers, famous actors, and airline executives lived cheek by jowl with Cockney dinner-ladies and television repairmen. The churches and pubs of the better off tended to be a lot older, and their houses nicer, but nearly everybody’s children went to the same schools.

  Our family of six moved into a small terraced house opposite a willow-girt millpond. Lying between our front garden and the unfenced water was a large green where we could safely play.

  One of the sounds I remember was the regular wail of a siren, which mooed across the neighbourhood like a distant vacuum cleaner whenever a fire engine was on its way to a shout. My mother explained that this was a wartime air raid alert being put to use. After a year or two the sound was heard no more.

  Phillip Stone, an older boy, struck up a kind of friendship with me. He showed me where toads and grass snakes lived and once handed me a slowworm, smooth as gravy. He taught me to identify butterflies in the fields around us, and as I grew older I began to net them myself, systematically pinning them to boards, like Stapleton the naturalist in The Hound of the Baskervilles, with their proper Latin names in my best handwriting underneath.

  Phillip was what was known as a ‘rough boy’ but he was a survivor. He could pee amazingly high against the railway bridge that took commuters to London and he really understood how the world worked, in a way I never will. Phillip’s worldliness complemented my fastidiousness, and when I was six or seven he gave me my first sex education lesson, behind the garages, using nothing more than a stick and a bottle.

  Our house turned out to be too small and we moved into a bigger one, which made national headlines forty years later when a man living there was found guilty of conspiring to cause explosions. It is weird to see on the news the gate through which you used to pass day after day being sealed with police tape, and to imagine people plotting to blow up the Bluewater shopping centre in the room where you once did your English homework.

  Soon after we moved in, a girl who lived nearby and always seemed to have mud on her face showed me how to cook potatoes on a campfire that she built in a neighbouring copse. Afterwards she hitched up her dress and weed into the ashes. Fascinating.

  One day, a huge Alsatian dog chased me across that copse, knocking me down and biting my elbow. Dogs, like people, have an uncanny knack of picking up on the alert discomfiture I think I hide so well, and it can make them aggressive. I have been wary of dogs ever since, which doesn’t help.

  I became interested in the wild mushrooms that grew abundantly in the copse, like the shaggy ink cap, or ‘lawyer’s wig’, which you could eat, but which would turn into a black puddle if you left it on your table overnight. I got a mushroom book out of the library and inspected the family tree. It was rewarding to discover, list, classify, and systemise the various fungi; I was especially allured by the poisonous ones, such as the destroying angel, a tall white phallus of death.

  Before long, my sister Ruth was born. Being the youngest, she was allowed a lot more freedom, and received a more dilute dose of the ambient family anxiety. I used to think it was this that had made her the most socially sophisticated of us, but I now believe it was merely the fall of the genetic dice that had allowed her to dodge the autistic finger.

  Because the half-curse half-gift of our Aspergic autism was not then recognised for what it was, we tended to be regarded by others as ‘odd’. And we still are. At a recent birthday party, Ruth told me: ‘Only two people described our family as “strange” tonight. That’s a good score.’

  Despite their own unusualness, my parents made friends in the New Town. There was a man with a beard who decades later would have something to do with the headline grabbing ‘literacy hour’, and another man, about seven-feet tall, who was News Editor of the BBC World Service at Bush House. When you saw him and his very tiny wife together they appeared to be members of two distinct species. I also remember a famous scientist who wrote programmes for television, and a solicitor who wore jeans and gave advice about neighbourhood disagreements on the Jimmy Young show. I was impressed by these scint
illating with-it people, some of whom had bidets in their bathrooms, or went to bed with women who were not their wives.

  Though we had no fridge, telephone, car, or central heating, my parents had aspirations for us. There was a little piano in what we called the back room, and as we got older we were given private music lessons. But with five children under the age of six, and bringing in a modest teacher’s salary, my father realised he was going to be bankrupted. It was at this moment that reason overtook the Catholic imperative to multiply, and my parents stopped producing offspring.

