Herefordshire author's debut book gives insight into country life in the 1940s

8:00am Wednesday 21st April 2010

By Jess Childs

BY her own admission, Rosemary Brown’s debut as an author came about because she needed to let future generations know what “illness, hospital life, expectancy of life with tuberculosis and recovery rates were in the 1940s”.

Born in How Caple in 1941, she was placed in the inexperienced hands of medics at Hereford County Hospital and at the Nieuport House sanatorium as a child, and endured horrific experiences that even now the pensioner cannot forget.

Separated from her parents at the age of five, she spent hours alone in a freezing cold room “with no enthusiasm from staff to stimulate me into having a will to live”.

“The nurse would run a bath and put something in the water that was yellow with colour. I suspect now that it was iodine.

“When I was placed in the bath from my wheelchair, I screamed out loudly due to the pain which was caused.

“I still bear the scars of the bedsores on my legs to this day, and I was chastised for crying,” she explains.

What began as apparent asthma would turn into almost two years of agony for the only child – whose family name was Webb – and her loving parents, who spent that time not knowing whether she would live or die.

Salvation later came by the way of the US government, which funded a limited place for her on trials of a new drug called streptomycin in Bristol, and her book Fresh Air and Streptomycin tells the whole traumatic tale from start to finish.

“It was my only chance of life, and anything was better than nothing,” Rosemary says.

But for local readers, the book also offers a fascinating insight into everyday county living during those post-war years. References that to others could seem insignificant are sure to bring much more to the mind of a Herefordshire reader.

Travels to Ross-on-Wye on the Midland Red bus, the ritual killing of the much-loved family pig for food, “whimberry”

picking in the Black Mountains and copies of the Hereford Times doubling up as toilet paper are just a few of the long-forgotten factors of daily life described in detail.

“I hope my words and recollections are of use to someone in the future, whether for medical research or social history,” Rosemary concludes.

“Twenty-two months of hospitalisation with only sporadic visits by parents and family is unheard of today.”