大象传媒

CHAPTER ONE

POLIO STRIKES

The fog swirled around the dark streets preventing the ambulance driver from seeing the road; his assistant walked in front with a lamp making slow progress towards the maternity hospital. This was the night I was born on the 26 November 1937.
The excitement of that year had been the coronation of George VI after his brother's abdication the year before. For my parents the excitement was managing a holiday in the Isle of Wight and presumably my birth. There were to be no more holidays for quite a while.
My parents brought me from the maternity home to their newly rented house in Horsa Road, Northumberland Heath, Erith in Kent. I remember nothing of the house, as I was only nine months old when they moved in August 1938 a few streets away to Hurst Road where I grew up.
Looking back I always think of it as been warm, cosy and secure and my mother as always being industrious and fussing around my father and me. I adored my father as he did me; his health was not good and he had always to be careful as he had ankylosing spondulitis (a bone disease) and duodenal ulcers. He always let me sit on his lap for a cuddle before going to bed and I would comb his hair or get him to read me a story. He always had the biggest chair in the room, it had big wooden arms and I could sit on them making them very shiny over the years, I loved the feel of them. When I was ill the chair would be made into a bed which I thought was great fun and sometimes my mother would sleep downstairs too, if I were very ill and needed to stay in a warm room.
I remember quite clearly the room where the chair was, it had a very high wooden mantelpiece and a creaky wood panelled surround to the fireplace. A brass toasting fork hung on a hook screwed into the wood panel to the left of the fireplace. The fireplace contained a big kitchen range of blue and white mottled enamel, considered rather posh in our street where all the other ranges were black and they needed black leading every week. The hearth was lined with dark blue tiles that were always washed and polished to keep them clean. The wallpaper was navy blue with most peculiar orange pagodas on it. The paint was dark brown. On the floor was coconut matting and later woven plastic; when I sat on it there were patterns all over my bottom or legs and it soon became very scratchy.
We also had a telephone, a very rare commodity in the 1930s, 1940s for an ordinary working class family. My father was a telephone engineer but did not get his telephone free, as all the neighbours seemed to assume (much to my mother's chagrin). Everyone in the neighbourhood used it to call the doctor or to pass on messages of death, illness or being kept late at work. Our meals were frequently interrupted by this message passing and my mother was convinced people waited to drop dead until we were eating!
When I was two years old Hitler's antics brought the beginning of the 1939-45 war but for one so young memories are distant and disjointed and mine are of my father giving me piggybacks downstairs to hide in the cupboard beneath the stairs to shelter from the air-raids. Lying under the stairs I vaguely remember looking up at the wood of the second stair and noticing knotholes. My memories of the air-raid shelters in the garden and later in the house are stronger but not in chronological order.
One night I remember waking up during an air raid to hear my mother screaming dreadfully. I of course was very frightened but it was not a bomb but a small spider, which had the audacity to crawl into my mother's ear causing her to become hysterical.
The neighbours gathered round after the 'all-clear' siren had sounded thinking my mother had been injured but the only first aid she needed was given by my father who had the good sense to shine a torch into her ear which caused the spider to crawl out towards the warmth! After that we always laid in our bunks wearing rubber earplugs and scarves tightly tied around our heads.
The event that changed my life forever and that of my parents dominate my earliest memories of the Second World War for many years to come. It was two months before my fifth birthday I had to be vaccinated for diphtheria, which was a common disease that had killed many children at that time. I was taken to the local children's clinic and lined up with many other children for my jab. My right arm was quite sore during the days following and I developed a sore throat. My parents noticed I was not using my arm very much and eventually called the Doctor who said I had tonsillitis, collected his half crown (12陆p) fee and went on his way.
My condition deteriorated rapidly. I had a special blue, rather delicate teacup of which I was very fond. One morning I told my mother I could not pick it up. 'Don't be silly, pick it up properly!' she said. I tried and the much-loved cup clattered to the floor and broke. At this point my mother realised there was something more than tonsillitis ailing me. Money for doctor's fees was not easy to find from my father's income so I was put to bed but my temperature and headache became worse and I started to hallucinate seeing faces at my upstairs bedroom window, within a few hours I could not stand. My grandmother, who lived next door to us, told my mother to call the doctor quickly as she thought I had meningitis. My father was away on a training course for his job.
