Mother: She was five weeks old. We weren't told straight away. I just burst into tears straight away. And I suppose you were a bit shocked.

Father: Well, yes, shocked I suppose is as much as anything, you can describe our reaction.

Mother: What I felt mainly was not nothing to do with my life but with Catherine's. I just felt, what sort of a life is she going to have, you know. I mean she was beautiful wasn't she, as a baby, I must say I had had a slight suspicion when I first saw her, but you know the members of the family said, no, no.

Father: You were more concerned than me, as well, about what other people would think.

Mother: Oh, yes, how would, you know, what sort of treatment would she receive from others, you know and what sort of life would she have, and I just cried and cried for days.

Father: I don't think it took us long before we more or less said that we had two options. We either sit in a corner and be sorry for ourselves or get on with life. And I think probably we had an advantage over a lot of other people because we had Andrew and Martin so, you know we knew everything was okay, and I suppose that helped us to also say that we would have to treat her as near as possible the same as we treated them.

Mother: She had been very difficult to feed. She was bottle fed. She didn't take very much milk at a time. She took a long time to feed and she was, you know, sick quite a bit and I have never been the most patient of people, have I, and you know I was sort of getting to the end of my tether, but funnily enough, when we knew that she had Down Syndrome, she was this special baby, my attitude just changed altogether and she still was difficult to feed, but you know, I could excuse that. But other than that there was not until she was mobile and she started trying to escape, you know, ran off a couple of times, was brought home by the police.

Father: That was when she was only about 4 or 5 as well.

Mother: Yes it must have been, well she was younger than that the first time. But no, you know, sort of physically caring for her - she was toilet trained you know at about the normal time for any other children. As you say, I think the two boys - well they just treated her like a younger sibling, not even a sister.

Mother: Well she started nursery first a special needs nursery. But she was only there about a year and then she went to Houghton-le-Spring just mainstream nursery.

Father: She was only about three when she went there.

Mother: She was three, yes. And it was well I found it a bit difficult at first watching her because she didn't know how really to interact with the other children. You know when they were playing outside for instance on the slide, all the others knew that they had to go and queue and take their turn. But she didn't know that. It took her a long time to learn how to play with them and, you know.

Father: Well, I mean that probably reinforced what we already suspected and that was that she was going to have to be taught - shown a lot of things that well Andrew and Martin, particularly had just picked up for themselves naturally as part of their development, but she had to have a lot of these things reinforced before she understood what they meant to her. I think she didn't for a long time she didn't play with the other children she played alongside them.

Mother: And then she started school and she was just four and a bit - the local special school which we were happy for her to go to because we knew she needed special education

Father: We also knew the headteacher round at the local primary didn't want to know. She just saw her as a problem.

Mother: So she went there and well I think she coped better than I did there didn't she as well, because it was you know the age range was four to nineteen at this school and there was you know a school bus came and took her there and for the first well it was nearly Christmas wasn't it before I stopped going on the bus with her and waiting in the school yard until it was time to go in, because you know I thought that she was only this big and there were these huge nineteen year old boys running around. But you know the headmistress gently said one day, you know you don't really need to come and I think she coped very well and she got on well didn't she?

Father: Yes, I mean that's probably another one of her strengths that she has always been very sociable and can get on with anybody and everybody.