Betty was the practical one, and she was wonderful with Paul. She had no illusions about what he could or could not do, and she knew he would never be any different. She simply accepted him as he was and did everything in her power to make his life a happy one. My mother was good with him too, but she had never come to terms with the situation. She had taken refuge in a sort of fantasy world in which Paul was no more than ‘delicate’; and she was quite happy with this version of the truth. Her own first child, my brother Tony, had been, as far as we were able to make out, very like Paul, but my mother had never accepted the truth about him either. He had died before I was born, and in my early years my mother constantly told me how good Tony was, how helpful, even how clever. Her fantasy even extended to the manner of his death. He had died, she said, of appendicitis. It was left to others to tell me that he had been severely sub-normal, and that he had been killed when falling out of a train. The various doctors who made a study of Paul and who asked about my family history, got no change out of my mother. I could tell them the little I knew or suspected, but it didn’t amount to much. She would admit nothing.
Betty – or Beb – as the children have always called her – was not my aunt at all, or indeed any relation. She was the nursing-sister in charge of the maternity ward where I was born. My mother had gone into the hospital to await my arrival and what she hoped would be her own demise. Betty had sympathised, taken special care of her, and afterwards had come to visit her at home. She was glad to make a friend, since her own home was in Yorkshire, and she had only just come to St Helens. Years later, when Betty decided to leave hospital work and take a job in industry, she moved in with us as a temporary arrangement – and stayed. We were a rather fearsomely all-female household: my mother, Gertrude, the sister with whom she had gone to live when my father died, Betty and myself. (The only men who ever came near were an occasional uncle and the parish priest.) I was always fond of Betty and was closer to her than to my mother. She and I would talk and share secrets, something I never did with my mother, of whom I was always in awe. The discovery, when I was ten or so, that Betty was not a blood-relation, was one of the most miserable moments of my childhood. I felt betrayed.
My mother had not even told Betty the truth about her son, Tony: she too had been told how clever he was. Then one day she met an old doctor who asked her if she had known my mother when Tony was alive. She said she hadn’t. ‘It was such a mercy he died,’ the old man said, ‘he would have been a millstone around his mother’s neck.’ But when Betty reported this strange conversation, my mother refuted it hotly. She had quite convinced herself of Tony’s normality.
So it was quite logical that she would see the Paul-situation through the same rose-tinted spectacles: she could not bear very much reality. But she loved Paul, and though she could not do for him what Betty could, she did her best. After their retirement, they both became frequent visitors to our house, though it was Betty who came more often. Betty, in fact, had offered to come for three days each week to look after Paul while I took a part-time job. The Headmistress of the school where Anthony was now in the kindergarten had asked if I could come and teach Latin in the senior school, and with Betty’s heroic help I should be able to. It wasn’t the teaching in itself that was so attractive. It was the opportunity it presented of escaping at least for a few hours from my own four walls. It was a way of preserving my sanity. Thank God for Betty.
CHAPTER 3
DESPAIR
Paul was getting on for five and in the normal way of things would have been going to school. One of the tortures inflicted on parents of mentally handicapped children at that time was the ordeal by letter. A school doctor was sent to the house to investigate the child’s suitability for normal schooling (in spite of his or her very obvious non-suitability), and then would follow a formal letter, stating explicitly that the child was subnormal and therefore unable to benefit from normal education (the word they used was ‘ineducable’). Everybody concerned was well aware of this fact before the process was set in motion, but for some reason it had to be spelled out, the i’s dotted, the t’s crossed, and the parents’ noses thoroughly rubbed in the dirt. Most parents resented this official humiliation, but they could do nothing about it. When our turn came, and I was told to expect the arrival of a school doctor, I bowed to the inevitable. It was only a routine visit after all.
But it did not turn out quite as expected. I have often hoped that the school doctor who came to see Paul that day was not typical of her species. There she stood on the doorstep, a large, bouncy, tweedy woman whose burly torso positively heaved with excitement. We had not met before, but she absolved herself from the courtesy of introductions. I had barely got the front door open before she announced with breathless fervour: ‘I can’t wait to see this child. Do you think he might possibly be a cretin?’
Blind rage swept over me, and I would have given much to slam the door, or, better still, my clenched fist, in her jolly face. How does it happen that doctors, who presumably set out on their careers because they see themselves as healers, become so frequently insensitive to other people’s pain? For years Paul and I were no more than objects to be examined under a microscope, two animate creatures of momentary interest to medicine. It never seemed to occur to anyone, or if it did it did not seem to matter, that we were also sentient human beings who could be badly hurt. It was difficult learning to be a non-person, but I was learning fast. Building up a hard shell within which to shelter was part of the process of learning. The only sure way to protect myself from hurt was by refusing to be hurt at all, refusing to notice, refusing to care. Ordinary human feelings were becoming a luxury I could not afford.
That doctor had almost penetrated my defences, but my public self-control was still armour-plated. So I forced a smile and asked her in, and we began, as one inevitably did, on the old, old questions. Who is he, what is he, why is he, when, how, where? The questions rolled off an endless cyclic conveyor belt, and were answered as mechanically as they were asked. If I had been better organised, I should have made out a list of questions and answers, and made photostats of them to hand out. They were always the same. We always began at the beginning, at pregnancy if not at conception, and worked right through. No one ever came pre-armed with the relevant facts, there had never been any liaison with previous questioners (even when they came from the same hospital or local authority), no data bank of information was ever consulted, if indeed any existed. We always started with a tabula rasa. The game began on square one, and our opponents were always the victors, if one could judge by the flushed face and air of triumph they wore on departure.
Even with Betty’s help, the strain was beginning to tell. I was getting to the end of my resources. The climax came one day when I was alone in the house with Paul. I went into the room where he was playing and found that not only had he soiled himself, but he was cheerfully smearing the faeces all over the wall. Ours was a largish Edwardian house, with half-landings recessed into a sweeping staircase. Holding Paul under the armpits I began to drag him up the stairs towards the bathroom, paying no attention to his squawks of protest. We had reached the first half-landing when he began to cough. I stopped there, but the coughing fit grew worse. Suddenly, to my horror, his breathing became jerky, he began to choke, and his face went black. I was terrified, stuck as I was half-way up the stairs and nobody within earshot. With a strength born of desperation, I pushed and pulled him up the remaining stairs and inside the bathroom. Shutting the door on him, I fled downstairs to the telephone to order an ambulance. Then I rushed madly up again to try and get him cleaned up.
The ambulance came. Unfortunately, in my panic, I had given no details over the telephone. I had omitted to say that Paul was breathing only with difficulty; and the ambulance arrived without the vital cylinder of oxygen. The minutes seemed like hours as we waited for the second ambulance to arrive, and Paul’s condition got worse with every breath he tried to take.
The oxygen arrived in the nick of time, and Paul was taken off to hospital to recover from the first of many bronchial convulsions. He came out within a week, fully restored and entirely cheerful. But my nerves were raw. The problem of Paul had me utterly beat.