Читать книгу A Spoonful of Sugar - Liz Fraser - Страница 30

Something that happens in a family home with remarkable and frustrating frequency is that someone gets ill. If it’s not a baby with diarrhoea it’s a toddler with chicken pox or a teenager with flu. Or, worse still, Daddy with a cold. Lord save us all! Illnesses fly through families like WAGs through a department store, and just as one person is showing signs of recovery, the next is sniffling and coming down with it. What should take three days for one person turns into a month of hell for everyone, and then we all start again with the next lurgy.

But here’s an interesting thing: once upon a time, people knew how to deal with common illnesses. If a child had a cold you’d feed her home-made chicken soup, give her a hot bath and put her to bed for a week. For stomach bugs you’d eat nothing at all or nibble on dry bread, keep the fluids going and wait till it worked its way out. For flu, my grandfather used to wrap us up in a freezing cold, wet sheet, causing our bodies to go into a kind of panic, sweat profusely, almost pass out and then sleep for twenty-four hours – before waking up with no symptoms whatsoever. Except possibly a desire to shout at him very, very loudly. (He was a medical man, incidentally, so it wasn’t quite as bonkers as it may sound, though I would urge you NOT to try this at home!!)

Old wives’ tales and ‘secret remedies’ passed down the generations, and, bar some nasty outbreaks of smallpox and the plague, many people did just fine with home remedies and bit of common sense.

Here’s a favourite family story: when I was six years old my entire family spent Christmas with my aunt and uncle at their home near Edinburgh. Also present were their three children all under the age of five, my grandparents, two other sets of uncles and aunts and their various infant offspring, three beagles, two Labradors, four cats, two kittens and a budgerigar. And nine kilts. It was, as you can imagine, a jolly, noisy, colourful gathering, but no one could have predicted the fall-out that this event would produce.

I am certain that the warm glow of my aunt’s pride could be felt as far away as the Outer Hebrides, as she served up the now infamous salmon mousse starter. It was pink; it was light; it was delicious.

It was also chock-full of salmonella.

Over the next twenty-four hours every member of the family spent time getting to know their toilet bowl better, and, as one of the youngest members of the Fraser Clan, I was the first to go. As luck would have it, this coincided with one of the very few occasions my parents were supposed to be going out for the evening, and something as inconvenient as a daughter at death’s door wasn’t going to stop them. Fair enough.

I was left alone in the house with my granny looking after me. And what fun it was! She tucked me up in bed with an entire year’s collection of Oor Wullie and The Broons, brought me water every so often – and watched to make sure I drank it – and largely let me get on with trying not to be sick any more. I wasn’t fussed over, she didn’t call a doctor, I didn’t require urgent medical attention. I got time and rest and peace. And I got better.