  My new junior school was a jangle of loud noises and strong odours. The days were punctuated by bells, slamming doors, a racket of voices down echoing corridors, the squeak of chalk on blackboard, and the rebarbative pong of school dinners. These incessant demands on my senses produced in me a condition of highly alert threat readiness, and low-grade anxiety. I was said to be a ‘sensitive’ boy.

  To be absorbed in something was a relief. I was fascinated by patterns and spent hours at my desk with a pair of compasses painstakingly drawing circles and superimposing arcs that generated a multitude of new, segmented shapes, which I would systematically colour. I produced a great many of these motifs and became engrossed while I was making them. With commendable understatement my teacher noted in a school report: ‘Thomas seems very taken with work of this kind.’

  Somewhere in his past, my father had learned the craft of bookbinding. One day, he showed me how to cut the boards to size and how to make the spine using a special tough paper. He taught me to mitre the corners, attach the end papers, and stick the whole thing together with paste. Finally, he handed me a thin celluloid stencil punched with an alphabet of capital letters, along with a stiff shorthaired brush and a red pigment block. With these tools you could put a title on your book.

  My dad told me that the typeface was Monotype Gill Sans and that it had been designed by the Catholic sculptor, stonecutter, and printmaker Eric Gill. I fell in love with the process and spent so many hours, days, weeks, and months using the stencil that, without realising what was happening, I absorbed into myself the anatomy of the fifty-two letterforms and their punctuation marks.

  This happy accident opened the door to the world of typography, a world governed by system, formality, detail, and rules. You knew where you were.

  I used my pocket money to buy sheets of rubdown letters, which were a bit sticky on the back so that by laying the translucent sheet over a piece of paper marked up with your faint pencil guidelines you could rub down the letters and make words. I learnt the names of these typefaces: Helvetica, Univers, Bembo, Garamond, Baskerville, and got to know their strengths and foibles. I made a thousand mistakes, which is the way you learn.

  Whether it was the letters themselves or the deeply satisfying diagrammatic unity that first attracted me to British road signs I cannot recall. Neither do I remember when I became aware of their systematic rigour and beauty; it was probably some time in the early 1970s, though it was not till years later that I learnt how these signs came to look the way they do.

  One day in the mid-1950s, a designer named Jock Kinneir was waiting at a bus stop when he got into conversation with a fellow passenger. This man was David Alford, an architect working on the huge expansion of Gatwick Airport. Alford liked the cut of Kinneir’s jib and without more ado offered him a hundred guineas to design the airport’s signage system.

  As his assistant Kinneir hired Margaret Calvert, one of his students at Chelsea Art School, where he taught. Calvert remembers that she had to look up ‘typography’ in the dictionary. But the pair produced a pioneering signage system in yellow and black.

  In 1957, the government decided that special signage was needed for Britain’s new motorway network and asked Kinneir and Calvert to come up with a scheme of signs that could be understood in all weathers at decision-making distance by drivers going at speed.

  The pair decided to go back to square one. Their focus would be on crystal clear diagrammatic rigour, supreme legibility under the special conditions obtaining on motorways, and, importantly, attractive appearance.

  They decided that the signs needed a new set of typographic characters. They wanted a type design of cardinal unambiguity, but one that would, ‘sit well in the English landscape’. Kinneir and Calvert based their new type family on a scrupulously clean nineteenth-century sans-serif design. For absolute clarity they adapted specific letter shapes, producing conspicuous differences in otherwise similar characters, such as the curve at the foot of the lower-case l, ‘borrowed’ from Edward Johnston’s brilliant 1916 London Underground typeface, which instantly marks out the l as neither a capital I nor the figure 1. They designed oblique fractions without a dividing bar and cut aslant the strokes of several letters, so helping to retain the word shape of place names. These had had to be widely letterspaced so as to counteract the effect of ‘halation’ caused by the glare of reflected headlights. As an aid to mass production they put each character onto its own uniquely proportioned ‘invisible’ tile, so that words could be perfectly spaced by non-specialists. Their new type, soon named Transport, was a great success in tests.

  Kinneir came up with a profoundly simple layout structure for the new signs, based on the width of the capital letter I, which Margaret Calvert rightly called ‘brilliant’. Under this rigid rule-governed system, motorway signs could be newly made at any size while automatically remaining in proportion, as well harmonious and clear.

