Scarlet Fever

The winter of my ninth year was hard.  My health had suffered in the unfamiliar climate of Quebec and I spent a good deal of that winter in bed with one childhood ailment after another.  My father had no job.  My mother for the first time in her married life had to cook, clean,  sew and manage to the penny my father's meager stipend.  As described I had a daily four mile trek to school, but helped her when I could.  One project was to grow peas, indoors!  We put a sprouting pea in a cup on some cotton wool and I watered it daily. 

It was a lonely time as I had no siblings, no friends.  All my relatives were being bombed in England.  I had never met any of them.  I begged my mother for a little brother.  "No." she said.  "A sister?"   "No."  "A dog?"  "No."  Well, we did have a cat.

 When I developed a high fever one evening, the doctor was called and he made a terrible pronouncement.  Because scarlet fever was extremely infectious it was necessary for me to be taken immediately to the  hospital for quarantine.  I was trundled off that night in an ambulance, and found myself in a brightly lit ward in a cot with side rails, a prison cell.  The hospital ward was full of cots, with nurses bustling about.  I began to cry.  "I want my Mummy!"  A nurse tried to cheer me.   "How long will I be here?"  "Oh, about two weeks. " TWO WEEKS!  "When can I see my mother?"  "Shhh!  Go to sleep".   She hurried off to forestall more questioning.

I continued to cry.  Two weeks seemed like an eternity.  Would I see her before then?  The answers were evasive.  The ward was brightly lit, and never in my life had I slept in a brightly lit room at night.  A record was playing in the distance.   "You Are My Sunshine".   I can never hear that song without recalling that awful night.  It was the first time I stayed awake all night.

In the morning the doctors and interns came to "inspect" me.  As I was a charity patient the medical staff allowed me to earn my keep by becoming an object of scrutiny.  " Look here," the doctors would point at my scarlet chest, and the group would move on to the next patient.  I found this humiliating, but there was more.  I would not have any visitors during the quarantine period.  I could write to my parents, and receive letters from them, but first the letter and envelope had to be 'sterilized' by sunlight outside. 

Since there was not much sunlight during a Montreal winter, the mail delivery to and fro was painfully slow.  My mother wrote every day, but sometimes I would get no mail for several days, then it would arrive all at once.  There were no telephones. Those letters were my one link to happiness.  The nurses were kind, but they were not my mother.  I might as well have been quarantined on the moon.

I soon learned that, although I did not have a bad case of the fever, regulations required me to be in the hospital for FIVE WEEKS.  I counted off the days, grimly accepting my fate.  

My mother drew pictures in her letters of the progress of the pea.  First the root lengthened downward, then the top began to sprout leaves.  She told me of the coming signs of spring in the back alley.  From my hospital bed I could see nothing but concrete roofs.  Five weeks!