Aged just nine, Lauren lost BOTH parents to the blood scandal. Today, she’s still waiting for answers — and hasn’t had a penny in compensation
WHEN nine-year-old Lauren Palmer was summoned to a family meeting her first thought was that she might be getting another pet.
Or could it be about the washing-up rota that she and her two brothers were always being threatened with? The truth, however, was horrifying.
‘Mum told us that she was very poorly with something called HIV and that she wouldn’t get better,’ recalls Lauren, now 35. ‘ She said my dad had it, too. I’d never heard of it, but instinctively knew that this was awful news and burst into tears. Mum was also crying and put her arm around me.’
Within weeks, in August 1993, both of Lauren’s parents were dead – eight days apart. Her brothers, from her mother’s first marriage, went to live with their father. Lauren, now an orphan, moved in with relatives who she says resented her presence.
This Dickensian series of tragic events would be no less heartbreaking for Lauren had her parents been drug addicts.
But in fact she came from a respectable family and home was a pristine semi- detached property in the small village where her father Stephen had been an engineer, before becoming too ill to work.
He had haemophilia, the bleeding disorder, and was among those given contaminated blood products in what has been described as ‘ the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS’.
Stephen contracted HIV and hepatitis C within the first two years of Lauren’s life, and in turn infected her mother Barbara. So great was the stigma attached to HIV and Aids at the time that Lauren and her brothers had been kept completely in the dark. ‘ We knew my dad was extremely poorly as his body began shutting down during his final years,’ says Lauren, in her first interview since presenting her testimony at the Infected Blood Public Inquiry.
‘He would have blackouts and get very angry about his situation, and lash out at mum. Recent research into HIV shows it can cause a form of dementia in the brain. I was largely kept away from him, and it deprived us of a close relationship. Dad was losing control.’
Lauren is fighting for an acceptance of liability from the Government because it allowed contaminated blood products to be imported from America in the 1980s. Shockingly, imports continued even when doctors in the US warned that its citizens with haemophilia were dying after being given factor VIII concentrate, a clotting agent created from mixing together cells from thousands of donors. Stephen was given this on NHS prescription and administered it to himself at home.
Ravaged by Aids and barely mobile, he also suffered from bronchopneumonia, pancreatitis, jaundice and even paranoid psychosis. Stephen became so ill his own parents insisted that he move in with them to be cared for properly.
Lauren’s memories of her mother are happier.
‘I had a porcelain doll collection and mum would take me to fairs so I could buy new ones,’ she said. ‘Some of my fondest memories are of us drawing and painting together, then snuggling up to watch my favourite Disney film, Lady and the Tramp.’
Two years before her death, however, Barbara developed a drink problem. From studying her mother’s medical records, Lauren knows this was a direct reaction to her fatal diagnosis which came at around that time.
‘Everyone was aware that HIV was a death sentence, so I can only imagine how terrified she felt,’ said Lauren. ‘She used alcohol as a way of coping. As a child, seeing the mum I adored in that drunken state was horrible and I still struggle with those memories.’
There may also have been resentment on her mother’s part. Lauren’s father’s medical
records show that he had initially ignored advice to use contraception because he ‘didn’t think the risk of infecting my mother was worth wearing condoms for’. While her mother struggled to hold things together at home, Lauren looks back fondly on time outdoors with her brothers, four and eight years her senior, riding bikes and playing. Shortly after her mother broke the awful news to them, relatives moved in to help and Barbara was admitted to the Oxford Haemophilia Centre. Stephen was being treated in the same hospital but the couple, now estranged, were kept apart and Lauren never saw her father. She vividly recalls sitting on her mother’s hospital bed, aware that she was very sick but having no idea that, aged 40, she was so close to death.
On August 19, as Lauren and her brothers were having breakfast with their relatives, a call came from the hospital to say that they should come quickly. As they were about to leave, the phone rang again. It was too late, their mother had already died.
Lauren recalls little of what happened in the immediate aftermath and believes blocking it out was her way of coping with the trauma.
She has since been told that she was offered the chance to attend her mother’s funeral and, in her grief-stricken state, declined. She also vaguely remembers being informed that her father had died, aged 35, eight days before her mother. Lauren and her brothers were tested for HIV and, mercifully, found to be clear.
Shortly before her mother’s death there was a dispute about where Lauren would live. Her father’s family wanted to take her, while her mother was insisting she should stay with relatives on her side. Social services ensured her mother’s wishes were fulfilled.
‘Mum’s relatives didn’t live locally, and the hardest part was moving away from the area and being separated from my brothers,’ said Lauren, closing her eyes in a vain effort to block out this memory. ‘It wasn’t an option for me to go to their dad, but he’s a lovely man and I think if he could have financially supported me, he probably would have given me a home.’
