大象传媒

It has to be remembered that the Blitz on London went on, with gaps when other cities were bombed, for several weeks.

People regularly went to their family shelters or to the public ones. In the latter the numbers could be large and people slept close together. Also, they slept in their day clothes, so that it was possible that people did not change clothes for some days.

One other thing needs to be recalled. For many people washing facilities were primitive. We had a bathroom for which the hot water was produced by the cooking range downstairs with pipes going up to the bathroom immediately above. In the 1930s my father had a gas geyser installed over the bath which, while often somewhat intermittent in its efficiency, did produce the necessary hot water. But many other people did not even have bathrooms. And in any case it was normal to have a bath at most once a week - 'Friday night was bath night' was a common phrase.

Not surprisingly, in those circumstances, with people huddled together in air raid shelters, dirt was commonplace and many people found themselves itching. The cause proved to be scabies, occasioned by a parasite that bore into the skin. My dictionary defines scabies in this way. 'A general term for skin-diseases characterized by scabby or scaly eruptions' and 'A contagious skin-disease, due to a parasite'.

I remember my family suffered from this and we went to the doctor who told us it was scabies which was something of a shock, as we knew or were told that it was a disease related to dirt and it was shaming to be caught up in it. He advised that to the next baths we had we should add sulphur.
This made the water go yellow but it did the trick of killing the parasite.

The word scabies was thought too brutal to use. Instead people called it 'Shelter rash'.

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