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 chosen 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.

‘Mr Chambers will be home at five fifteen and he will take you to the pub,’ said Mrs Chambers, spraying furniture polish at a glazed print of a mountain sunset. Her premonition proved accurate and on the dot I spotted through the modesty glass of the front door the distorted form of Mr Chambers shimmering down the path.

After exchanging his blue trilby for a beige one he walked us to his local, where he bought me half a pint of sterilised beer and sat us down on a severely upholstered bench. Between the horse brasses, various Rotary Club notices announced forthcoming charitable dos. Mr Chambers spoke softly so as not to disturb the other merrymakers, who sat in nylon blazers beside the hissing plastic-coal fire looking as though life had dealt them hands of disappointment and defeat.

‘They make you feel very hospitable here,’ fumbled Mr Chambers, removing a particle of dust from the gleaming table with the corner of a starched handkerchief. It was as if his mind had been flushed clean by a blue chemical block.

There was no teaching at the university yet. Instead, something called freshers’ week was under way and everyone was registering, picking up timetables, choosing subsidiary courses, and finding their way about the campus. We had been encouraged to visit the freshers’ fair, an induction event taking place at the students’ union, the place, it was said, where you went to strike up new friendships, buy a scarf in the university colours, or ask for help if you were going bonkers.

The freshers’ fair turned out to be a ramshackle event, with representatives of assorted clubs, from beekeeping, to history, to gay, sitting behind trestle tables around the walls of what was apparently some sort of dance hall or dining hall. Depending on just where you stood, the place smelt of shepherd’s pie or pineapple urinal deodorisers. Here and there hooray henrys in striped shirts handed out rugby leaflets, new students chatted to other new students, and predatory agents of the various churches smiled at you competitively. Under a wisp of bunting someone was trying to recruit aspiring journalists to the student newspaper. A headline on its front page showed that the bar had been set low: ‘Cybernetics annex flat roof “prone to leaks” says student’.

I had never been to a freshers’ fair and, though everybody else appeared to know what was going on and what to do, I was at a loss. The rooms were lit by fluorescent lights, there were many people, and the hullabaloo was intense.

The walls seemed to be inching in on me so I made my way to the upstairs bar, which at this time of day was dark and quiet. The carpet smelt wonderfully of sour beer. I ordered a pint and sat down on my own in a musty corner. On the table was a cheaply printed leaflet. ‘Would you like to help us start a university radio station?’ it said. Radio was something I was keen on. I had always fiddled about with reel-to-reel tape recorders and microphones and I loved to listen to radio features on the BBC. I had been captivated by Plain Tales from the Raj, a series of programmes featuring stories of British India told by the people who were there. I admired the birdlike skill with which the producer had systematically assembled each episode from thousands of little pieces.

I was also deeply impressed by the poetic-montage features of a radio producer called, rather wonderfully, Piers Plowright. His haunting programme on the subject of death I have never forgotten.

Since the age of thirteen I had made a recording every year of the Christmas Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge, which was broadcast live on the radio. After editing out the Bible readings, which I knew almost by heart, I would transfer the carols to a cassette tape. I continued recording the broadcasts until the demise of cassettes, when, with a heavy heart, I threw out more than thirty years’ worth.

A related interest was sound effects, in which I took a great pleasure. I would annoy my family during episodes of Columbo by saying things like ‘Footsteps wrong as usual’ or ‘Funny how the sound of the closing front door is exactly the same as the bedroom door’. At other times I would announce, ‘That cat meowing is from BBC Sound Effects, LP 4, band 7a.’ I once gave a talk on the subject at school, to the frank bemusement and, I imagine, deep boredom of the class, for whom such details were irrelevant.

Just a Minute was a BBC radio comedy panel game that I greatly enjoyed. At that time it was taped in a former underground cinema in Lower Regent Street identifiable on the radio by the occasional rumble of Tube trains. I went to many of these recordings while I was at school and once saw the music hall comedian Tommy Trinder make a guest appearance. Among the regular contributors were the actor–impresario Derek Nimmo, who always arrived in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce; the chef-cum-MP Clement Freud, who tended to dismiss fans with a backhand brush-off; and Kenneth Williams, the actor, raconteur, and diarist. Unlike Freud, Williams was charm itself, especially with children, for whom he clearly had remarkable respect.

I slipped the leaflet about the new university radio station into my pocket.

Freshers’ week continued to pass slowly in a muddle of library tours, solitary pizza meals, a talk from the gowned sub-dean about the love of learning for its own sake, and a growing feeling that I had fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole. I spoke to almost nobody.

As an insulin-controlled diabetic it was important for me to sign up with a doctor to arrange my prescriptions so I went along to the university medical centre, which had a tank of warm-water fish in its reception and its own cottage-hospital-type ward upstairs. There were leaflets about VD, and posters asking for healthy student volunteers for a ‘research project’. A bearded fellow with his leg in a cast told me, ‘I did that. It’s money for nothing. All you do is masturbate into a yoghurt pot.’ It sounded a ridiculous way to make a living.

We had been told to report our presence to the art department. Art being perceived, possibly, as an ‘unclean’ subject, the department was situated on a separate site half an hour from the main campus. It was a pleasant stroll down the steep hill, past the Edwardian terraces and the hospital where Douglas Bader had had his legs amputated.

Like the main campus, this one was entirely self-contained. Enclosed by monastic shrub-sheathed cloisters was the sharply trimmed lawn of a central quadrangle. Off the quad were two or three departments, including art and food science, a subject that I never quite understood though I think it has something to do with the development of chemically engineered cheese and extruded snacks.

I walked the cloisters, a circuit I was to take many times over the next few years, till I reached the department’s administrative section: two or three offices clustered behind a pair of rickety double doors smeared with the painty finger marks of bygone students. In one of these rooms sat a secretary. I stepped forward, submitted my details, and a box was ticked.

The Professor of Fine Art was to give an introductory talk and an excited gaggle were arranging themselves about the studio on clattering metal chairs. Distant echoes of last term’s linseed oil filled the air and everybody but me was dressed in paint-splashed overalls. Most, for some reason, were wearing builders’ boots. They all smoked roll-ups, a club badge like the crest on Mr Chambers’ blazer pocket. In my jacket and V-neck sweater I must have looked like a representative of the local golf club.

The professor was a ghostly presence, so lukewarm that I remember almost nothing he ever said, though I do recollect the smell of his pipe smoke, which filled the corridors whenever he was there. He did no teaching that I recall.

After his trifling introduction we were spoken to by one of the lecturers who came up on the train from London most days to supervise the teaching of first-year students. This man was Austin Randall, a painter just out of his twenties who had been a student in the same department not long before. A tall figure with a hunch, Austin smoked incessant roll-ups, had brown dirt under his fingernails, and spoke with a distinctive whistly delivery. He often seemed to be going somewhere with what he was saying but the trouble was that when he got there you wondered why he had bothered. ‘There’sss sssixsss sssortsss of ssshapesss, I sssupossse,’ he said, ‘and sssixsss sssortsss of sssurfacccesss.’ Many students took such fatuities for pearls of wisdom. Austin’s paintings looked to me like occupational therapy.

Playing Robin to Austin’s Batman was a young woman called Fleeta Swit, who detested me from the start. As I would learn, Fleeta, like Austin, expected students to paint in a style resembling as closely as possible her own. She produced an unvarying stream of brightly coloured circles and squares, and if you decided that you might have an idea of your own — having been drawing and painting since you were a boy — you were shot down in flames. At the time I impugned, and I still impugn, the seriousness of Austin and Fleeta as teachers, as painters, and as people.

The best painter in the university was a man called Terry Frost, who had the titles Artist in Residence and Professor of Painting. He had a grey military moustache and zingy clothes, and was great friends with Roger Hilton and Mark Rothko. Frost was the only artist I have ever met who seriously wore a beret. He also wore huge spectacles that made him look like my grandmother. His work was beautiful and he made no qualitative distinction between figurative and abstract art, excelling in both. His paintings revealed those of Fleeta Swit to be frail derivations.

Terry Frost had a favourite aphorism. ‘Life’s a bowl of cherries,’ he would say, and he said it often. Sometimes I felt he was saying it because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He was a great family man and years later his son Stephen Frost would make his name as a comedian.

The most intellectually interesting member of staff was Tony the technician, a practical man with grown-up children. His job was to help around the rabbit warren of studios, which were divided up by year. He put up partitions between one student painter and the next, or fixed things that broke. I spoke to Tony as he prepared my space by erecting panels and securing them to the floor. ‘I’ve been here fourteen years,’ he told me, a nail between his teeth, and I’ve seen everything. The first year exhibition: really interesting, it all looks exciting and different. Second year: less so. Third year: hard to tell one painter from the next. Final show: everything exactly the same.’ Tony was Professor Emeritus of Having Your Head Screwed On and I think he alone amongst the staff noticed that there was something awry in me.

Among the new students were two Bobs. Bob Strange was aptly named. He dressed very oddly and had a pudding bowl haircut and vast unflattering glasses. His portfolio was full of drawings of classical sculpture. He smoked miniature cigars, which he would pierce with a cocktail stick when they shrank too small to hold with the fingers, enabling him to suck out the final minim of goodness.

Possibly because he was strange, Bob was one of the few people who did speak to me. One day he showed me a stick of chalky pastel. ‘It’s called sanguine,’ he said earnestly, looking slightly crackers, ‘It produces a blood-red line.’ He had unusual fixations, on one occasion showing me a pamphlet about a dead Catholic friar who was said to have had bleeding lesions on his hands corresponding with the crucifixion wounds of Jesus Christ. I was sceptical; he didn’t push it.

The other Bob was Bob Scotland: tall and tremendously self-confident, with no boundary between his chest hair and the stubble that darkened his chin twenty minutes after he had shaved. In one incomprehensible exercise that we were made to do, a huge roll of paper was pinned along a wall and we were instructed each to paint a vertical line on it. I made the tiniest mark I could, up near a corner. Bob Scotland splashed a four-foot-wide black strip down the middle, obliterating the lines of many of the other students.

The weeks passed. Everybody else seemed at ease. They compared paintbrushes, chatted, or invited each other to parties. Before long some were arriving in the studios hand in hand.

