WE HAD DECIDED to call the new child Christopher if it was a boy, simply because we both liked the name. He was born in the early hours of Friday 14th of October, at home in our bedroom, which had a wash-hand basin in one corner, a convenience appreciated by the midwife when she arrived. We were well prepared. I helped to get the bed ready with plenty of protective newspaper covering the mattress, and timed the contractions. Mary was practised in natural childbirth by now and in complete control, which impressed me – and the midwife – no end. She never seemed to be in pain, but was like a trained athlete in a strenuous event, concentrating, pacing herself and saving her strength for the final push. At last I saw a child of mine born, and like everyone who has had that experience I was astonished and awed as he slithered into the world and, after the midwife snipped and sealed the umbilical cord, took a breath and began to cry. She washed him, swaddled him, and gave him to Mary to hold. When the other two children woke they were allowed into the room to see him; then I gave them their breakfast and took them off to their respective schools. A busy but happy weekend followed, phoning family and friends with the good news, and on Monday morning I went into the University to teach my classes. It was before the days of paternity leave.
I came home early in the afternoon and went straight upstairs to Mary and the baby. She was sitting up in bed, with Christopher asleep in a cot beside her. As soon as she saw me come smiling into the room she began to cry. I sat down on the edge of the bed and put my arm round her shoulders. ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, already filled with dread. ‘It’s the baby,’ she said. ‘The doctor came. He says the baby is a mongol.’ ‘What does that mean?’ I said. I had heard the word, and it had an unpleasant resonance, but I didn’t know what condition it referred to. Apparently the midwife had noticed something was wrong with the baby, but hadn’t told us. Instead, quite correctly, she had alerted our GP, and he had called earlier that day and told Mary that our child was a mongol, and would grow up mentally and physically handicapped. Suddenly I had a flashback: a crocodile of shambling children and youths led by an adult coming towards me on a pavement, all grinning and dribbling and twitching, and one of them clumsily banging into me as they passed. It was an image I associated with the word ‘mongol’. I looked at Christopher: he seemed perfect. ‘How can they tell?’ I said. ‘There are signs,’ she said. ‘The lines on the hands are different from normal. And they usually have slanted eyes, that’s why they’re called mongols.’ ‘He doesn’t have slanted eyes!’ I said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but he has the lines on the hands.’ ‘What causes it?’ I asked. ‘It happens at the moment of conception, apparently,’ she said. ‘Nobody knows why. Dr Evans had a cousin who was one.’ We had registered with Dr Evans only recently and did not know him well, though he and his family were neighbours and would become friends. Like all doctors in this situation he had a difficult decision to make: whether to tell the parents immediately, or wait until they begin to have misgivings themselves about the baby. Alan Evans decided it was better to tell the truth quickly and avoid a cruel disillusionment later, and I think he was right, but he should have waited until we were both present. By talking about his cousin he was trying to domesticate the event, to convey that it was part of life, something that could happen to anyone, but it seemed that his relative was severely handicapped and the picture he conjured up had upset Mary.
Later we would learn to call Christopher’s condition Down’s syndrome, after the Victorian doctor who identified it. Down was a clever and humane man, who ran his own home for the mentally handicapped on progressive principles for many years, but unfortunately he shared the racial prejudices of his time and place. In a medical paper called ‘Observations on the Ethnic Classification of Idiots’, he named this particular condition ‘mongolism’ because of the slightly Asiatic features of those born with it, thus encouraging their stigmatisation as alien and ugly. The word ‘mongol’ is no longer acceptable usage – one of the few linguistic effects of ‘political correctness’ which I wholeheartedly approve of – but it was current for much of Christopher’s childhood. We would also learn what Dr Down had no means of knowing, since it was not discovered till 1959, that his syndrome is caused by an extra copy (three instead of two) of the twenty-first chromosome out of the twenty-three involved in cell division in the embryo, a blip in the biological processing that produces a human being which causes a number of physical and mental abnormalities as the foetus develops. Nobody knows why it occurs. Mothers over thirty-five are more likely to have Down’s babies, and there is a variant of the condition that may have a hereditary element, but neither of these factors applied to Mary. In Christopher’s case it was a completely random genetic abnormality, unpredictable and unpreventable. Neither Mary nor I had any previous knowledge of it.