It is nothing short of scandalous that the state, responsible for prescribing the contaminated medicine that caused the death of both her parents, did not step in and provide support to let Lauren stay with her siblings.
Instead she had to make do with visiting them three times a year during school holidays. Although they never discussed their mother these were the only times she actually felt happy during an otherwise bleak childhood.
‘Where they lived was very rural and I loved the fact they had chickens roaming around the garden and dogs,’ said Lauren.
‘My cocker spaniel, Lady, was given away to a farmer after I moved in with mum’s relatives because there wasn’t room in the tiny cottage. Leaving my brothers always felt like another bereavement and it would take weeks for me to recover.’
As she told the inquiry, she was made to feel like a burden to the new parents she lived with. The marriage broke down soon after she moved in – leaving the mother struggling both financially and emotionally.
She explained that the daughter in the family, perhaps not surprisingly, resented her and she found herself living in a ‘ cold’ environment.
She said: ‘I remember being told before my first day at my new school that I couldn’t breathe a word about how my parents had died – apparently even the headteacher was hesitant about giving me a place – because otherwise we would all have been
ostracised. Back then, people were spraypainting obscenities on the houses of people with HIV, which I guess is not surprising given the terrifying ad campaigns, featuring tombstones, combined with the general belief that those who had this disease were all druggies and prostitutes, who some felt deserved it.
‘Thankfully, I loved school and escaped into my work, which meant I got good GCSEs.’
Lauren recalls visits from social workers who would try to talk to her about what she had been through, but believes they stopped coming because she struggled to open up: ‘I was quiet and withdrawn, mainly because I didn’t want to be any trouble to anyone. I didn’t feel comfortable talking to strangers.’
She spent much of the second half of her childhood, when at home, in her room, only coming downstairs for meals eaten in silence. Aged 17, Lauren moved in with a friend’s family.
Her relatives, she said, subsequently returned any birthday and Christmas cards she sent them, unopened, and she has not seen any of them since.
‘If outside agencies had stayed in touch and offered appropriate support, things could have turned out very differently,’ she said.
While this sounds like yet another thing Lauren could justifiably be resentful about, she doesn’t do bitter. For this, she feels indebted to her mother, whose favourite poem, Thinking, by 19th century poet Walter D Wintle, includes the line: ‘For out in the world you find success begins with a fellow’s will. It’s all in the state of mind.’
Having spent her late teens and early 20s working in retail, she went on to work on cruise ships for four years, a job that allowed her to travel the world.
She’s had boyfriends but, having being independent from such a young age, doesn’t feel the need that so many do for a life partner.
She also closed her mind to thoughts of having children when a doctor told her, shortly before her mother died, that she carried the haemophilia gene, meaning there is a 50 per cent chance any son she had would be born with the condition.
In her late 20s Lauren settled in Bristol and landed a job working for cosmetics company Mac. While doing her pre-interview research she came across the company’s charity, the Mac AIDS Fund, supporting people living with the disease, and told bosses that this was a subject very close to her heart.
She said: ‘Having told no one, other than my very closest friends, how my parents had died – it wasn’t even recorded on their death certificates – it was a huge relief finally being able to open up. After 20 years, I realised I had no reason to feel ashamed. They made me the charity’s ambassador in the South West.’
But it wasn’t until 2017 – while watching the Panorama documentary, Contaminated Blood: The Search for Truth – that Lauren discovered her parents were among 2,000 people who had died, or became seriously ill, as a result of infected blood.
She contacted Jason Evans who founded Factor 8 – The Independent Haemophilia Group and whose father, also a haemophiliac, died in 1993 after being infected with AIDS and hepatitis C.
So passionate was Lauren about helping to secure justice for those affected by the scandal that she gave up her job at Mac, taking on a less demanding role elsewhere, to support the charity’s campaign for a third public inquiry. This began on April 30 and will run for six months. Victims branded both previous inquiries whitewashes.
The latest inquiry’s findings could be used to support litigation in the High Court, where claims for adequate compensation for those affected have been paused, awaiting chairman Sir Brian Langstaff’s report.
However Lauren doesn’t expect any cash that may be awarded stretching to compensate relatives like her.
She is still close to her brothers, who support her campaigning but, for personal and professional reasons, don’t want to be involved. ‘The devastation caused by this didn’t stop with my parents’ deaths, it affects our family to this day,’ she said. ‘We were innocent victims, pushed to the sidelines of society and left to pick up the pieces.
‘I’m not hopeful that we, the children, will get compensation. We have been very much neglected in all of this and haven’t received any support, certainly not financially.
‘We will probably have to make do with getting the truth, on behalf of all of our relatives who died in shame. That should not have happened, because they were all innocent in this.’
Surely it’s now time someone stepped in and gave this brave young woman the helping hand so shamefully withheld three decades ago?
‘It was a huge relief to open up’