No pains spared

Matthew, the author’s son, and the subject of this memoir, had Downs Syndrome, but I should state at once that the book is much more than a guide for parents, or carers, of such children. It stands on its own as a work of literature and should win the PEN/Ackerley prize for memoir and autobiography.

The author, in her poised, sometimes old-fashioned prose, beguiles the reader. As a little girl, she befriended a neighbour’s child whom she first saw through the hedge:

Large and silent … she wore a bow in her hair and usually carried a doll in her arms. Her smile melted my heart, and though I could not understand the reason for this, it sometimes brought tears to my eyes.

Later, married, but still childless — her first baby died — Crosby is similarly touched by the son of a Hammersmith vegetable vendor whom she sees collecting coins, calling: ‘Money for mongols like me. Money for mongols’ place please.’ The ‘mongols’ place’ was the nearby Normansfield Hospital, founded in 1868 ‘to study and care for a particular kind of inmate’, by a Dr Norman Langdon Down, hence the term ‘Down’s Syndrome’.

Crosby puts her own son in there when he is three, and removes him less than two years later, after a strongly worded letter to the grandson of the founder, stating: ‘Most of your patients spend their lives doing nothing at all’.

Crosby is a painter, and has a memory for visual detail. However, she also has the ability to reproduce dialogue and, in particular, her son’s idiosyncratic remarks. In a lift, Matthew says nervously: ‘This horrid room got bad floor, make my legs go shorter,’ and, in a rocking train: ‘Got be brave walking in train ….