In fact it had never occurred to me that anything at all could be wrong or go wrong with the child in Mary’s womb. She had produced two healthy and intelligent children, and I confidently awaited a third. I knew nothing about congenital disorders or the possible causes of brain damage at birth. Such a state of blissful ignorance could hardly occur today because of several developments since then: advances in medical knowledge and practice, the large amount of information about mental and physical disability disseminated through the media, and more enlightened social policy towards those afflicted. Up to the time of Christopher’s birth, having a mentally handicapped child, especially among the middle and upper classes, was regarded as a tragedy best kept private, and often swathed in secrecy and shame. In fact he was born just as attitudes to such children were about to become more positive, but that was not evident in the information we received from people who should have known better, including a health visitor and a friend who was the wife of an eminent child psychologist. We were told that Christopher would never learn to read or write, that he had a very limited life expectancy (estimates varied from twenty to forty), and were advised to place him as soon as possible in a mental subnormality hospital. All wrong assertions and bad advice – but we weren’t to know that, and were very distressed. Those who tried to comfort and encourage us said that mongol children were usually affectionate and lovable, which turned out to be true of Christopher, but at the time it was hard to imagine how that could compensate for all the other aspects of his condition.
For me it was a profound shock. I had supposed I was on an escalator bearing me and my family to higher and higher levels of fulfilment, pleasure and happiness, and suddenly it had stopped, irreparably. The vague visions I had entertained of the future did not include looking after a mentally handicapped child. The first days and weeks after the event were very hard to bear for Mary and me: having to keep up a cheerful front for the sake of Julia and Stephen, who were delighted with their baby brother, having to break the news to parents, friends and colleagues, and having to live with being the object of so much concern, sympathy and pity in response. I went to work on the day after we learned the truth about Christopher, and my first tutorial group came in looking solemn and subdued. Someone – I guessed it was Michael Green, who I had spoken to by phone – had told them, with the best of intentions, of our misfortune. Ironically the subject of the tutorial was Tristram Shandy, with its Rabelaisian humour about conception and childbirth, and the discussion was constrained. A few days later the disaster at the Welsh mining village of Aberfan occurred, when a waterlogged colliery tip suddenly collapsed and engulfed the school in an avalanche of slurry, killing 116 children and 28 adults. The horror and pity that gripped the whole nation for many days somehow merged with our own private sorrow and added to my gloom.
In those early days it crossed my mind, as I suppose it does with many people in such a situation, that it would be a blessing if the child died peacefully and painlessly, but there was no prospect of that. He was in essential respects a healthy baby, and although he had difficulty taking sustenance from the breast or bottle, he began to put on weight when Mary started feeding him with a spoon. Dr Evans had put us in touch with a paediatrician who offered to arrange a visit to a Birmingham subnormality hospital. Mary was reluctant but I thought we should at least see what it had to offer, so we went by appointment. When the staff discovered we had not already made up our minds to place Christopher there they refused to show us round the wards, which was enough for both of us to decide firmly against this option. From then onwards we were united in a determination to give Christopher as normal a life as was possible without a detrimental effect on his brother and sister, or on our own relationship. Inevitably the main burden of this project fell on Mary, especially in Christopher’s early years, but it was greatly assisted by the fact that he was our youngest child, always stimulated by interaction with his older siblings and never disheartened by being overtaken by one younger than himself.
In one respect Christopher caused a positive improvement in our marriage. Not long after he was born Mary decided to go on the pill, without any prompting from me but with my unhesitating agreement. Suddenly it seemed a very simple decision. Random though the extra copy of chromosome 21 was, mothers who gave birth to a Down’s baby were more likely to have another, and the effort of bringing up one was going to be demanding enough. We made a simple pragmatic decision, but it was enormously significant: we took responsibility for our own lives, instead of being governed by a code invented by theologians which looked increasingly irrational and had no demonstrable basis in the teachings of Jesus Christ. I’m sure we would have made this decision eventually anyway, but Christopher gave us the impetus to act without further delay, to the great enhancement of our intimate life. This is not to say that my peace of mind was unaffected by his advent. Henceforward I became more prone to anxiety when confronted with unexpected events and difficult decisions. The first such challenge came quite soon.
