Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  When I later watched the show at home with my family I spotted the back of my head being briefly mixed into a shot of the female dancing group known as Pan’s People, who on television looked very sexy but who in real life were sweating and grunting like horses, behind Pan Am smiles. It was another lesson that the way things looked was not necessarily the way things were.

  *

  Gordon Parkhurst was a curly haired youth who, like me, was good at art. Gordon had an enviable way with girls and one day showed me the first pornographic magazine I had ever seen. It contained a gaudy picture of a lady with her pubic hair shaved off, to which he drew my particular attention. On another occasion he followed our young teacher Miss Legge into the art room stock cupboard, closing the door behind him. There was the sound of softly clinking jam jars before Miss Legge emerged, cheeks flushed, smoothing down her skirt.

  My friend Jon and I were starting our A-level studies and we asked if we could have a life-drawing class at school. Miss Legge put it to the higher-ups who ummed and ahed before nervously agreeing, with the proviso that this was an experiment open only to pupils already doing art. And so money was found — I think our parents chipped in — the windows of the art room were papered over, and the young model arrived, undressing as required behind a screen. Even though we were seventeen, with all the hormones going at full blast, the mood in the room always resembled that of a class of respectful anatomists examining a cadaver. Models became personally attractive only once they were dressed again. As far as I know, this was the first time that pupils in an English school had been permitted to draw live naked women.

  If you were aiming for art college you were expected to do A-level art history. Our art history teacher, silver-haired Mr Lutyens, had been at the Royal College with Lucian Freud, John Minton, and other well-knowns, and regaled us with rude tales about his time there. We particularly enjoyed his impression of a very camp Francis Bacon having a sulk.

  A-level English was less amusing. They made us read Jude the Obscure, which I found unbearably gloomy, and I was the only one in the class who seemed not to have grasped, or be interested in, the idea that the fog so elaborately described at the beginning of Bleak House was a metaphor for the law. Literary metaphors of this kind often go over my head.

  Like other Aspergers, I have never been much of a novel reader. I don’t seem to get the same thrill from novels as your average book lover. This tendency in readers with Asperger’s has often been noted and a possible reason for it was revealed in a 2016 report in the Royal Society journal Open Science Experiments, which found that fiction causes the body to release pain-killing endorphins and promotes social bonding, an effect seen also in laughing, singing, and dancing. Whether unsmiling, non-dancing, non-singing Aspergers fail to get the same chemical rewards from fiction as other more socially bonded people is the subject for somebody’s PhD.

  My favourite books were biographies, exhibition catalogues, and texts on typography and magic. Amongst the fiction I did like were ghost stories and detective mysteries, including the Maigret novellas by Georges Simenon, and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe adventures. These were generally shorter and more concrete than the novels I found such sterile going.

  One day my father gave me a copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. I read this novel with enormous relish and it affected me so much that Sherlock Holmes and his world became my new enthusiasm. I got hold of all the Sherlock Holmes adventures, four novels and fifty-six short stories, and soon knew them inside out.

  *

  I was a late developer and did not yet realise that at heart I was a writer myself. From an early age I had had a bent for the geometry and mechanics of language. I saw linguistic communication as an engineering job and had a knack for identifying the crucial architecture of a sentence, just as an engineer might pick out the vital members of an iron bridge. I had always enjoyed parsing sentences, which we did in English when I was twelve, until modern teaching precepts swept the idea away.

  I took a delight in wordplay, and the straitjacket of limericks and palindromes particularly appealed. ‘Satan oscillate my metallic sonatas!’ seemed to me as good as anything by T. S. Eliot, whose name I noticed was an anagram of ‘toilets’.

