Disability Arts Online

You mentioned your family and their approach to disability – was disability ‘normal’ in your upbringing then?

I suppose my family were the final piece of the jigsaw. My father had epilepsy and died when I was three. His epilepsy didn’t stop him doing sport at school including boxing, fencing, running and then, after dropping out of university (which in the 1950s was pretty much unheard of), starting his own business making harpsichords.

Growing up half German Jewish in a conventional small town in Kent with a young widowed mother who had three small children and a harpsichord workshop didn’t exactly enable us to blend in!

Because my mother was on her own in difficult circumstances, we moved to be near my English grandparents who, along with my great aunt and her ‘dear friend’ and a whole circle of determined older people, became our everyday world. My mother played duets with a brilliant flautist who happened to be blind and learnt all the music by heart from Braille copies and my grandmother was great friends with a young blind man studying to be a piano tuner. Compared to the temperamental professional musicians I had contact with through the harpsichord workshop, these people were a dream.

As time went on, my English grandmother became progressively deafer and my sisters and I learnt not to talk to her when she had her back to us, to pitch our voices lower so she could hear and sit close to her in noisy places. (I have always assumed I would probably loose my hearing eventually too - although actually it's my sisters who are having more problems with that – for me, its my heart that doesn't work very effectively, but that's another story.)

My German grandmother was also very disabled by her hearing impairment and had a serious heart condition which meant she could only walk a few hundred yards, but she was still busy translating the work of leading English writers into German, so that the two countries could understand one another better.

And then when I was around twelve, my cousin Conrad - who has a learning disability - was born. Conrad’s birth had a huge effect on all of us and changed the way my entire family viewed disability almost overnight. All the adults were very upset, but to me Conrad just seemed like a cute and very cuddly baby, just the right size to be lugged around from place to place. I could help change him and give him his bottle in the way twelve year old girls seem to love.

As he got older Conrad became very good at things I could never do - swimming for example - where he competed at a very high level and won medals. He’s exhibited his work as an artist, danced with his sister, my cousin, on Top of the Pops and now lives independently with friends in a shared house in Hertfordshire. We share a love of musicals (which, coming from a family steeped in early classical music, is tantamount to playing in a heavy metal band) and he’s always been a great person to sing all the songs from The Sound of Music or Joseph and Technicolor Dream Coat with. My aunt Jane, Conrad’s mother, explained to me very early on that it wasn’t that Conrad couldn’t do things, it was that he did them differently or more slowly or needed more time, or that he just did and enjoyed different things from the rest of us, and as far as I could see, that was true.

What’s more, having spent a lot of my time as a child with older people I always assumed that I would become disabled by an age-related condition eventually, so for me, there wasn't any 'us and them' - more a 'now and later' continum.