I was feeling strange. Though used to my own company, I hadn’t made proper human contact for too long and the hard edges of the days made me long for some softness. I eyed various girls in the studio. They seemed either unavailable or unattractive. There was Bernice: rather masculine and gruff in her denim fisherman’s smock, always smoking; there was Big Lil, who drank pints and had a huge face; there was pretty Sue, who, when I tried to say something amusing, rounded on me, catching me completely off guard. ‘What the hell,’ she snapped, ‘is that supposed to mean?!’ What had I said wrong? My favourite was a beautiful young woman called Alice, with strawberry blonde hair and a terrific smile. But she was going out with, and presumably staying in with, a fellow from the typography department, the son of a man who read out the news on television. Each time I tried to catch her eye she blanked me. The position was hopeless. I wondered what Katy was doing. I was homesick.

That evening, I returned to the Chambers’ house, where Mr and Mrs Chambers had dressed up for an evening out.

‘I was reading in the Post about someone that’s defamed the Thomas Moore statue,’ said Mr Chambers, squeezing his lapels like a barrister.

‘Defaced, do you mean?’

‘With pink paint.’

I was puzzled. ‘Which Thomas Moore statue?’ I asked.

Mr Chambers plainly thought I was slow. ‘At the university. The Thomas Moore statue.’

I realised he meant the Henry Moore sculpture that stood on the main campus not far from the library. Some angry students had daubed it with poster paint as a sign of their seriousness. The grounds staff had to spend more than five minutes wiping it off with a rag.

‘We go ballroom dancing on Monday,’ said Mr Chambers, swerving suddenly into a new lane. ‘That’s why we’re dressed in our refinery.’

It seemed to me that I couldn’t last long at the Chambers’ without being driven crazy. I felt I was in a different country, one with a similar language but a mysterious culture and no etiquette book.

After buying a bag of chips and eating them on my own in the silent dining room I went up to the bedroom. Net curtains covered the window and a decorative fan was arranged behind a print of orange horses galloping through the surf. Like the famous dolly–zoom shot in Hitchcock’s Vertigo the room seemed to be changing perspective in a way that was hard to understand. It was very warm, and I couldn’t turn down the radiator. I noticed a ringing in my ears.

Things seemed to have gone wrong somewhere. I was a facsimile of myself. An impostor. I was maintaining an exhausting camouflage, a mask. There was a veil between me and everyone else. The real me was hidden. Always had been hidden. Few spoke to me and though I made some bungled attempts to start up conversations, they petered out. I felt completely alone.

I decided to go out. Going out was better. I took a bus into town and walked along the main road towards the river. It was pelting down and the streetlamps were reflected in the varnished road, the spiderwebs heavy with rain. I reached a squat brown-and-cream church bleached at intervals by the headlights of passing cars. On the board was a notice: ‘SOMETHING IS MISSING FROM THIS CH__CH: U. R.’ Above this it said, ‘Church of St Jude, Patron for the Hopeless and the Despaired’. I tried the door but unsurprisingly it was locked.

I wandered back into the street, which was shin-deep in the fallen leaves of the September plane trees. In the gutter lay the body of a ginger tomcat, eyes open, a thread of blood darkening the pavement beside his mouth. Hit by a car, I suppose. I walked past an empty café, past a door with a sign reading ‘Dom Polski’ and past a long industrial building with hundreds of chamber pots stacked in the window. Mock-antiques for export to the USA I imagined.

I went and sat in a huge ugly pub called the Janus. I had a pint of beer that made me shudder and watched the minutes tick slowly away. Everything in the pub was big: the tables, the pattern on the carpet, the noise coming out of the jukebox. It was a hall of mirrors.

Being a university town the usual uncouth toilet graffiti was augmented by more erudite benefactions. Over the toilet roll holder in the cubicle some wag had put: ‘Sociology degrees. Help yourself.’ Above this was neatly written: ‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth!’ Beside this it just said, ‘BUM’.

I could see the past with knifelike sharpness, but not the future. I wished I could feel happy or excited about something. I went to the telephone box in the vestibule, where I tried to ring Jon back home. There was no answer. A couple in the corner seemed to be talking about me so I left the pub and boarded a juddering bus back to the house, letting myself in with the key on the Lions Club key ring that Mrs Chambers had given me. It was just gone nine o’clock. I got into bed and fell asleep to the sound of a buzzing streetlamp.

*

I wasn’t sure how long I had been awake, but a hard moon was silhouetting the weft of the curtains. I’d been having a nightmare, which had faded, leaving me with only the horrible feeling attached to it. I got up and looked into the blue deserted road.

Solitude had been my refuge from loneliness, which, it seemed, came most when I was with other people. But the strain of getting through each self-punishing hour had exhausted me. I had imploded. I was down a black hole, thinking only of myself, because I had to survive. I was swimming in armour.

The abrupt changes of the past few days, the new town, the new routines, the incessant new information, the endless decisions and demands, the overstimulation, and the flubbed social overtures were all too much. I burst into tears.

My psyche, which had been frail for some time, was starting to come apart in my hands. Rooms were not really shrinking in on me: I was losing touch with reality.

In the morning, through a towering effort, I made it into the university. There were a few days left of self-regulated freedom before the official start of the academic year the following Monday. I had reached a turning point, the point at which relief from the suffering had become the vital thing. What I did that day is lost to me but at some moment I decided to stop, or anyway did stop, taking my insulin. The consequences of this I understood.

Autistic people die significantly younger than members of the typical population. At the more severe end of the continuum, it is epilepsy that does it. At the Asperger’s end — where they are twice as likely as people in general to die young — it is suicide. This increased suicide risk is not a minor one: Aspergers are nine times more likely to deliberately kill themselves than non-autistic people. To say I had resolved to end my life is, though, not exactly right. Though it is silliness to live when to live is torment, all I really wanted was for the intolerable pain to stop. Just draw down the curtain and make it stop.

My decline was steady. I became extravagantly thirsty, exhausted. I sat on my bed or wandered confused around the campus. I stumbled and tripped. My eyes became blurred. I lost weight. I gasped for breath. Jagged pains cramped my back. My body was eating itself; shutting down. There was nobody to notice.

One evening in my bedroom at the Chambers’ I found myself bent double, groaning in anguish. I staggered into the hallway and collapsed. This was it. Mrs Chambers called an ambulance. I faded to black.

*

I faded in again. There was a twisted square of light on the bright wall opposite. This was not a room I recognised. I was under a white sheet. Much of the furniture was white. A brisk nurse came in. This was some sort of hospital.

‘Back with us, then? Let’s sit you up. The doctor will be coming to see you in a minute.’

A pleasant breeze drifted through the window and I could hear a blackbird singing. The door opened and in glided a confident man in his forties, wearing a grey double-breasted jacket. His hair was polished and there was about him an ambience of kindliness, humour, and aftershave.

‘I’m Doctor Alexander,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling?’

I made a face.

‘You’re in the university medical centre. Your blood glucose is off the radar and your body is consuming its own muscle. What we’re going to do is get your insulin sorted out and once your numbers start coming down we’ll slowly try to get some weight back on you. We’ll monitor you for a bit. Doing things too quickly — that’s how you make mistakes.’

I nodded.

‘Anything you need? Anyone you’d like to talk to?’

I shook my head.

Dr Alexander was the first person since I had arrived at the university to pay close attention to me, to say something kind.

They had been feeding me water enriched with salt and glucose and now they wanted me to eat. But I had no appetite and was turning away food. One day I caught sight of my face in the mirror. It was cadaverous. When my parents came to visit they looked terrified. The nurses tried preparing all kinds of stuff for me but the taste of a piece of melon — which they sent out for after I had said I might manage it — was so strong that I was unable to swallow it. The brisk nurse lost her temper, which frightened me so much that I forced myself to chew a corner of dry toast and gradually I was able to build up my appetite again.

After I had put on a bit of weight she came in one evening.

‘I’m sorry I barked at you,’ she said, ‘but we were so worried. We thought you might …’

‘What? Die?’

‘Let’s get these pillows sorted out a bit,’ she said, plumping them with unnecessary force.

When Dr Alexander discharged me two weeks later I was still very thin. He gave me a penetrating look. He realised, I think, that there was more to this than met the eye. ‘I never forget my diabetic patients,’ he said, writing his name and number on a slip of paper and pushing it across to me. ‘Ring me up any time you need to.’

Having missed the first couple of weeks in the art department, I approached Austin Randall to explain my absence. He seemed not to be listening and kept looking over my shoulder. His understanding of his pastoral role was, I felt, poor.

I went to my space to arrange my paints and brushes. Partitions separated me from a girl called Lucile on one side and I forget who on the other.

‘I owe you a tube of chrome yellow,’ said a voice. It belonged to a young man with a thick orange moustache who was wiping a brush in a space on the other side of the room.

‘I’m going for a coffee,’ he said. ‘Fancy one?’

He peeled off his overalls and we strolled along the cloister. I caught sight of Fleeta Swit ambling across the lawn, a length of toilet paper flapping from her shoe. On the fascia of a large shed-like construction in an area behind one of the buildings the hand-painted word ‘Refectory’ announced its purpose. My new acquaintance ordered coffee, I asked for tea, and we crossed the creaking floor to one of the tables.

‘I’m Anthony White,’ he said.

‘Hello,’ I said. My portcullis was still down.

Anthony was a couple of years older than me, he liked football, which made my heart sink, but he also knew a great deal about the history of modern painting, Marvel comics, and black-and-white B-movies. He was dressed in a natty thirties tie and cavalry twill trousers as if for the role of a passerby in a film about plucky Londoners carrying on regardless as their houses are blitzed around them.

‘We thought you’d chucked yourself in the river,’ said Anthony.

‘Bit under the weather,’ I said. ‘Been banged up in the medical centre.’

‘I sneaked a tube of chrome yellow out of your box,’ he said.

‘Keep it,’ I said.

‘You’re the focus of quite a bit of gossip. You’ve scared half of them stiff. You look so haughty.’

I was astonished. This was the first time I had heard myself described in this way, but it wouldn’t be the last. My social dread was being mistaken for disdain. I thought I had been invisible but it wasn’t other people who were being standoffish, it was, apparently, me.

I spoke to Anthony every day for the next four years and I have known him now for four decades. He sends me beautifully painted birthday cards, and the other day an invitation to his sixtieth birthday dropped onto the mat. Though we meet only occasionally we pick up right where we left off. Much of life hangs on the throw of the dice and if Anthony had not run out of chrome yellow that day it is possible we would never have become friends.

