Memories of my childhood maladies

Memory is like an old-style metal filing cabinet. Lift any tab and a whole wad of the past comes up at once. I’ve just watched the news and it pulled on the tab labelled measles. I had measles aged 6. So did everyone else. A kid at the back of the class sneezed and atishoo atishoo we all fell down. (I’ve always suspected Glynn Mansfield of being the culprit. He was a dirty boy. He used to pick his nose and eat it. So did the rest of us, of course, but he didn’t pretend not to.)

Anyway, we were all sent home for three weeks but the school didn’t close because the older kids had had measles in the years before. Measles back then was an annual rite, like the first day of spring (and wasn’t that a cracker this year. Almost enough to engender hope. But then, well, Trump.)

I don’t recall the symptoms of measles but I do of chickenpox. Chickenpox sounded like an illness to sneer at, but I came close to despair with the itching. Had there been a button to end life I’d have pressed it. Every inch of your flesh needed scratching. Your ambition when you scratched was to rip through the skin. Then you ripped through the skin.

It must have been dreadful for mothers, unable to take the misery onto themselves. Mine dabbed at me day and night with calamine lotion. Mind you, she’d have done the same if I’d broken a leg.

Calamine lotion was the panacea of the 1960s. That it didn’t work on chickenpox, or on quite a lot of other things, didn’t seem to diminish belief in it. (Which makes it, I suppose, similar to prayer, except that there are occasions when calamine lotion does do some good – no no, please don’t bother to write in. – What odd creatures we are.)

The third horseman of the viral apocalypse was mumps. Only a few of us got mumps. The first to go down was Andrew Middlewick, so Dave Collier and I went round ostensibly to sympathise. His little brother Titch welcomed us with a jar of Marmite. I took a fingerful and a week later I got mumps. In my mind to this day the disease and the spread are inseparable.

(Fifteen years later Titch Middlewick joined the Royal Navy just in time to sail to the Falklands as a cook on the HMS Sheffield. An Exocet missile, made in France but fired from an Argentinian plane, hit the ship and penetrated to the galley. Eight cooks were killed instantaneously, one of them being Titch. The ship caught fire and later sank.)

Mumps for me was the birth of vanity. Until then I’d lived in the bliss of unselfconsciousness. To say I was not a beautiful child would be a textbook example of litotes. I was more ginger than the biscuits. My hair could have guided rockets in from space. Where my skin wasn’t freckled it was luminous. But as far as I was concerned I wasn’t concerned. I was happy as a puppy. Then came mumps.

I was sitting up in bed when Dave Collier and a recovered Andrew Middlewick came round, ostensibly to sympathise. When they saw me they burst out laughing. I looked in the mirror and saw a bloated horror, with hugely swollen neck and jowls and cheeks and eyes. I looked, in other words, pretty much as I do now. It was awful.

There’s heaps more in the file. Every memory brings another. What does it prove? Sod, as Philip Larkin, the best of all poets, put it, all. Amen.