The Lives of Children

There would be no exaggeration in saying that in the middle of the twentieth century the health matters that most troubled our community differed vastly from those causing anxiety today. Children in particular were more at risk back then and unlike today parents more eager to take advantage of any government schemes such as mass vaccination that would protect them. There was no need for medical personnel to explain that vaccination was a miracle of modern medicine and that it would save more lives worldwide than any other medical product or procedure. Uneducated though we were there existed a tacit understanding that this was so and in those days there was no knowledge of afflictions such as Autism and those stumbling across it would have been unlikely to recognize it as something that was undesirable or that could have been avoided. They would have found any assertion that it might be connected with their child’s recent vaccination very hard to believe. There was an acceptance that in the midst of any group of children there were those who were different, slower than the norm, with visual or hearing defects, or suffering from an inability to control their impulses. The latter were seen as wayward, described as badly behaved and might be beaten more than was customary and if their parents failed to sufficiently quell their behaviour with violence at home, regular canings could be doled out at school that often had the desired effect.

So we were all vaccinated against Smallpox when we were under two years of age and apparently many children had an unpleasant reaction to the inoculation with high temperatures and were perhaps sick and fretful for several days. Some of them might well have gone on to develop conditions associated with the vaccine but unlike today the attendant gossip about such matters did not particularly proliferate around the neighbourhood. There were no radio Talk Back Programmes on which to air concerns, no television and nobody knew what Support Groups might be. What most pre-occupied our parents was that we should not fall victim to the truly terrible illness that had killed and maimed so many of their own generation. The vaccine did not come accompanied by doubts and uncertainties.

Old Aunt Maudie was profusely pock-marked and in her eighties and her opinion was that Smallpox was a malady that struck with guile and without pity and should never be under-estimated. She was not anyone’s real aunt and her neighbours had quite forgotten whose aunt she had originally been except that his name was Humphrey. He had not been a proper nephew but the son of one of her cousins from Southend who had died in the Flu epidemic just after the Great War. She said The Smallpox when it settled upon her family in the latter part of the nineteenth century seemed to be just a cold in the head and nothing more than that. Victoria was still Queen it being just before she also adopted the title Empress of India, the very same summer in which the Chapel organized an outing by train to Ramsgate. They had lived In Chatham at the time on account of her father’s work in the ropery at the dockyard. Both she and her older sister Gracie had been chosen to go on the outing because of their good behaviour and oh how they had enjoyed themselves. What tales they had to tell when they returned. Gracie had even won a prize at Hoop La - a set of wooden alphabet blocks which she intended to give to their youngest brother who was about to reach his fourth birthday. It was to be a surprise and she hid the box under the bed she shared with Gracie in the attic. None of them were accustomed to birthday presents.

Then they both began to feel unwell and as the days passed her mother had never known such girls for crying and complaining just for the sake of runny eyes and noses. It was surely giving her The Pip and so they tried as hard as they could not to make The Pip any worse. Then she and Gracie began to vomit and to feel much worse. It had taken more than a week for the tell-tale blisters to make their entrance and my goodness didn’t they cause a deal of dread and trouble. At first they seemed perhaps harmless, just little pink clusters but she and Gracie knew it must be bad from the extent of the fear and fright on their mother’s face. They wondered how long it would be before they recovered. Maudie remembered it was more than two weeks before the scabs fell off and it was then she first became aware that at some stage during that time her sister had died and had even been buried for there was no longer any sign of her. Nobody in the bed beside her, no longer a sister to squabble with or to share secrets with. She remembered the alphabet bricks and checked that they were still hidden which they were.

She, Maudie, had been lucky really and most especially when you considered the fact that despite her poor mother’s best efforts The Smallpox had not been content to take just Gracie and within weeks the three little brothers aged six and five and very nearly four were similarly seized, two of them passing in one night. The youngest never did reach his milestone birthday and so never knew about the wooden blocks won by his sister which was a pity really. And now all these years later Old Maudie couldn’t for the life of her remember what happened to them. She said she thought her poor mother had never really recovered from that time of The Smallpox and the loss of four of her five children. And in recent years Dr Crawford had told her that it was a good thing her mother had once been a milkmaid but what he meant by that was not clear except it was something to do with all the children dying.

My father when regaled with the story upon his return from the six to two shift said that several boys admitted to the Chatham Orphanage he grew up in were there because Smallpox had killed so many in their families. And because he thought it was interesting he added that what was more the disease had been active in Egypt thousands of years ago and those that dug up mummies had found evidence of it. My mother said she found that very hard to believe and qualified this remark by explaining that she meant the bit about Egypt, not the orphanage. He replied that the scourge of Smallpox would probably be with us for all time, vaccinations or not. But he turned out to be wrong about that. It’s hard now to know what Old Maudie would have thought about the fact that Smallpox was destined to become eradicated from the face of the earth within two decades.

