Our provision for adults with learning disabilities is seriously inadequate

This book reveals one man’s determination to enable his brother to live his best life. It is also a fable for our time. It hints at how we all might live if we turned the lens on the world. ‘Does Reuben have a learning disability’ asks Manni Coe, ‘or do we have an understanding disability?’

Coe’s younger brother Reuben, now 39, has Down’s syndrome. In brother.do.you.love.me Coe senior describes their loving upbringing in Yorkshire and Berkshire as other people stared, and Reuben’s adventures living a supported, partially independent adult life. Reuben visited another brother in the US (being able at that stage to fly unaccompanied) and enjoyed part-time voluntary jobs, though he was fired from stacking shelves at Waitrose after wolfing down coleslaw straight from the display cabinet. He also spent more than three years in Spain with Coe, who moved there two decades ago and now guides tourists as well as running a farm with his partner. The arrangement came to an end when Reuben experienced a breakdown in Spain, and willingly moved to an assisted living facility in the south of England. Then the pandemic crashed over the Coes’ world.

Reuben, whose charming illustrations enliven the book (hence its dual authorship), shrank from within, a prisoner in an institution which only serviced him. He became an elective mute and stopped eating. Glimpses on a screen revealed eyes that were ‘dark pebbles’ above the mandatory mask. On a rare permitted visit, his mother cut his filthy fingernails through a crack in a sash window. When lockdown relaxed, Coe returned to the UK and visited Reuben 46 times in as many days. After a text message pinged in asking brother.do.you.love.me, Coe sprang Reuben from the home. The book unravels their painful journey together as Reuben thawed and started to speak again.