CHAPTER 1
‘YOU KNOW HE ISN’T NORMAL . . .’
In 1956 there were three of us: Frank, my husband, an industrial chemist whom I had met when we were both undergraduates at Oxford, Anthony, our year-old son and myself. We had just had a house build in a village a few miles outside of Derby, but we did not really belong to that part of the country, and the Midlands never felt like home. Home for Frank was Hampshire, whereas I had sprung from the smoke and soot of St Helens, a grey town in what was then called Lancashire. Nowadays it has been renamed Merseyside, much to the disgust of its inhabitants.
We spent quite a lot of time in St Helens, since my widowed mother lived there, and it was not such a very long haul from Derby in our tinny second-hand Morris Eight. Whenever we went there, a little spastic girl who lived lower down the road used to come in and play with Anthony. She was a nice child, very gentle and affectionate, and really very intelligent. But she filled me with horror simply because she was not normal, and I hated abnormality of any kind. I despised myself for it, but every time that M. came to my mother’s house, a wave of revulsion swept over me. I could not bear to see this malformed and inarticulate child play with my son; and I wished with all my heart that she would stay sway.
Where we lived in Derbyshire we had no Catholic church, but attended Mass every Sunday in a hired room above a local pub. Among the fairly small congregation was a woman who came along each week with her three tall sons. I no longer remember the names of the other two, but the middle one, I know, was called John, and he was learning-disabled. After Mass, the mother always made a fuss of this boy, taking his arm lovingly on the way home. Could she not see how repulsive he was? Did she, I wondered, see him as he really was, or were mothers of such children blinded by mother-love?
Like most people, I suppose, I was frightened by my rare encounters with the unthinkable. I cherished the belief that abnormality was something that happened to others. It couldn’t possibly happen to me. But it did.
My second pregnancy was unremarkable, except that I was sick rather a lot, and was unusually nervy and irrational. (On the day when two gipsy-women had called at the house selling clothes-pegs and heather, Frank found me sitting under the stairs, terrified to death, when he came home from work.) For the birth itself I went over to St Helens, where I had booked an amenity bed in a small teaching-hospital near my mother’s home. The night that I went into labour, I remember speaking to a friend on the telephone, and telling her that I was scared stiff, much more frightened than I had been the first time. And it wasn’t really the pain that I was afraid of; there was a deeper, free-floating anxiety which I was at a loss to explain.
It was, in fact, a very difficult labour, followed by a high forceps delivery and a breech birth. I lost an inordinate amount of blood, and afterwards felt exhausted and ill, with none of the elation which I had felt when Anthony was born. The baby, another boy, was large, about 8 lb 12 oz, and when they showed him to me, declaring that he was beautiful, I shivered. Flesh seemed to droop off him, like an overcoat several sizes too large. To my own dismay, I felt no urge to take him in my arms or cuddle him. Instead I found myself turning away.
But as the days passed the initial feeling of revulsion passed too. I stopped noticing that he looked odd, or perhaps I decided that the oddness was all in my imagination. The nurses seemed genuinely enthusiastic about him, so I began taking my cue from them.
The trouble really began when I took him home, to my mother’s , and tried to feed him myself, as I had done with Anthony enjoyably enough. He was insatiable, and although I had plenty of milk I was soon making up a bottle for him as well. First half-strength, then full-strength. It didn’t matter how much I gave him, he went on crying and looking for more. In the end I gave up trying to breast-feed and put him on to extra-strength powdered milk. Not that it made much difference, but it was less exhausting for me. In retrospect it seems to me that he didn’t stop crying for the next five years or so, but I suppose memory is playing me false. He must have slept sometimes.
We called him Paul Christopher. Friends assured us that once he had passed his first birthday he was bound to improve; and we waited longingly for that scarcely-to-be-believed-in day. Meanwhile he cried so long and so hard that he ruptured himself. He was only ten weeks old when our doctor discovered a hernia and decided that an immediate operation was called for. In a way, in spite of our obvious anxiety, the crisis was something of a relief. We thought that perhaps the mystery of his crying had been solved: he had had the hernia all the time without our suspecting it. Now perhaps he would stop crying. But the crisis came and went. Paul came out of hospital crying as hard as ever.
All that crying did not seem to affect his growth, and he was putting on weight fast. The sagging pockets of flesh were filling out, and in the foolish way that parents have we rather gloated over the phenomenal growth-rate. He was well ahead of the other babies at the local clinic, tipping the scales at a rate that caused eyebrows to rise. My mother-in-law spiked our complacency by hinting that this might be a cause for alarm rather than pride, but though we were both irritated by her seeming lack of perception we did not let it worry us for long.
Paul’s first birthday arrived, that magic day when the crying was to stop and peace be restored. Alas for our hope. On that day he excelled himself, bawling for the entire day and reducing us all to a frazzle. So much for the prophecies of our friends; we should have to go on waiting.
Memories become blurred. At some time during the year that followed, I suppose he must have improved, because I remember a brief happy period when he was large and cheerful, with big china-blue eyes and masses of golden curls. An attractive child, mistaken by almost everyone for a girl. But our friends were even then beginning to be uneasy; they were noticing what we were too close to see: that Paul’s blue eyes lacked intelligence, his nose was without a bridge, and the fingers on his chubby hands were disconcertingly spatula-shaped. He had done most of the expected things at the normal time – sitting up, cutting teeth, crawling, but one thing he had not yet done was talk. Instead of talking he made bizarre noises, rough, meaningless sounds which could not possibly be mistaken for speech. Unwittingly we joked about it. Anthony by this time was very advanced for his age and was bursting to go to school. Paul, we laughed, without any sense of foreboding, was certain to grace the bottom end of the class rather than the top. Perhaps he’d be good at football instead. A visiting social worker hinted that he might be deaf and suggested a hearing-test. But deafness was an unthinkable stigma, and I would not entertain the possibility of it.
About three months before Paul was two, I discovered, to my horror, that I was pregnant again. After the last experience, I could hardly welcome the prospect of another baby, but as I would not have considered having an abortion I had to get used to the idea. I was worried, though. With a restless three-year-old Anthony, and with Paul, my hands and days were completely full. And as if to underline the awkwardness of my new state, a few days later Paul was once again whipped off into hospital – again with a strangulating hernia.
In 1957 we had moved from Derbyshire to Hale, in Cheshire, which was much nearer to St Helens. Packing Anthony off to his grandmother’s , I was free to visit the hospital as often as I was allowed. But though I went down there each day, nobody was able to tell me what the programme was likely to be. Paul had a wheezy chest, and as long as this was in evidence, it was not likely that he would be given an anaesthetic. It began to look as though he would be sent home untouched by medical hand, strangulating hernia or not.
The night when everything fell apart was a Tuesday in February, 1958, and every detail is etched like poker-work into my mind. The previous evening, the Sister in charge of the children’s ward had asked if I would come early, as the