Little Ruins: Rebuilding A Life by Manni Coe: How I recovered from being abused - by my vicar

Brother. do. you. love. me.’ That was the plaintive text sent by Reuben Coe (born with Down’s syndrome) to his elder brother Manni, from the home in Dorset where he was (supposedly) being cared for during the pandemic. Manni knew what those words meant. They were a cry for help. Reuben needed saving from that loveless institution.

Manni’s bestselling memoir of last year, Brother. Do. You. Love. Me., described the rescue, and Reuben’s slow recovery from his depressed, almost non-verbal state. The deep bond between them was beautifully evoked – both in words and through Reuben’s Narnia-inspired drawings.

Manni Coe’s new book Little Ruins is the prequel. It’s just as evocative and moving. In 2018, he and his partner Jack bought half of a ruined house in Andalusia. If you want to know what it’s really like to take on a derelict property like that – the beauty, the isolation, the drought, the searing heat of summer, the cold and floods of winter, the wild animals, the olive oil harvest – this book will either tempt you or put you off for life.

At their happiest, Manni, Jack and Reuben live a wonderfully simple, contented life there, with their four beloved dogs.

But Manni and Jack need to leave every now and then to earn money, Jack in England and Manni as a tour guide in Spain. A volunteering scheme supplies them with a stream of young people willing to live there for free, in exchange for working and helping out.

All very well – except that some of the volunteers turn out to be drug addicts, in a poor mental state, and others are hopelessly lazy.

The first plaintive text from Reuben goes: ‘I. lonely. can. you. come. get. me.’ Reuben never asks for anything, so Manni knows this is serious. He returns to find that the volunteers Jordi and Leti have utterly neglected him. He has to turf them out – which is not easy to do, as they claim Spanish squatting rights.

Cue Reuben’s return to England to stay with kind, loving Jack – but the daily reality of looking after Reuben, on top of his work, takes Jack to ‘the end of his emotional tether’.

Much worse is to come, when another volunteer, Joe, tries to destroy the interior of the house in a drug-induced frenzy, and then takes his own life. Manni is utterly distraught. ‘I can’t sleep. Sometimes I can’t breathe. And here was me thinking I had dealt with it all.’

What does Manni mean by ‘it all’?

The dreadful experience of Joe’s death forces him to face the traumatic event buried in the deepest recesses of his own memory. He knows time has come to write about it. Even Jack doesn’t know this story.

When Manni was 14, he played the drums in the worship band of the local evangelical church in Berkshire where his family lived. As he lived 18 miles away from the church, the vicar always invited him to stay the night after Saturday-evening band practice.

While his wife was downstairs doing the ironing and prepping for the next day’s Sunday lunch, the vicar took

Manni into his bed and abused him. ‘We’re not doing anything wrong,’ he assured Manni.

‘Every Saturday night,’ Manni writes, ‘he removes another part of my innocence.’ So that’s why, even now, having bravely come out as gay in the homophobic world of evangelical Christians, and met Jack, the love of is life, he still has ‘this deep, niggling sensation that I don’t deserve to be happy’.

There’s a great deal of mental agony in this book, but, again, the deep bond of love between Manni, Jack and Reuben holds them (and the reader) together through the onslaught of traumatic events, past and present.