Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  The venue for the service was a split-level 1970s fibreboard church, brutally carpeted throughout. We had rehearsed the evening before and the amiable young priest who was to be the celebrant took it well when I insisted on going through everything I would be called upon to say, so as to expunge anything I believed to be false.

  On the day, there seemed to be special rules which nobody had explained to me. Moments before the ceremony I was admonished for eating a sandwich. Looking around the crowd as I stood on the carpeted platform, I realised that apart from Lea and her immediate family I knew not a soul.

  We went to a local hotel for the reception. Lea’s family’s friends and relations came to shake my hand: university people, mechanics, elementary-school teachers. They wanted to chat. The whole thing was the typical Asperger’s nightmare. Luckily there was alcohol to take the edge off. A local photographer took photographs of us holding bits of cake: me in the runt’s suit, my long hair shivering in the air conditioning. But she did something wrong and the pictures came out so orange that we threw them away.

  We drove some wedding cake to my father-in-law in the ER. He was plugged into bleeping machines and looked green. We stood briefly in the incongruous setting, Lea in her white wedding dress, me in my short-sleeved tux.

  We had decided to travel to South Dakota for our honeymoon to take a look at Mount Rushmore, which Hitchcock used so brilliantly for the climax of North by Northwest. It was a long drive across the prairie, with the accelerator set on ‘cruise’. There was sun, wind, and mile after mile of flat openness. We passed occasional small towns that seemed unchanged since the days of the Wild West but for the paraphernalia of the internal combustion engine. We were to stop overnight en route but because of a baseball match most of the hotels were booked up. At the last minute Lea had found us a motel and reserved a room.

  It was dusk when we arrived. The owl that had been flying alongside us flew off as we pulled in. We could see this was not the ideal honeymoon place. Its dust, neglect, and yellowing net curtains made Bates Motel seem like the Ritz. We looked on the bright side and pushed on south next morning.

  Seeing Mount Rushmore after dark was said to be dramatic, and hopes were high. A man gave us a fascinating talk about the monument’s construction and announced that the lights would now be switched on to reveal the presidents in their glory. There was a deep clunk and we found ourselves staring up at a vast curtain of mist.

  ‘You’ll have to come back tomorrow,’ said the guide.

  Back in North Dakota someone asked if we would like to tour the State Penitentiary. Not many honeymoons feature a prison visit so we said yes. We were shown around a newly built part of the jail. There were cells off a gallery from which you could look down into an open area. We were introduced to a polite inmate in a smart uniform, who proudly showed us his room. He was particularly pleased with the view from his arrow-slit window, out onto the parking lot.

  ‘What’s he in for?’ I asked our guide afterwards.

  ‘Raped an eight-year-old girl,’ she said, looking for something in her handbag.

  She took us through a locked door into a room where convicts were spinning pots and painting sunsets. Some were huge unsmiling Native Americans who were not in prison for parking violations. A few had murdered people. I felt uneasy. I was a skinny little thing accompanied by two women. The inmates spotted my strange demeanour at once, and had they decided to get nasty I don’t think I would have lasted long.

  On our way out of the building we passed a dim passage with a parade of squat old cells. Pacing like animals behind the flaking paint of their iron bars were the gloomy figures of caged men. It was nice to get out in the sunshine again.

  Not much later we heard that the priest who had married us had been admitted to a mental hospital.

  *

  We returned to England with little money, nowhere to live, and no jobs. Lea’s application for a work permit had been denied while we were in the States so she couldn’t accept the BBC post. My patient parents put us up while I checked in with Eugene at the Busy Bees Agency. One day a strange voice answered. Surprised, I said: ‘Is that you, Gene? Um — is that you-you Gene? Er — is that Eugene?’

  We liked North London so Eugene sent us to the purlieus, some less lovely than others. We turned up at a house near the Holloway Road, where the door was opened by a giant in a none-too-clean vest. ‘You’re early,’ he grunted through broken teeth.

