The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  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 FeebleMinded 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 linked, arms linked, as they walked down the corridors. Jess felt much better for this contact, and she would continue, in a long afterlife, long after she had lost touch with Hazel, to find the memory of it a comfort. Such small gestures are so much needed and not so often offered.

  As she walked away from Marsh Court, on this her first of many visits, Jess looked back, calm enough to take in the school building and its immediate surroundings, which until now had appeared to her in a blur of anxiety and hope. The main house was an early-Victorian building, not unhandsome, built of reddish brick wi
th stone facing, and surmounted with a couple of what Jess thought were Dutch gables. Despite efforts to make it cheerful and child-friendly—pots of geraniums outside its front door, bold blue-and-orange geometric-patterned curtains, fresh green paint—it had a melancholy air, pertaining less perhaps to its institutional function than to its architecture. It looked like the kind of house that might have been occupied by a lonely old woman, the last of her line, or by an embittered miser hiding from his heirs. It looked like the end of something, not the beginning.

  It survived amidst a waste of random redevelopment, of housing estates and industrial parks, and was itself surrounded by little outcrops of prefabricated schoolrooms and workshops and allotments. But an older Enfield could still be traced in it, older by far than the little two-storey 1930s neat-shabby suburban homes that lined the road down which Jess now walked towards the River Lee and Enfield Lock.

  Keats had been to school in Enfield. In a special school for the children of progressive tradesmen, not a special school for the educationally problematic. He and his friend, the schoolmaster’s son, used to walk the ten miles into town to go to the theatre to see Sarah Siddons and Edmund Keane. How high their hopes had been, how lofty their ambitions, those earnest talented young men.

  Jess walked towards Enfield Lock and the canal and the River Lee, and then began to walk, thoughtfully, reflectively, receptively, along the tow path. Anna liked the water. Anna, Jess thought, would like the water walkway. The lock was old and quiet, with a stationed narrow boat and a cluster of old buildings from another age—the dark-brick lock-keeper’s cottage with white-fretted wooden gables, a row of tidy little houses, a pub called the Rifles. Jess sensed there was a historic arsenal connection here, as in Highbury, a military link, but the waterside this day was peaceful in the sun. The track was overgrown with elder and buddleia and nettles, with long greens and purples. Jess walked on and through a gate and over a wooden stile, and the water flowed strongly. She had left the placid canal bank and joined the path of the deep full river. A warning notice leaning rakishly on a rotting board told her the water was deep and dangerous. Small golden-winged birds flew in swift flurries in a light June breeze through tall willows and reeds. Dark dragonflies, blue-black, hovered and coupled over the rapidly moving surface.

  Jess as she walks hears the high unearthly cry of the fish-eagle, calling from another world, calling from her youth and from Africa. She hears the honey-guide and the blacksmith plover and the go-away-bird and the boubou and the bird that cries Nkoya, Nokoya, Nkoya Kupwa . . . I go, go, go to get married . . . She hears the sad descending call of the emerald-spotted wood dove: I lost my mother, I lost my father, and I am alone, alone, alone . . . That, the tribesmen had told her, was the dove’s lament, the lament that Livingstone had heard as he was carried dying on his litter through the swamps and the rushes.

  Great submerged intensely green plants with large leaves like the leaves of cabbages stream in the current of the River Lee, with tight golden balls of flowers on long snake stems, rooted, tugging, flowing, flowering under the water. A great force of water flows powerfully in this half-tamed landscape of Essex.

  Jess sees the swamps and marshes and sedges of Lake Bangweulu, the green spikes of reed and papyrus, the rain tree, the tussocks and the clumps, the rising bubbles of marsh gas, the green tunnel of the waterway and the slow progress of the low canoe. The lechwe are as numerous as the stars in the sky, their herds cover the grasslands, but the shoebill is lonely.

  When one of the lechwe is taken by a lion, the rest of the herd moves onwards, uncaring, indifferent. Not one breaks off or strays behind to grieve.

  Primates are different. Primates linger with their dead.

  On his death march, Livingstone heard a little tree-frog ‘tuning as loud as the birds and very sweet’. A luminous green-and-yellow tree-frog had perched on Jess’s bedside torch, in her tent, all those years ago, safe with her under the mosquito net.

  Walking on through time by the strong, fast-flowing water, Jess hears Hazel singing with Anna and the group of simple children, the pure bronzed woman singing with the pure gold child. Hazel sings:

  The river is flowing, growing and flowing,

  The river is flowing down to the sea.

  Mother Earth carry me,

  Your child I shall always be,

  Mother Earth carry me down to the sea . . .