My mother sent for the doctor who began to realise that I was seriously ill. He told my mother to send for my father immediately. My beloved Daddy got home as quickly as public transport would allow; he was devastated by what had happened, I remember quite clearly his face reflected in a mirror over the fireplace in my bedroom. He was crying! I had never seen my father cry before.
Our family GP called another doctor; he was an ex-army man and had seen many cases of polio. He confirmed that I had what was then known as Infantile Paralysis. I had to be sent to an isolation hospital where no contact with my parents would be permitted.
I remember my mother asking what I would like for my tea before the ambulance came:
'Can I have a tomato to eat like an apple?' I replied.
When the ambulance came my parents were told they could not kiss me goodbye because of the height of the infection but I think they did. I was not to see them again for seven weeks as I was sent to an isolation sanatorium.
Nobody explained to me why I could not see my Mummy and Daddy, I thought I had been abandoned though they wrote to me but the problem was I could not read. A nurse would read the letter to me then take it away.
At this time I was paralysed all down my right side. I know two other girls shared my isolation, we had all caught the disease around the same time. I have few memories of those weeks presumably because I was still fighting the critical effects of the infection.
After seven weeks when the infection had subsided I was moved to West Hill Hospital in Dartford which was a major general hospital at the time. My mother was informed that I was to be shifted and she would be permitted to visit on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons for two hours only. No other visits were normally allowed unless patients were expected to die.
My mother and grandmother immediately went to the hospital and as they got to the gates an ambulance pulled in and stopped. My mother asked if it was her daughter in the ambulance; the driver said it was and he allowed them to see me for a few minutes. I do remember that because as the doors opened there was Mummy and Grandma smiling broadly but their faces turned to a look of shock that I think puzzled me. My mother told me many years later that I was almost unrecognisable as the healthy, happy four year old of two months earlier. Polio had taken its toll.
My new home for the next seven months was to be a large open ward. The bed had a black iron frame and my right arm was tied with a bandage to the rail of the bed head. What this treatment was supposed to achieve I have not the slightest idea, in fact I believe that, and the later splinting, contributed to the lifelong deformity of my arm. The nursing staff was generally kindly but very strict in keeping to hospital rules and I soon became very institutionalised.
Not only did the staff have to cope with the patients but they also had many problems from constant air raids as this was during the London Blitz of wartime Britain in 1942 when the Germans were bombing from Dover to London very heavily. The hospital being less than twenty miles from London and close to railway lines and the river Thames it was in what was then known as 'bomb alley'.
I have no remembrance of fear then, only the hustle and bustle that took place before and after an air raid. At such times the nurses would pull the heads of two cots together and a nurse sat in the 'V' between the two little patients. An enamel bowl was placed over each face as a protection from flying shrapnel; a pillow covered this. I used to think it was all a rather funny game. The night when a bomb dropped, close by the hospital ward I occupied, a lot of shrapnel came through the ceiling and went straight through the floor and an empty bed! By one of those weird strokes of fate the ten-year-old who had previously occupied the bed had died the night before from her illness. Fortunately no one was seriously injured but I do remember the soldiers in their tin helmets coming into the ward carrying hurricane lamps, as there were no lights. Not being aware of the cause or consequence of war I found it all very exciting.
There was little else to look forward to because parental visits were limited to two hours on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons. We were not allowed our tea until visitors had left the ward and as I was always hungry I used to encourage my family to go home promptly which must have hurt my mother no end!
I remember the fantastic Christmas we had when a very large Christmas tree was brought into the ward; it was so tall the top had to be removed. How they managed to get the tree in wartime I have no idea but as I had never seen one before I was absolutely amazed. I have never forgotten the thrill of receiving two presents from that tree, a black doll and some doll's house furniture. That night we had green jelly for tea, a real treat, bread and jam being the normal teatime fare! I thought it was wonderful and to this day the sight of green jelly makes me feel happy.
