Chapter 2 The Outside World

Chapter 2  The Outside World

Eventually, her mother arrived with the horse and buggy to take her home.  As they left the shadows of the hospital, Peggy found the bright sunlight startling.

  She remembers, “I kept blinking--the sun was so bright. On the way we met a friend, a neighbour of our’s. Mum talked to her for a while and then the woman said,  “She blinks a lot, doesn't she?”

Peggy never forgot that careless remark spoken so unthinkingly in front of her when she was just a little child newly discharged from hospital. The imprint it left on her mind remains to this day.

By the time Peggy started school, she still suffered much pain. “They operated such a lot on my jaws. After one, I had to wear a huge calico bandage tied around my jaw, which was pinned at the top of my head with two big safety pins.” I remember her wistfully telling me that story many times.

Hearing about the hole in the roof of her mouth was heartbreaking. The doctor had given Annie instructions that every day she should paint the roof of Peggy's mouth with a solution, which may have been an acid, for it savagely burnt the roof of her mouth. The idea was that if the mucous membranes were burnt, it would heal over the hole.

“But I screamed in pain, until about the third day Dad stopped it.”

When Annie explained to George what she was doing, he said, “No more.” 

Still more suffering followed, “The doctors put in long horsehair stitches, trying to stitch up the hole. My tongue was raw from them and the hole still didn't heal.” In fact, she told me it was larger than before, and once again George took control, preventing any further experiments.

 Annie cooked special soft foods for Peggy because of the pain in her jaws, and as she grew she came to prefer a somewhat bland diet. Hence she could never tolerate anything too rich or too hard. One episode she related in my childhood, still makes me smile. She was shopping one day with her mother and spied a pretty coloured paper covered item. When she asked, her mother told her it was an Eskimo Pie. Unknown to Peggy, this was a small block of ice-cream, but all Peggy knew was that it looked delicious, and that it was a pie, so she pleaded with her mother to buy her one. Annie warned her that it would only make her sick, but her daughter persisted and eventually the mother bought her the sweet. 

Inevitably, as soon as Peggy got it to her mouth, she handed it back to her mother. “I can't eat this.” 

Years later, as Peggy reminisced, she’d say sadly, “Poor Mum.”

 Being a few years older than Peggy, Ruby spent a lot of time minding her little sister, and one-day was giving her a piggyback ride through the house. When they came to go down the five front stairs, Ruby tripped on the fourth step and they fell forward on to a large cement block, which served as the bottom step. The girls were not generally hurt, but Peggy sustained a cut lip. Ruby was roundly admonished by her parents for her clumsiness, and Peggy felt badly for her sister.

She recounted that incident often, commenting, "Poor Ruby, she was only trying to look after me."

Although Peggy had no memory of the accident or events leading up to it, details filtered down over the years from her family until she had a coherent story firmly fixed in her mind. In that way she also heard of her eldest sister’s tetanus.

Her mother told her, "They had to scrape Alice’s jaw." 

Apparently this was done because Alice, 16, suffered from lock-jaw, and as a result  bore a large scar down the side of her face. Her arm also was disfigured where she had ripped it on barbed wire, the cause of the tetanus.

Despite the fact that Alice was a bit of a daredevil, when she went housekeeping, the family that she worked for allowed her to drive their sulky, which was drawn by a smart-stepping little pony. Well off horse breeders, they liked Alice and trusted her, but she drove the sulky at breakneck speed, showering dirt and gravel as she came to a halt at the front gate of her house, the pony panting and wet with sweat.

 “I loved that sulky,” Peggy told me, “It was beautiful, so classy, with polished wood,   fancy scrolls and shiny brass fittings.” It sounded like the sort of vehicle that would have been owned by people with class, (and money.)