  We were shown into the dark hallway. Off this uninspiring passage sprouted a kitchen with a filthy stove and a frosted plastic window onto somewhere else. The lino-floored sitting room contained a massive fridge covered in brown stains, and a vinyl sofa with foam rubber erupting from a long knife slit. The nearby lavatory was so narrow you would have had to back into it if you wished to take a seat. Everything smelt of fried onions. We were polite but didn’t stay for tea.

  We saw an attic flat in a half-timbered house in an Edwardian suburb near Alexandra Palace. It had a charming little kitchen and a decent size sitting-cum-dining room. If you stood on tiptoe you could peer from the skylight into the wood opposite. ‘This is good,’ I whispered. Lea seemed doubtful. She was used to American walk-in closets, en suite bathrooms, a carport, and a gym. In the end we took it and came to love it.

  Now married to an Englishman, Lea was offered another job by the BBC. I continued to check the paper.

  Like everyone else, almost all Aspergers want to work, but many of these frequently talented people end up with no kind of permanent paid employment. I knew that I struggled in interviews: misunderstanding the situation and making people feel awkward by my strange eye contact and Pan Am smile. I got the feeling when I was turned down for things, as I repeatedly was, that something had gone awry during the interview — as if I had used the wrong knife and fork during a royal banquet. I would sense the ice forming on their faces.

  Employers tend to hire people who are like them, but Aspergers are not like anyone else: they are like themselves, and when the employer asks the question, ‘Will this person fit in?’ the answer is often a reverberant, ‘No!’ Though there are niches where autistic people can make a powerful contribution to organisations using strengths other than social facility, it’s getting the job that is often the hard bit.

  The UK’s National Autistic Society has found that employers think autistics need solitary technical jobs requiring attention to detail. A good number do want jobs of this kind, but others do not. For example, as many autistics want to work in the arts as in IT, and this was true of me, though I did not know exactly what I wanted to do. Surely there must be a field for my particular powers, if only I could find it.

  Plenty of people with autistic traits show strengths early on in the spheres they later go into professionally, and it is frequently the oddballs — those who had a miserable time of it at school — who end up with the most interesting jobs. Anthony Hopkins showed early promise as an actor, and the author E. B. White, who was troubled by noises and smells, and so fearful of public occasions that he was unable to attend his own wife’s funeral, had always been interested in writing. He adored nature, and this, along with his love of children resulted in his classic Charlotte’s Web. ‘All writing,’ said White, ‘is both a mask and an unveiling.’ He was fascinated by the systematic rules of language and, in typical pedantic style, co-authored The Elements of Style, a classic guide to English usage.

  I too have always deeply enjoyed the pernickety details of style, and find etymology rewarding. A few years ago I discovered the Online Etymology Dictionary, etymonline.com, the compiler of which is Douglas Harper, who has an enthusiasm for the history of Cleveland street railway cars. Learning this I felt the secret handshake of the Asperger and was unsurprised to find the following in his brief online autobiography: ‘I was thought to be in need of remedial education for dyslexia; had the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome been known then, I have been told I might
have been given that.’

  *

  Money was tight. We were eating a lot of cheap mince, and liver. I applied for a broadcasting job but botched the interview.

  ‘Your application form is beautifully typed,’ they said.

  ‘My wife did that,’ I replied.

  I needed income. One evening in a pub the landlord heard me say I had done bar work.

  ‘I can give you a job, if you like,’ he said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now.’

  On Saturday nights the place was packed and a band containing the Punch cartoonist Wally Fawkes pulled them in. I didn’t get on with the other staff but the evenings went in a flash and I was reminded of my time at the hotel on the river.

  Later, I managed a high-street toyshop in Islington. A collection of elasticated animal noses was delivered: pig, horse, cow. I arranged them in a basket and wrote a notice: ‘Animal noses. Pick your own.’ The actor Bob Hoskins came in and spent a fortune but was shirty when I wanted to verify his credit card. I sold the protean Michael Ignatieff a wind-up steam train. ‘I thought you’d like that,’ I said. In the middle of summer, I put out a big Santa Claus holding a sign: ‘Only 173 shopping days to Christmas.’ The job had its moments, but I was at a loss. The owner resented my querying her instructions and my assistant complained that I was insufficiently bossy.