  The children join in the round, some tunefully, some at random, but all of them intent on Hazel’s divine face, her sweet rich heavenly voice, as she keeps them together, against the odds.

  Hazel will be a friend, a saviour, a haven, for a short while. She has the heart and the skills. To know Hazel, even briefly, is lucky. Anna is a lucky girl.

  Anna was apprehensive about the move, but Jess prepared her as best she could, persuading her Marsh Court was a grown-up school where she would make new friends and learn new skills to show off when she came home for holidays. Anna, always an obliging child, was extremely anxious to please and appease: if her mother thought it best that she should go to Marsh Court, she would try to enjoy Marsh Court. She struggled not to show her fear, and so did her mother.

  ‘You’ll like the music lady; she’s called Hazel,’ said Jess from time to time, to comfort herself as well as Anna.

  Anna had missed Fanny Foy when she moved from Plimsoll Primary to Highbury Barn. There hadn’t been a good music teacher at Highbury. Fanny had been to tea once or twice in Kinderley Road, but it hadn’t been the same.

  Jess tempted Anna with stories of the canal walks and the lock and the water gardens and the pond with white and pink lilies and the turquoise damsel flies.

  Jess delivered Anna to Marsh Court in early September, for the beginning of the new school year. Anna’s face on parting showed a watery crumpled look of kindness and anxiety mixed, an expression far too mature for an abandoned child. Jess did not cry on the way home, but she felt like howling. She wanted to howl like a monkey or scream like an eagle.

  That night Jess dreamt that Anna was drowning in the canal. She was slowly going under, her trusting face gazing upward for help, her clothes filling with water like Ophelia’s, as she made little paddling movements with her arms. (In fact, Anna could swim well, a competent dog-paddle, so why she wasn’t trying to swim in the dream was a mystery, though not the kind of mystery you notice when you’re dreaming.) And, as Jess gazed at her helplessly, from some out-of-frame vantage point, the green-brown weed-decked Essex canal grew and broadened and spread and swelled into a shining blue lake, and Anna drifted further and further away into its distant reaches, until she disappeared from sight.

  Jess woke and lay there in the night on her old second-hand bed with its sagging mattress and tried to reassure herself that this dream meant nothing, nothing at all, that its sources were too obvious to be worthy of consideration. Anna would not fall into the canal, the school would look after her, and anyway she could swim, Jess had made sure of that. Jess lay awake, and thought of the little children in Africa with their dugout canoes. How many of them, in that watery landscape, died by drowning? Was drowning a common fate? Too late now to go back to ask. Could they swim, did they swim? Did anybody know, had anybody ever thought to ask? What were the statistics? Had anyone counted them? She hadn’t seen any of them playing in the water, but that was probably because of river blindness or leeches.

  A leech had attached itself to Jess’s firm brown ankle on that long ago trip, and they had all laughed as group leader Guy Brighouse burnt it off with his cigarette. It had winced and puckered, poor leech. Jess had almost felt sorry for it.

  Anna never had any dreams, or so she told Jess. Anna said she didn’t know what dreams were. When Jess tried to describe the act and process of dreaming to Anna, Anna was uncomprehending. That layer of her consciousness seemed to be missing. Jess didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it was a semantic problem, maybe Anna could not explain in words about her dreams, just as she could not remember
the letters of her name.

  Not even Jess always understood Anna.

  Jess did not tell Bob about her bad dreams. Bob was her fair-weather lover, her lightweight boy He was so much younger than the Professor, so very much younger. There was no point in worrying him with her anxieties.

  Jess cooked Bob eccentric little meals of offal, snails and fishtails, chicken’s feet, pigs’ ears, tripe and bits of webbing. This was the frustrated anthropologist in her coming out, she claimed. She enjoyed hunting around in the strong-smelling sawdust-sprinkled local shops for unexpected morsels, some of them, in those days, stored in old-fashioned wooden casks and barrels of brine that might have come over on the Windrush. The courteous withered old Jamaican gentleman who ran the large open-fronted corner grocery store admired her initiative and smiled toothlessly with his hard gums at her purchases. Bob gobbled up the results of her forays, and traded them for dubious memories of dubious bushmeat from his African journeys. Ants also and caterpillars he had devoured, he assured her. Lévi-Strauss had nothing on him and his adventures.

  He had photographed great apes and aardvarks and small children in Senegal and the Cameroons, but he had never been to the Shining Lake of Northern Rhodesia, with its strange and special children.

  Bob was jealous of the sighting of the shoebill, and interested to learn that Jess had never even thought of taking a camera with her on her African journey.