In the spring of 1967 I received a letter from my former colleague, Derek Brewer, now a fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to tell me that there was a vacant lectureship in the Faculty of English and that several people there hoped I would apply for it. It was followed up shortly afterwards by John Holloway, a member of the Appointments Committee, pressing me to do so. The vacancy was created by the resignation of Denis Donoghue, a highly esteemed Irish critic who had been in the post for little more than a year, and having decided that he did not wish to bring his large family to live in Cambridge was returning to University College Dublin. The date for applications had officially passed so there was some urgency about the matter if I was interested. Derek kindly offered to put us up for a weekend if we would like to consider the possibility in situ. This approach from what was generally regarded as the top English department in the country couldn’t have come at a more inopportune time, but I could not be indifferent to it. The appointment would bring with it a fellowship, possibly at King’s, where Donoghue had been, with its perks and privileges, eight-week terms, and more money than I was getting at Birmingham, not to mention the beauty of the city’s ancient core, and the fact that it was in easy reach of Norwich and the Bradburys. So in early February we got someone to look after Julia and Stephen, and took Christopher with us in his carrycot to stay with the Brewers. John Holloway gave us lunch in his rooms at Queens’ College, and I met L.C. Knights, who had recently been appointed to the King Edward VII Chair of English at Cambridge. Since he had been a pupil of F.R. Leavis, who had been denied the title of Professor by his enemies, Leavisites disapproved of Knights’s acceptance of this position, and I heard a story that, shortly after he arrived in Cambridge, Leavis’s wife Queenie crept up behind him in the University Library and hissed ‘Traitor!’ in his ear. In our brief conversation Knights mentioned that he and others involved in the lectureship appointment had been particularly impressed by the way I took on Leavis in Language of Fiction. The notorious factionalism of Cambridge English was one reason to be chary of moving there. Another was that we would have to sell the house we had just acquired and look for another in a place where property prices were twice Birmingham’s, and disturb Julia and Stephen’s schooling once again. But when I wrote to Holloway to say that I had decided not to apply, I emphasised another reason:
I suppose the decisive factor was a feeling that to be a Cambridge don would not be a good thing for a novelist to be, at least for me personally, at my present stage of development (if, as I hope, development is what it is).
I knew that Cambridge English was a very competitive, critical, self-obsessed community, and that, in spite of the short terms, I would have to work hard to hold my own there, endangering the balance I had tried to maintain between my creative and academic writing. For all these reasons I decided against applying, with Mary’s relieved agreement. It was a thoroughly sound decision, and in the long term seemed more and more so. But soon after communicating it I began to have doubts and regrets. Had I turned down a golden opportunity that most of my peers would have seized with alacrity? Of course I could not be certain that I would have got the job if I had applied for it, but that somehow made no difference to my state of mind, and before long I had argued myself into a state of depression. In retrospect it seems obvious that I was transferring feelings associated with Christopher’s condition, a random event over which I had had no control, on to one for which I was responsible and could have managed differently. I must have confided in my father, for I have found in my files a long and very moving letter of counsel, which concluded by saying he had mentioned my regrets about Cambridge to a man he was playing golf with.
He said, ‘Oh not to worry. It will come again.’ Okay, so he doesn’t know, and it might not come again, but then it might come again and who’s to say on this earth what is going to happen in the future and perhaps everything is going to be for the best and all the fretting was needless.
Wise words, and I wish I had taken them to heart. Dad thought I was overworking my brain, and wanted me to get more physical exercise (‘I would like to hear of you going for a good walk every day now without your pipe’), but my own programme for recovery was to start working on the novel that was already entitled Out of the Shelter in my head, since that was the prime reason why I had decided not to apply for the job at Cambridge.
I had study leave coming up in the summer term which offered a good opportunity. I felt I needed to refresh my memory of Heidelberg, and asked the British Council in London if they could arrange some lectures or seminars for me at Heidelberg University. That proved impossible but they did organise a short lecture tour to speak at the universities of Frankfurt, Marburg and Mainz, and I added on a visit at my own expense to Heidelberg, where a young lecturer in the English Department kindly kept me company. The trip was interesting and useful, and I was in a good mood as I waited for a train at the beginning of my homeward journey. There was a newspaper booth on the platform, where I bought a copy of the previous Sunday’s Observer. Inside it was a full-page article about Cambridge by Michael Frayn, who had been an undergraduate there. He described its charms with lyrical nostalgia and declared that he could not imagine a more blissful place in which to spend one’s life. My good spirits evaporated instantly.
