Val Kennedy's Diary - A Mother's story of Polio
Foreword by Sue O'brien (Nee Kennedy)
When I was 13yrs old I was looking for a sewing pattern in a drawer in my mother’s studio. Tucked in amongst the patterns at the back of the drawer I discovered this book. My heart dropped like a stone when I realised what it was. I read a few pages and guiltily put it back, not to look at it again until many years later. On the death of my mother in 1997 I hunted for it and read it in full.
My name is Sue and I was the middle child of Val Kennedy, an artist and Ken Kennedy, an architect. In the 1950s we lived a happy family life in a Victorian terrace house in Newcastle upon Tyne, where it was safe for us to play out in the streets with all the other neighbourhood children.
On June 31st 1952, aged five, I was sent home from school after throwing up my school milk at playtime. I never liked milk and wasn’t surprised at being sick, but this was more than just a tummy upset. I was put to bed with a temperature and a painful stiff neck. Two days later my elder brother Peter, aged ten, and his friend Peter Davison, from down the street, also fell ill. We all had polio. The two Peters ended up on the same hospital ward, and the lives of all of us and our families were never the same again.
The diary is my mother’s account of the year which follows these events. It still makes me cry when I read it today. I well remember that year; the strain on my parents having to make two bus journeys there and back every day to the hospital and my poor two year old brother Hugo being left with a home help every day. I missed my older brother terribly and remember in detail the few times I was allowed to visit him in hospital. The diary tells of how my parents dealt with this year and graphically describes Peter’s death. They and Peter were clearly luckier than most polio victims of the time in that they were allowed daily visiting. I believe that most hospitals only allowed very rare family visits in the 1950s.
It has always upset me that I was not allowed to go to his funeral, but that was the thinking of time, to supposedly protect children from experience of death! Peter “down the road” was considered to be “the unlucky one” as he was left with physical problems. “Our Peter” was “at peace” and I was “the lucky one” to be suffering no long term ill effects. After these pronouncements Peter’s death was rarely mentioned again and the word “Polio” was a “No Go Area” in our house.
My parents never really recovered from their loss, which had a marked and lasting effect on the rest of mine and Hugo’s childhood. I am sure it is a consequence of Peter’s death that both my parents suffered from depression from then on, and this in turn resulted in myself and Hugo also succumbing to bouts of depression.
I went on to live a normal life raising three children and, following in my mother’s footsteps, teaching art. My brother Hugo spent many years building the cars for a national rally driver and then training adults with learning difficulties. I am glad that my parents did not live to see me succumb to the effects of PPS in my fifties. ( Peter Davison is still alive and living in his original childhood home and also suffering from PPS)
Although the diary is sad and painful (for me) to read, I am glad that I found it. I treasure it as something tangible left from those days of the polio epidemics which were long ago, and yet with the onset of PPS, have recently become much closer to home for so many people.
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