The Pure Gold Baby Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    The arrangement they came to was, for its time and place, unorthodox, but, as anthropologists, they were familiar with the immense variety of human arrangements, and not inclined to pass temporal judgement upon them. In this, they were ahead of their time, or out of their time. It doesn’t matter which. Or it would not have mattered, had there not been consequences, in the form of Anna.
    It could have been Katie who was first to know about Anna, it could have been Maroussia, it could have been me, or it could have been the blond egocentric sexually athletic Professor Lindahl (a specialist, as it happened, in Chinese agrarian societies). A few months after the initial diagnosis, we all knew, and had progressed beyond the stage where we made comforting remarks like ‘I’m sure she’ll catch up soon’ or ‘She seems perfectly normal to me, my Tim (or Tom, or Polly, or Stuart, or Josh, or Ollie, or Nick, or Ben, or Jane, or Chloe) can’t do up his shoelaces/ write her name/ ride a bike/ count beyond twenty.’ Those were the days of tolerant, progressive, permissive parenting, when it was not the fashion to impose great expectations or much discipline upon one’s offspring. The prevailing philosophy was of laissez-faire, and we believed in the noble savage, the blank slate. Original Sin had been banished, and we held that, if nurtured by kindness, natural goodness would always prevail. Our chief pedagogue Dr Spock told us that babies usually knew best, and that mothers should trust them, even if they wanted to live on a diet of beetroot or burnt toast.
    Motherhood was being deprofessionalised, but not deskilled. Trained nannies were out of fashion, because they were too expensive for the new generation of struggling working mothers. Trained nannies were for unemployed rich mothers, in those days. Improvisation was in favour with the middle classes: au pair girls, amateur and cheap nursery groups, reciprocal child-minding.
    This was lucky for Anna and her mother.
    It is not surprising that Jess and some of her closer friends began to be deeply interested in the subject of birth defects, childhood illnesses and inherited abnormalities, despite their faith in the natural goodness of infants, and despite Jess’s necessary assumption that Anna’s paternity had nothing to do with her condition. This was a period when important discoveries were being made about the chromosomal basis of Down’s syndrome (not that Anna was thought to have Down’s syndrome), and certain inherited genetic diseases were being routinely tested for at birth, not always with the mother’s knowledge or consent. (It was at this time that Jess’s mind began to go back again and again, involuntarily, almost dreamily, not unhappily, to those little agile club-foot children by the shining lake.) Vaccination was then, in the sixties, a major ethical issue, though autism, with which it was later to be (as we now think erroneously) connected, was not as yet a frequent or popular diagnosis.
    Autism is now, in the twenty-first century, a hot topic. Down’s syndrome is not. You can’t make much of a career from studying Down’s syndrome. It doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s low key and unsensational. You can maintain, you can provide care, you can campaign to alter attitudes and perceptions, you can argue about the ethics of termination. You can admire Lionel Penrose for his research on the chromosome at Colchester, for his enlightening discoveries and enlightened Quaker principles, for his respectful attention to, and affection for, his patients.
    You can respect. You can abort. You cannot cure.
    Most of us were amateurs, struggling on with motherhood and learning as we went, but Sylvie had studied medicine and qualified as a general practitioner before her marriage to the dashing and increasingly absent Rick Raven, so we used to listen to her as our neighbourhood expert on medical matters. She wasn’t practising at this time, when her boys were