Liverpool Loo

My first memory of being ill goes back to when I was four. I can still remember the sound of the ambulance bell as it sped me to Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool. My temperature was 104F, I’d been sick and had stomach ache and was being admitted with suspected appendicitis. I can remember the 13-year-old girl in the bed next to mine. Her nightdress had caught fire and she was badly burned. I can remember being washed and prepared for an operation, then being told the x-ray results had come through and I didn’t have to have one after all as it wasn’t appendicitis.

The next thing I recall is being on an isolation ward. For a month. In a glass cubicle. Seeing my parents’ faces gurning at me through the window pane. And the cruelty of the nurses. Forcing me to drink scalding hot Ovaltine that would have burned my mouth and slapping me when I strained it through my cloth serviette to try and cool it down – very resourceful for a four-year-old, I think now. But they just punished me for my intelligent solution. Warning a nurse in advance that I was going to throw up and then being shouted at and slapped because they didn’t bring me a receiver and I chucked up all over the bed. I was four years old, for God’s sake! (I hear and feel that inner wail of, ‘It’s not fair!’ again.) I had dysentery. The bug was sweeping the hospital and I had been unfortunate enough to catch it while they were keeping me in for ‘observation’.

My month included the Christmas period. Father Christmas visited the wards. I was given a dolls’ tea set, tiny red plastic cups, saucers and plates. I hated dolls. I loved stuffed animals. I had brought my favourite with me, a nightdress case called Spot, a threadbarehand-me-down with one ear and one eye and half a nose and mouth, as he’d only been embroidered on one side. He was flat when not encasing a nightie, and he had a zip up his middle. Spot was my first real love, but they took him off me and burned him in case he carried germs. A few years ago, I read an article by Beryl Bainbridge in which she recounted a very similar experience, having her favourite toy burnt in Alder Hey because of germs. I wrote to her, commiserating, and she wrote back. I still have her letter.

When I was released from hospital, I was brought home and proudly shown a sparkly tree, tinsel and presents. My parents, sad that I’d missed Christmas, had staged a late one for me. Apparently (and I don’t remember this), I threw a tantrum and shrieked, “I want to go back to hospital!” My mother never forgave me. It was a wound she carried till her dying day. Thinking about it now, I suppose I was just disorientated. A four-year-old doesn’t use logic and reason, so Mum was being a bit hard on me there.

Could this attack of dysentery have been the start of all my stomach trouble? Or was it an inflamed stomach that landed me in hospital in the first place? Who knows? I had been diagnosed with acidosis as a child and my mother had been told that my stomach glands were producing too much acid. By the time I was a teenager, I was chugging Milk of Magnesia like an alkie on Special Brew. Curries upset me even back then. On Fridays, it was our habit to meet up in the pub and then go to the chipshop for a ‘six of chips’ (sixpence went a long way in those days) and curry sauce. That used to upset me but I loved the taste. Then when I got to university, I encountered my first Chinese and Indian dishes. More stomach ache. Especially when the owner of the Chinese was arrested for passing off Alsatian dog as chicken! Lord only knows what was in the curry. Students, probably. That would pay us lot back from diving out with a pocketful of poppadums and not paying the bill.