For Mum, the pain of social distancing is nothing new
She was just seven when she was sent away after her mother contracted tuberculosis. Now, Christine Manby’s mum is revisiting the profound impact of that isolation once more
At not yet eight years old, the little girl is too small to see over the high windowsill of the Victorian building so someone lifts her onto an old coal bunker. Now she can see into the ward where her mother is in quarantine. She hadn’t seen her since the day the ambulance took her away and gave her persistent cough the worst possible diagnosis. Over the past few months, it’s become a familiar scene: a tender family reunion through glass. But this isn’t 2020. It’s the 1940s.
The concept of social distancing was not a new one for my mother, Ann, once that little girl, now a grandmother of 77. In 1949, her mother Mildred, my Nana, was diagnosed with tuberculosis and immediately transferred from Atherton in Greater Manchester, where the family lived, to Meathop Hospital at Grange-over-Sands in Cumbria.
It wasn’t just Nana who was sent away that summer. Because her father didn’t think he could cope with raising a daughter alone, Mum was sent to live with her godmother, Aunt Doris. At the time, Mum knew her godmother only by name. Her brother Roger, five years older, would stay in Manchester with their dad.
The time Mum would have to spend away from her immediate family was open-ended. In the 1940s, the treatment for tuberculosis took at least six months, and a large percentage of patients still left the hospital by hearse. So Mum was enrolled in the village school at Bishop’s Cleeve near Cheltenham and tried to settle into a new life, far from everything and everyone she’d known. In Atherton, the family rented two rooms in a house owned by a woman they called Auntie Gert and Mum had to share with her brother.
In Bishop’s Cleeve, she had a bedroom in Doris and Uncle Fred’s “pre-fab”, one of the houses thrown up to accommodate the workers at Smiths Industries after the war. Though Mum felt at once that Gloucestershire was more beautiful than Manchester – and the air much cleaner – it wasn’t home. Though the pre-fab was small, Auntie Doris was house-proud. Excessively so. If she read books or played with toys, she had to put them away as soon as Auntie Doris said so. It was hard to get too comfortable.
As the months rolled on, Mum heard from her father only rarely. He had no phone and wasn’t a letter writer. He didn’t ever visit. Mum spent Christmas in London with other relatives. If Doris and Fred heard anything about the progress of Nana’s recovery, they didn’t let Mum know.
It wasn’t until the summer of 1950 – almost a year after Nana’s quarantine began – that Mum made her first trip back home to Atherton and thence to Grange-over-Sands. The Meathop Hospital was a custom-built sanatorium, close to the Cumbrian coast. It opened in 1891. At the time, doctors believed sea air was good for respiratory diseases such as TB, and thus the building had been designed to provide as much exposure to the elements as possible. There were large verandahs, onto which patients could be wheeled still in their beds. There were gaps in the walls and louvres in the hospital roof that could be opened to increase circulation. In winter, patients sometimes woke to find a light dusting of snow on their beds.
Mum remembers Meathop Hospital as beautiful but intimidating. Children were not allowed into the building to prevent the spread of infection. Instead, Mum had to stand on that coal bunker so that she could see and be seen through the window to the women’s ward. She had worn a dress that her mother knew, now slightly too small, to show how much she’d grown since they’d last been together.
As it happened, on that first visit, Mum did get to go inside the hospital. After the doctors finished their last
rounds for the day and went home, a soft-hearted nurse let Mum slip into Nana’s ward for “just a couple of minutes”. She had to stand at the end of Nana’s bed, not touching anything.
“I couldn’t run and hug her, and she was very upset,” Mum remembers. “Looking back, I wonder whether it was a good idea to have visited at all. It would have been better if I hadn’t gone. Afterwards, I could picture the hospital. It was easier when I didn’t know where she was.”
Then it was back to Cheltenham with still no idea how much longer Nana’s quarantine would continue. Mum spent another Christmas away from home. Roger visited for a couple of days, but it was uncomfortable because Auntie Doris didn’t like people messing up the house. “She did her best but she wasn’t used to children. She was more like a nanny than an auntie.”
In the 1940s we knew nothing. Now we know everything. It’s hard to see the daily figure of people who have died. When you’re bombarded with figures like that all day long, it’s very difficult to keep a balance
The second time Mum saw her mother was another nine months later. It was March. Nana’s birthday. This time, a doctor was on the ward so Mum couldn’t slip inside, only wave through the window again. No hug, no kiss. Not even a real conversation through the glass. “It was a long way to go for so little. I missed her very much, but I couldn’t complain. Not to Dad, or Doris or Uncle Fred. I just had to get on with it.” Mum still wasn’t quite nine.
“I just had to get on with it,” is a phrase Mum often uses when talking about that time.
