Matilda In The Middle
Katy Lironi
(Into Creative, £10.99)

Matilda is, by all accounts, an utterly adorable young lady, “essentially a social butterfly and an incorrigible flirt”, who could charm the birds from the trees. That her personality shines so brightly from the pages of her mother Katy’s book, written with love and a hint of admiration, makes it a pleasure to read.

In a way, it’s two intertwined stories: Katy Lironi’s memoir of raising five children, including a middle child with Down’s syndrome; and an account of how music has been her constant companion, forging connections between individuals and across generations. Whenever she writes about one, the other is never far away.

Scottish music fans will know of Katy from The Secret Goldfish, the band she and her husband Douglas McIntyre formed in 1994. Further back, denizens of live music clubs at the height of the C86 scene will remember her fronting the Fizzbombs (the most nervous-looking person ever to set foot on a stage, according to her brother).

(Image: Into Creative)

She recounts here a typical 1970s childhood of Thursday nights in front of Top of the Pops, the sounds of The Sweet, Slade and the Bay City Rollers contrasting with the wartime songs she’d learned from her parents. Later, enrolling at Napier University, she found herself in a world of “stripy T-shirts and anoraks” and agreed to join the Fizzbombs because, she says, she was too scared to refuse. Despite the band’s ramshackle beginnings, she felt that she was finally in the right place.

Music was put on indefinite hold in 1999, when she became pregnant with her oldest daughter, Jeannie, followed 19 months later by Marco, an exhausting “harbinger of chaos” who needed constant supervision. Matilda is in the middle because she preceded the twins, Tom and Louisa. A 20-week scan revealed that she had a 50% chance of having Down’s syndrome, but this was pushed into the background by the trauma of her birth. Matilda arrived with a heart condition, collapsed lungs, hypertension and pneumonia and was put in an induced coma. After an agonising three weeks, she was allowed to go home, “where she would never cease to surprise us all”.

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In the years that followed, she kept her parents in “a state of perpetual panic”, a moment’s inattention giving her the opportunity to climb over the back fence, attempt to leap a balcony or disappear to play “spy” in a neighbour’s house. But she also discovered joy in music and dance, beginning with the Ups and Downs Theatre Group in Lanarkshire when she was five, which has boosted her language skills, self-confidence and performing talents immeasurably.

It’s an unflinchingly frank account of being a parent, but one that’s positive and life-affirming. Katy is clearly well suited to motherhood, a fact that cuts through all her admissions of self-doubt, uncertainty and inconsistency. And she shows us a resilient family that’s pulled together through difficult, chaotic times and logistically insane challenges.

She’s frank too about the downsides, the visitors who stopped calling and the hard conversations that no mother would want to have. It’s been a continual learning process that, although Matilda is now 20, never ends: “We are navigating a whole new set of rules, how to parent a young adult so that she doesn’t realise she’s being parented.”

A lifelong lover of music, Katy now writes of it as an essential way for “people who struggle to communicate” to connect with the world after organising numerous successful events over the past two decades, raising funds and awareness for Down’s Syndrome Scotland and with Matilda always somewhere in the middle.