Forties (part 2)

I seem to have been a sickly child, because my mother later kept telling me so.  In fact, I had croup when I was three, whooping cough a couple of years later, chickenpox at some point, and German measles twice (which wasn’t supposed to be possible).  My parents later told me that they’d shoved me into rooms with neighbouring kids who had mumps in the vain hope that I’d catch my immunity before it could do permanent harm, but mumps declined me (until I was in my forties).  The same ‘expose and immunise’ system was probably applied to other childhood ailments, like scarlet fever.

My body obstinately refused to comply.  I still haven’t had scarlet fever, as far as I know.  Again later in life (probably in my teens) I was reminded that my TB test – a ‘patch test’, it was called; it was conducted at Cranleigh Road school, and for some reason I had to go back and have it again because the first try hadn’t worked – had come out positive.  This meant that I was immune to TB.  Somehow this was presented as bad news.

But the by-product of that sickliness was reading.  Memory is a distorting mirror, but I do know – having been told so many times – that I was reading by the age of four.  How fluently I have no way of telling, but the breadth of my reading is fairly well established.  It was ‘Picture Post’ and ‘Illustrated’ magazines, and The Children’s Encyclopaedia.  

I was given the two magazines, unedited, to keep me occupied.  I was reading words I’d never actually heard or said.  I clearly remember wondering how that word ‘illustrated’ was pronounced.  I say unedited, because I have since looked back and there were some fairly challenging images in there; but I don’t recall being traumatised.  Perhaps the worst pages got torn out before the mags were dropped onto my bed, but I doubt it.

The Children’s Encyclopaedia, though, was another thing, and must have formed a large part of my early education.  I don’t intend to retrospectively flesh out my actual memories, but I will use the internet to check facts, so I am fairly sure that what I had was the 1920 ten volume blue-bound edition.  So I certainly learned about the solar system, and probably picked up some attitudes that may have taken a while to question and discard.  I wish I had those books now, because I’d love to revisit and revise that early education.