Meanwhile, in Manchester, Mum’s brother Roger wasn’t having the best of times either. Grandfather was a mercurial character, who could be very charming but who could also fly into a rage at the slightest provocation. When Roger complained that he was feeling cold, Grandfather saw red. There was no coal, so Grandfather chopped up the dining table and made 13-year-old Roger burn that instead. “Are you warm enough now?”
Nana was at Meathop Hospital for two years. Type 1 diabetes, which had hitherto gone undiagnosed, made her recovery complicated. During Nana’s quarantine, some 52,000 people in the UK were diagnosed with tuberculosis in its various forms. In the years that followed, that figure steadily declined, but there are still around 5,000 new cases a year in the UK, and worldwide the numbers are astonishing. The World Health Organisation recorded an estimated 10 million cases globally in 2018. That same year there were 1.5 million TB deaths, making it the world’s most deadly infectious disease. And this lockdown, while it may stop the spread of Covid-19, may inadvertently have been helping TB to extend its fatal reach.
A study by Imperial College London for the Stop TB Partnership suggested that a four-month lockdown – which would disrupt diagnosis, treatment and contact tracing – could result in an additional 1.8 million new cases and 342,000 deaths worldwide over the next five years. That’s an optimistic scenario.
The most common symptoms of TB are a persistent cough lasting for at least three weeks, fever, unexplained weight loss, extreme tiredness and night sweats. In 2014, Mum had that persistent cough. Her GP, seeing a reference to Nana’s TB on Mum’s notes, asked her to self-isolate while awaiting test results. We were astonished. It was more than 60 years since Nana’s illness, but TB can lay dormant for a very long time indeed. The results came back negative, but I remember very well the three-week period when Mum wouldn’t accept visitors. We spoke on the phone. She was adamant that she had to keep away from her grandsons for their protection, though I knew how difficult it was for her not to see them. How odd and cruel it seemed to be separated from loved ones for so long. Three weeks since Dad’s death, Mum’s moved in with my sister Kate, to live in an annexe built onto the side of Kate’s house. It’s self-contained with a front door. That’s where Mum’s been self-isolating for the past 12 weeks.
When I last saw Mum, on 11 March, it still wasn’t certain that the UK would go into lockdown. The Cheltenham Festival was in full flow in the shadow of the hills where Mum spent the two years Nana was in Cumbria. But when I took Mum around the local supermarket, there wasn’t a toilet roll to be found. On my way back to London the following morning, I swung by the supermarket again and discovered that the loo roll had been replenished. I bought Mum and my sister a 12-pack and some disinfectant wipes and returned to drop them off before continuing my journey. Instinctively, I went to hug Mum. She flinched away from me. The worried look on her face haunted me in the days that followed. How could I convince her not to be scared by this virus thing? We had a long phone conversation about whether or not she should join my sister and her family for a pub lunch to celebrate my nephew’s birthday that weekend. Mum didn’t want to appear antisocial, but neither did she want to get ill. She didn’t go out. Twelve days later, we were all locked down.
Later, Mum told me, “When lockdown was announced, I was relieved. Now everyone would understand why I wasn’t mixing. They wouldn’t think I was just being funny.”
Mum has taken lockdown seriously from the start. Whereas previously she would happily join my sister, brother-in-law and nephews in their part of the house to watch TV or have Sunday lunch, since mid-March she’s kept her distance in the annexe. My sister and her family now talk to Mum only through the window or from across the garden. There’s no more hugging, no sitting between my nephews on the sofa and no casually sharing a box of chocs on a Saturday night.
I wish the government had made the decision to lock down earlier. They put the economy first, and they’ve
made a mess of things. But I suppose we’ve just got to get on with it
I asked Mum if she found lockdown easier than most, given her experience as a child and again when she thought she might have TB. She said: “I felt very isolated when I was sent to live with Doris and Fred. If we’d had a phone when I was eight, I don’t doubt I would have felt better. I had no one to discuss my feelings with. Now it is very different. I’ve got my family next door. There’s social media, TV and telephones. Of course that’s better.”
But the ease of communication has a flip side. “In the 1940s we knew nothing. Now we know everything. It’s hard to see the daily figure of people who have died. When you’re bombarded with figures like that all day long, it’s very difficult to keep a balance. I can be doing my jobs or watching television, and it feels like a nice day then I see the news. Knowing so much takes away your sense of control, but I have to live my life and make the most of what’s here. I don’t want to bother you and your sister with my feelings about the virus. You’ve got your own worries. I’ve just got to get on with it.”
Mum’s never been one to make a fuss, it’s true. I remember when she had her heart attack. I’d just arrived for the weekend and Mum tried to finish making me a cup of tea before she sat down on the sofa and let me call an ambulance.