In the evening, he invited me up for dinner at his hall of residence on the main campus. Starley Hall was a three-storey brickwork enormity so ugly it made you laugh. Named after a dead vice chancellor, it resembled a 1960s barracks: four sheer walls enclosing a square of prison-like corridors overlooking a meagre lawn. It was the only single-sex hall in the university, and was, I learnt, favoured by rugby players. The clattering of studs down the passages was a constant background sound effect.

Anthony took me into the bar, where a banner announced: ‘Freshers’ Week 1978’. The date had been crudely done in black pen over a palimpsest of deletions going back years. I ordered two pints of beer and a packet of peanuts, which the barman pulled from a display card decorated with a lady in a cowboy hat and very short shorts. We carried our food over to a bench, where we sat down and surveyed the room.

Tongue-and-groove pine slats clad the walls and a pair of self-closing ship’s kitchen doors led into a dining room that gave off a perfume of meat pie and disinfectant. The bar’s ceiling was pocked with gobbets of dried Blu Tack, drawing pins, and bits of Christmas tinsel. A handful of pink-faced boys, one with a haircut like an erect horse’s mane, were chatting and laughing beside a coin-operated telephone.

‘We’re having curry,’ said Anthony.

‘Who’s “we”?’ I asked warily.

‘Rick, me, and a chap called Bill Bradshaw. You’ll like him, he’s unusual.’

Dr Alexander had instructed me to stuff in the calories, and wanting very much not to be alone I agreed to join Anthony and the others for curry. We walked up the corridor to Bill Bradshaw’s kitchen area, which was, so it was said, the liveliest in the hall, and the place to be seen.

A fug of cigarette smoke hung in the air and Rick, who like us was a first year art student, was preparing to go round to the curry house. I had seen him chatting to four girls that morning, flicking his golden hair over his shoulder with studied nonchalance. Anthony introduced us and Rick told me he had once smashed a guitar over the head of a drummer who he found having sexual intercourse with his girlfriend. ‘You hit the wrong person there,’ I said.

‘Tom’s joining us for curry,’ said Anthony.

‘What do you want?’ asked Rick, waving a menu at me.

‘He’ll have the same as me!’ bellowed a reverberant voice. Down the corridor buzzed a barrel-chested man in an electric wheelchair, which he was directing with his toe. His legs were essentially thighs with feet on the end and he seemed to have no arms. He was the source of the cigarette smoke.

‘Shake hands, newcomer,’ he said, proffering his bare right foot by lifting it off the special tray he had on the front of his chair. This was Bill Bradshaw, a man who was to become one of my closest friends. I took his foot awkwardly and shook it. Bill bent forward and replaced between his first and second toes the cigarette he had been sucking.

‘Ever eaten a phaal?’ he asked, coughing through a cloud of smoke.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘It’s the hottest fucking curry ever.’

‘Hotter than vindaloo?’

‘Suck it and see,’ said Bill.

I felt that a challenge had been issued. Though anxious by nature, and cautious by principle, there is a contradictory risk-taking element to my character. ‘All right,’ I said.

‘Get extra beer!’ Bill shouted after Rick. A lot of university life so far seemed to involve drink.

There was a pregnant pause. I didn’t see how I could not refer to Bill’s unusual bodily construction without it becoming something, if left, that was forever too late to mention.

‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ I said, ‘what in God’s name happened to you?’ There was a guffaw followed by rather a lot of coughing.

‘Bluntness gets points,’ said Bill. ‘It’s a congenital condition, Tom. It’s called, “phocomelia”. It’s not thalidomide. Let’s open those cans.’

Bill told me he was in the second year of a linguistics degree, and said he was related to the Bradshaws, of Bradshaw’s Railway Timetable fame, which I knew about from its mention in the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Bill’s beer-drinking technique was intriguing. He would bend forward, grip the rim of the pint glass with his teeth, and lift it off his tray before tilting it back to swallow a mouthful.

When the curries arrived, a semicircle was formed around Bill and me. We opened our foil containers, the contents of which were black as the sea. I peered into the depths. Everything solid seemed to have been dissolved. Pouring the treacly phaal over the rice, I gave it a nervous sniff. The miasma made me splutter.

‘Ah, the mystic Orient,’ said Bill. ‘Well, here goes.’

Gripping his fork between his toes he bent double, inserted a mouthful of curry, and sat up again, chewing vigorously.

I took my first, deliberately small, mouthful and chewed it like a debutante. It was certainly spicy, but nothing special. I took another, more generous, forkful and became aware of a creeping conflagration beginning at the back of my throat but spreading forwards until my head was engulfed. Tears came to my eyes and I started to cough. Rick passed me a can of beer. ‘Alcohol dissolves it,’ he said urgently. Water only makes it worse.’

Bill was clearly suffering too. Rivulets of sweat were rolling down his temples into his bushy beard.

‘Well?’ he asked, through a mouthful of food.

Bravado seemed the best plan. ‘It’s a bit warm,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you that.’

The others finished their curries and tipped their plates into the sink. Then they sat down to watch us. Breaths were held.

We ended the ordeal pretty much together and though my gorge was ablaze I became conscious of a feeling of anaesthetic calm. ‘Endorphins,’ said Bill. I think it was the first time I had heard the word. We wiped our foreheads and Bill lit a cigarette. I had passed the test.

I began spending more and more time at Starley Hall with Anthony and Bill. At the end of the first term Mr and Mrs Chambers decided that accommodating students, or, at least, accommodating me, was perhaps not what they were cut out for, and they asked me to leave. So, at Anthony’s nudging, I took over the place of a student who had just moved out of Starley. It was a warm, decent-sized ground-floor room with a regular cleaning lady, a single bed, bookshelves, and a window onto the shrivelled quad.

Much of the first year in the art department was spent suffering the indignities of the daft exercises that we were continually set. I wanted to draw things I could see but was told that this was ‘mere illustration’. I felt like Josef K. accused of some mysterious crime, without having done anything wrong. Why this loathing for the human drive to record what we see? I wondered. To me, cave paintings, Rembrandt, and Rothko were part of the same story.

Instead of matter-of-factly going along with things I took it all too much to heart. If Miss Legge could have seen me now she would have railed at me again for having turned up my nose at the Central School. The trouble with advice is that you cannot tell the good from the bad until it’s too late.

One student who took the whole thing in his stride was Charley Lindsay, a boozy and charming young fellow who knew how the system worked and how to work it. He did almost nothing for four years because he was permanently propping up the bar in the Beehive or the Turk’s Head. Everybody including the teaching staff liked Charley, even though they barely saw him outside the pub. One evening, full of beer, he fell downstairs holding a knife and cut his little finger tendon, which they replaced with a bit of toe.

‘If they ask if I’ve had my bowels open,’ said Charley when I saw him in hospital, ‘I always say yes.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Tell people what they want to hear; it makes life easier.’

I was impressed by this worldliness but repelled by the dishonesty. Someone later whispered that Charley Lindsay was actually Charles Lloyd-Lindsay, who had learned at nanny’s knee how to glide along on life’s gondola while some other poor fool pushed with the stick. Not for Charlie the bleak single-sex Starley Hall. The rumour was that he, like fellow students who had been to public school or who were otherwise perceived to be of good stock, had got himself put up in Christ Church Hall, a building of Tudor pretensions, endowed with crenellated turrets and stone archways. Such shameless social engineering, if that’s what it was, struck me as squalid. Others, less moralistic, just shrugged.

Every art student had to take art history as a subsidiary first-year subject. Anthony and I had agreed that one year of art history would be a doddle for most of us painters, and so it proved. We did not mingle with the art historians, none of whom seemed particularly interested in painting, or aesthetics, or being painters themselves. They were like eunuchs in the harem: they knew how it was done; they saw it done every day; but they were unable to do it themselves.

The subject of art almost never came up in art history lectures. There was instead a zeal for dates, schools of painting, the politics of the time, who had known whom, who had done what to whom, and, most absurdly, what paintings were called. The only thing I remember of the art history professor was that, while working in the beautiful art library one Sunday, he tripped on a Turkish rug and went hands-first through the glass doors of a bookcase. Microsurgeons at the nearby hospital had their work cut out.

I recall only one art history lecturer with any clarity, a softly spoken young Scotsman with degrees in law, philosophy, and modern languages from a number of distinguished British and French universities, as well as one in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where the spy Anthony Blunt had admired his oomph. Somebody said, ‘That man is chair material,’ which puzzled me.

The man’s name was Neil MacGregor and he went on to run the National Gallery and the British Museum. Though I have forgotten everything he told us about painting, sculpture, and architecture, I do remember that during one of his talks some people were nattering. ‘Will you please shut up at the back!’ he said. Though not good enough, perhaps, for a book of quotations, this did stick in my mind.

As well as art history, all undergraduates had to pass a first-year exam in a third subject, one of their own choosing. I plumped for philosophy, imagining stimulating tutorials in which we would be thrashing out tricky problems such as ‘What is beauty?’ or ‘How ought one to behave?’ or ‘Does it make any sense to talk about the “meaning” of life?’ As it turned out, we were just told to read a lot of old books and attend tedious lectures. The only chance to discuss ideas came in tutorials during which everyone spoke in a pre-agreed code that was gobbledegook to me. They used terms like naturalistic fallacy and secundum quid, which sounded like the final part of a two-part payment.

The only time I scored a point in philosophy was when I declined an invitation to agree that atoms were real. ‘Aha!’ said the tutor, ‘Another Wittgenstein.’ As a young man, Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, had famously annoyed Bertrand Russell by refusing to accept that there was not a rhinoceros in the room.

Like Hans Asperger, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was born in Vienna, the youngest of nine children. His father was described as a harsh perfectionist, lacking in empathy. His mother was characterised as anxious. He was almost certainly autistic.

As a boy, Ludwig was fascinated by machinery and was so technically adept that by the age of ten he was able to make a working model of a sewing machine out of bits of wire and wood.

The family was musically educated; his father was a good violinist, and his brother became a celebrated concert pianist, who continued playing even after he lost an arm. Ludwig himself had absolute pitch and could whistle lengthy and intricate tunes. He played the clarinet and also composed.

He had a superb sense of proportion and later in life he designed a house for his sister Margaret, paying very close attention to every detail: drawing each window, door, lock, and radiator with such care that they might have been precision instruments. It took him a year to design just the door handles. The radiators, another year. Nothing was unimportant.

