Brenda Bullock: Memories of bandages and ill-equalities

Jul 21 2008 By Brenda Bullock

Reading Dr Elinor Corfan’s graphic description of the appalling conditions and inequalities in healthcare before the advent of the NHS in the 1948 (Post July 4), I had only to close my eyes and I was back in those days again.

When she described the fate of so many children from underprivileged families who were “more susceptible to infection” and, consequently, “suffered multiple hospital admissions and lost not only their health but their education” as well as being further handicapped by “unrecognised deafness”, it was as if she was holding up a mirror to my own childhood.

I’d had a bad start. I’d been a puny, premature baby, weighing only 3.5 lbs in the days before incubators and, with no immunisation against the childhood illness yet available, I had caught chickenpox from my older brother at an early age, which gave me the complication of repeated infections, which left me with the painful legacy of long stays in hospital and numerous operations.

For the first years of my childhood I spent months at a time in Selly Oak Hospital, wearing my bandages like a turban covering my half-shaved head, while we amused ourselves as best we could in the austere war-time wards, where there were no toys, no tuition for school-aged children and we saw our families only twice a week for an hour: Wednesday 2 - 3pm and Sunday 2 - 3pm.

I had no clear memories of infant school, apart from freezing in the playground during PE lessons and playing with a few dismally floppy beanbags.

We had few books at home, so I don’t remember how I learnt to read or master the 3Rs, but I keep vague memories of closed eyes, hands together and a muttered prayer before being dismissed from class at the end of the afternoon.

After the war, late in 1946, when Penicillin finally became available to civilians, I was promised, on going down with yet another ear infection, the great new drug instead of an operation which would certainly make me deaf in one ear.

Sadly, the wonder drug didn’t work for me and I was rendered deaf and then dispatched to junior school, deaf in one ear and with no pervious experience of school life.

I stayed there fore there years, coping as best as I could, finally passing the 11-plus exam and going on to grammar school at the tender age of ten.

Dr Corfan paints a dismal picture of many children’s lives, blighted by chronic illness and consequent educational failure but, miraculously, at a time when my peers on the council estate where I lived left school at 15 and went to work in factories, I stayed at school until I was 18. I then went off to university and, from there, to a life in education.

Although in 1958, when I went to university, only one in 1,000 working class girls ever made it to university, I knew myself to be one of the lucky ones. Now, reading Elinor Corfan’s poignant memories of what was, in essence, my own history, perhaps I was luckier than I knew.