In The Family

When I was a little lad, a very little lad, I think, I formed the assumption that I would be something of an invalid when I grew up. It wasn't that I was a particularly gloomy child, but I was being sent to hospital with what seemed like reasonable regularity for some kind of checks on my chest, so I assumed I had a poorly chest and this was likely to have a marked effect on me eventually. This never came to pass and as I continued in the usual rude health of childhood I put such thoughts behind me. I almost said such anxieties, but they weren't really. I don't recall ever being at all worried over the possibility of some kind of invalidism Adulthood was a long way off and, if anything, I think I thought being ill when you grew up was quite interesting.

When we were in Manchester last December I asked my sister about all this and what she made of it. She's some seven years older than me and I needed some light shed on what I've been wondering was some kind of false memory. I think I'm talking about events, the hospital visits, that took place when I was around three or four years old. She was hazy about it all herself but reckoned it was somehow connected to Dad's emphysema, which had been diagnosed at some time earlier than this. The family seemed to blame his poor health on his experiences in the war, but it may have been suggested that it was some kind of hereditary condition and so they were running tests on me. Oddly we couldn't recall them checking my sister. And we guessed that the tests on me had been by no means extensive. Far from being subjected to a series of hospital visits we suspected there my have been just two or three and these had quickly given me the all-clear. I suppose the impact on me had been great enough in its little way to have seemed a lot more substantial than that.

Thinking about this - which I have rarely done over the years, the past being a very different place for me where they really, really do things differently - I feel lucky and mildly guilty. Which is strange because I'm writing about a sort of non-experience: the ties that didn't bind, as it were. Sometimes not being a chip off the old block can be very useful.