A not so happy memory of food was the day I refused to eat my greens; I hated the waterlogged dollops of mush that we were served but on this occasion I was going to endure a torture that also has never been forgotten. Along came a redheaded nurse who would have been better employed by the Gestapo. If it was the last thing she did she was going to make me eat that plate of greens and for two hours she forced, the now cold, food into my heaving mouth. It was to warp my view of greens and redheads for many years after the event!
Now I had to learn to walk again, the paralysis had subsided from my right leg but the muscles were much weakened and at first it was difficult to stand. Time and effort by the staff gradually brought back enough strength for me to take my first tottery steps. The fingers of my right hand began to recover some movement though the muscle, which pulls the thumb up, and the muscles of the upper arm and shoulder were never to work again and eventually shrivelled up. When I became adult the arm was about five inches (130 mm) shorter than the left arm but of course neither my family nor I knew the outlook for many years to come. The arm hung loose from the shoulder socket when not splinted. People these days are kept better informed about their illnesses but forecasting the future is still not an exact science. I assumed my arm would one day be normal again, realisations that it would not was very gradual and I sometimes wonder if maybe this was not a better way of coming to terms with a permanent disability. I certainly was never aware of any trauma but perhaps that was because I was a child.

Finally after my seven-month stay in hospital I was to go home to my parents. Although I was always to be an only child my mother came from a large family, there were aunts, uncles, cousins living near by and my maternal grandmother in the house next door and my paternal grandparents just across the road.
A large box awaited my return. I remember excitedly opening that box; inside was a 'big dolly' as she was always called; it was the size of a real baby. My family had managed to buy her second-hand and my mother had made her a new set of clothes out of her old clothes. I could not believe my eyes. I loved her dearly on sight!
During the last year of the war I become a very nervous little girl. Because of the constant bombing I lived almost entirely in an air-raid shelter made of corrugated iron, half-buried underground in our back garden. It smelled of damp earth and paraffin used for the little stove which was our heating and also the means by which we boiled our little tin kettle used to make a cup of tea.
My father fitted up a little bell with batteries to warn the neighbours when I saw approaching aeroplanes or 'doodlebugs' (German unmanned rockets) coming overhead from where I sat in the doorway of the shelter, too frightened to go indoors even when the all-clear siren had sounded.
When my bell rang mother would run down the garden to see what was worrying me; if the siren went we shut ourselves in the shelter until we heard the all-clear siren denoting the end of an air-raid. My mother would then return to the house to continue her housework or cooking if it was daytime. If the weather was fine the local housewives would gather their children about them and get together with their neighbours. They sat near a shelter where they could knit socks and pullovers for their men folk who were away fighting or repair the clothes and bedding that could not be replaced, because of rationing and the need to make do and mend. The conversation usually revolved around their worries about their husbands and the lack of food or who 'copped it' in the air raid the night before.
An air raid that went into our family folklore was on a day when my mother had cooked one of my father's favourite meals, rissoles. She had just finished cooking them when the siren went so she ran down the garden with the meal on a plate to the air raid shelter where there was a little shelf that my father used as a table. He picked up his knife and fork; a bomb dropped and in the ensuing blast covered my father's rissoles! The day 'father lost his rissoles in the war' was a family joke thereafter!
During this time my mother had to take me to hospital three times a week for treatment to my right arm which had been left paralysed by the polio. There was at the hospital a physiotherapist who was very kind to me and I liked him very much; he made me laugh a lot while he fitted electrodes to my arm, which he then placed in a small bath of water, switching on the current. I used to grit my teeth then, as it was so painful, I think it was called Faradayism and was used to stimulate the muscles to work again. This was followed by exercises and massage, which I found very comforting. I had to wear a splint on my arm for which my parents had to pay. A letter in my possession dated 15 April 1943 asks for the sum of 拢2.10s for one splint, this was a considerable sum at that time and probably represented almost a week's earnings for my father. My mother did not go out to work.
