I have been getting a dose of these regrets recently, all because of reading Punch for 1947.
Actually I have a lot of personal memories of that year, all of them precious. But it is only now that I feel real gratitude, admiration even, for how my parents worked & coped to make them so during that annus horribilis.
When 1946 began I had not even met my father – it would be a few weeks before he got home from Burma.
In the autumn we had a brand new house (a prefab) and my mother was having to learn how to be a housewife, her husband often away during the week while he was training for the new profession he had decided to adopt; his war experience had shown him that engineering was more to his taste than banking.
By the time the year had ended I had a new baby sister & by the end of 1947 there had been one of the worst winters on record.
Electricity cuts
A draconian budget.
Continuing shortages & rationing.
I got whooping cough late in the year.
My mother was initially pleased that I did not get the whoop, but she learned how wrong she was when it turned into bronchial pneumonia.
I do not really remember being ill, except for Christmas Day. I had been put into my parents bed while the rest of the family had Christmas dinner. I remember Nana sitting, rocking & cuddling, & asking ‘Won’t you just try a little bit of chicken?’ No, wailed the ungrateful child; I want some semolina.
In later years my mother, when defending the NHS, quite often spoke of the difficult decision they had had to make: should my baby sister be immunised against whooping cough? [NB Note how Bevan quotes his medical advisers!]
This was not because of worries about its safety - it might simply be too late, & the expense would blow a real hole in their budget.
Raymond Tallis (in Hyppocratic Oaths) tells of getting pneumonia in the same epidemic; in his case he was fortunate enough to be treated with penicillin. I have a generalised memory of having to swallow M&B tablets, which were so big they seemed like horse medicine to me.
Rather puts our present problems into perspective.
But I still love semolina pudding.
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