1944-1949
2.1 Banknock Village – ‘Its Early Curses on Me’
Schoolhouse, Banknock in 1944
This
was my home with my parents and sister, Elizabeth, from the July 1944
until August 1949. The house, its garden and adjoining rectangular acre
of primary school garden, its school buildings and playground, its
surrounding farm land, and all the simple but sufficient village
amenities, became a dramatic environment for my infant years five to
ten. In due course, many people and happenings blessed my development
there, but, without doubt, certain medical conditions that afflicted my
sister and me in these days, can arguably be perceived now in retrospect
as curses.
In late
November 1944 I was a happy pupil in Miss Johnstone’s Primary 1 class -
Infants 1 as it was then called – when, somehow or other, I contracted
the contagious disease Scarlatina. Visions of my being whisked away
alone and tearful in an ambulance in the middle of a cold wet night have
never left my memory. I may have been told where I was going, but I was
so ill and unaware at the time that it appeared to me that I was being
snatched from the security of my parents’ care into the unknown. It
transpired that the unknown was Bannockburn Hospital for Infectious and
Contagious Diseases. Equally traumatic was the first thing that happened
to me in a ward there as I lay in a strange bed in the company of rows
of other children. A nurse, gently, but clearly with a great sense of
urgency, wrapped a burning hot kaolin poultice tightly round my neck and
throat, and then whispered to me, ‘Do not try to get out of bed; try to
sleep; your mummy and daddy will come to visit you on Sunday.’ My tears
of discomfort and loneliness soaked my pillow but, alas, they did not
reduce the extreme heat or the uncomfortable constriction of the strange
scarf that had been foisted on me.
Next
morning, and three times each day thereafter for about the next three
weeks or so, the poultice ‘brutality’ was repeated. Only then the
purgatory of having the sticky scarf yanked off was if anything worse
than the process of renewal! Then, when mum and dad eventually came to
visit during the first week-end, the nearest they got to me was on the
other side of a ward window looking in from the hospital grounds. I was
of course thankful to be able at least to see them again. I was also
overjoyed that they had brought me some comics to read. Thus I started
to relax a wee bit thereafter and to gradually understand a little more
about what was going on.
As I was
still very ill, being confined to bed did not bother me for three or
four weeks or so. However, as my appetite gradually returned, and I
became more resigned to my predicament, my natural childlike desires to
be physically active and play with all the toys scattered around the
ward floor called for some form of action on my part. So, disobeying
orders one morning in mid-December, I stealthily slipped my legs over
the side of my bed, reached out for the floor far beneath, and then
tried to stand up …. Only to collapse in a heap as a nurse, too late,
rushed over to try to prevent the inevitable! ‘I cannae staun,” I
remember muttering to myself … “And when you’re a wee bit stronger,
you’ll have to learn to walk again too, sonny, came the smiling
rejoinder from the nurse! You’ll want to get your present from Santa
over at the Christmas tree next week, won’t you? Well, from tomorrow,
we’ll start practising … a wee bit at a time. Now, here, I’ll lift you
back into your bed.” ….. Progress ….hooray!
Only
later on in life did I discover that, at a time when the very new
penicillin type antibiotics were priority for our troops abroad and not
for those of us ill at home, the dangers of my condition developing into
rheumatic fever had been very great. I also found out later that this
knowledge had weighed very heavily on my parents’ minds as my mum had
barely survived this accursed rheumatic affliction in her teens, and
that this fact had not been unconnected to her being advised not to risk
having a second child after the birth of my sister in 1936. Little
wonder my return home to Banknock in January 1945 was met with a greater
emotional welcome than even I, as a most contented and loved bairn, had
ever received before.
A minor
blessing or curse, I do not to this day which, came my way, when, in
mid-February of 1945, and my being barely back at school after
convalescence, an opportunity was offered to us by Dr Melville, a friend
of my mother’s Telfer family in Falkirk, to arrange for the surgical
removal of my tonsils and adenoids. Chloroform haunts me to this day and
although the memory of the prescribed ice-cream in the taxi home after
the operation is soothing, the bucketful of blood I filled as a
necessary result is still a vivid 'horror movie picture’ in my mind.
A much
quicker return to school for the summer term for me only brought on more
medical misfortune – Chicken pox! And then after being strong enough to
enjoy a summer fortnight’s holiday in Rothesay and to learn how to swim
in its fine indoor salt-water pool, the Autumn term of Infants 2, saw
the invasion of Measles into Banknock School not long after the joys of
VE Day celebrations on August 16th, 1945. I naturally
succumbed like many others, but was then ‘fortunate’ to also catch
German Measles, which, as was often said then, “It’s more a blessing
than a curse.”
So the
first real blessing to me from sporting activity in my life was
swimming, albeit something to be only experienced during summer
holidays. “A swim in the sea before breakfast” was my dad’s rallying cry
to all in sundry, and this resounded in ours ears during all our
youthful vacationing in the likes of Lundin Links, St. Andrews,
Monifieth, Saltcoats and Crail until we ‘escaped’ such family holidays
late in our teens.
The Henderson Family in St. Andrews in 1946