  When a German exchange student came to stay he said I was the only person whose English he could readily understand. I seemed to have a natural grasp of the best method of getting my meaning across. First you had to abandon idiom. ‘I’m popping up the road’, ‘Do you need to spend a penny?’, or ‘He has ideas above his station’ were the kinds of things that people would come out with, causing deep furrows to form in the brows of their foreign interlocutors. In speaking English to the French, or Spanish, or Italian you had to make sure to use plenty of long words, which tend to have their roots in Latin and are therefore more easily guessable by speakers of these Romance languages than short words rooted in the Anglo-Frisian dialects of Old English. In describing a potter’s vase, ‘ceramic’ is a better word than ‘clay’.

  It was a bit different with the Germans, where syntax was the vital thing. In putting together a sentence ‘the words or members, most nearly related, should be placed as near to each other as possible,’ as the grammarian Lindley Murray put it in 1795.

  My German teacher was Mr Evans, a mummified creature who had never been abroad and had a distaste for modern languages. He would take out his pill bottles in class and encourage us to sniff the uncanny odour of the cotton wool. He drove an improbable sports car full of torn exercise books and trailing wires. To start it he had to take a battery from the boot, stagger to the front, lift the bonnet and attach jump leads, before humping it back to the boot again. He went through this magnetic performance every day for years. The idea of having the car repaired seemed not to have occurred to him. Mr Evans taught me almost no German but an enormous amount about what life could do to you.

  My French teacher Mr Zamenhof was a Pole with dyed-purple hair and a fuzzy number on his forearm. Known as ‘Chopper Zamenhof’, he ran French Club at lunchtime, where he made a delicious version of coffee, using evaporated milk. Anybody who misbehaved would be threatened with his notorious karate move, known as ‘The Chop’, and treated to a string of heavily accented abuse: ‘Dirty, ugly, naughty little one — fly from French Club!’ Mr Zamenhof once accidentally locked Mme Bonnard in the stock cupboard. One day I saw him parked in town behind the wheel of his car. He was weeping in great gasps. His whole family had gone up in smoke in the camps.

  It seemed necessary to have a girlfriend, and on my way to school I spotted a dark-eyed creature called Katy. It wasn’t just a girl’s prettiness that made her attractive — it was her confidence, and her intelligence. Katy was full of aplomb. She was a very good pianist, spoke French, and had a delicious laugh. Her sunny outlook counterbalanced my reserve. Her parents lived in a small house with no books in it and her eye was on the horizon. She told me she planned to visit Rome to learn Italian before going to London University to study English. I had no idea what my plans were, beyond trying to get into some art school or other.

  I was no good at flirting, flowers, and romance. Nonetheless restaurants and pubs were visited, cinemas patronised, and walks taken. I found it hard to read the signals but in due course, and after a good deal of hard work on my part, the vertical progressed to the horizontal.

  First love is often steeped in meaning but I made far too much of it all, turning Katy into my new ‘special interest’ hang-up. My expectations were astronomically high and the intensity of my attachment, known to nobody but myself, was out of all proportion. Perfect commitment is too much to expect of anybody, let alone a determined young woman with a string of books under her arm and the itch to get away.

  Katy visited Italy as she had said she would and rang me from there. Afterwards she gave me a copy of Strait Is the Gate by André Gide, the story of a sensitive boy deeply in love with a girl — with whom,
he is sure, his life will be forever entwined — as she goes deliberately and inexorably cold. My literal self refused to get the message, and it is only writing about it today, forty years later, that I have finally taken the hint. Though now it is more than too late.

  I tried to hold things together but Katy’s vaulting ambition was more ardent even than my own lust for perfection. ‘You treat me like a thing,’ she said. It ended. I don’t think I ever got over it. Only recently have I learnt, to my great great relief, that such quixotic overbearing attachments are a classic hallmark of the Asperger self.

  In 2017, naturalist Chris Packham presented a BBC Television programme about his life with Asperger’s, during which he described his boyhood infatuation with a kestrel. ‘I loved it with an enormous passion and amount of energy … The obsessive interest and intense focus on that one organism meant that I could just exclude everything else. All that existed was just us two … I don’t think that I’ve ever loved anything as intensely.’ But after a few ‘perfect’ months the bird died, an event Packham described as, ‘catastrophic’ and, ‘an enormous turning point’. All this struck a resounding chord with me. Such monomania does not bring contentment.

