SOFT KITTY, HARD NAILS

I took Mum to see my #2 daughter in her new home, and she was very taken with the family cats.

We’d been talking about all the medication Mum has to take these days, including supplements for strong bones and nails and I remarked how good her nails were looking (as here) and she told us this story:

It was about 1941 and she was about 12 or 13 and living with her dad in a small Wiltshire town. Her mother had died of flu, aged 36, two months before the second world war began. She had been evacuated to the Midlands with her school and her younger brother and sister sent to their grandparents in Cumbria. Her father was doing secret research on radar, and his company was evacuated to Wiltshire where the local population resented them and thought they were all spies or shirkers, being mostly youngish men out of uniform. He sent for my mum to join him which she did, and that was an amazing story in itself. Living in digs with him (and he was admittedly a pretty crap father), on rations and with nobody really looking after her she wasn’t well and her fingers and nails became infected (pre-antibiotic days). Grandpa got a woman from work, who my mother didn’t know, to take her to a doctor who made her stand up and then took a scalpel and with no further preparation, sliced down the nails to release the pressure from the infection, at which Mum fainted. When she came round, the doctor told her she was a silly little girl and sent her home. She said her nails had never really recovered and had always looked ridged and split, and I said that they look better than ever now with her medication, and I was surprised she’d ever married a doctor after that experience.


I’m sure lots of other children had extraordinary wartime experiences, but I always thought she should have been interviewed by Anthony Horowitz and her stories put into something like Foyle’s War (one of her favourite TV programmes). It’s what made her into the tough, feisty woman she’s always been.