Unsociable and strange, with mad staring eyes, Wittgenstein had very few friends throughout his life and found even simple social exchanges difficult. The Times reported his periods of ‘extreme abnegation and retirement’, likening him to, ‘a religious hermit of the contemplative type’.

He studied aeronautical engineering and later became a mechanical engineer. At other times he was a schoolmaster and a gardener for a monastery, where he inquired about becoming a monk. Engineering, gardening, and philosophy are all systems-based occupations attractive to the autistic mind. They demand, like the routines of the monk, little in the way of sociability.

In Christopher Sykes’ BBC film A Wonderful Life (1989), the wife of Wittgenstein’s doctor, with whom he was staying at the time of his death, said that Ludwig refused to shake hands, and, ‘seemed as oblivious as if he was walking through us … Normally he sat at breakfast facing a window, not speaking to anyone … He was just the man in the corner.’

He suffered from terrific loneliness, and depression was his constant companion, as it had been for three of his brothers, who killed themselves. He too continually thought of suicide. ‘My day passes,’ he said, ‘between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed.’

Sulky, snappish, sensitive, and nervous, he was attuned to any change in mood, or the tiniest slight. In spite of this personal touchiness he could himself be very offensive. The physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson at first took exception to being on the receiving end of his rudeness, but later made allowances: ‘He was a tortured soul,’ he said, ‘living a lonely life among strangers …’ Philosopher Anthony Quinton described him as ‘an extremely isolated figure, perhaps locked up mainly in his own thoughts’.

Like many autistics, Wittgenstein found solace in nature: sailing, gardening, walking, and observing the natural world. Among his other interests were pulpy detective stories, which he loved. He also visited the cinema, where he insisted on sitting in the front row so that there was nothing in his field of vision but the screen.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is generally agreed to have been the most original philosopher of modern times, coming up with two entirely new, though incompatible, philosophies — one early in his philosophic life, the other late. These dealt with language, a frequent preoccupation of autistics. His special concern was with trying to work out how it is that language represents the world. Though his two different approaches became highly influential, he had, by the end of his life, disowned them both, stating that it was impossible to put into words anything that really mattered.

His writing was as distant and aloof as his personal behaviour. But despite his obsession with being intellectually ‘well scrubbed’ and his immensely fastidious insistence on precision and discipline, his gnomic Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was obscure even to philosophers used to opacity. To the ordinary person it is about as much use as a chocolate teapot. When his English translator asked him what he had meant by certain things he either said he had forgotten or that he couldn’t understand how he could have been such a fool as to write what it looked as though he might have meant. How much use is this sort of thing?

The otherworldliness of much philosophy and the abstract peculiarity of its language started to annoy me, and as time passed I found myself drawn instead to science. Using scientific method you could make concrete predictions based on reliable underlying laws; science was testable, and it was less highfalutin. How I got through a whole year of philosophy beats me.

*

Spring followed winter and, as the wisteria’s heavy perfume wafted across the campus, posters appeared asking for writers for the end-of-year review. I went along to a meeting and was overawed by the sophistication of some of the students there. Most were two or three years older than me, which seems an important difference at that age. Two of them — Andy and Jimmy — were doctoral students approaching their thirties. They seemed impossibly mature and wise. To my delighted amazement I recognised that much of the show’s writing, produced mainly by Andy and Jimmy, was distinctly superior. How wonderful to find some people who really knew what they were doing. Of course it wasn’t exclusively top notch: after becoming irritated in early rehearsals by the constant reference to a kangaroo as a mammal I approached Andy, who was directing. ‘That should be “marsupial”,’ I said. ‘It’s more precise and it’s a funnier word in context.’

‘See what you can do with this,’ he said, stuffing a crumpled sketch into my hand, making me suddenly an accidental script doctor. I remember suggesting a few improvements, including some language jokes with a German lady at a bus stop and a bit of business with cucumbers in a bicycle basket. Andy chuckled but I was sure he would soon find me out as the impostor I was.

At the end of the year I somehow passed my exams and got myself a job for the long vacation in a town down the river with a pretty suspension bridge. In the high street was a hotel and it was here that I was to be employed as barman and factotum.

Charley told me he had landed a job as a whisky deliveryman. Any breakages, he was warned, and he must return the bottle’s unbroken cap seal. ‘What I do,’ he said, ‘is turn the bottle upside-down and hit it below the label with a steel ruler. The bottom flies off and you can then drink the Scotch and return the seal intact.’ I was shocked.

Reporting for my hotel job on the first day, I met the boss, an Italian who combed the remaining six strands of his hair over his shining scalp. He introduced me to a few of my new colleagues including a pretty young waitress from Wolverhampton and a chef called Mike: cynic, lothario, and wit. Mike pointed to the kitchen cookers, which were mounted on casters and stood in huge stainless-steel trays that caught the dripping fat, custard, and fallen scraps of food. ‘A company came to clean those trays recently,’ he told me. ‘They pulled out the cookers and underneath was a gigantic carpet of pus.’ It was a vivid picture he painted.

Gerry the washer-upper was scrubbing an oven tray and wanted to tell me about his favourite subject — his time in the Far East after the war.

‘What do you remember best?’ I asked, hoping for some historical colour.

‘Those Japanese girls,’ he said. ‘They’ll do anything.’ I noticed a blob of ash drop from his cigarette onto a tray of tomato salad.

There were several bars in the hotel and I was kept busy, learning on the job. I was very anxious at the beginning, partly because of my inability to chat with customers, and partly because of my severe problem with numbers, which made it difficult to work out prices fast, especially when customers were three deep at the bar, all shouting and waving pound notes. Out of desperation I came up with my own method: calculating the pounds first and adding the pennies afterwards. This resulted in weird mental sums that went, ‘One pound forty-four, plus three pounds twenty-eight, that’s four pounds sixty-twelve.’ But it worked for me.

The assistant manager was a compact fellow of about my age, whose mission was to become a silver-service waiter. He was bright and ambitious but prematurely world-weary having got his girlfriend pregnant while still at school. Trapped in a curdled marriage he found his job a release from the limbo of dirty nappies and tired harangues. At the end of my first shift, which flew past, he came to help me with the mountain of glasses.

‘Do you want to wash or dry?’ he asked.

‘I’ll die,’ I said, which kept him laughing for several weeks.

I was being put up in the staff lodgings, where I briefly shared a room with a Parisian student who wore red silk underpants to bed. Other members of this transitory menagerie were a Portuguese chef and his dishwashing wife. In a hutch at the end of the scrappy garden the chef kept rabbits that he fussed over like a dowager. One day I saw him in tears after he had broken the neck of one and cooked it for his dinner. His wife explained in stumbling English that this was the purpose of these animals, but that it made him cry every time.

One sultry evening after the clamour had died down I was tidying the bottles behind the bar, a repetitious classification job ideal for the systemising mind. The pretty Wolverhampton waitress, whose name was Soraya, came over. She was engaged to another hotel employee, a prognathic clod with wide shoulders.

‘Would you like to go out for a meal?’ she asked without preamble. I was immediately alert.

‘How do you mean?’ I said.

‘Brett’s going to a party and he won’t take me,’ she said.

‘Are you sure that’s wise?’

‘Look, it’s just food. Nothing else.’

Having lived like a monk for too long, the promise of female company sounded like just what the doctor ordered, so I agreed. A more experienced person might have warned me that this was not a good idea.

We were to meet in a local restaurant so I showered and ran a comb through my hair and through the highly unfashionable handlebar moustache that I was beginning to cultivate. I walked the short distance to the place. Soraya had got there before me.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘What would you like to drink?’

‘I’ve got butterflies,’ she said.

At this moment warning sirens should have gone off, but instead of thanking her for a delightful evening and going straight home I went to the bar.

During dinner I was discretion itself. Afterwards she wanted to walk along the river but halfway over the bridge she stopped me.

‘Tom,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Are you gay?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because you’re the only man I’ve ever met who doesn’t try it on all the time.’

‘But you’re engaged,’ I said. ‘And anyway that is not a respectful way to behave.’ I was starting to sound like the Most Reverend Donald Coggan.

‘I’ve never met anyone like you,’ said Soraya, suddenly clasping my hand and intertwining her fingers with mine. Full of beer and also wine I did not dissuade her.

‘Let’s go down here,’ I said, indicating a secluded spot on the riverbank. She stiffened immediately.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I know what men are like. You all want the same thing.’ I got the feeling that she had been hanging around with the wrong sort of men.

‘We’ll just sit on the bench,’ I said. I led her down and we sat beside each other listening to the lapping water. We discussed what she had seen on the television, why southerners pronounced ‘jug’ ‘jag’ instead of ‘joog’, and, less trivially, her unhappy life at home in the West Midlands, where all men wanted the same thing.

I looked up into the crisp sky. I could see several constellations, and recalled my boyhood interest in astronomy. I squeezed Soraya’s arm and pointed out Cassiopeia. I watched the soft light on her upturned nose as she inspected the constellation’s giant W for the first time in her life. She was a remarkably pretty, intelligent girl who seemed horribly ill informed about almost everything.

A church carillon sounded the quarters. She stopped and looked steadily into my eyes. Then she let go of my fingers and very deliberately put her palm into my lap. Catalysed by the alcohol pumping through my temples, desire erupted and I roughly took hold of her. She moaned luxuriantly.

Nemesis follows hubris and next morning the boyfriend demanded to interrogate me in the bar. A background tape was playing a quiet medley of hits, and to the accompaniment of an ersatz Nancy Sinatra singing a soundalike version of These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ I delivered in my defence a series of statements that, though strictly true, were non-incriminating. My bland account of a dullish evening somehow persuaded the boyfriend that I hadn’t been a-messin’ where I shouldn’t’ve been a-messin’ and that his girlfriend’s late arrival home minus certain articles of clothing was innocuous. Thus I avoided being punched. I convinced myself that my brain had been too subtle for his brawn, though I did wonder afterwards whether Soraya hadn’t just told him I was gay.

Though my stonewalling had been strictly truthful, I knew it had also been dishonest and this troubled me. I consoled myself that the preservation of my teeth had been a justifiable motive. I was also concerned that this oaf might take physical revenge on Soraya. And of course I was young. And of course I had not been the one pushing it. And of course I had been drunk. This is called ‘rationalisation’.

I wonder what pretty little Soraya is doing today. She must be sixty. Has she retained her naive poise, or ballooned out, lost teeth, and been shunned by the men who once all wanted the same thing but no longer want it, at least not from her?

