Life

Nuala McCann: Death was no stranger to our parents’ childhoods. The fever hospital and quarantine was a fact of life

My mother says she’s watched mothers kiss their 17-year-old boys and wave them off to war, knowing they might be killed. We forget how many children never got to grow up, she says softly

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

For my mother's generation, quarantine wasn't that unusual
For my mother's generation, quarantine wasn't that unusual For my mother's generation, quarantine wasn't that unusual

THEY are wiry, these older people. We worry that this darkness will swallow them. But they have lived through harsh times.

I ring my mother from her self-isolation, remind her that Pope Francis wouldn’t want her risking herself at public Mass. She tells me that this self-isolating is fine, but many’s a one could die of boredom.

She says she’s watched mothers kiss their 17-year-old boys and wave them off to war, knowing they might be killed. We forget how many children never got to grow up, she says softly.

Death was no stranger to our parents’ childhoods. The fever hospital and quarantine was a fact of life.

“I had my fourth birthday in hospital,” said my mother. “It was scarlet fever and I went in just after Christmas and came out at Easter.”

The doctor swept her up in his arms and carried her off. She was the youngest. Her mother cried to see her go.

“Don’t cry mother, I’ll be fine,” she said. She was just three.

Her aunt gave her a big copper penny to hold. It was to be three months’ quarantine.

Her parents walked up to stand outside the fever hospital and think of her inside – they were not allowed to visit. But one day, her father jumped the wall and ran across the grounds, shouting up at a window to a girl inside.

“Go and find Lily McBride, hold her up to the window, her mother and father want to see her.”

The girl did and they all waved from the two sides of the glass, so near, so far.

Such a picture of love and anguish – that was isolation, old style.

It ended when her mother was able to come and collect her, weeping for joy now. They walked home along the streets of Derry to the family house that my mother had forgotten completely.

“The lino looked strange, the whole house looked foreign,” she said.

“What’s that in your hand?” asked her mother.

And she opened her hand and it was the big penny that her aunt had given her.

She had clutched it for all that time, held on tight – a touchstone to family and love – her palm bright green from the copper.

And all the neighbours who had very little themselves, all came with Easter eggs to celebrate the happy return of the child.

As if one isolation were not enough it happened again, three years later when she and her brother and her sister caught diphtheria and ended up back in the fever hospital.

Her father cried. He worried that if she had nits, then the nurses would shave her beautiful curls off.

But at least there were three of them in it this time. Her brother was in a separate ward and was not allowed to visit the girls. So he snuck out a window and crept along a ledge – high up, a tightrope walker – and he knocked the window in the girls’ ward and got let in.

He ended up with paralysis of the throat for his sins.

“He nearly died,” said my mother. “Every time he ate or drank, it all poured down his nose.”

Ask her what she remembers of her quarantine and she talks of rice pudding in a cracked enamel cup; of the empty bed in which no-one dared sleep at the bottom of the ward.

“A girl brought me down to that bed and told me that a little red-haired girl had died in it. She showed me a hairbrush and said: ‘See that red hair, it belonged to the wee girl who died’.”

I tell my mother that I’m not over that story yet.

Yes, we have heard old tales of sanatoriums and of quarantine wards – of children with polio locked into iron lungs... but that was long ago. And this is now.

“We’ll not see each other but I’ve enough food to feed an army and I’m all right, says my mother channelling the spirit of the Blitz.

It feels like we’re waving each other off to war. I’m scared.

“Haven’t I lived enough,” she says. “There are neighbours coming to say they’ll bring me food but I could feed the whole street and let them come if they want to. Your job is to write funny stories and make people laugh.

“And by the way, just to be clear, tell them I never had the nits!”