Open Writing

This week I have had to chase our ten-year-old around the kitchen table four times a day with a spoonful of antibiotics. It looks like strawberry syrup, but she says it tastes like poison. Once you’ve caught the patient and administered the magic potion it’s miraculous how soon they recover.

Being ill was a considerably lengthier affair when I was a ten-year-old. Any suggestion of a ‘temperature’ meant straight to bed and stay there. Fortunately a child in a sickbed is becoming a rare sight today.

We had to suffer many indignities to keep the doctor from the door. Never would we have been allowed out after August with an inch of goose pimpled midriff showing, like a lad I saw recently.

The fear of doctor bills was rife in our area. Tribal chiefs used to dress in hideous costume before they danced away evil spirits. We were adorned equally scandalously to frighten away bronchitis – the family curse. It started with one mother innocently trimming her daughter’s pixie hood with fur, then the idea snowballed until we all walked to school looking like a band of fur trappers.

Winter brought another chest development for me, in the shape of a dreaded Thermogene vest. Two pieces of peach coloured wadding impregnated with a smelly oil, which my mother taped together to form a sort of ‘Mae West’ life-jacket. Worn under my blouse, it added incredible bulk to my non-existent bosom and produced enough fumes to clear all our form’s sinuses.

At bedtime out came gran’s special seven oil mixture, which was rubbed into our backs, fronts, sides, legs, depending on how much there was on mother’s hands. For a change we sometimes went to bed in a brown paper vest covered in goose grease. Some friends used to sport a camphor necklace – a block on a piece of string – but I never succumbed.

Every week our hair was washed in Derbac soap and rinsed in a solution of Borax and water. Shampoo was for film stars and those not afraid of being handed a white card on the school ‘nit’ parade. I lived in mortal fear of being singled from the herd in the school assembly hall. In extreme cases card-holders had to forfeit all their hair. I came close to this once when I was in hospital with a skin disease which, I was careful to tell no one, had spread to my scalp. At bath time it took all my vanity not to flinch under the comb.

Then there were the poultices. ‘Gatherings’ or sceptic sores were drawn to a head with almost anything that had been boiled and wrapped in a cloth. Bread and onions were great favourites. Toothache was eased with dash of clove oil and a hot salt bag held to the pain. If a cause or name could not be found for what ailed us, out came the aperients. Senna pods, fig syrup, cascara liquorice powders, or my favourite, a chunk of black Spanish shaken up in a bottle of water.

Camomile tea and other herbal teas were often on the ‘brew’ simply because ‘they did you good.’ When we weren’t being treated for an illness, we were in the ‘protection racket,’ drinking preventive potions to keep well.

Each district had its own remedial figure, usually someone’s gran, who was always sent for before the doctor. They often had a special gift for healing and could even lend a hand in ‘laying out’ the deceased.

Fresh air was used more. When my sister’s whooping cough persisted we were advised to take her for ‘a blow on Lindley Moor.’ I remember sitting beside her, watching her cheeks go bluer, while the wind played tunes with my teeth. As soon as we got home she started to recover.

I probably took my first steps running away from a fever mixture.
Parish’s food could spark off amazing energy – one clink of the spoon and I was half way up the road. We chewed gentian root, which tasted like nail-biting repellent, to settle stomach gripe. In fact, if and when you eventually could afford a doctor, his medicine tasted most pleasant!