*

The leaves were trembling along the river and the holiday was coming to an end. There was a new assistant manager who was annoying everyone by poncing about smoking Balkan Sobranie cigarettes through a holder. Custom was slackening off and summer staff were leaving the hotel. Soraya and her fiancé had gone to Weston-super-Mare and Mike the chef thought he might join the army.

On my last day I knocked off early and went to look round the church that had chimed the quarters as I sat beside Soraya that night. It was a Victorian Gothic number with a skinny stone spire and chequered flushwork. As I walked into the cool interior the door swung shut with a boom. Pews were ranked among the great yellow arches, and dusty standards hung from the walls. I sat down under a discreet loudspeaker and thought about Katy. She was somewhere now, doing something. I could draw a line from where I was sitting to wherever she was. We were physically connected. Everything was connected. I got on the train back to the university.

After ten weeks of dehydrated breakfast mushrooms and carousing rugby clubbers I had decided to move out of Starley Hall and was to spend the rest of my four years in a small but convenient bedsitting room in the town. The room was in the attic of an Edwardian house, my neighbours on the top landing being a giant black man who played eye-watering reggae that shook the rafters while he bellowed into a microphone, and a pale bearded Scotsman called Tim Scattergood who brought a different woman back to his flat each night. The walls were thin and when I wasn’t being kept awake by the pounding music I was listening to the squeaking of Tim’s springs and the grunts of his various lady friends. On the floor below me lived a strange man who wore kilts and cried himself to sleep.

During the second year we were left more to our own devices in the art department. I learned etching and also lithography, a technique unchanged since the eighteenth century. First you drew onto a smooth stone with a greasy pencil. Then you applied acid and gum arabic, which smelt of cat’s pee when it went off. You then wet the stone and applied ink, which stuck only to the original greasy drawing. Finally you overlay a sheet of paper and put the stone to press. The magic moment came when you peeled back the paper to reveal your drawing, in reverse. The work I produced was heartily loathed by the teaching staff, and they let me know it.

I became vaguely friendly with a student called Diana. She had been to an expensive school in Highgate and was polished. I was talking to her one day about turps or something and jiggling my leg, as I like to do. ‘Don’t do that in my space, please Tom,’ she said with a laugh. Diana’s dad had bought her a house in town. The wallpaper was peeling and each door was sloppily painted in different colours, which unsettled me. Diana let out rooms to students, including Anthony, who, like me, had moved out of Starley Hall. One of her tenants smelt very strongly of antiseptic. She took me to his room. ‘Have a look,’ she said, pushing open the door with her elbow. Thousands of empty TCP bottles covered the floor and the bed. The smell was hard to describe.

Some of Diana’s tenants were girls from the art department. Alice, the strawberry blonde who ignored me, had a room near the staircase and was often obliged to pass me as I sat talking to Anthony in the kitchen. After a while she began to nod grudgingly when she went in or out of her room. One day we were discussing the Sony Walkman, a newish battery-run gadget for listening to cassettes through earphones while you walked along. Was the plural ‘Walkmen’ or ‘Walkmans’? I wondered. Alice didn’t know. She smiled mysteriously.

Jon, my friend from school, had moved to London to study at the Slade. He was staying in a hall of residence near King’s Cross, not far from the National Youth Theatre, where Michael Croft had looked me up and down in his office a few years before. King’s Cross is now a sterile promontory of gentrification, craft beer, and al fresco dining. When Jon was there it was a lovely shithole of tarts and drunks.

I began travelling to London on a Friday evening and staying on Jon’s floor over the weekend, a procedure I kept up over three years. I spent more than I could afford on a plaster bust of William Blake from the National Portrait Gallery. It stands on my bookcase today, next to an old box of Woodbine cigarettes. One day I stopped off in the Berkshire village of Cookham to visit the Stanley Spencer museum. Spencer, whose work I liked, was a peculiar painter and a peculiar man. Slovenly looking, he dressed in ludicrous hats and grubby looking formal jackets, frequently with his pyjamas underneath. In the rare interviews that I have seen he makes no eye contact whatever.

He had a strange, distant relationship with his two daughters, one of whom said that he, ‘needed to be alone a great deal … he had to go into himself and rummage around and walk about inside himself’. He was curiously naive, and, to everyone’s dismay, married a lesbian freeloader who moved her partner into his house before taking him to the cleaners and evicting him.

Spencer had a series of narrowly focused unchanging interests, including painting, sex, and the Bible. He would traipse through the lanes of Cookham pushing an old pram full of paints and brushes, recording in abnormal detail every leaf and blade of grass. He was also a prolific writer of lists, which documented, among other things, every single plant he had included in his paintings.

At the time I didn’t know that these peculiarities were autistic traits. All I knew was that Stanley Spencer reminded me very much of Bob Strange, the intense student who stuck cocktail sticks into cigars.

After my visit to Cookham I got back on the train to continue my trip to London. It was one of those clanking slam-door trains that used to call at all the halts and produce a lot of diesel smoke. In time we pulled up at a quiet station where an old man supporting himself on two sticks clambered aboard. As we took off I noticed that although he and I were the only occupants of the carriage he had chosen to sit on the seat across the aisle from me.

We had been jiggling along for a few minutes when I became aware that I was being watched. I peered furtively at the old man’s reflection and he caught my eye. I looked him in the face.

‘Is your name Thomas?’ he asked quite suddenly.

Although I am not prone to supernatural woo-woo an eerie thrill ran through me. Being of a scientific bent I tried to work out what rational thing might explain the accuracy of his query: a wild guess? (improbable), an elaborate prank? (even less likely), or did the old fellow think he knew me? If so, how did he know my name and who could he possibly be?

I thought I might have some identifying label hanging from my bag or coat, like a wartime evacuee, but I quickly decided against this. In any case, nobody called me Thomas except my parents.

Then it struck me that this serious-faced old chap might be my long-lost grandfather, the bigamist, who had abandoned his family, but kept in touch sporadically with my father, enough to know my name.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s right.’

He gave me a respectful nod. ‘Thomas the cat,’ he mused, looking kindly at me for a moment.

‘Where do you live?’

I told him.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘A nice town. A nice place.’ He smiled a rather wistful smile and turned slowly away to watch the sunny banks and trees passing by his window.

I sucked my teeth. Should I take things further or should I let sleeping dogs lie? Before I had come to a conclusion, we drew into a station, where he got off with his two sticks, as best he could. Slamming the door, he gave me a searching look through the glass before disappearing down the underpass. I saw him come up on another platform, where he stood inscrutably in his grey coat. The train sat for some time ticking over and I had half a mind to jump out and ask him some questions. But before I could act the whistle blew and we began grinding noisily out of the station.

As we chugged away towards London I felt pretty sure that I had been speaking to my grandfather. Had he recognised in my face the face of his own son? I wished I had taken the time to question him. There was so much we both could have said. He had been an engineer. Did he, I wonder, share the family’s Asperger genes? Had he passed them on to my father, who passed them on to my brother and to me? Who knows what turn my life might have taken had I got off that train and spoken to him? He will be many years dead, that old man, but I often think of him that day, long ago and far away.

*

I went along to a meeting in the students’ union of the group who were interested in starting a university radio station. It never got off the ground while I was there, though a portable tape recorder was acquired. I borrowed this one evening and took it along to a concert in town given by the American jazz guitarist Barney Kessel. With an audacity that I now find hard to credit I asked an usher if Kessel would be prepared to talk to somebody ‘from the university radio station’. She went away and returned promptly to say I should go backstage in the interval.

When I went round I found that Kessel’s relaxed onstage persona disguised the truly alarming intelligence and seriousness of the man. I had read about the techniques you needed for a good interview, and it was a good job I had prepared, because this was my first radio interview and Kessel had done a thousand of them. During the twenty-five minutes he generously gave me he absolutely kept me on my toes. Though I had jumped in the deep end I found that I enjoyed interviewing. It was a safe imitation of conversation, without any room for the social prattle I found so hard.

The next day there was a letter for me on the hallway table. I recognised the blue handwriting and was astonished. It was from Katy. I took it upstairs and read it through. It was a mildly friendly note telling me that she had started her studies in London and suggesting a meeting. I tried to fancy what the flame of a candle was like after the candle was blown out, for I could not remember ever having seen such a thing. I replied politely, accepting the proposed date and time. Then I went over to see Bill Bradshaw, who had moved into a wheelchair-friendly flat near some shops.

Nodding at a printed card on his tray, he made a suggestion.

‘I’ve been invited to this thing in London. Fancy coming along as my official wheelchair pusher?’

I looked at the invitation. It was from a set-up run by Lord Snowdon, the recently divorced husband of Princess Margaret. The purpose of this organisation was to award grants to disabled students.

‘You don’t need a wheelchair pusher,’ I said.

‘It’s going to be boring,’ said Bill. ‘I need a drinking companion.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

The awards event was taking place in a large private room at the South Bank complex and Bill was driving us in his crazy-looking adapted car. The sight of him sailing along, steering with his foot, could give you pause for thought, since he was as carefree a driver as he was an eater, drinker, and smoker.

‘This is the Seven Bends of Death,’ he shouted cheerfully as we shot round a hairpin turn. He treated the speed limit as an advisory minimum, and, as we hurtled towards our destination, I held on to anything stable.

After a near miss on Hyde Park Corner, Bill parked without incident. When we got to the door we were ushered into a long room with blond wood and soft carpeting, issued with tea in china cups, and encouraged to mingle.

I was frozen with anxiety at the number of self-assured men, and women chuckling ambassador’s-wife chuckles. Everyone was kitted out in sharp lounge suits or stylish dresses, whether or not blessed with a full complement of limbs. Bill and I were quite a contrast to other guests. My hair was unfashionably long at the time and there was paint residue and printer’s ink on my hands. I probably seemed terse and offhand. Bill rarely dressed smartly and didn’t own a suit. Hiring one was an expensive nuisance for him since few off-the-peg numbers were made for a four-foot-tall man with no arms.

‘I don’t go in for these “Cripple of the Year” contests,’ he said.

‘I notice you don’t turn your nose up at the money,’ I replied.

‘Hello, hello,’ said a voice. There, in a nimbus of cigar smoke, stood an extraordinary-looking pale-haired creature wearing a loud tracksuit. It was the children’s television personality Jimmy Savile, widely esteemed for his charitable money-raising work. Bill was not to live long enough to witness Savile’s saintly reputation being shattered by the discovery, decades later, of a fifty-year history of reported sex attacks on defenceless children.

