A powerful tale for Mother’s Day
When Helen Stevenson first noticed that her baby daughter Clara was ‘slight and sick’ – in the old phrase, ‘not thriving’ – she consulted doctors. They were bemused, until finally one asked her whether the baby tasted salty when kissed. Stevenson tested the premise, and found that ‘she tasted of mermaids, of the sea’.
As she discovered, unusually salty skin is one sign of cystic fibrosis, a genetically inherited disease that mostly affects the lungs and digestive system. Until relatively recently, it was unusual for those who had it to survive into adulthood.
Love Like Salt is a portrait of mothers and children, of a daughter’s illness and how it rearranges relationships in unexpected ways.
The author weaves in reflections on music and mortality, France and England, religion and secularism, and on the protective love that a mother feels for a sick child, especially just after diagnosis, saying: ‘I thought of her as a candle, cupping my hand around her.’
After Stevenson’s older, academic husband Nico reached retirement, and her second daughter, Verity, was born, the family moved to rural France. They stayed for seven years, described as ‘too short a time’.
Yet it gradually becomes clear that, for all its charms and the presence of some dear friends, she had a love-hate relationship with France’s ingrained culture and the insensitive treatment of Clara that sometimes flowed from it.
Since the Anglo-Saxon literary world is so often supine in its fuzzy admiration for every aspect of France, from food to style to child-rearing, Stevenson’s critical observations make for interesting reading.
‘Solidarity isn’t a challenge if you’re French,’ she writes. ‘Tolerating difference is.’
Clara’s ‘difference’ lay not just in the practical baggage of her illness – pills, injections and special dietary rules – but also in her clear-sighted, singular personality, which refused to fake interest in pop stars in order to fit in.
Suddenly, at school, Clara became the object of quite extreme class bullying, and her mother was disappointed that many adults did little to restrain the worst instincts of the children.
One incident in particular, quietly described, in which other children threw stones at Clara’s sling (which contained a precious antibiotic drip into her arm) made me catch my breath in vicarious indignation.
Somerset, and a Quaker school, came to the rescue. Gene therapy offers continuing promise. Stevenson has written an honest, poetic, affecting book that will speak to any reader, but most strongly to parents.