E L James

E L James

My Earliest Memory

I can picture my parents standing in a doorway, holding a large inflatable rabbit. From memory, he was green and pink and humongous – probably bigger than I was at the time. He was an odd choice for a sick child and, looking back, I wonder what the hell my parents were thinking. My first language was my Chilean mother’s tongue, so I named him ‘Gringo’. (I know, I know!) To a wee girl of two, this was just a funny and familiar word, the epithet my mother often used for my Scottish father, fondly … and occasionally not so fondly.

This memory might be the remnants of a nightmare – and I imagine it was, for my parents. Or perhaps Gringo was a product of my fevered two-year-old mind, a thought just occurring to me now as I write this. But what’s even weirder is that I see Mum and Dad as their forty-year-old selves, not the overwrought twenty-somethings they would have been at the time. It’s sobering how one’s mind and the passage of time can play such tricks. Sadly, I can’t ask either of them for more details; my father is no longer with us and my mother suffers from severe Alzheimer’s. Her memory is a distant acquaintance who rarely visits, and never writes thank-you letters.

I know it was 1965 and I was in Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire. When I was first admitted, the doctors had suspected that I had meningitis. Fortunately, it wasn’t that, but what I did have was a critical case of double pneumonia. I was on the edge of death, my temperature so high they thought they would lose me. Back in the day, during a more lucid era, my mother told me that it was the only time she’d ever seen my father pray; he was a confirmed atheist – so much so that the priest from Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Acton, who married my parents in 1962, begged my mother to reconsider her choice of husband.

My mum told me – again, I can’t check – that I was given a new drug that reduced my temperature so quickly I had to be wrapped in tin foil, like a small basted joint, to warm me back up.

I recovered fully, saved by the staff of the NHS, to whom I remain eternally grateful. However, my near-death experience from a respiratory disease decades ago may explain my very real fear of this horrible virus now affecting so many of us.

Thank you to the brave men and women who work for our beloved NHS. We all owe you so, so much. I hope that, in time, we as a nation can repay this debt of gratitude with better appreciation, better facilities and better pay for everything you do.

Much love.

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