  One morning I looked into the mirror. My left shoulder and the side of my neck were peppered with angry spots. Dr Armstrong took one look: ‘Under stress?’

  ‘A levels coming up,’ I said. I didn’t mention Katy.

  ‘It’s shingles,’ he said. ‘Go straight home and go to bed. If it reaches that eye, we could be in trouble.’

  Days and nights passed in a haze. I was feverish. A breeze blowing across the now hideous rash was unbearable. Interviews with various art schools were in the diary. Jon offered to assemble my portfolio.

  After a time, things began to improve, but there was still a feathery electric pain in my skin. Even today if a shirt brushes across the pale splotches left by the rash it makes me gasp.

  I dragged myself and my portfolio off to several London art colleges. At the Slade, Sir Lawrence Gowing, an ungainly stuttering giant, dribbled over my life drawings.

  ‘You ah ah ah did these ats ats — at school?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘These are ah ah ah — they’re very good.’

  I looked blank. Nobody had told me about selling yourself. It was the age before selling yourself and I was terribly naive. Every other applicant had done a foundation year and already looked like an artist. I was dressed in a jacket and tie, straight out of the Asperger’s wardrobe. I felt lost. They told me to do a foundation course and they’d have me next year. I was too young.

  The Central School of Art were so impressed they offered me a place without the expected foundation year. ‘That’s unheard of,’ said Miss Legge, but I turned them down, pinning my hopes instead on my first-choice university, which was one of a handful doing a practical Fine Art degree course. Learning that I had said no the Central School Miss Legge blew her top, telling me that I’d made a gigantic mistake. I scoffed. How could I know that she was right and I was wrong? Just how wrong I would come to find out.

  But something else was amiss. I felt as though a surgeon had opened my head. People appeared to be speaking in slow motion. My hands were unusual, and I had become increasingly uncommunicative. Everybody’s talk was of exams, but I could hardly move. My obvious collapse inward seemed inexplicable to my teachers. My parents received the final report from my form master: ‘Tom sits alone, silent, lost in a world of his own.’

  When the exams came round there were problems. I became tremendously distracted during the art history paper. The room stank of food and the timekeeper kept writing a cricket score on a blackboard at the front, leaving me endlessly dreading the next interruption and the mind-blowing screech of chalk. Someone somewhere was sniffing. Over and over the desk of the girl two rows ahead of me kept squealing, like a monkey caught in a trap.

  The English paper had a question that read: ‘In Bleak House character spins the plot. Comment.’ I was flummoxed. ‘Spins the plot’? What did that mean? What did that mean? And who cared about characters? Not me. If they had asked me to write about Dickens’ handling of paragraph transitions in building a narrative, or chapter architecture in serial publication, I could have done something. But I didn’t understand what they wanted, and wasn’t interested. Instead I wrote a withering critique of the question, pointing out its faults.

  In all the years I’d been at school nobody had ever explained that exams ought not to be taken to heart. They were a game that, once you understood the rules, could be laughed off rather easily. In my rigid, moralistic naivety I believed that the real point here was higher-quality question setting, so I said so. I wasn’t going to play games. The trouble was that, as the Chinese sage pointed out, it was a false economy to burn down your house in order to inconvenience your mother-in-law.

  I waited for my results. On some days I couldn’t get up. On better days I would sit alone, slowly practising second deals beside the blue cones of the blossoming buddleia. I was a ghost. I was lost, and by the wind grieved.

  When it came in, the news was bad. I’d got a D in art, my main subject, and I didn’t just fail English I got a U, standing for ‘Unclassified’, meaning ‘unclassifiably bad’. I did okay in art history.

