Several years ago, my sister, Joy Waterhouse, who has died aged 66, wrote a short autobiography, This is My Story. She also achieved high grades in music theory and lived independently for some 15 years.
Nothing special in all of this, except that she was born with Down’s syndrome.
Our father, John, and mother, Esther (nee Martin), were respectively a Methodist minister and a paediatric doctor, so in many ways Joy had a great start in life. She was a bright, agile and fun-loving child, joining eagerly in family activities. She was, as she later wrote in her book, quite simply a “bundle of joy”.
She became one of the top collectors nationally for the Methodist Missionary Society’s juvenile branch. Her method was exemplary. Every Sunday morning, in her Brownie uniform and just out of Sunday school, she would hang around beside the church porch and pounce on those good souls who had signed up for weekly contributions. They couldn’t dodge her.
Joy’s Three Rs skills were more than adequate, but my parents chose to encourage her home-based interests rather than push her into the world of employment. Joy played the piano, the organ, the spinet, the recorder and the clarinet. She produced tapestry, spun and wove, made rugs, knitted and crocheted, then learned the arts of calligraphy with an aim in mind: penning religious texts.
For she was (unlike her three brothers) a committed Christian. That is not to say she remained a Methodist. Having flirted with Roman Catholicism as a young adult, she joined the Salvation Army in the 1990s before becoming a member of two Anglican churches in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire.
Joy’s interests in politics were equally catholic: she started out in the Labour party then switched to the Lib Dems, the Greens and finally to the Conservatives.
Helped by excellent care from Warwickshire social services (she did voiceovers in a video, My Home, My Choice, for Warwickshire county council), Joy was able to live on her own after our mother died in 1995 (our father died in 1971).
Joy continued to fend for herself until she moved into sheltered housing in 2006, but by the end of the decade dementia was setting in. Her final years were spent in a Shrewsbury nursing home, close to her family.
Our brother John died in 2010. Joy is survived by two brothers, David and me, and our families.
