‘Don’t worry about the boa,’ said the dad. ‘She’s harmless.’
It was around this time that Anne Diamond’s cot death campaign was gathering momentum, with lots of TV and newspaper coverage. There was endless talk of positioning babies and low birth-weights. But the mums that I saw – Nigerian, Chinese, Jamaican, and Kurdish refugees – didn’t have cots: they were busy trying to survive. What’s more, they slept with their babies, often until they were five years old.
One day a mum covered in tattoos came to see me.
‘Can you come and see my son?’ she asked. ‘I’m worried about his language.’
Two days later, as arranged, I went to their flat. I rang the door. It opened and a little boy looked up.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
The mum quickly came to the door (his father was in prison for GBH).
‘Well,’ I observed. ‘He doesn’t seem to have any language problems.’
‘Yes, he does,’ she insisted. ‘And I don’t know where the fuck he gets it from!’
Trying to assess the effectiveness of your work as a health visitor can be difficult. There are only so many follow-up visits you can make but I knew I had secured the trust of the women on the estate when one of them introduced me by saying, ‘This is Sally. You can’t get her to lie for you, but she won’t dob you in.’
In other words, I wouldn’t report them to Benefits or Housing. I would, however, report to Social Services if I had any concerns about their kids. There were so many life-or-death situations. Children on the Child Protection Register were relatively safe; they had routine visits. It was the ‘grey areas’ – the kids who weren’t on the Register – where there was no proof of abuse that you had to worry about. They were the cases that kept you up at night. With nearly 300 families on my caseload, what could I do?
Sometimes my efforts were in vain. I once saw a young Latin-American woman whose husband was abusing her; it was a clear case of domestic violence. She was hiding her bruises and despite gentle probing would never admit it to me. It was also difficult to get her alone as she spoke very little English. Then one day she came into the health-care centre, crying. Moments later her husband charged in, wielding a kitchen knife: the three of us (and their baby) were in my office. Outside, a crowd of women and babies were in the waiting room. I handed the baby over to a nurse, who quickly vacated the room. Eventually I talked the husband down and listened to what he had to say, that he just wanted his baby. Following this, I promptly got on the phone to try and secure the wife a place in the Latin-American women’s refuge but it was all the way up in north London. The husband agreed to leave but to come back and see me the next day. Meanwhile, the woman left with the police and her baby, but the police wouldn’t take her to the refuge: they would only put her on the Tube so I gave her the money for the fare. The next thing I heard, she had taken her baby and gone back to her husband.
Throughout this time, my sanity was Jet. Before and after work, I would take him for long walks, relishing the green after a day in the grime. We were now in the spring of 1991. Tuesday morning. As usual, I took Jet for a walk before work at Beckenham Place Park, which backed onto some big estates. This was before the craze for Staffordshire Bull Terriers but there were a lot of other vicious dogs around. One moment Jet was sniffing a bush, the next thing he was being attacked by a large Alsatian – he tried to run away but it was hopeless. I shouted at the owner to control her dog and she casually called him. The Alsatian released Jet and followed his owner out of the park, leaving me to rush over and pick up my own dog. Panting, he was visibly in pain. I drove him to the vet. An hour later, my worst fears were realised: the vet informed me that the knee-joint of Jet’s one and only back leg had been fatally damaged.
‘I’m very sorry,’ he said. ‘He only had three legs to start with. You’re going to have to put him down.’
Heart-broken, I broke down and sobbed. The pain was physical: my body ached with the loss of my best friend. Some lovely friends of ours went to the house and removed all of Jet’s things before I got home so that we didn’t have to deal with the trauma of seeing them. Throughout my diagnosis, subsequent recuperation and the first few months of learning to live with MS, Jet had been my rock.
How do you learn to live with fear? I’m still looking for the answer to that one.
All I knew was that the mornings were now filled with dread as I woke to discover which bit of my body was, or wasn’t, working. Andrew and I had in a sense been ignoring the MS so that it wouldn’t become central to our lives. Instead I used to whisper my fears to Jet as a way of sharing the sadness; I’d tell him how much pain I suffered over my altered body image (I’d prided myself on my strength). He would listen patiently as I wept over lost opportunities and wagged his tail when I told him how glad I was that Andrew had travelled, had really lived and been so active before I was struck down by the disease.
Some people in our church were of the view that I should pray for a healing yet my feeling was that if I was to be healed then it would happen. Jet’s bravery was an inspiration: I only had to watch him bound across the park with his determined three-legged run to feel better about everything. He could always bring a smile to my face but now he was gone.
It would be another 20 years until I had another dog and under very different circumstances – which says a lot about Jet.
To try and make up for the loss, Andrew and I plunged ourselves into work. That August we went camping in Czechoslovakia. We drove all the way there, which allowed us the freedom to go where and when we wanted on our adventure. It was 1991 and only two years after the Berlin Wall had come down; everything was insanely cheap. The further East we went, the more deprivation we witnessed: shops became emptier and the stunning scenery was unexpectedly interrupted by a huge toxic lake or mine. Everywhere we went we encountered friendly, hospitable people and simple, but well maintained campsites. Camping, it seemed, was a Czech national pastime. We visited Wenceslas Square in Prague, where in 1969 a freedom fighter set himself alight. I remember my dad talking about him and really we went there on his behalf. Towards the end of our trip everyone started to look worried and warned us to stay close to the border. On our return, we read in an English newspaper that Mikhail Gorbachev had stood on the tanks in Red Square. The Czechs were concerned that the Russians were once more about to invade.
Our trip to Czechoslovakia proved more fruitful than expected. Nine months later, on 14 May 1992, my beautiful, dark-haired son was born in Lewisham Hospital. In the early days after my diagnosis the doctors stressed the risks of pregnancy and how it could trigger a relapse of the MS but it was a risk I was prepared to take. At the time they also told me that MS wasn’t genetic, although now of course there is evidence of a significantly higher chance of diagnosis if another family member is a sufferer. They also believe there is a female-to-female connection given the sex has a higher predisposition to the disease. This risk is one for which I feel tremendous guilt; I wouldn’t wish MS on anyone – it’s terrible but no one has found a gene for it.
There was no mistaking whose child he was: here was a mini-Andrew, who looked very similar to my husband’s maternal grandfather, whose giggle I can still hear. We christened him Peter after the patron saint of Czechoslovakia.
So now I was a mother, who also happened to have MS.
It wasn’t an easy birth – I had a long labour, an epidural, episiotomy … the works. Nor were my three days in the hospital all that comfortable. At the time breastfeeding was frowned upon: clever mums bottle-fed their babies. I’ll never forget the first long night of motherhood (who can?) as I struggled to get to grips with breastfeeding. How could I get Peter to latch on, suck, burp, latch on, suck … oh and then change him? He screamed and screamed.
‘What’s wrong with that baby?’ I