  These pioneering efforts worked brilliantly, and Kinneir and Calvert were soon asked to redesign the signs for all British roads, with Margaret Calvert devising a charming suite of simple pictograms, including the now very well-known ‘men at work’, ‘children’, and ‘farm animals’, the last of which shows the silhouette of a real cow she had known as a girl. For signs such as ‘wild horses’ and ‘wild animals’, which featured creatures in motion, she went to the work of the Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge, famous for his photographic studies of movement.

  Kinneir and Calvert’s masterly and beautiful system came into effect on 1 January 1965. It is interesting to think that had it not been for a serendipitous meeting of two men at a bus stop a decade earlier, British road signs would now look quite different, and probably worse.

  *

  At junior school I met a boy called Jon. Like me, he was good at drawing. We liked to spend our time walking round the playground discussing the geometry of perspective or classifying the dinosaurs. Jon was brainier than me and seemed to forget nothing. When I was seven or eight he introduced me to the work of Picasso, and by the time we were ten he had taught me a good deal about the history of art.

  Jon’s father, an engineer, was taciturn but focused. Ranged along his mantelpiece were the cups he had won for bowling. His mother was good at crosswords and was surprised one day when she learnt that I had been eating the petals from the roses in her front garden. Hearing recently that the autistic TV naturalist Chris Packham had eaten tadpoles I am unsurprised by my behaviour. Jon told his mother that I insisted on sticking stamps onto envelopes upside-down and she maintained that I must be an anarchist.

  Jon and I were cast in a school play about the Flood. Jon got the part of God and I got Mrs Noah. It seemed a mirror of real life. In fact, the casting was inspired. Mrs Gossop, our first primary-school teacher, wrote in my school report, ‘Thomas is going through what I can only describe as a silly phase.’ I have yet to grow out of it. Like many Aspergers, I enjoy silliness of all kinds and being a grotesque suited me. I am always relaxed when showing off on stage: finally alone and in control, anxiety drains away.

  Jon’s older brother was also intensely bright. He spoke in an odd staccato, was tremendously good at maths, and had various absorbing interests, including horror films, on which subject he must have been some sort of world expert. He went on to study maths at Cambridge University.

  Jon himself was and is a walking enc
yclopaedia. In a bookshop with me recently he picked up a jazz dictionary. ‘Several mistakes in this,’ he said. ‘Here — Wes Montgomery’s brother was born on the thirtieth of January 1930, not the thirteenth.’ He has remained my greatest friend for fifty years and people sometimes ask if we are brothers.

  Every fifth of November, the best firework display in town was put on by the Cornfoots, who lived across the road. The perpetually grinning Mr Cornfoot wore a cap made of some coconut-matting type of material, and over his vast brown belly a short gravy-stained vest. Every third tooth was chipped or missing and his wife looked like the Bird Woman from Mary Poppins. The Cornfoots’ front garden was full of the earliest forms of supermarket trolley, and their children, ranging in age from six months to about forty years, were forever tinkering with vans.

  On bonfire night, the Cornfoots’ fireworks brought observers in their Minis and Morris Minors from far afield. Starting with half a dozen white-streak rockets, the display built over hours until its phenomenal climax turned the sky orange, like an accident in an armaments factory. In the morning, my brother and I would wander the neighbourhood collecting the eggy-smelling bodies of the dead Sky Hunters.

  Our own bonfire night was different, safety being the main concern. The handful of inexpensive fireworks were kept in a biscuit tin, as recommended in alarming public information films on the television, and my father would jump up and down if anybody went near them. Like a bomb disposal man, it took him ten minutes to approach an extinguished Roman candle in case it came to life again, and he would retreat from a lit rocket like a sprinter, pushing us all up against the house. The whole anxiety-ridden performance lasted hours, even though there were only a dozen anorexic fireworks, and we were all grateful to get in again, warm our frozen fingers around the gas fire, and watch the culmination of the Cornfoots’ extravaganza, with a mug of cocoa.