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We started to suffer from skin diseases. I can remember having scabies at some point, which I must have been about six years old. Then just before and just after Christmas 1944 I started with impetigo and eczema.
It’s infected and then it just spreads through the whole of the body and eczema as well and if eczema gets infected it’s just a vicious circle. One of the worst things was no food, no cleansing materials and no medical supplies or very little medical supplies so nothing to treat it!

The way they did treat it wasn’t very nice and the only thing they could do. Before I was put into the Hospital I used to go every morning to the — what we would now call the ‘Outpatients Clinic’ at the Town Hospital. (It’s quite funny to think of it now as a Police Station because I spent months in there). The sister with a pair of, well they looked like scissors to me, but they must have been surgical things, would just cut the heads off and let the poison come out. It wasn’t really very nice because I was only seven years old at the time and then of course it spread to my hair. I had very long curly hair and I had to have half of my head shaved and I was really worried about this because my mother and her friends were saying
“Oh, hair shaved off at that age, I don’t think it will grow again, what will happen?”
So I thought I’m going to be half bald when I grew up, which of course was a load of nonsense because it did grow again, but of course people weren’t quite so wise about things as they are now. Somebody got hold of something and rumours just spread like wildfire. It was a very traumatic time to be living in.
RUTH WALSH

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