IN HOSPITAL WITH MY SON SIR, —Mrs. Overall makes her points
about mothers in hospital with their children so reasonably and so well that if you had no child of your own you could hardly, I think, fail to agree with her. But surely the one thing that overrides all she says about the chances of mothers being tiresome, excitable, unco- operative and generally inadequate (what percentage of them are, I wonder?) is that when a child is small, and above all when he has pain, fear or trouble to cope with, the one person he wants is his mother (or her substitute, if she hasn't looked after him her- self). Isn't the principle rather like that propounded by the Curtis Committee in the case of deprived children, that a home of some sort, even a not ter- ribly good one, is always better than the lack of it (i.e., than even a perfect institution)? In the case of a sick child, surely an inadequate mother around is better than no mother at all? When I was in hospital with my little boy a child was brought in whose mother's behaviour shocked everyone—she seemed so harsh and cold—yet the child screamed for three days and most of three nights for her, and I saw her myself pulling her own hair out: only her mother's presence managed to calm her. Who is to judge which mother is 'good' for a child and which isn't, and what helps or hinders recovery? Who knows better what a small child feels, or is going to feel later? The parents, who have known him from birth, or the hospital authorities, who know his physical condition and his (obviously unusual) behaviour for a few days or weeks?
As for the problem of lonely children who get no visitors, I think people from the outside world are better than no one at all, and visitors in children's wards surely tend to include the lonely ones in their own family circle. One of the nicest things about my own stay in hospital was the way I could give the others in the ward something of a feeling of home. It wasn't just me and my child in a corner, it was me surrounded all day from 6.30 onwards by five uproarious little boys, all aged three and four; and, once my own child was past the bad stages of his operation, I was able to look after them all in ways the nurses hadn't time for—play, chat, read stories, tuck them up for the night, just be companionable, in fact. This sort of thing must happen wherever a mother gets inside a ward for any length of time.
I know Mrs. Overall's views are shared by many hospital people. 'Parents,' said the matron of a hos- pital that introduced free visiting the other day, 'can do a lot of harm, in my opinion.' Well, abolish them, it's very much neater.—Yours faithfully, Tower Cottage, Retching, Sussex
ISABEL QUIGLY
[This correspondence is now closed—Editor, Spectator.]
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