I was looking forward to a holiday with the Honans and the Bradburys, whom I had put in touch with each other during Malcolm’s fellowship year. He and Elizabeth had enjoyed a visit to Park and Jeannette in Providence, and Park had inspired a plan for all of us to get together in St Brévin in the summer of ’67. We and the Bradburys arranged to share a rented bungalow very near the Colins’ place for two weeks in July, and planned to drive there together in our respective cars. Before then, however, something happened which I still find distressing to recall: I had a serious car accident with the whole family, and my mother, who was staying with us, on board. There was just room for them in the Anglia estate: Mary beside me in the passenger seat, Mum in the back with Julia and Stephen, and Christopher in his carrycot on the flat floor behind the back seat. It was a Sunday in June, and we were going to visit Mary’s sister Margaret and Ioan, who had been married for about three years. Ioan was now a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Warwick and they had bought a new house in Wellesbourne, near Stratford.
There were several factors that contributed to the accident. On our way we ran into a thunderstorm and rain so heavy that I stopped the car in a lay-by and waited for it to pass over. I suffered badly from hay fever in those days, and the deluge, so far from clearing the air, forced the pollen down and I suffered a paroxysm of sneezing. I swallowed a Piriton tablet, which was the medication Dr Evans had recently prescribed. Its tendency to cause drowsiness is better known now than it was to me then, and it’s possible that it slowed down my reactions when we proceeded shortly afterwards. Just past the church at Wootton Wawen I approached a bend with steep grass banks on each side. The rain had poured down the banks, bringing a good deal of mud with it and forming a slick surface on the road. I was doing about 30 mph, and eased my foot on the accelerator to slow the car down, but this had no effect, even when I lifted my foot completely, so I touched the brake pedal. The wheels locked and the car skidded into the left-hand bank, bounced off it, turned over and ended up lying across the middle of the road on its side, the driver’s side. I felt utter surprise, helplessness and dismay as the world went topsy-turvy. Mary said she felt anger and resentment, sure that we were going to die – and if another vehicle had come fast round the bend towards us we might have done. Fortunately no other vehicle was involved, though one soon appeared and its flabbergasted occupants opened the doors of ours and helped us climb out. We were all strapped in except for Christopher, who was protected by his carrycot, and my mother, who must have been held in place by the other two children. She had a bruised rib later, but astonishingly none of the rest of us had any injury. People from a neighbouring cottage came out and kindly invited us in to have a cup of tea and use their telephone, while some strong men from the other cars that had by now come to a halt managed to lift the Anglia on to its four wheels and pushed it to the side of the road. I phoned Margaret and Ioan to tell them what had happened, and ordered a taxi to take the family back to Norman Road. Stephen, who had lost a sandal in the crash, said that if we could find it he would prefer to walk, but was dissuaded. The Anglia was badly scratched and dented on the driver’s side, but seemed to be otherwise in working order, so I drove it cautiously home.
The main cause of the accident was that the car did not slow down when I took my foot off the accelerator. There was a reason for this: the car had been serviced the day before at a local garage, and the mechanic had obviously set the carburettor incorrectly. I had been compensating for this by using the brake, which in slippery conditions caused the skid. What I should have done was to call in the AA to verify the malfunction, and then sue the garage, but I was too shocked by our narrow escape from a dreadful tragedy to take any such action – and too remorseful, for I blamed myself for not noticing the high revs of the engine when idling. But this carelessness in turn was traceable to stress and anxiety associated with Christopher. It was not coincidental that later Mary had an uncharacteristic and potentially serious accident with a second car I had bought for her. But I could not bear to think of the guilt I would have felt if I had survived a crash in which any of my family had been killed or seriously injured. We had had an escape of a kind that is colloquially described as ‘miraculous’, and devout Catholics like my mother-in-law would have ascribed it to the special intervention of God, and thanked Him effusively for it. But I did not. It would imply that God had declined to bestow the same favour on all the people who were killed or seriously injured in car crashes that day, many – perhaps most – of them no less deserving than us. I no longer believed in such a God. I knew we had survived by luck. I felt the emotion of gratitude, but there was no recipient. I was chastened, I was relieved, and I set myself to make the most of our luck – first of all, by going ahead with the planned holiday. I had the car checked out for safety but postponed the bodyshop work it needed and drove it in its battered state to St Brévin.
