No 43 - My Other Brother

This has been a difficult post to write, not least because I don’t come out of it so well. I sometimes fantasise about what I’d do if I had a time machine - I think one of the first things would be to go back into my own past and give myself a talking to, and maybe even a slap.

Mum and Steve

There is a popular view among many people of around my age, that their misremembered past was a simpler time when pretty much everything was better than it is now, the world having gone ‘to hell in a handcart’. It is a view I do not share. In my writing I have made the past my business, but I try and reconstruct it as faithfully as I can, rather than portraying it as some cosy paradise lost, and longing for its return.

In this blog I’ve told tales of my family and recounted their eccentricities with warm affection. But one cannot leave anyone out and I have been guilty of doing this, by avoiding the subject of Steve, my third brother. There are things in my own past that are not comfortable to revisit.

Third Son

There is a series of photos of my three brothers playing in the back garden of the terraced house my parents rented in Pwllheli, North Wales. They were taken by my father before I was born, around 1954/55, and I think he has captured the fraternal tomfoolery in such a natural way, considering that photography wasn’t as instant and easy in those days.

Jeff, Jos and Steve playing in the garden.

In the photos, the little blond boy in the stained shirt was Stephen, born in 1948 with a disability that wasn’t understood by the medical profession, let alone anyone else. Beyond uttering strange, often loud noises he could not speak and his movement was uncontrolled and unpredictable. He seemed unable to do anything for himself. My arrival in 1958 was probably what sealed his consignment to an institution at the age of nine. My father was the sole wage earner, a very busy man, and my mother couldn’t have coped with a new born baby, a disabled child and two others besides. They made a heart-breaking decision, but in the 1950s, this was a common fate for anyone classified as ‘mentally handicapped’.

When I was a child, I couldn’t understand Steve at all and I resented it when he was brought home for the occasional weeks holiday. The antipathy was mutual for he did not take to the little boy who competed for his mother’s time. Why would he? For nine years he had been the centre of attention. My father took many photos of him, for Steve was a very photogenic subject. Then along came the new baby, a new focus for attention, and he was sent away from everyone he’d ever known to live in a hospital full of strangers.

Steve being photogenic for Dad

When he was home, I made sure not to stray within striking distance, because he would sometimes lash out at me. As he grew older he became progressively stronger, and unable to communicate in any other way, he would seize our tiny mother’s arm in a vice-like grip and lead her to wherever he wanted her to go - usually into the scullery for food. It was an alarming thing for a small child to witness in his own home, despite our mother’s constant assurances that he meant no harm and didn’t know any better. Watching him eat revolted me so much that I would avoid using any crockery or spoons I’d seen him use for months afterwards. Mum would explain that he couldn’t help it and that I should be thankful that I wasn’t born like that. She wanted me to love my brother as she did, but I could not. In my child’s mind, he was more than just an unwelcome disruption to my routine, he was a monster, and he terrified me.

'Awkward Park'

We’d sometimes visit his residential hospital, a mock Tudor former hotel in Conwy called Oakwood Park, or Awkward Park as I misheard it. We’d take him out to Llandudno for the day. I can’t recall what we used to do there apart from walking along the prom. They couldn’t take him into shops or cafes, because people would stare and wouldn’t understand. They’d think he should be shut away, without appreciating that he mostly was. I used to get car sick on these trips and when I did, he used to mimic the vomiting noises. I thought he was mocking me, but Mum insisted that he was just being sympathetic. With hindsight I think he saw the attention it brought me and wanted some of it.

I’d like to say that I became more understanding as I grew older, but although I may have made more reasonable noises about him, it wasn’t really the case. By the time I entered my teens I had effectively written him off as an unfortunate accident, and nothing to do with me. I became less afraid and more embarrassed by him. Heaven forbid that I should have to try and explain him to my friends. When he came for the week I was old enough to be able to make myself scarce and I could duck out of the day visits to Conwy altogether. It didn’t occur to me that I might be able to help my parents cope. There was once an incident where Steve decided to lie down in the middle of Mostyn Street in Llandudno and Dad was only able to move him out of the traffic with the assistance of several strangers with kinder hearts than mine.