I wonder if Mum’s determination not to “be a burden” to anyone else springs from those two years she spent isolated from her mother. Though the move to Cheltenham was presented as the best solution, Mum couldn’t help feeling she was being punished in some way. I met Auntie Doris when I was about the age Mum would have been when she moved in with her. Doris no longer lived in the pre-fab but a brick-built council house. The very ordinary facade belied an astonishingly elegant interior: all cream upholstery and bone china teacups. My sister and I sat ramrod straight on the sofa and tried not to giggle. It was a game for us, trying not to make the plastic covers on the chairs squeak, but this was every day for Mum as a child, not knowing when she would see her mother again. Doris and Fred were kind people, but they weren’t used to having a child about the house.
Being separated from parents in childhood for a prolonged period has long-lasting psychological effects on the developing brain. Persistently raised levels of cortisol and adrenalin can interfere with the activity of genes, which manifests in mental health issues in adulthood: stunting emotional expression and causing anxiety and depression. It doesn’t take two years for the effects of separation to take hold. Up and down the country, children have been living apart from parents working on the Covid-19 front line for weeks. Who knows what the long-term effects might be for them?
There’s no hugging ‘hello’ though I feel a physical straining to wrap my arms around Mum’s tiny frame
One morning during lockdown, Mum and I talked about the day Nana was released from the hospital. The doctors suggested Nana wait a little longer before sending for her daughter. She was still weak. But Nana wasn’t having that. “She arrived home on a Friday and sent for me the very next day. ‘Ann’s been away long enough,’ she said.” Mum remembers how sudden it was. There had been no hint that Nana’s confinement was coming to an end. “It was the middle of the school term, but Nana was determined that the family should be together again right away. Doris and Fred loaded my things into the car and drove me north at once. I was elated.”
While Nana was in the hospital, Grandfather had moved out of the two rooms at Auntie Gert’s into a better house, a railway cottage, where they wouldn’t have to share.
“When Nana came home, Dad had mellowed. He didn’t drink as much. He still got cross, but he was better. Nana kept the peace. She’d stop him shouting. It was a relief for Roger.”
I can hear the sadness in Mum’s voice as she remembers her brother, who died at the beginning of last year. Nana’s two years in the sanatorium had a profound effect on both of them and their relationship with each other. Each of them felt isolated in a different way: Mum packed off to live with the aunt and uncle she barely knew, Roger left with a volatile father who wasn’t used to looking after a child alone. There were times when each sibling thought the other had it better. It makes me wish we could be having this conversation face to face on the sofa, in the way that seemed so natural not so long ago.
I ask Mum if she thinks this latest period of life in isolation will change anything for the better. “Hopefully, people will be more aware of others, but I don’t know if the country will be any better for it in the long run. There are lots of problems ahead. We’re all selfish. We all want what we want. Soon people will be complaining that they want to go on holiday again. They’ll forget about the NHS and the elderly.” Mum concludes our conversation: “I wish the government had made the decision to lock down earlier. They put the economy first, and they’ve made a mess of things. But I suppose we’ve just got to get on with it.”
A day later, Boris Johnson announces that we will be allowed to meet in groups of up to six people from separate households in gardens or the great outdoors. I immediately make plans to travel down to see Mum and my sister.
On Tuesday 2 June, Mum and I reunite in my sister’s garden. My brother-in-law lets me in through the side
gate, so I don’t have to go through the house. There’s no hugging “hello” though I feel a physical straining to wrap my arms around Mum’s tiny frame. I set up a deckchair at what I imagine is a two-metre distance. Mum moves her chair slightly further away. My sister, brother-in-law and nephews are dotted around the flowerbeds at their two-metre remove. Our necessarily shouted conversation makes me feel self-conscious. A neighbour pointedly shuts his window. Only the dogs come near me. They run frantically from person to person as though working to bridge the space which suddenly feels more psychological too, more so than on any recent phone calls.
Thanks to lockdown, for the first time in my life, I have a sense of how Mum must have felt as a child. How very lonely and frightening it must have been for an eight-year-old, who couldn’t pick up the phone to hear a familiar voice, to spend so much time away from her loved ones. It makes me all the more grateful for my sister, who has been there for Mum all the way, even if at arm’s length.
I leave our socially-distanced reunion with sunburn and an aching heart. When I get home, I find that Mum has sent me a text message, which echoes the way she felt when leaving the Meathop Hospital, having seen Nana only through the window. “One thing today proved was how much I had missed you. Now I am sad again.”
I call her right away. “Don’t be sad, Mum. Before you know it, things will be back to normal.”
But I am sad too. And normal feels even further away than before.