When Christmas came, the physiotherapist gave me a lovely rag doll, I thought her the loveliest thing I had ever seen, she had flaming red plaits and wore a green velvet suit, I really loved that doll. A game I played with my dolls was to give them electrical treatment using jelly moulds for the bath of imaginary water and bits of fuse wire bound to their arms for the electricity!
My parents became concerned for my mental well being at this time because the air raids were making me very nervous. I began to have awful nightmares about bombs that were half through the ceiling of my bedroom and if I dared to move they would fall through and kill my whole family. One night a bomb dropped in a field behind the houses on the other side of the road from our house, it blew all the windows out and doors off their hinges. It cracked the bedroom walls though they did not fall down. My parents and myself were at this time sleeping indoors under an iron table called a Morrison shelter; it was like a double bed with an iron roof and legs about the height of a dining room table. The sides were made of strong horizontal and vertical wires and when you got inside they were fixed to the sides to stop the large debris from injuring the occupants. The noise of the air raid was deafening and as I lay between my parents we clung together and were very frightened. I remember my mother saying to my father 'This is our lot, Ern!' but eventually the raid ended and the dust settled.
As was the custom my mother carried on calmly afterwards and made tea in the big brown earthenware teapot she always used. But I have never forgotten that night and it stuck in my memory like a film that I can rerun whenever I choose.
My mother and father decided that for my mental health I would need to be evacuated, but I could not go under the normal government scheme because of the polio. My mother had to find someone who was prepared to take me in privately, with her accompanying me, because of the constant hospital treatment I needed. She made contact through the WVS (later the WRVS Women's Royal Voluntary Service) with a lady in Yorkshire who was prepared to take my mother and I.
My mother did not want to leave my father especially as he was in such poor health and working underground in the telephone exchanges where he was employed by the GPO. It was essential to repair damaged lines quickly to ensure that emergency calls could be dealt with as quickly as possible in the days before computers had any part in communications.
When all was arranged for my evacuation my mother and I bid a tearful farewell to my father and went by train to Yorkshire. I had never been so far before or seen so much, it was a very exciting journey for six-year-old who had never travelled. The train was packed with evacuees and soldiers who sat on kit bags and told me stories and showed me things out of the windows, things that I had never seen like cows and sheep and high hills. I suppose I was spoilt more than other children were because I wore a splint on my arm, which was stuck up in the air at right angles to my body. It looked as if I was permanently asking to be excused! (The splints I had as a child are now in the Science Museum in South, Kensington, London)
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CHAPTER TWO

EVACUATION

A few things stick out in my mind about being evacuated during the war. One was the kindness of the lady in whose bungalow we first stayed in Redburn Avenue in Shipley, Yorkshire. Mrs Campbell was a young voluntary nurse in a local hospital, the daughter of a local doctor; a vivacious and friendly person married to a much older and very serious businessman. My mother and I were considered to be of a much lower class than him. He was not at all happy to have us in his home, however provided we stayed in the kitchen, or our bedroom and did not venture into the lounge or dining room we were tolerated well enough. Mrs Campbell would eat with us when her husband was not at home and she and my mother got on very well together. She owned a lovely shiny black cat called Mickey but I once incurred a reproof from her for kicking poor Mickey when I lost my temper (the only time I remember doing so)! I know I felt very ashamed of my action afterwards and worried she might not be friendly towards me after that but I need not have worried.
About this time I developed a friendship with a local owl which I named Tony. He would fly in the kitchen window at dawn from a great big tree at the back of the house. Perching on the high kitchen mantelpiece he would be given left over scraps of food; he particularly liked a bacon rind. After his breakfast he flew back to the tree presumably to sleep all day. I became extremely fond of Tony as I had never had a pet before but alas one morning a jug of milk stood on the mantelpiece and Tony went to perch on it and down it came spewing milk everywhere and smashing the jug. After that he was firmly banned from entering the house and the loss of my first pet was very painful.
