The Pure Gold Baby. Margaret Drabble

liked Bob. I didn’t take him very seriously, but I liked him. I’m not sure if he liked me, in those days, but he didn’t need to, did he?

      The Professor was a wedge, a prow, a beak. Austere, determined, rock hard and unrelenting. Bob, as his name happily suggests, was a rounder chap, with animal spirits and a good deal of energy. He was a seal, a bear, a handsome beast with fur on his chest, a healthy mammal. He tumbled and laughed and talked smartly. He seemed to take stepdaughter Anna as part of the deal: Jess, North London, SOAS, a Bohemian intelligentsia, an inner ring, swinging London, long hair, impromptu street parties, a little hash. Jess didn’t smoke hash – she was too responsible in her maternal role to take any small risks – but she didn’t mind when other people did. She wasn’t the kind of woman who said ‘not in my house’.

      I think Bob first came on the scene in the early seventies, but I couldn’t swear to it. Anna would have been about eleven, I suppose.

      Bob was friendly and at first ingratiating towards Anna, making her laugh, teaching her the words of some American summer-camp songs he’d sung as a teenager in Vermont, helping her to join in the conversation, not minding when she spilt her orange juice on his trousers. But it soon became clear that Bob felt she’d be better off at a residential boarding school for children with special needs, financed by the local authority. An offer of a place in Enfield had come up, and Jess had been worrying herself about whether or not to accept it. Anna was growing up. Anna had left our local primary school in Plimsoll Road when she could no longer cope with the lessons, even with Miss Laidman’s special attention – I think she was about nine when she moved on – and she was already outgrowing the special class that she’d been attending, one attached to a larger state primary up in Highbury that gathered together most of the special-needs children of several North London boroughs. I think she was already at the Highbury school when Bob arrived in our lives.

      Secondary school, Jess knew, would be a tougher proposition than primary school, and the local options for special needs weren’t immediately attractive. Maybe Anna would be happy at a boarding school, where she would benefit from expert professional attention. (So, plausibly, reasoned Bob.) She could learn to be a little more independent, learn skills that would help her to survive better, in the long run, without Jess. The local authority agreed to fund her transfer to Enfield at this stage, and was committed to funding her until the age when she became the concern of the social services rather than of the education department. All in all, it seemed a sensible move to make.

      Bob didn’t press it, but it was clear that he was in favour of this move. We didn’t quite know what to think. Most of us sent our children to the local state schools, although one or two of the more privileged and better-off amongst us had reverted to their ancestral type and opted to pay fees. My Jake went to the local comp, and Ike would soon follow him. I reasoned that Jake was such a bright lad that he’d do well wherever he went. Bright Tim Bowles had become a weekly boarder at Harrow; his father took the opposite line from me and thought he was too clever for a comprehensive. We didn’t approve of that. Stuart and Josh Raven would also be sent to public school, and we wouldn’t approve of that either. We were good at disapproval.

      My husband and I didn’t really see eye to eye about education, but he allowed me to make the decisions. He was, I sometimes thought, too busy with his work, his stressful decision-making work, to notice much of what was happening on the domestic front, and that suited me quite well. But happily that is not part of this narrative.

      Anna, we all realised, was in a category of her own. Her needs were different. Her needs were special. The comfortable new phrase ‘special needs’ was to fit her like a nice warm woollen glove. She didn’t have Down’s syndrome, she wasn’t a cretin or a moron or an idiot or an imbecile or even a High-Grade Feeble-Minded Girl, but she did have special needs.

      Well, perhaps that’s exactly what she was, in the language of that earlier day. A High-Grade Feeble-Minded Girl. Lionel Penrose at Colchester would have recognised her, would have liked her. He liked most of his patients.

      The debate about whether to educate special children in integrated classes within the mainstream system or by themselves in separate institutions is an old one, and, despite waves of reform and new education acts, it is never finally or satisfactorily resolved, because there is no final or satisfactory solution. There is no solution that fits all, as that warm-glove-word ‘special’ fitted Anna.

      It was in 1913 that the Mental Deficiency Act was passed, which required ‘defective’ children to be taken out of elementary schools and placed in schools for the ‘feeble-minded’: a decision that was reversed by the Warnock Report of 1978, although that reversal is under constant review. No need to try to spell out this long, ongoing debate or to dramatise it here, although the dramatis personae are an interesting bunch of characters. The medical experts, the geneticists, the psychiatrists, the educationalists, the psychometric testers, the Mendelian mathematicians, the frauds and the faithful and the fanatics, the sociologists and the philosophers – they did their best and their worst. The story goes back a long way: to statistician Karl Pearson, who incidentally (entirely incidentally) computed the incidence and heritability of lobster claw in Scotland; to loveless tyrant Cyril Burt and his juvenile delinquents and his dubious twin studies; to gallant Lionel Penrose in the old Royal Eastern Counties Institution at Colchester, where he observed with affection the loving Down’s children and what he called their ‘secret source of joy’; then on to R. D. Laing, the liberator who redefined madness; and to Mary Warnock, the steel-haired, hooded-eyed, clear-sighted, no-nonsense wise old woman of the Warnock Report.

      Penrose saw the secret source of joy of the pure gold babies.

      There are schools now, as Jess will tell you, that specialise in many subdivisions of special needs and learning difficulties (Down’s syndrome, autism, hearing difficulties) and apply many differing pedagogic theories to the education of their charges. There are schools with spiritual or religious foundations, schools with large endowments from concerned and wealthy parents, schools with cranky dietary beliefs and schools with regimes that veer towards the rigour of the boot camp. All over Britain, there are little communities and care homes, some open, some heavily gated, where the able and the fairly able look after the less able, with varying degrees of compassion and success. Some hope to cure; some are content to manage. Some of these care homes have ageing populations, as some of the needy live longer, and their carers age too. This is a worry, as our demographic curve changes. There are new needy being born every day, as we strive to keep alive premature babies that are not really viable, but Jess says we haven’t even begun to worry about that yet.

      There was not so much choice of special-needs schooling then, when Anna was a child, or, if there was, Jess didn’t know where to look for it. Jess and Bob, during their courtship, thought they were lucky when a place for Anna was made available at Marsh Court. Anna’s social worker had made inquiries and discovered it. Anna was a lucky girl. Anna would like Marsh Court.

      Jess went to visit the school on her own, with a predisposition to find it suitable. She needed a safe stretch of time for Anna, she needed to marry Bob and have a year or two of quasi-normal life, she needed to like Marsh Court.

      Marsh Court was within easy reach of North London, and it seemed to Jess to be a pleasant enough place, with caring staff and good facilities. The director and the staff were out to make a good impression. Jess was too nervous to ask them any searching questions, but she felt that the atmosphere of the classes, the smiles of some of the young people she met, were a recommendation. She did not hear any wailing from locked rooms or see any pale faces peering through barred upper windows. No mad children in the attics, no orphans strapped into their cribs.

      After her interview with the director, Jess was shown round by a well-built, golden-skinned, broad-featured, crinkle-haired handsome middle-aged woman called Hazel, with a rich contralto voice and a beautiful carriage, who said she was in charge of music: was Anna musical, Hazel wanted to know? Yes, said Jess. She liked to sing. She knew a lot of songs.

      We love to sing here, said Hazel, and grasped Jess’s hand warmly in hers, and held her arm, hands