‘I’m still amazed that no one

Covid-19 has reminded Rowan Pelling of the time her family secretly battled contagion in the Eighties

The Covid-19 pandemic is not my first brush with a notifiable disease. As these long lockdown weeks have passed, I have found memories of the summer of 1984 returning in an insistent manner, bringing many unanswered questions in their wake.

When did my father become so worryingly irascible? Did my little sister disappear for a month, or was it two? When did Granny come to run the household? Why was I told never to speak about what happened?

So I phoned my four brothers and sisters to see what they remembered.

It started around spring, with Dad’s deeply embedded cough that built to fierce crescendos.

This was still the season of flus and colds, so no one took too much notice at first. Also he was a heavy smoker and was still puffing away at his full-tar Rothmans. Although it must have been disconcerting for the drinkers at my parents’ country pub – perched in woodland high above the Kent Weald – to see my 74-year-old dad hawking up phlegm near their pints of ale.

His personality seemed off-kilter, too. My father was infamous for calling people “bloody idiots”, telling customers to “bugger off, the lot of you” at closing time, and for giving regulars rude nicknames like “John the Rat”. But he was kindhearted and funny under the gruffness and was always doling out free drinks, giving racing tips and helping locals find work. As the cough bedded in, though, he began to seem genuinely foultempered. He shouted at drinkers and spat into a big cloth hankie he kept in his jacket pocket.

I was in my O-level year at school and my desk for doing homework was stationed just outside the door connecting the pub to our cottage, so I could hear every fearsome, shuddering hack. The cough escalated over a couple of months. On a couple of occasions I stuck my head round and saw my father trying to hide a sherry glass, which was odd.

Dad had spiralled into alcoholism in his early years as a publican, but became a teetotaller when I was four. My mother was beside herself with worry and was aware some customers were now staying away. My father

If she hadn’t taken him to the GP when she did, he’d have been dead in a week

never consulted the doctor, but after days of forceful cajoling when he seemed close to collapse, my mum managed to haul him off to the GP.

That’s when everything started moving at speed. Mum returned from the doctor’s without my father; she was dazed. Dad had been rushed into hospital for urgent X-rays and tests, and the medics were certain he was suffering from a serious case of tuberculosis. Our GP had told mum that if she hadn’t brought him in when she did, he’d have been dead within a week.

Now the entire family needed to be X-rayed and checked, with my five-year-old sister, Dorcas, first in line. We were all suddenly keenly aware that she’d also had a bit of a cough. Within a day she was in hospital – although we four older siblings were given the all-clear. My mother was in tears as she relayed how five nurses had to hold my little sister down as they took blood tests and put a tube down her nose.

If this had happened today, there’s no doubt the pub would have been closed down and notice given of an outbreak of TB, which would have destroyed our customer base. I imagine my sister’s village primary school would have been subject to restrictions, too. Certainly parents would have been told, tests offered and we would have felt like social pariahs.

Tuberculosis was a Dickensian contagion that had pretty much been eradicated in Britain by the Eighties. I later found out that the doctors suspected my father had become infected in Ghana – where he had