Mrs Campbell really enjoyed her voluntary nursing work that was concerned with all the wounded soldiers returning from the front. She was very kind to me when I caught diphtheria which in those days was a very serious illness often resulting in death; in my case I had been vaccinated which probably gave me more chance of recovery although it was after the vaccination I had contracted polio. I was isolated in Keighley Hospital for a month. I was not allowed visitors because of the risk of infection, a fact that no one thought to explain to me. I thought I had been deserted once again, as I had when I was sent to an isolation hospital when I first had polio. The thoughts and feelings of children were rarely considered in those days and often they had to face very frightening things alone because they were thought too young to understand what was going on. I remember intense fear of many medical procedures but I have always kept quiet because I did not know how to express my fears.
It wasn't all bad though, I remember some of the wounded soldiers being allowed to walk me round the grounds when I was able to get up. They used to tell me stories and I remember one sitting me on his lap on a seat in the grounds telling me about his own little girl at home and that he missed her very much. I felt he was my friend when everyone else had gone away and left me, he often waved to me through the windows when I couldn't go out. There were other soldiers but none like my 'Special Friend'.
At Christmas my father was able to come up to Yorkshire. We were invited by Mrs Campbell's father, Dr Hayes-Smith and his wife, to spend the holiday in their home while they were away. The reason for their leaving their home over Christmas was the death of their only son on active service. They were so desolate at his loss that they felt they could not stay in their lovely home. I remember a little of, what seemed to me, like a very big house. A soft rug to sit on in front of the fire, red tiles on the kitchen floor and a pale blue bedroom with large mahogany wardrobes and twin beds with very shiny head and foot boards, much softer beds than the hard flock mattress I slept on at home. There were lots of books and a big squishy sofa in the lounge; I suppose really it was a typical middle class home of the 1940s but I thought it was a magical place. It was wonderful to have 'Mummy and Daddy' together with me. I still have a small book of 'Cinderella' with beautiful coloured pictures that Mrs Campbell gave me. I really loved that book and think it was my first romantic ideal. I also had a big book (all in black and white) of nursery rhymes. Both these books gave me many, many hours of pleasure and became much treasured possessions.
Unknown to me at the time was the fact that Mr and Mrs Campbell's marriage was not working out and Mr Campbell was not very happy to have my mother and I staying in the house. He decided that we must leave and we were transferred to a new billet.
Our new home was such a contrast to the comfort we had enjoyed in Redburn Avenue. It was a house that had been rented to the army by the owners. The army had not taken care of the property and after they left it was occupied by a pregnant woman and her three children, her husband being a soldier and away.
We had to share with the family already in residence and we found the house very bare, dirty and smelly. We had few possessions so life was bleak, my mother and I had one room to ourselves and shared an attic bedroom. We were issued with two folding chairs as those sometimes found in church halls, one dining table, two camp beds, two knives, forks, teaspoons, one teapot, two cups, saucers, tea plates and dinner plates. We were given dark grey army blankets and straw pillows covered in grey striped ticking but there were no sheets or pillowcases and no armchairs. My father eventually sent our sheets from home but there were very few comforts and I was often ill. But I was lucky enough to be treated by Dr Hayes-Smith who did not charge my mother at that time when there was no health service. All doctors normally had to be paid unless you were a member of their panel in which case an amount was paid weekly as a kind of medical insurance. However, it was generally only the doctors who worked with the poor who ran such schemes and Dr Hayes-Smith was not one of those.
Sometimes at night I cried as I missed my Daddy and all my extended family at home, I was frightened of the very cold, dark attic bedroom with just a tiny window high in the roof that rattled when it was windy, in fact the place was called Windhill. The grey blankets made my skin itch and the straw pillows were hard and uncomfortable. The unhygienic conditions under which we lived must have been the cause of our getting scabies; these are small insects that burrow under the skin and cause irritation. The cure was to take frequent very unpleasant smelling sulphur baths.
Our stay in the billet was made much easier by the family who lived in the house next door. There was an elderly couple, their son and his wife and daughter. A very typical down to earth Yorkshire family with accents much broader than those heard today, since the advent of television and the fact that people move around a great deal more than they did at that time.