‘Traffic’s terrible!’ said Savile, through nicotine-yellow teeth. But before either of us could think of a sufficiently flavourless reply he spotted a teenage girl in a wheelchair and turned on his heel. I cannot say that he gave me the creeps exactly, but he did seem excessively self-interested, and his cigar-breath was unforgettably foul.

After the awards, a lady who was trying to arrange a group photograph beckoned Bill over. ‘Picture then pub,’ said Bill under his breath, pressing his wheelchair button and moving off into the photographer’s bubble. As I waited, staring down at my scuffed shoes, I became aware of a man standing with his back to me. He had on a superbly cut grey suit and was smoking savagely. Another crisply dressed man with spectacles arrived at his side and leant forward discreetly. ‘You have to be in the picture,’ he said.

The smoking man shook his head.

‘You must,’ said Spectacles-man, pressing his lips together.

Smoking-man gave his head another shake: more emphatic this time. I searched my memory for anything similar that might explain what was happening. Was this man friendly? Was he dangerous? While maintaining the bearing of slightly sinister servant, he seemed to be in command of the smoking man. He struck me as the sort of creature who would not hesitate to push home the last inch of steel.

The smoking man turned resignedly, looking around for something. I recognised him at once as Lord Snowdon. He extended his arm. ‘Hold this,’ he said unsmilingly, handing over the rump of a cigarette that had been smoked to within an inch of its life. A chunk of ash hung on fiercely to a slender relict of unburnt tobacco. Any normal person would have stubbed the thing out. I took it and stood holding it hot end skywards as Snowdon moved into the group for the snap. To him I was nothing more than a human ashtray but I took no offence. People have reasons for the way they behave, and anyway the observation was an interesting one.

When the snapping was done Snowdon returned, plucked the stub from my grip without a word, and sucked it, like one of Bob Strange’s cigars, into oblivion. I noticed as he did so that his hands trembled. I had the feeling he needed a drink.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Bill.

We went to a vast black pub I knew under the railway arches near Waterloo station. It was dark and smelled deliciously of soot and dripping beer. Every time a train passed overhead the whole place rumbled, and glasses rattled against the tabletops.

‘Are you okay?’ said Bill, gripping his glass between his teeth. ‘You seemed rather quiet in there, and you were a bit rude to that lady with the pearls.’ I tried to explain, but I didn’t understand. Why my permanent lover’s quarrel with the world? Why could I not feel cheerful along with everyone else? We drove home fast but quietly.

Despite my continuing low mood, I was somehow still able to laugh. I read Prick Up Your Ears, John Lahr’s biography of playwright Joe Orton, who used to send spoof letters to pompous officials under the name Edna Welthorpe (Mrs). On Valentine’s Day 1967 Welthorpe wrote to the manager of the Ritz Hotel in London asking whether he had discovered her brown Morocco handbag, which contained, ‘a few loose coins, a Boots folder with snapshots of members of my family, and a pair of gloves made of some hairy material’. On another occasion, she wrote to the manufacturers of a pie filling objecting to the inclusion of, ‘“EDIBLE STARCH” and “LOCUST BEAN GUM” … My stomach really turned at what I saw when I opened the tin’. The way Orton used language made me laugh out loud. I wanted to write my own spoof letters.

It was a tremendous help to me that alcohol was a central pillar of student social life. After a pint or two, I always felt more at ease, more able to join in. It’s not that drinking made me feel good so much as that it made me feel less bad. I am not a social drinker but neither do I drink alone at home. I like to be in a pub, where I sit in a corner in the company of strangers, watching. Luckily there were several wonderful pubs near the art department, one for every mood. There was the Turk’s Head, where the landlady put lemon zest in the chicken sandwiches, the snug Beehive, and the Fisherman’s Cottage on the canal, with fresh sawdust on the floor every day.

The inability to join in has always been the essence of my problem. So often, at school, at parties, at work, I was faced with other people’s insistence that I join in with something thoroughly disagreeable. This expectation, I learnt recently, is known by human resources people as ‘FIFO’, standing for ‘Fit In or Fuck Off’, a charming philosophy that results in many Aspergers being socially shunned, excluded from work, and failed at school.

I found parties terribly difficult, but, wanting to fit in, I used to go along. Usually it was a disaster. Once or twice, to my dismay, someone offered me a marihuana cigarette, which I refused, before getting up and going home. My attitude to sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll was that I was all for the first but firmly against the second and third.

This was not Puritanism: it was, in the case of rock music, that I found the sound physically painful and emotionally upsetting. I cannot cope with so much noise and aggression in so distilled a compound. As for illegal drugs, my antipathy to them is that, being illegal, they ought not to be taken. Laws ought to be obeyed. I feel this very strongly. My attitude is, actually, that ordinary cannabis could probably be decriminalised, since it may well be less physically harmful than the very harmful legal drugs tobacco and alcohol. If it were made legal, however, I should object to it on two grounds. First: exclusivity. To someone who does not wish to smoke it, a shared marihuana cigarette is highly antisocial, a shibboleth that pushes him further out than before. Second: hygiene. Putting something in my mouth that has been in somebody else’s mouth has always disgusted me. The marihuana cigarette is thus as nauseating as the communion cup of my boyhood, slathered with other people’s spittle and crawling with faecal coliforms and who knows what else.

*

The swirling leaves from the plane trees gave way to feathers of frost on the inside of my bedsit window. One bitterly cold morning I awoke to ice on the surface of my blankets. Later my water pipe burst while I was out, flooding the flat downstairs.

I had arranged to visit Katy at her hall of residence in London. I was, of course, on time.

I rang the bell and she let me in.

I gave her some small present.

She thanked me.

I asked about her English course.

She told me about it. Did I want a cup of tea?

Yes please.

Should we go for a walk around the area?

Okay.

What time was my train home?

I was flexible.

Would I like to go to the pub?

Yes, okay.

So we went to the pub and had a drink by the fire. And then some more. Her knee accidentally touched my knee. It was late. I walked her back.

Did I want to come in before catching my train?

Okay.

She was sleepy. Did I mind if she lay on the bed?

How could I?

She seemed to have dozed off. I leant over her and she opened her eyes. They were like stars.

*

Many people look back on their time at university as one of the most enjoyable and freest periods of their life. For me it was the unhappiest time. As well as my difficulty with the enforced social expectations, I remained irked by the course and the quality of teaching, and indignant at the way I was being treated. Other students were also disaffected but understood how to change their circumstances. Both Bobs left, moving on to better places, and so we lost two interesting people. Lucile had a word with her uncle, who she said had connections with the Ruskin school, and she moved to Oxford. A new student named Harry Samson, who was in the year below me, made an official complaint to the professor. Before he knew what was happening he had been summoned for a grilling by the sub-dean. Coming back with his tail between his legs he told me that he too would be leaving.

One day a tutor berated me in front of the group: ‘You are so uptight!’ he scolded. ‘Is there something wrong with you? You should get pissed! You’re not an artist.’ Being publicly ridiculed in this unkind way is not helpful to Aspergers — or anyone.

The autistic writer and television presenter Chris Packham has said that at university he was, ‘confused … inordinately angry … absolutely raging.’ I identify with this remark. My indignation had always been righteous and now it became focused. I composed a three-page letter of complaint, referring to the ‘you should get pissed’ incident. I addressed it to my tutor and copied it to the professor. Since Harry Samson had been levered out by deliberate use of the sub-dean I decided to give them a taste of their own medicine and copied it to him too.

The next morning I was drying a cup at my window when, looking down from the eminence of my garret, I saw a tweedy middle-aged lady arrive on a bicycle. She got off holding a long white envelope, passed out of sight, and reappeared envelopeless before cycling off. I walked down to the hallway. Sure enough, there on the mat was a luxury envelope. On it, superbly typed, my name.

At the top of the enclosed heavily laid paper was the insignia of the vice chancellor. The thrust of his message was that he would very much like me to make an appointment, at my convenience, to discuss the letter I had posted the previous morning, which had been passed on to him by the sub-dean.

I was astonished by the speed of this response, by the careful hand delivery, and by the urgent politeness. Had I been more worldly I would have recognised the signs of a chief executive scared green that the business he was supposed to be running was conceivably about to be exposed in the press as one that was encouraging the teenagers in its care to ‘get pissed’. But all this passed me by.

As requested, I made an appointment with the vice chancellor. He was genial, but at one moment his eyes narrowed: ‘Three copies of your letter,’ he mused. ‘In long hand …’

The next day the professor, who generally had no contact with students, asked to see me. I walked into his sanctum. There were papers, a pipe rack, and a tin of coin tobacco. He was not smoking. Through gritted teeth he made me a subspecies of apology, at the end letting something slip: ‘I find the vice chancellor a rather aggressive man,’ he said.

‘I found him charming,’ I retorted.

I had them in the vice. One wrong move and they would get another rocket fired right up their department. But that was not my aim and I never mentioned the sorry business again. I had been intent only on doing whatever I could to overturn the injustice I felt. I was treated thereafter like a vibration-sensitive bomb in a shoebox. That is to say, their hostile movements became slower, craftier, more subtle.

The hounds of spring were on winter’s traces and Katy had arranged to visit me. I tidied assiduously, washed linen, and bought flowers, which I put in a vase. This was nothing new. I often had flowers on the table and had always been fastidious. In this I was unlike many fellow students, the worst of whom posted his dirty laundry home to his mother, who returned it washed and ironed.

When Katy arrived something was wrong: she was distant. We went through the motions, but she seemed elsewhere. Afterwards I took her to the station. She said goodbye politely. Within a day or two I had a letter finally dismissing me.

Autistic people have great trouble accommodating change, and sudden romantic loss is withering change of the most permanent and painful kind, second only to bereavement by death. I struggled with the double-barrelled dispossession: taken away once, given back, taken away again. The course of true love never did run smooth, but what good had all this done?

It was my great fortune that there was a pressing distraction. The art department had organised a three-week trip to Paris, where we were to stay, all of us, in a rickety hotel near the Gare du Nord. I kept a callow diary of this expedition, the only one I have ever kept, and digging it out recently I was surprised to see how crammed and organised I had made my days. It is plain that I would allow no time to ruminate. I must be occupied.