Auntie Eva, Steve and Mum

His visits to Pwllheli became less frequent because as he became even stronger, Dad wasn’t able to handle him any more than Mum could. The hospital reported that for a spell after he returned from these breaks he was unmanageable. I suppose he had been transplanted from a routine, where he was surrounded by people who understood him, and placed in the care of my parents who were well-meaning amateurs. It would be easy to conclude that the visits were pointless and meant nothing to Steve, but were that the case, why did he cry when he had to leave his mother and go back to Oakwood Park? If anything he did ever got through to me, it was the crying.

The last of the home visits happened when I was fourteen, and it was to be the last time I’d ever see him.

A Difficult Decision

In 1974, when I was sixteen, my father died unexpectedly. After the turmoil subsided, my mother agreed with the hospital that she would no longer visit Steve. She couldn’t manage him and he was unsettled by the contact. It was a pragmatic decision that further broke her heart. He was by now in Bryn-y-Neuadd hospital in Llanfairfechan, and from then on, every week or so she would send them a large parcel full sweets and biscuits. Food had always been her main way of expressing her love for him and she continued to do that for the rest of his life.

In 1984, shortly after I’d moved to London, Mum phoned to tell me that Steve had developed a brain tumour. It seemed desperately unfair that someone who’d lived with a disability all his life, should have to endure this new affliction. How was he meant to understand what was happening to him? What was already a tragedy assumed a new level of awfulness, especially for my mother. I did the only thing I could do and wrote her a letter of sympathy, for Steve sure, but mostly for her. For once I’d done the right thing, because she considered it a comfort and kept it in her handbag for the rest of her life.

My eldest brother Jeff was a professional teacher of those with special needs and he used to visit Steve. To this day, if I cannot communicate with someone using words, I’m lost, but he had a talent for finding a way to get through, no matter what the barriers. I wish I could be more like that. Instead, I was full of excuses - Steve wouldn’t even have known who I was, when I was a child I’d only annoyed him anyway - blah blah.

Those Who Care

By this time, the care of patients like Steve had progressed considerably. He may have been shut away in an institution, but they made real efforts to give him the best possible life. He wasn’t just kept alive and managed - he was better understood, treated, taken on outings. Most of all, I believe he was befriended by these incredible people who were probably underpaid and undervalued. They considered not only Steve, but our mother too. They recognised her pain and took the time to write her letters, updating her on how her son was getting on - his mood, his personality, his achievements - unlike me, he really loved the swimming pool apparently. I make heroes of writers, artists, singers, and sportspeople who can achieve wonderful things better than I ever could, but I have the same admiration for those who care for others and do it as well as this.

Steve died in 1990, aged 41, and when I asked my manager for leave to attend the funeral I was embarrassed by the sympathy he afforded me, because I considered myself unworthy of it. In the chapel at Bangor Crematorium, I felt a fraud sitting at the front with the family while the hospital staff who had cared for him every day were consigned to the back. I hadn’t seen him for eighteen years. They knew him, I did not. They were his friends. They had an emotional investment in him that I had never had.

Possible Answers

My brother Jos and I have often talked of Steve, sharing the different perspectives of an older and a younger brother, but neither of us had any idea what ‘the trouble’ had been. While scrolling through social media I came across a reel from an American page called For the Love of Gabe, about the progress of a teenager diagnosed as non-verbal autistic. The sounds he made, and the way he moved were immediately familiar and I genuinely believe that Steve had the same condition. With Steve it may have been more severe - but we will never know how much better things might have been for him had he been born a few decades later.

Gabe seems to be living a life full of joy, surrounded by people who love and support him. He can communicate via a keyboard and some of the articulate thoughts he expresses show that a caring and intelligent person has been released from the prison of his disability. I am so happy that despite his condition he is smashing through the barriers. But even in 2026 he and his family are having to fight for an education tailored to his needs, because the systems aren’t yet there to do that.

To see his progress is a bittersweet thing, because Steve lived in a darker time and never got this opportunity. I used to tell myself that in his own way he must have been happy enough, for all he ever seemed to want was food, and he got plenty of that. But it is heart-breaking to contemplate that there may have been an intelligent person locked inside his body, who was never understood, challenged or developed in any way, at least until the last few years of his life. I recall him as an often angry and frustrated young man, and if he was anything like Gabe, it is no wonder.

It was nobody’s fault - that’s just where science and society were at the time, but perhaps this is something those who desperately long for ‘the good old days’ should bear in mind.