  My parents demanded a review. The examination board came back, defending the marking. In art, we were told, ‘form cannot be described in line alone’. As my drawings were exclusively line drawings this unbargained-for commandment rendered several years’ work futile, as it must have done for Picasso, Matisse, Hockney, Warhol, and the vase painters of Ancient Greece.

  At the time I didn’t understand, but now I know, that you will never be any good at passing exams if you fail to conform, since part of their job is to discipline the wayward and the recusant.

  Miss Legge said she would take things further, but coming down the A285 one evening a lorry went into her, and that was that. It was academic anyway because, based, rather amusingly, on their great admiration for my line drawings, my first-choice university had only asked for two Es. I had scraped in.

  The groves of academe beckoned. I was to be off, out into the world, leaving home for the first time. I thought back over my schooldays. I remembered Iain Westmore who’d drunk two pints of eggnog in a domestic science lesson and vomited prodigiously into the girls’ toilets; I recalled the pretty student teacher who had sat on a collapsible trestle table in the art room and fallen over backwards, exposing her knickers; I remembered Mr George pushing a piano over the Cairngorms, cigarette in mouth, and Mr Robbins with his wet towel, flicking naked buttocks in the showers. I tried to forget, but could not forget, Katy.

  I understood nothing about myself, and nothing about the world. I was empty: my body a seedless shell, yet inside something was chasing me. Where was I going? Formless weather systems swirled around and I could not escape the Big Question, the one to which the Church said it had the answer: What was the point? Maybe Van Gogh had had the right idea. Maybe oblivion was the way out.

  Though I didn’t know it I was in the grip of a very serious depression. Had there been a magic wand on the table with the power to wave away my misery, I could not have been bothered to pick it up. For the thing which I greatly feared was come upon me, and that which I was afraid of was come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.

  Chapter 4:

  Steep hill upwards

  The one thing we can never get enough of is love.And the one thing we never give enough of is love.

  HENRY MILLER

  Autumn was unusually sunny and warm that year. As the days shortened, the practical preparations for moving out occupied my thoughts.

  When the day came that my father was to drive me to the university, we made an early start. In the passenger seat sat my mother, rotating the map on her knee and telling Dad when he had gone the wrong way or c
hosen the wrong gear. ‘You’re in third, you know,’ she would say as he negotiated a tricky roundabout or tried to accelerate onto a motorway. I was squashed in the back with my student baggage — artist’s materials, books, LPs, rusting bicycle — watching from the rear window as my past unrolled from the vehicle’s cloaca in an improbable ribbon.

  The ancient minster town we were heading for stood at the confluence of two rivers. The ruins of a flint abbey occupied a central plot, its last dissident abbot having been hung, drawn, and quartered in front of his church. Once important, the town had lost much of its grandeur, its modern history being one of brewing and biscuit manufacture. The university was not prestigious, its most famous products being a number of television weather-forecasters and the robotic seat used on his television show by the creepy child molester Jimmy Savile.

  Owing to some bungle, no place had been found for me in any of the student halls of residence dotted about the university. Instead I was to be put up in the suburbs by a middle-aged couple, Mr and Mrs Chambers. We arrived at the house, pleasantries were exchanged, my stuff was unloaded, and I waved my parents off.

  Dressed in a protective blue tabard Mrs Chambers showed me round. She drew my attention to some framed photographs of her children wearing academic gowns and clasping certificates. She indicated the hi-fi equipment, on the lid of which was a record sleeve. ‘Moon Over Naples’, it said. She showed me the three-piece suite, an antimacassar over the back of each armchair, and asked me to use a drinks coaster. She showed me the cornflakes in the kitchen cupboard and pointed out what she called the ‘conveniences’. From the lip of the toilet bowl hung a small plastic cage containing a chemical block that turned the water blue when you operated the flush. To camouflage the horror of the spare toilet roll on the cistern Mrs Chambers had placed a crocheted dairymaid over it. Everything in the house was spotless. There wasn’t a book to be seen.