I sent an account of my experiences to Jon back home. This is an edited extract, leaving out most of the art galleries and focusing on other things:

Paris lived up to my expectations and to the clichés. The city is a huge village across which you can stroll in an hour. The hotel staff seemed unfazed by the arrival of an entire department of bohemian English students bent on getting as quickly as possible to the nearest bar. Anthony and I were put into a small room with two skinny beds, foot-to-foot, and no toilet. There were no baths in the hotel either and the showers were often locked. Unpleasantly close to my pillow was a bidet. It was all very French.

In contrast to England the weather was hot and the skies cloudless. We were sleeping with the windows open and from the back of the building came the sound of scolding mothers, wailing children, and the endless moaning of beaten-up police vans clattering around the streets.

We studied a Paris map over a bowl of breakfast coffee with croissants, highlighting in pen the various places of artistic and historic interest that we wanted to visit. I stuck to my plan to do something in the morning, afternoon, and evening and therefore saw a good deal of the town and its museums and open spaces. We walked almost everywhere and quite quickly I found myself getting my bearings. The street name-signs are all in blue-green-and-white — house numbers in blue-and-white. They are very beautiful, and quite different from those anywhere in England. ‘Do not be deceived by the “zebra crossings”,’ I wrote in my diary, ‘Cars do not stop.’

Like every city, Paris has its own perfumes. Everywhere there was the smell of Gauloises Turkish cigarettes, the vanilla of the two-foot-wide crêpes sold by endless pavement vendors, and a peculiar French scent seemingly worn by everybody, which clung even to the money in my pocket. It is a fragrant aroma but when I tried to point it out to people they denied being able to detect anything.

Anthony’s French is limited to the basic, ‘Un paquet de Rothmans s’il vous plait.’ Mine is better, but not much. Nonetheless I did all the talking and all the translating, and it was exhausting. After a time he was able to manage ‘Merci’, as well as the cigarette request, but he had no interest in learning more. I like French: the rules of the language seem easier to grasp than the irregularities of English. I bought Le Monde, which was too difficult for me, so to start a bit of French conversation I asked a shop assistant for some cheese. ‘C’est un boulanger, Monsieur,’ she said in astonishment.

Saturday is market day and lying about in baskets or on slabs were mountains of fish, vegetables of all sorts, and every kind of meat and sausage. Skinned rabbits with crimson eye sockets hung from hooks, twisting in the breeze. We walked down some small streets crammed with Greek restaurants and stumbled on a fairground roundabout. Looking for the Panthéon we went to the Sorbonne by mistake. We had a cold beer in a café and then walked into the gardens and watched the men playing boules while we drank a bottle of wine. A plastic bottle of quite drinkable red can be had from the supermarket for the equivalent of about a pound. For some reason Anthony missed his footing at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume and fell down the steps. I didn’t see the spectacle because I was trying to buy some postcards in the shop.

We visited the wonderful Musée Rodin, an eighteenth-century mansion in a very salubrious part of town — lots of architects and doctors round that area I should think. We helped a man push his car down a hill. ‘’Aving a ’ard time wiz ze goddam’ weather,’ he observed in good idiomatic American. We went up the only hill in Paris to the Sacré-Coeur and I had a look over the city through a telescope. There was a fuss in the road, where a large piece of masonry had fallen off a building — firemen and everything.

We climbed a steep slope to a park. The sun bearing down on us made us thirsty so we ‘uncorked’ a bottle of wine. To soak up the wine we ate a phenomenal amount of bread and cheese. Still thirsty we opened another and became terribly inebriated. We managed to get back to the hotel, where I fell down the stairs into the lobby. These French stairs are very dangerous.

In the evening we found ourselves in the Rue St-Denis, where we had to hack our way through a jungle of prostitutes. They look very like their King’s Cross equivalents, though somewhat older and with a sleeker sense of dress. The favoured outfit seems to be shiny boots, very short fur coat, and plenty of make-up. We made our way back to the hotel in good time as we had a train to catch in the morning: a group trip to Chartres.

I watched dawn gather over the lift shaft across the alleyway at the back of the hotel. There was trouble at breakfast: no crockery, or food, or indeed anything. Irritated and in a hurry, I asked for the necessities using any vocabulary that came to mind. The waitress complimented me on my French, but I didn’t understand her.

We sprinted to the Métro, where we spent ten minutes hunting for Montparnasse on the map. Unlike London’s superb Tube diagram, I found the Métro map a complete shambles, a snarled ball of knitting. Finally we found the stop and got to the Gare Montparnasse with just minutes to spare. We ran like the wind and leapt aboard the train. This was all very bad for my nerves.

In a stiff breeze outside Chartres Cathedral we all had to listen to a long talk by Cliff from the art history department. He has a habit of turning his head away during the last few words of a sentence, so that half the party caught things like ‘… ain façade of the cathedral or not’, while others heard ‘You simply must see the very moving — whooooo’, as his words were blown away on the breeze. I knew that mathematics, especially geometry, had played a central role in the design of the church, and that with little more than a pair of compasses and a straight edge an entire cathedral had been conjured from the simplest elements: the square, circle, and triangle, resulting in the unified proportions that echo around the structure. From the positioning of the altar to the patterns in the magnificent rose windows, number holds sway above the flux. It reminded me of the work I did as a boy, dividing and subdividing circles.

Cliff didn’t mention the beauty of the geometry. He was more concerned with what the bishop was thinking when Charles the Bald gave him an old shirt. That man could make any subject boring.

Back in Paris for dinner Diana recommended a restaurant she knew and, rounding up half a dozen of us including strawberry blonde Alice and boozy Charley Lindsay, she took us off to the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, a baguette’s throw from the Folies Bergère.

We had to wait in a queue outside but before long a suave maître d’hôtel showed us through the revolving door and up a spiral staircase to a discreet little balcony with a couple of tables. We could look down from the gallery into the well of the restaurant proper. ‘Belle époque’ does not begin to describe the romance of this place. High ceilings, polished wood, huge built-in mirrors, veined marble dados, linen napkins, and a clientele of Parisians including professional men seated opposite younger women, who may be their wives.

This is good traditional food at a truly marvellous price. No cut glass: plain French tumblers. You decide what you want and a grumpy waiter dressed in black bow tie, waistcoat, and long white apron scribbles your order on a huge sheet of newsprint that lies on top of the red-and-white tablecloths.

Charley speaks not a word of French but within a minute he had the swarthy waiter laughing and smiling, talking in sign language about the bet he had on for some horse race. I wish I had this social knack but I don’t.

After coffee I needed to water my horse. I found that the gents had those curious holes over which one is, presumably, meant to squat.

‘How come those two footprints?’ asked Rick.

‘One for each foot,’ said Charlie.

On the evening of the last day there was a knock on the door. To my immense surprise it was Alice, and Janice too, each holding a bottle of rosé. We invited them in and everyone got as comfortable as they could on the floor, on a bed, or on the edge of the bidet. We polished off the two bottles and finished the remaining beer and wine from our wardrobe ‘cellar’. From time to time I caught Alice looking at me from the corner of her eye. I must have nodded off. When I awoke the room was dark so I crawled between the sheets and was gone to the world.

It was a terrible night. I woke repeatedly, tied up in the sheets and sweating like a horse. At about two o’clock I heard the sound of a person urinating in the washbasin.

Morning broke heavily. It looked as though someone had come in during the night and stirred the contents of the room with a giant spoon. The sheets were wine stained and there was a cigarette burn on the wall. My pillow was nowhere to be seen, my head was thumping, and I was gasping for a drink of water. As I got out of bed I trod on an empty tin of snails in garlic butter.

I threw on some clothes and padded off to the shared lavatory along the corridor. This toilet never flushed effectively. When you pressed the strange foreign mechanism it just boiled the contents into an unsavoury cassoulet.

When I got back to the room I discovered Janice clambering unsteadily out of Anthony’s bed, sheepishly pulling on her bra. I wished her a dry-mouthed good morning and got a grimace in return. She pushed off back to her room.

Anthony emerged from the sheets looking damaged.

‘Sleepless night?’ I asked him. He said he felt as if his head was bigger than normal and that people were playing drums somewhere. I packed slowly, feeling wobbly.

My final diary entry read, ‘Should be okay on the boat with enough fresh air and not too many head movements.’

Back home the crying man who wore kilts had moved out of the house, Tim Scattergood was still notching up women on his bedpost, and Reggae Man continued to play his deafening music. The antidote was my own handful of LPs. I particularly enjoyed the music of J. S. Bach, especially when played by a strange and brilliant pianist called Glenn Gould, who insisted on always performing on the same chair even after the seat fell out. I didn’t know then that Gould’s hatred of handshakes, his wearing heavy overcoats indoors, his health anxieties, his repeated nighttime egg meals, and his many other eccentricities were autistic signs, I just loved his idiosyncratic playing. Among other LPs in my collection were recordings of Gregorian chant, Spanish guitar music, and the lute works of John Dowland. But, as Sherlock Holmes says, ‘To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.’ Thus I enjoyed military bands and sea shanties, and often played records of fairground organs, tin-whistles, and bagpipes. I sought out recordings of other unusual instruments, from the glass harmonica to the serpent, zither, and autoharp and would sit and listen to sound effects LPs as though they were music. I liked music hall songs, and had a collection of the signature tunes of radio and television programmes, going back decades, many of which I can still hum.

I liked character comedy and listened to Gerard Hoffnung reading out letters written in hilariously mangled English, which he claimed to have received from the proprietors of Tyrolean hotels: ‘There is a French widow in every bedroom, affording delightful prospects …’ I listened to Joyce Grenfell as ‘Shirley’s girlfriend’ discussing her boyfriend Norm, ‘the one that drives the lorry with the big ears’. On television I saw Kevin Turvey, a character played by a young actor named Rik Mayall. He sat in a swivel chair and spoke in urgent non-sequiturs about cornflakes and the meaning of life. He had a Birmingham accent and mad staring eyes. Always it was silliness and the playful use of language that made me laugh.

Whenever I could, I liked to visit the typography department up at the main campus, where they sometimes held exhibitions of students’ work: everything from book jackets to the design of individual letterforms and punctuation marks. The full stop at the end of this sentence is not just a dot; it was drawn by someone. I was particularly taken by what they were doing to improve the look and legibility of official forms. The proper design of forms demanded, like the cathedral at Chartres, a system of mathematical rules governing proportion: a set of cardinal precepts that insisted on nothing less than the pinnacle of clarity. Many people found these forms tedious, but I saw in their hidden design a deep abstract beauty. After a look round on my own I would return to the art department, my anxiety greatly reduced and my admiration for the skill and artistry of the typographers increased.