In the 1940s and 1950s a range of childhood illnesses that are becoming less familiar to us such as Measles, Mumps, Rubella and Scarlet Fever, were run of the mill and every child was expected to encounter them at some stage, suffer the effects that would hopefully be temporary and emerge all the stronger for the experience. There were after all, far more critical onslaughts on the child body. There was Polio for example that nobody wanted to contemplate although oddly enough it largely ignored the working classes and concentrated on those more affluent, the toffs from the smart houses on the London Road, and even those from more moderate homes in Springhead Road. Why this should be was not clear and when a vaccine appeared it was received with relief and delight because everyone in communities like ours had at least heard of children whose lives had been devastated by the disease even though the death rate seemed to be lower than other more feared illnesses. In the late 1940s Polio had spread throughout North Kent. Swimming pools, cinemas and schools closed and the fear of its direct visitation became visceral. There were tales that the more badly afflicted became unable to breathe and lived their lives inside something called an iron lung whilst others recovered with only a limp to show for it. For some children months were spent in hospital. I was rushed to the local doctor one morning by my alarmed mother simply because overnight I had developed a stiff and painful neck. And in the waiting room other parents, pulled their children just a little further away from me and left the chairs on either side of us empty. Dr Outred examined me carefully, taking twice as long as was customary for him and with tight lips and narrowed eyes so that I became slightly alarmed myself turning over in my mind everything I had heard about those unfortunates who fell into the clutches of Poliomyelitis. But I was to be reprieved and in our immediate area only Joyce Martin of Dover Road fell victim to it, was hospitalized for seven months and left with a pronounced limp.

The greatest fear of all was reserved for Diphtheria, the sore throat that killed and was passed effortlessly from child to child. In 1942 three and a half thousand British children died from the condition compared with a mere four deaths in the past twenty years which fact should do just a little to indicate the positive aspects of vaccination. In 1946 Grace Bennett’s Joan developed a sore throat with attitude, and became so ill that her mother feared she had somehow stumbled across the infection and took a torch to peer into her throat, imagining she could clearly see a grey membrane. Old Mrs Bassant next door to us, whose adopted daughter Ina had been a victim years previously, and luckily survived, was called upon to give her opinion which she did and it was to call the doctor even though it was seven in the evening and a Sunday. This advice was coloured by the fact that in 1923 young Ina had all but perished and had been taken hurriedly to the Gravesend Sanatorium in Whitehill Lane where there were beds for those with infectious diseases. She had been lucky in more ways than one because only a few years before she would have had to be taken to Strood where it cost eight shillings a day but the medical care was not as good as it should have been. Gravesend that year had a total of sixty beds of which sixteen were allotted for Diphtheria, twenty for Scarlet Fever and twenty four for Smallpox and the cost of care was three guineas a week. When Ina was there first class care was given by a Matron and two proper nurses with the help of a couple of trainees. It was well worth the exorbitant fee for those who could afford it. They had been stretched to afford it but their Ina was well worth the financial sacrifice. The Matron had said that left another day she might well have had to have a tracheotomy which was where a hole is cut into the throat in order to ensure the patient can breathe. It just didn’t bear thinking about and Grace Bennett should get the doctor to her Joan as fast as possible.

When he finally arrived that evening, charging five shillings and sixpence and slightly ill-tempered because he had been intending to spend the entire evening sorting his boyhood stamp collection into the order he had long imagined would increase its worth, he said it was not in fact Diptheria at all. Their Joan was suffering from a common or garden Quinsy. Apparently a Quinsy was a tonsillar abscess and although in some cases it could be serious in this case it was, in his opinion, not as it was now with his help, to be adequately treated. Joan’s mother was left wondering if she would have been better advised to leave consulting him for his advice until the following morning when the cost would have halved because this was in the time before the National Health Initiative. Most people thought better safe than sorry and even today Diphtheria kills up to ten per cent of sufferers but because of widespread vaccination programmes is now rare in the developed world.

When the National Health Service was finally introduced and news spread throughout the working class streets of Northfleet that consulting a doctor with a sick child would no longer cost half a crown there was disbelief from some. My mother said she had never begrudged the money in the first place, which was not completely true. My grandmother wondered if the free visit would actually result in the kind of care that was worth having in the first place. But within a short space of time the community was reassured and free health care together with the development of vaccination programmes had the intended result.

Over time there were to be fewer funeral processions where the youngest child mourners dressed in white, and less mournful burials involving little white coffins. Mr Horlock and his sons were to be asked less frequently about the possibility of a white plumed horses-drawn hearse even though Old Aunt Maudie said it had always been a sight to behold and that the streets of Chatham had been wet with tears the day her little brothers were buried. My grandmother, who would have been the first to note that as time went on white plumed horses became an option reserved for The Toffs, said that back then all hearses were pulled by horses anyway and white plumes were commonplace. She recalled that when their little Arthur was taken, her Edgar had Polly the little Shetland pony decked out with the finest equine headdress he could find and she was made to pull a goat cart with the little white casket on it all the way to Dartford cemetery. People had stopped in the streets and men removed their hats and the women all cried. I didn’t ask what childhood malady had snuffed out the life of Little Arthur but I wondered. A long time later my brother, having done a great deal of family history research, told me that more than likely the infant had been smothered accidentally in the bed of his parents who in those days drank far more than was good for them or their children. So many aspects of the lives of children have changed for the better.