Mum, dad, brother, polio and other stories
Exhibit: Esther McVey, The Belvedere independent school for girls
Kenya
Taloned screams scratch the sleep from a young mother’s eyes. Hot, humid Kenyan air eddies across Betty’s cheeks as her head lifts to the last echo. One silent breath and then the agony sounds again, reflexing her to the cot-side of her 20-month-old son. She reaches for the tiny, spasming body straining to draw its next breath, burnt-finger reflexes snatch back her hand as he recoils from her touch, screaming and screaming and then screaming. She focuses on his face, his eyes bulging like balls pressurised by pain, beseeching, begging his mummy to make it better. His cries diminish into “help me mummy” whimpers, his whole-body clenched in an agony that draws her hands to his skin to comfort. He screams at every touch..
Streaming parental dread behind her, she runs through the hotel corridors to find the resident army doctor and worries him back to her room like a sheepdog fielding a recalcitrant ewe. Then she waits (badly) as he bends over the little pen.
“I think it’s polio” paralyses her with the cloud of consequences that rise like heat from her child. “We need to get him to hospital, bring him to reception while I call an ambulance”. Her touch still burns, but she has no choice. Despite her desperate need of a cuddle to comfort them both, she carries him with as little contact as possible.
“Polio.” A film reel of paralysed misshapen children, callipers, dead infants and the mechanical sounds of iron lung breaths plays a loop in her head as she braces in the ambulance. Carried on a flow of ‘I’d give my life for my child’ moments, she can’t tell if his gradually reducing sensitivity to touch should be a source of comfort or the cause of further fear.
Surrounded by hospital hardness, she follows the small procession to seek inspection by another army doctor, an army doctor unused to dealing with children, or women, or humanity. “Child’s name?” “Peter Wilson”. After a cursory evaluation, he concurs that it’s probably polio but they will need to perform a lumbar puncture to be sure. He decrees that, as she is female and this is an unpleasant, painful procedure involving a large needle inserted into the spine, she is therefore an unsuitable witness and must go away. Now. Despite her protests that she wants to stay so Peter won’t be so alone and so frightened in a room of strangers, she finds herself on a chair staring at the reverberant wall of a corridor.
Meanwhile, the polio virus is replicating in the nerves of his spinal cord, shredding the motor neurons it subverts to make copies of itself, leaving behind a creeping trail of excruciating disconnection. If it spreads too far towards his neck, he will first become paraplegic, then unable to breath and then dead.
Betty starts from her seat, triggered by a familiar scream echoing down the corridor. She sprints the passage to the room from which she’d been peremptorily thrown. The thrown room is empty, empty except for a tiny boy whimpering weakly under the glare of an antiseptic light.
First, first they hurt her too-young-to-understand son and then they desert him, leaving him as stranded and helpless as a beached jellyfish. A magma of maternal rage flows through her, melting a lifetime of middle-class inhibitions and deference. She picks him up as carefully as she can, and as his tired little head flops onto her breast, 1950s middle class propriety falls away as she turns to hunt the cunt who did this…
…
He lives. He is lucky. His immune system has fought the virus to a halt at the cost of a left leg and sundry other muscles.
Months later, the little family is in a Bata shop, buying him new shoes. For the first time since that polio night, he manages a brief drunken hobble before falling. Betty cries. Brian is brave.
Persuading a 2-year-old to do physio is a trial on a par with persuading a Jehovah’s Witness to give blood. Nevertheless, his hobbling improves from an epileptic stagger to a syncopated stumble. He is happy enough with any form of locomotion, it’s all he knows. Betty and Brian are just happy he is alive and healthy – but, every now and then, they catch a glimpse of his handicap from the corner of their minds.
Learning to walk again – mastering the hobble…
9 months post-polio, a backup child called David is born. Peter sets out to teach him how to play, climbing into his cot with toys, seemingly unfazed by the complete lack of any detectable playing ability shown by his tiny sibling.
…