#NATE NEWTON'S BROTHER SKIN#
#NATE NEWTON'S BROTHER FULL#

Is that what you meant Reubs?” Reuben raises his finger in agreement. If you love me then show me the colour of your love’. “That was Reuben’s way of saying ‘come and get me out of here. The text was not a question, says Manni, it was a prompt. – which would inspire the title of their book. That’s when I saw that he was ready to fight and that he’d found courage.” Soon after that came the text – brother. It was only a November selfie, of Reuben roaring like a lion, that gave him any hope. Manni spent nearly two months visiting him every day over the summer but returned to Spain with “huge doubts”. View image in fullscreen One of Reuben Coe’s drawings, based on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which feature in his new book. A picture taken during lockdown of Reuben shows him gazing from his bedroom window, one hand against the glass. Family Zooms made everybody feel further away, not closer. He clinically regressed, then improved, before regressing massively when he was admitted to a care home in February 2020.

#NATE NEWTON'S BROTHER FULL#

“Always the life and soul of the party.” He didn’t use many full sentences but he was a skilled communicator. Some people are still living it.”īefore September 2018, when Reuben lived with his brother and his partner in Spain, he was “chatty Cathy”, says Manni. “Not just people who have someone in the family with Down’s syndrome or a sibling, but anybody who was isolated in lockdown – and we were many. “It’s a story that so many connect with,” says Manni. We think that what we’ve lived through will help other people.” They have already had people who have read the book get in touch. Reuben is clear about why they’re doing it.

So it was a very private thing and now it becomes very public.” “It does feel as if we’re taking it outside. How does it feel to be sharing such an intensely personal journey? “We’re still getting used to it, because we’ve lived a very quiet last year,” says Manni. The first thing Reuben plans to say to her is her Miranda catchphrase “bear with”. Their six-week tour, which will take them around bookshops and festivals around England and Wales, will culminate at Hay festival with Sally Phillips interviewing them, after Manni approached the actor in a chance encounter at a restaurant. “So if I was writing it, it was giving me inspiration that we could push this through to a happy ending.” Every night he would do a drawing, give me a kiss, whisper ‘night brother’, and then hand it to me. “Writing about it gave me hope because I realised that there was a narrative and I wanted it to be a happy ending,” he says, his voice cracking with emotion. “And that’s how we communicated – he communicated with me through drawing.”Īnd for Manni, who has always written, it was a form of therapy. “Every night he would do a drawing for me, give me a kiss, whisper ‘night brother’, and then hand it to me upside down, so there was a big reveal,” says Manni. Reuben’s boldly coloured felt-tipped drawings – which include Joseph’s technicoloured dreamcoat, many lions and the lamppost from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – were a means of expression and communication at a time when words were not available. Originally, there was no plan to share their writings and drawings publicly, says Manni. At one point they lived in the care home that their father ran. It also describes their lives growing up in the Yorkshire Dales, then Berkshire, with their parents in a family of four brothers – a life that “orbited the church”, writes Manni. Their pictures and words communicate with one another but also express the voices of two interweaving individual lives. The book, published this month by Little Toller Books, tells the story of their journey together during Covid and how they wrote and drew their way through one of their biggest ever challenges. Later in the evening, Reuben, who loves theatre, films and musicals, will appear on the stage of the Normansfield Theatre at the Langdon Down Centre in Teddington in front of a room full of people to huge applause. Before I arrived, they were dancing around the auditorium to Beauty and the Beast, says Manni. He often looks up at the dramatically lit stage, dressed in forest scenery, which instantly reminds him of Jack and the Beanstalk.

#NATE NEWTON'S BROTHER SKIN#

On the floor next to him is a blue tote bag, to which he later carefully returns the newspaper, and on his person at all times is a narrow paintbrush, which he sometimes uses to stroke his skin or the chair. View image in fullscreen Manni, left, and Reuben Coe.

Nate newton's brother