Found out about the outbreak’
worked when he met mum – and that the bacteria had lain dormant for years until his immune system weakened.
He’d starting drinking alcohol again in an attempt medicate the pain in his chest, but all it had done was exacerbate the inner fire. Without advances in TB medication, he and Dorcas would have perished like the consumptive souls of Victorian novels, coughing into bloodstained hankies.
But instead of closing the pub and putting out public safety alerts, our family GP of many years somehow managed to hush the outbreak up.
He would have known my parents were barely scraping a living as tenant publicans of a large brewery. A prolonged closure would have bankrupted them and left seven people homeless.
Mum once told me she would always be grateful to him that he somehow managed to circumvent the protocols that would have necessitated a public alert. I should probably point out here no one else in the family or village contracted TB – you generally need to be in close contact with a cougher for a prolonged period to catch it, and my little sister was particularly vulnerable because she often shared a bed with my parents, and was too young to have had the BCG vaccine like we older children.
We four other siblings, aged between 12 and 20, were informed we
We sat A-levels and O-levels with two family members in strict isolation
mustn’t tell anyone. So my big sister, Holly, and I prepared to sit our A-levels and O-levels with two family members in strict isolation at Orpington hospital, not knowing if Dad would live or die – all the while pretending in public that things were normal.
Meanwhile, Mum spent her waking hours with one or the other, and nights on a camp bed beside Dorcas. Granny, her mother, moved in to oversee meals and help with the school run.
What’s amazing to me now is how the tale never leaked out to our customers or school friends, and how vague we five grown-up siblings still are around the details.
We were told so often that nobody must find out about the TB that we seemed to have pushed the whole episode into deep recesses of our memories. My mother must have invented a cover story about dad’s and my sister’s absence that satisfied all enquiries.
Measles, or mumps perhaps? My younger brother, Hereward, who was just 12 at the time, says he was barely aware of the crisis, while my big brother, Justin, had just started at university and was away for the key five weeks of hospitalisation.
But I remember helping with domestic and pub chores when I should have been doing revision, and having to sit up late cramming.
Holly keenly recalls sleeping on a makeshift bed on the hospital floor alongside Dorcas, while Mum spent the night beside our father at the peak of his illness. “I took my A-level biology exam the next day and spilt the Bunsen burner practical experiment all over the lab surface because my mind was elsewhere,” she tells me now.
Dad and Dorcas were returned to us by the start of the summer holidays, but my father never regained his previous age-defying vitality. Four years later, he died of lung cancer, brought on by the scarring in his lungs. But then lungs are a family weak spot. Asthma runs down the generations, while my mother was also to die, 15 years after Dad, of secondary tumours that had formed deep in her chest.
Only Hereward and I seemed clear-chested until we both caught what we think was Covid-19 in early March (though neither of us was tested) and felt a tightening around our rib cages and, in his case, a terrible cough. We’re both fine now. My case was pretty mild compared to friends and it’s only as a range of symptoms have been brought to public notice I’ve become convinced it was the virus. Mercifully, this time round there were no hospital visits – and no cover-up.