Park’s letters about Christopher over the past year had been typically positive and encouraging, but he was as restless and dissatisfied with his own situation as ever. He had abandoned his project of a book about style in the novel, and had gone back to Browning, agreeing to complete a biography left unfinished at his death by a distinguished Browning scholar, William Irvine, whom Park knew well. It involved a huge amount of research work to check and improve Irvine’s manuscript as well as writing completely new chapters, and corresponding with the scholar’s wife, who took a keen interest in the project, all of which delayed the publication of the book for several years. He was also in constant dispute with Mark Spilka over the editorial management of a new journal based at Brown called NOVEL in which they were both involved. I had taken part in some preliminary discussions about the project when I was there and my name appeared on its list of editorial advisers, but I never understood what the dispute was about. It was, however, one of the factors that made Park hanker after an academic post in England, as he often mentioned in his letters. He was aware that he was much better off in America as regards salary, teaching load and funding for research, but as he had explained in a letter of 2nd May, ‘my reason for wanting to go to England is that I seem to be able to think and write there much more freely than I can here . . . I can’t and won’t teach American lit but I’ll make myself into a specialist in anything ENGLISH overnight, so please for God’s sake keep your eye out for me at Birmingham.’ I promised to do so.
We had a happy reunion with the Honans and Bradburys in St Brévin, and the holiday passed in a pleasantly relaxing way. One day Malcolm and I made an excursion along the Loire in his Rover 2000, pausing to visit a number of chateaux; but most days we occupied ourselves swimming and lounging on the beach, amusing the children, shopping for food (a chore at home, but it acquired a pleasing novelty abroad) and later enjoying an aperitif at a café and a meal which we took turns to cook. Not for the first time I regretted my poor French, especially after Mary complained to the tourist office about some bad milk we had been sold which the shopkeeper refused to exchange. That afternoon I was in the village on my own and a gendarme who evidently recognised me said something which I could not understand. A small, interested crowd gathered round us, and someone interpreted for me: ‘He says tell your wife to meet him here at four o’clock this afternoon.’ It was of course to resolve the milk issue (in our favour) but some of the spectators sniggered as if I was revealed as a complaisant cuckold. It made a good story to amuse the others that evening.
Not long after we returned home from this holiday we received a letter from the local health authority asking if we would be willing to take part in an experiment that a child psychologist, Mr Rex Brinkworth, was conducting into improving the learning abilities of mongol children. We replied promptly in the affirmative and were soon visited by a slightly built, soft-spoken man with a moustache and an unpretentious manner that nevertheless inspired immediate confidence. He explained that in collaboration with a doctor in Northern Ireland he had developed a programme for maximising the potential of mongol children by stimulating them in infancy. It was based on the little-known fact that the human brain continues to develop after birth, so it was possible in this period to teach them to respond to their environment in ways that normal children learn unaided. This made immediate sense – it revealed in a flash the folly and inhumanity of consigning such infants to a hospital where they would get a minimum of stimulation and thus confirm the pessimistic prognosis assigned to them – and we waited eagerly to learn more. The snag was that Mr Brinkworth had already assembled a group of children on whom to test his latest programme, and was looking for some to form a control group who would not take part but would be tested periodically for purposes of comparison. Naturally we said we wanted Christopher to be part of the experiment, not the control group, and after some discussion Rex agreed to help and advise us outside the experiment. He examined and played with Christopher, and encouraged us by praising his responsiveness, remarking that we must have intuitively applied the principles of his own system in several ways, so we had not lost too much time by being ignorant of it. Before he departed that day he gave us a copy of the schedule of exercises and activities he had designed, and he left us feeling immeasurably more hopeful about Christopher’s future. Here at last was a knowledgeable person telling us how to do something positive for him instead of merely accepting him. He turned out to be a very rewarding child to bring up, with a distinctive personality that charmed most people who met him – confident, affectionate, and for a Down’s remarkably articulate – even witty. Inevitably most of the necessary effort was made by Mary, especially in the early years, but he bonded strongly with me and I shared the satisfaction we felt later, when he learned not only to read and write, but also to use public transport, to make speeches at family celebrations, to beat me routinely at pool, to carve beautiful wooden bowls on a carpenter’s lathe, and to paint pictures that people would buy. His life was not to be without problems and anxieties, for him and for us, but it has been mostly a happy and (given his limitations) a fulfilled one. For that we owe a lot to meeting Rex Brinkworth at the right moment.
Rex had been motivated to develop his ideas about improving Down’s children by having one himself, his daughter Françoise. The short book he wrote with his collaborator Dr Joseph Collins, first published in 1969, and subsequently revised and reissued many times as Improving Babies with Down’s Syndrome, has been of enormous help to many parents. He founded the Down’s Babies Association in Birmingham, which subsequently became a nationwide charity known as the Down Syndrome Association, based in London, and he was awarded an MBE, the least public recognition he deserved for his contribution to society. He died in 1998.