FURTHERMORE

Some incidental advantages of an absurd illness

PETRONELLA WYATT

At the hospital they gave me a gown and told me to lie on my stomach. The doctor took out a magnifying glass. After a short while he left the room, returning with two colleagues. They peered at my posterior. Business could not have been brisk in the doctoring department, for they assumed the delighted expressions of junior clerks who had finally received a bonus.

The doctor said, `I'm afraid I've got bad news for you. It's shingles.'

Shingles? I had thought this was a dis- ease that affected only the old and decrepit. Surely I was not decayed enough? I had met a man with shingles; he was 78. The rash spread to his face and he nearly went blind.

`It's all right,' said the doctor. 'You've got it in the best possible place — your bot- tom.'

Shingles, apparently, is a member of the chicken-pox family. It is a kind of herpes. Its medical name, in fact, is Herpes zoster. However, shingles is not sexually transmit- ted. There are two ways of catching it: either from a child infected with chicken- pox or from nervous exhaustion. I had not been near a child. The doctor assumed that I was suffering from stress.

`Are you very unhappy?' he asked. 'I wasn't — until now.' He was disappointed. `But you must be unhappy.' I'm not, thank you. Honestly.' Then you are an extremely nervous person?"No, not really.' Are you sure?' Yes!"But you must be.' He assumed the demeanour of an elephant that has had its bun taken from it. 'Well, I really don't know.'

The trouble with shingles is that, while it is the most painful of diseases, it is essen- tially comical to the outside world. A rash? On your bottom? Can't sit down? Ha, ha. I spent the next six days lying on my stom- ach. They had given me a rubber ring to sit on — the kind used by women after they have given birth — but it was like balancing on a blancmange with a hole in the middle. After slipping off thrice I gave up.

I'll say one thing for shingles, though. It is very effective for dealing with men that is, the unwanted ones. For weeks I had been pestered by a man with a face like a squashed potato. Last Monday he tele- phoned.

`Dinner? Oh, dear. I'm afraid that won't be possible.'

`Why not?'

`Because I can't sit down.'

`What's wrong with you?'

`I've got herpes.'

I do not recall a telephone receiver ever being replaced so fast. As a lady friend put it later: 'Men seldom get tingles/For girls who have shingles.'

0 ne of the few things I was able to do was read. Just as the invalid likes comfort food — meals that are both familiar and undemanding — one turns also to comfort books.

Biographies are in this category. When- ever I am ill I raise my spirits with Duff Cooper's Talleyrand. Why this should be uplifting I do not really know, except that, whatever one thinks about Talleyrand, he certainly survived. There is a particularly vivid chapter describing his upbringing. According to Talleyrand's own memoirs, he never once spent a night under the same roof as his parents. This reminded me of the row last week over nursery school places. The chairman of the Independent Bill, there's a wasp in the bedroom.' Schools Association, Paddy Holmes, attacked parents who send their two-year- olds away from home. 'We are beginning as a nation to produce children who are treat- ed in many ways like young animals,' Mrs Holmes said.

What, in principle, is wrong with this? Aside from the fact that young animals particularly pets — enjoy in this country better treatment than many human beings, an infant is in some ways not unlike a puppy or a kitten. Indeed, until it is capable of making distinct moral choices, a child can hardly be called a proper person at all.

In any case, as the Talleyrand book indi- cates, Mrs Holmes is quite wrong to say that this view of children is new. The doc- trine that parents exist for the sake of their offspring was not accepted until the 19th century. To all sensible people the hourly parental care and coddling bestowed upon modern infants would have seemed absurd. When Rousseau, allegedly a man of senti- ment, gave away his children to be raised as foundlings he was thought strange but not wicked. The heir to the richest dukedom in England was entrusted to one of his father's servants who happened to be able to read, while the Bessborough offspring were often left naked and hungry, the fate of many children of their age and class.

Young children were considered to be theologically wicked. At Wesley's school, 'a general conversion was once effected . . . one poor boy only excepted . . . for which he was severely flogged.' It was the 19th-century Romantics who began to change accepted behaviour. Wordsworth was the first to popularise the idea that children were 'innocent', crediting them with 'High instincts before which our mor- tal nature/Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised . . . "Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year/And worshipest at the temple's inner shrine.'

This led to predictable results. It hardly seemed correct to thrash something that lay in Abraham's bosom. So a theory of educa- tion grew up which made it necessary to consider the child's feelings before all else. The modern method, of course, reflects greater credit on the parents, but there is little evidence that it produces a superior type of individual. If Richard Wilding, the unruly 14-year-old whose school is refusing to teach him, had been left naked and hun- gry from time to time he might have more respect for adult authority.