  I took a job at a lithographic printer’s run by a man who combed his hair across from the back. When he went to the post it was blown into a vertical ginger flame. His ink-covered assistant ate a lot of cold sausage and taught me to fan paper, a skill with which I can still impress people. They put me behind the counter, dealing ineptly with customers who wanted things photocopied.

  A mild little man asked me to copy some Polaroid pictures he had taken of himself wearing ladies underwear, and a famous actress wanted the whole of Othello reproduced. ‘Cheaper if you do it yourself,’ I said. There was an old soldier who frequented the place dressed in a smashed-up hat, disintegrating tie, and a threadbare shirt that poked out of the fly of his baggy trousers. His chin was a patchwork of smooth bits and rough bits and his broken glasses looked pre-war. But he was well scrubbed, smelling strongly of coal tar soap, and spoke in clipped officer-style tones.

  ‘I must have this document copied,’ he said. ‘It’s my letter to the Queen.’ I looked down at the scrawl-covered ream of dog-eared sheets so thumbed and soft they barely hung together.

  I didn’t know what had gone wrong for this man, but he must once have been a normal little boy sitting down to tea with his mum or running about laughing with his playmates. Not knowing quite how to handle the situation I hesitated, but a colleague, one of the world’s natural psychologists, stepped forward.

  ‘We can do this for you, Sir,’ he said, ‘but you will have to leave it with us.’ The man put both hands down on top of the papers and, like a cat with a kitten, drew them in protectively. He decided he would do it himself and was in the shop for hours.

  One day a man in a black suit came in. He showed me part of a newspaper containing a two-column story. ‘What do you think is wrong with this?’ he asked in an insistent monotone. I looked it over and read it through. I didn’t know what he was getting at. ‘Look,’ he said earnestly, not meeting my eye, ‘the margin between the columns has a vertical rule in it. That’s all wrong.’ I must have looked puzzled. ‘It’s the space between the columns that is the separator, not the rule. The rule does not help: it confuses.’ I made him five copies and he left.

  On the way home I realised he had been making a point so dazzlingly obvious that it was impossible to understand without deep thought. His five minutes with me made such an impression that in all the work I did in later years I would object whenever a designer or typesetter tried to use a rule instead of space to separate columns of text. He was an odd, monomaniacal character, that man: a chap after my own heart. It is only lately that I have realised that he was showing definite traits of Asperger’s syndrome.

  On Saturday mornings Lea and I would potter about the flat, drinking tea. Standing on tiptoe and looking across to the wood I used to listen to a radio programme called Loose Ends, in which a fey academic named Professor Donald Trefusis sometimes presented, ‘wireless essays’ on serious subjects. This was, in fact, character comedy of the highest quality. I admired the way the writer–performer, whoever he was, attacked full-frontally the things and people that annoyed him. The anger-turned-to-laughter reminded me of the letters of Edna Welthorpe (Mrs). I could do that, I thought. I would be good on Loose Ends. Not that anyone was going to invite me. It was only years later that I discovered the name of this young performer. He was Stephen Fry.

  We took weekend strolls around the suburb and I noted lampposts, bridges, and road signs. The signs were generally of the Kinneir and Calvert sort, but tucked away here and there one could find examples in the old style, which had evaded replacement. In one of these, the white arrowheads pointed to ‘Highgate; Holloway; Finchley’. Something about the character of this twenty-year-old notice told of a time of bomb sites, trams, and tweeds. Against the classic faded blue background, the letterspacing of the bold black capitals on white oblongs was good, and the typeface admirably clear, but as a unified thing it just wasn’t as effective as the new signs. Nonetheless, despite my love for the new, the muddle-through British charm of the quieter age shone out from the face of the old.

