Rash decision had the sweetest result

HoNNor was 15 in 1939 and, having just left school, she found herself a job as an office junior at an Army base on the South Coast. on her first day at work, the sun shone as she cycled the 15 miles to work. Arriving at the office, she went to the ladies to freshen up and discovered, to her dismay, an angry looking red rash across her abdomen. She reported this to the office supervisor and was quickly marched to the Medical officer. He was newly qualified and very able to cope with most emergencies, but Honnor’s rash baffled him. But he declared she had shingles and that it was infectious. ‘Go home at once,’ he told her. ‘i will arrange for an ambulance to take you to a fever hospital.’ So Honnor cycled home and waited with her mother. After an hour or so, an ambulance drew up and two elderly men got out and tottered up the long garden path, carrying a stretcher. Honnor protested that she had been fit enough to cycle the 30-mile round trip, but they insisted she lay on the stretcher: ‘We have our orders.’ They struggled back to the ambulance with her. At the hospital, which resembled a row of beach huts, she was allocated a place and she lay on her bed with a bag of toffees and comics to read. ‘And thus was how i spent the first day of the war,’ Honnor later told me. Three days later, a senior doctor did his rounds, took one look at her red tummy and declared that Honnor had a heat rash. Before he left, the doctor kindly suggested she should go home, get herself a bike and try to lose a bit of weight.

Mrs Wendy Little, Poole, Dorset.