But still in my soul it was drizzly November and I traipsed around town trying to understand. I went on my own to hear Segovia playing at the venue where I had interviewed Barney Kessel. I wandered down Canal Passage, the road sign of which was frequently vandalised by the deletion of the letter C. Walking through the abbey ruins one night I heard a noise. In the gloom I could just make out the vague shape of a couple leaning against the remains of a flint wall, doing what people have always done in such places. I went into a pet shop, where I bought two zebra finches in a large cage: large for my room but too small for them to do more than flutter from one perch to the other. A cruel cage I now think. For quite some time they were to be my company, my friends.

One morning in the studio Big Lil poked her huge face round my partition.

‘Tom,’ she asked, ‘how do you make brown?’

Was she serious?

‘What sort of brown?’ I asked, ‘Raw sienna …? Burnt umber …? Cadbury’s Flake?’

‘You know … brown.’

Having clear in my mind the memory of the typographers’ deep understanding of their subject I was staggered that a painter at the end of the third year of a four-year fine-art degree course did not know how to mix a basic brown, the recipe for which infants stumble upon at school.

‘Red, yellow, blue,’ I said, giving her my best Pan Am smile.

I asked Tony the technician to erect partitions all the way round my area. I was now almost completely boxed in. Here I beavered away, producing the work for my degree exhibition, undisturbed and undistracted.

One day I found that someone had pinned an anonymous note beside my small painting, Portrait of a Gibbon, praising it extravagantly and offering to buy it. Was this intended to be amusing or nasty? ‘That’s Alice’s handwriting,’ said Anthony. But why would Alice, who seemed entirely indifferent to me, bother? There was nothing to lose so I responded with my own note, writing that as a member of the Expensivist school I doubted whether the picture was within the range of the prospective buyer. It was my first spoof letter. In the years to come there would be more, and better. I waited till the studio was clear and pinned the paper in Alice’s space.

Later in the day there was a tap on my partition. It was Alice, wearing a clingy woolen jumper. ‘Thank you for your reply,’ she said. ‘I’m not interested in buying your picture any more.’ She burst into laughter. Her teeth, I noticed, were very neat. ‘I hear there’s a spare room in your house,’ she said. Within two days she had moved in.

Alice would borrow teabags and she started to chat to me about painting and life. She laughed at my funny remarks without taking offence, or saying that I had a strange sense of humour, or was the rudest man she had ever met. One evening after a day in the studio she walked home with me. She spoke about her family and then, idly, about her boyfriend, who was, she mentioned quite casually, no longer on the scene.

Aha!

She came in for a chat. She was wearing a pair of tight trousers with vertical yellow and green stripes. Her strawberry blonde hair touched her shoulders. Instead of sitting in a chair she sat on the bed. I sat beside her, at a discreet distance.

I made some tea and we shared a couple of crumpets, then I showed her a magic trick. She wanted to see more so I did another and sat down beside her again. She took off her socks and wiggled her toes. I was very aware of her succulent perfume, which filled the crackling air. Neither of us spoke. Misjudging things badly, I lunged, smothering her and knocking over the bedside lamp. She became silent and still. I backed off.

‘You can’t just do this, you know,’ she said sternly.

I subsided onto the floor, leaning deflated against the bed. Once again I had got the codes mixed up and put my foot in it. I was no good at seduction, no good at flirting and games. The business flummoxed me. Instead of logarithms at school how much more useful it would have been had we studied the rules of courtship. Alice got up and left, closing the door with a click.

I poured the tea dregs down the sink. Why was Tim Scattergood never flattened like this? I opened some sardines and ate them standing up, as I often did, straight out of the tin. Decades later I would read that the neurologist and ‘honorary Asperger’ Oliver Sacks used to eat sardine meals in the same way. I thoroughly washed the crumpet plates and threw the tin into the rubbish outside. Then I heated some lemongrass oil to perfume the atmosphere.

I picked up a book and read some extracts from the diary of John Dee telling of the strange behaviour of his nurse, who, on 29 September 1590, ‘long tempted by a wycked spirit … most miserably did cut her owne throte’. It was plain from the story that this wycked spirit was what modern psychiatrists would call clinical depression.

There was a tap on the door. It was Alice. Her eyes were huge.

‘You can stay tonight. If you want,’ she said quietly, turning and padding down the stairs.

*

The next morning in the art department I was talking to Anthony as Alice came in. I winked and her cheeks flushed excitingly.

We bought bottles of wine and stayed in. We huddled under my umbrella in the hurtling rain. We ate our lunch in the park or spent sunny days on the river, watching kingfishers flashing across the surface. We dozed in the breezy grass under the willows. We went to the Bull and wandered home beside the riverbank casting long shadows in the golden sunlight. One day we swam among the reeds, Alice’s mermaid body twisting like a silken rope.

At the house, Alice pointed out a cockerel strutting about the back garden under the trees. She said he was ‘Gregory Peck’. He stayed a couple of days. I liked birds. Birds were wise, remote, but not unfriendly. Some would peck seed from your hand. Corvids used tools.

‘Anthony told me you bought your zebra finches when you were sad,’ said Alice. I smiled. As Jerome K. Jerome remarked, there is sometimes no language for our pain, only a moan. In Three Men in a Boat he tells a fairytale.

Once upon a time, through a strange country, there rode some goodly knights, and their path lay by a deep wood, where tangled briars grew very thick and strong … One knight of those that rode, missing his comrades, wandered far away, and returned to them no more; and they, sorely grieving, rode on without him, mourning him as one dead … One night, as they sat in cheerful ease around the logs that burned in the great hall, and drank a loving measure, there came the comrade they had lost, and greeted them … He told them how in the dark wood he had lost his way, and had wandered many days and nights, till, torn and bleeding, he had lain him down to die.

Then, when he was nigh unto death, lo! through the savage gloom there came to him a stately maiden, and took him by the hand and led him on through devious paths, unknown to any man, until upon the darkness of the wood there dawned a light such as the light of day was unto but as a little lamp unto the sun … And the name of the dark forest was Sorrow; but of the vision that the good knight saw therein we may not speak nor tell.

Alice, understanding, had led me from the depth of the forest out into the sun. I told her I wasn’t sad any more. We decided that after our final exams we would move to London together.

*

In the last two months of the course we had to make final preparations for our degree exhibition. Charley, who had little to show for four years’ ‘study’ got himself a vast roll of canvas and several washing up bowls, which he filled with paint. Nailing numerous sail-sized pieces up on the wall he brushed the paint over them with a long broom, never mind the drips. Once dry they were nicely stretched for him by Tony the technician.

I caught Charley off guard one afternoon beside his huge splodge-covered canvases. ‘This is just a load of rubbish Charley, isn’t it!’ I said, in my usual unvarnished way. He smiled an intriguing smile. His final show made a big impact, but only really because the paintings were so enormous.

One of the visiting teachers in the art department was Adrian Heath, a great friend of Terry Frost, of the bowl of cherries fame. Being, like Frost, well heeled and well known, Heath was sycophantically admired by the teaching staff. One afternoon I was hanging my degree show: paintings of people and things with baleful atmospheres and titles like ‘Mrs Febland Becomes Conscious of Her Own Mortality’. Austin Randall, who had always hated my stuff, was leading Adrian Heath through the studios to show him somebody else’s work and was obliged to come through my space. Heath stopped in front of one of my paintings, one that Austin particularly loathed.

‘That’s a very good painting,’ said Heath, looking it over for a couple of minutes. ‘Very good.’ Austin caught my eye. I smiled a Cheshire cat smile. He was beside himself with fury.

The class of degree you were awarded hung on the whims of the teaching staff. A dissertation was part of the assessment process so I deliberately inserted three pages upside-down in various places, and stuck a couple of pages together with a dab of Cow Gum, a now defunct latex cement which you could roll into huge bouncing bogies. The dissertation came back with the pages still upside-down and stuck together. It had not been read. I didn’t make a scene; my mind was already on London and getting away.

Boozy Charlie and Big Lil, who couldn’t make brown, got very good degrees, as, quite properly, did Anthony. The tutors could hardly give me a final punishment beating or the vice chancellor would be down on them like a falling piano. So they damned me with faint praise, awarding me a middling degree. I decided not to go to the ceremony in the Great Hall to kiss the vice chancellor’s ring, or whatever it was, and they posted the certificate to me. The envelope was less sumptuous than the one the vice chancellor had caused to be hand delivered all that time ago. I slipped out the certificate, gave it a look, folded it in quarters, and dropped it in the bin. In none of the jobs I was later to do did anybody ever ask to see it.

My old friend Jon, who was still at the Slade, asked if Alice and I would like to move with him into a large flat he had found in north London. I looked at my prospects. I had no money, no promise of any kind of job, and a degree that qualified me for nothing. But London flats were much cheaper then, and attitudes were different. Thousands of graduates were to be found bumming around the city before deciding what it was they wanted to do with their lives, while others squatted happily in a fog of joss stick smoke.

At school it had seemed that everybody was on my side. At university I had learned that many people were not. It was a sobering lesson, and one which knocked off a little of my naivety. I was eager to get away and I knew that in London, ‘the Old Smoke’, I would be among friends. Bill Bradshaw was already living in a wheelchair-adapted flat in Waterloo. Diana had bought a place in Stoke Newington and Anthony was going to move in as her tenant.

I cannot remember whether Alice and I worried about how we would pay the rent on an income of zero, but a dictum of the fourteenth-century Christian mystic Mother Julian of Norwich came to mind: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ I found this an uplifting maxim, and always have. Things would be okay. Something would turn up. London would be an adventure. I looked at Alice. She nodded purposefully. We told Jon yes.

Gazing across the pink roofs of the town, lightning flashes of memory lit up my mind: the dirt under Austin Randall’s nails; Mr and Mrs Chambers dressed in their ‘refinery’; Anthony falling down the steps of Paris; Alice’s smile; and the vacant Fleeta Swit ambling across the quad, a pennant of toilet paper fluttering from her shoe.

I had long sensed that I was somehow different, but now, for the first time, I realised I could be happy. I squeezed Alice’s hand.

‘Whatever happens in future, if I seem … if I can’t …’

‘What?’

‘You will forgive me, won’t you?’

She laughed and threw her arms around me.

‘Come on,’ she said.

‘Where to?’

‘London, silly.’

We picked up our stuff and shut the door.