  Lea had been at the BBC for a while, working on various dramas. She was good at the job, but the pay was feeble. One day the man I had seen coming out of the ladies’ toilet at the radio and television training centre got in touch and offered her a job. He was the publisher of the Pope’s encyclicals in England and wanted to expand into making and selling videos. The money was a good deal more than the BBC and there was a pension, so she said yes. After a while he needed a new editorial assistant and he offered me the role.

  ‘I’ve never worked in publishing,’ I told him.

  ‘I’ll teach you. I think you’d be excellent,’ he said. ‘And I’ll pay you more than you’re earning.’

  I couldn’t believe my luck. The work sounded fascinating and Lea would be in an office upstairs, so we could unwind on the Tube home. The new boss was a change from the printer with the vertical hair. He was a polished Brasenose graduate who read Latin, and seemed clear-headed, sane, and sensible. Little did I know.

  I left the printer’s and started at the publisher’s, which owned a tall white building in a Pimlico square, minutes from Victoria station and close to the road where my mother had lived after her father’s death.

  ‘You will share an office with me,’ said the boss. ‘Here’s a key to the garden.’

  He was as good as his word, teaching me about book production and editorial matters. I was introduced to Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers and learnt about ‘Oxford style’. I found I was a natural proofreader who could spot a wrong-font hyphen at a thousand yards. I fell in love with the so-called ‘Oxford comma’, the much-argued-over, ‘extra’ comma before the last item in a list. I found some delicious examples of what could happen if you failed, or refused, to put one in: ‘This book is dedicated to my parents, Gertrude Stein and God’ and ‘Alan Whicker’s tour included meetings with Mother Teresa, an 800-year-old demigod and a collector of dildos.’

  These were the fag-end days of hot-metal printing, a world populated by old men who could zero in on a p instead of a q in a tray of upside-down back-to-front type. From them I learnt about the craft of compositing and printing. My childhood days poring over sheets of rubdown letters came back to me. There was an inky magic to the business, which was shortly to be swept away by computers.

  I sometimes ate my lunch in the beautiful garden in the middle of the square. The gardener, who wrote books on the subject, had a fondness for catapulting cables high into the plane trees, up which, over the years, he trained a forest of climbers.

/>   I was guided around the publisher’s stock room by two crones who had worked in the office since the war. Their life’s meaning was to hate each other. As they bickered I looked through the backlist: apologetics, the lives of the saints, the Catechism, Church history. One day I recognised the cover of one of the pamphlets. It was a biography of Padre Pio, a priest who claimed to have had on his hands the bleeding wounds of Christ. It was the very booklet Bob Strange had shown me years ago in the art department refectory.

  The company was full of unusual characters. Doing some sort of office management job was a woman who insisted on being called Bernard. Her face, a colleague told me, would change from green to blue whenever he walked into her office, as she clicked off the prototype poker website she was furtively using. In an attic room dwelt a tiny lady of about a hundred, who made tea for the boss in an iron kettle that weighed a ton because its interior was encrusted with two inches of pre-war limescale.

  The quickest way from the editorial office to the stock room was down a very dark staircase that backed onto a yard. The rear of other houses at right angles to this one looked over the same space. As I ran down one day I glanced through the tall window that lit the stairs. Across the way was a brightly illuminated room and walking about inside it a young woman, completely naked. There was a delight in seeing this graceful figure unselfconsciously moving about in her space, unaware that she was being observed, but at the same time I felt a pang of protectiveness. It was an odd business.

  One spring day, the big brown office telephone rang. It was a friend telling me of the death of the comedy actor Kenneth Williams. I remembered watching him during recordings of Just a Minute and thinking there was something very weird about the man. He was a terrific raconteur but he grimaced and scowled, and refused to drink the BBC water, calling it, ‘foetid’. He was noticeably remote, using very restricted eye contact, and accepting handshakes and the odd hug without enthusiasm. A cold fish. His editor Russell Davies called him ‘a strange and dislocated personality’, while his revealing diary, which he said eased his loneliness, recorded in perfectionist detail his isolation and constant health anxieties: notably his bowel problems.