At first I had great difficulty understanding these people but as time went on my speech imitated theirs much to the amusement of all my relatives when I returned home. I was teased unmercifully for saying things like 'We got on a buzz (bus)' and 'I am having a bath' (rhyming with Cath rather than 'barth' as it is pronounced in the south). But while evacuated I was always referred to as the 'Little Cockney Girl'.
The family next door built greenhouses and after the war travelled all over the country to sell their product. Once a year they exhibited at the Chelsea Flower Show in London.
Although I was only months away from my seventh birthday when we were evacuated I had not been to school apart from about three months in the infants. There were no special schools in Kent for disabled children and the state schools were very reluctant to admit me because they felt the strange splint on my arm would be a distraction for other children and they did not want the responsibility of anything going wrong. I remember my brief stay in the local infant school at Brook Street in Erith because I was made to feel very odd and different from the other children. I was not allowed to use scissors or go out to play the playground for fear of hurting myself! I had longed to join in the games with the others and I was allowed to use scissors at home and I could not understand why things were different at school. How attitudes have changed in the intervening years, such a situation would be unthinkable now when all sorts of disabilities in children are accepted and can be integrated into ordinary schools although prejudice still does remain in many areas.
The authorities in Yorkshire in 1944 appeared to be much more enlightened than those in Kent and had a very different attitude to those with special educational needs. In fact, I shall always be grateful to those who recognised my needs and made every effort to educate me at a very difficult time in our history. I was sent to a special school for disabled children where I was encouraged to do everything myself, receive a normal education, and in addition was given treatment for my arm. I was happy there and made some good friends.
There was an older girl called Mary Cole with very severe cerebral palsy, she had great difficulty in controlling any part of her body although her mind was perfectly normal. Her arms and legs flew out at all angles, her eyes and tongue constantly rolled and her speech was deep and distorted. Mary had the most fantastic personality but, to my shame now, I was very frightened of her at first and could not understand what she said, however she very quickly became one of my closest friends and after that we had no communication problems! She could weave the most beautiful scarves on a handloom and was so clever I really loved her and still think of her. Although she made enormous effort and wrote me a letter after the war we lost touch. There is still a place in my heart for her.
While evacuated my mother took me to the cinema for the first time where my first reaction was absolute amazement, remember these were the days before ordinary homes had televisions and I just stared and stared. I don't remember what the film was but there was a scene of girls dancing in full-skirted dresses filmed from above their heads as they swirled around and around. I couldn't believe my eyes it was so pretty and so far removed from my make do and mend world. Only one other film stands in my memory as a child and that was 'Scott of the Antarctic'. I became so involved in the story that when Captain Oates walked out of the tent to his death I cried so loudly, I had to be removed from the cinema.
We returned at the end of the war on Tuesday 12 June 1945. As the train came through London I saw all the bombed buildings, the shattered homes of so many. Walls were sometimes left intact with rubble all around them but all I could think of was that I was going home to my beloved Daddy and to the large family of relations who at that time all lived around us.
Our home had some bomb damage, ceilings had come down and windows had been blown in but these had been patched up by the time we returned. However, I was very upset and cried because my doll's pram and big doll were damaged, the pram lining had been shredded by the blast and the doll badly scratched and her clothes torn. She was my special doll who had been waiting for me when I returned from hospital and although neither she nor the pram was anywhere near new, I did not know that, to me they were the best things I had ever had. However things were soon put back to rights and the bomb damage men soon came to repair the house.
Whilst my parents were clearing up after the repair men I went to play in the garden and I saw two cats having a fight, as I rushed to separate them I tripped and my splinted right arm went snap. My poor parents who were up to their eyes in soap suds had to drop everything to take me to the local cottage hospital which fortunately was only about ten minutes walk away (none of our neighbours were rich enough to own a car). The hospital diagnosed a green stick fracture and my arm was put in plaster with a sling, which I must say made a change from being stuck up in the air! It was very painful being put in a different position at the same time as the fracture. After I had been patched up my mother realised what a state she was in from her cleaning activities, she had her hair in a turban and was wearing a large pinafore, she began to worry what people must think of her which I thought was very funny.
That episode seems to be last of the war years and the beginning of new things for me.

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