From The Times, February 26, 1924
This is the season of the year when parents, guardians, schoolmasters and school-mistresses, dwell in the shadow of a perpetual terror. The merest sneeze sounds like a knell; a sore throat and a weeping cold are heralds of the inevitable four raiders of households — measles, mumps, whooping-cough, and chicken-pox.
For the victims no excessive sympathy need be felt. If we try I to remember our own measles — to use this generic term — we find that the first day or two of hotness and crossness and headache have left no impression. What we can recall vividly are the long, placid days of convalescence: the absence of lessons and the profusion of picture-books; the delicious chicken, the bunches of grapes, the fact that everybody was nicer than usual and played Halma and read aloud to us, the scientific interest of watching our favourite spots and finally, the recuperative visit to some kindly house in the country.
It is on the elders that the blow falls more heavily.
The period of waiting is the worst. Hospitable relations must be mobilised to harbour the uninfected. Intricate calculations have to be made. Supposing the period of incubation to be x, and supposing each child to catch the disease singly from the one before it and at the latest possible moment, how long will it be before the whole household is out of quarantine? The making of different plans to suit all the different possibilities demands a Staff College training.
Moreover Fate can be cruel. Sometimes the sands have almost run out, it is the last of the x days, the little victim plays happily, the thermometer rests in its drawer and then at bed time comes the first, the fatal snuffle. It may be argued that once a house is stricken the whole family should “get it over” together. This was the principle of one experienced guardian of youth, Mr Squeers, who “ran the whooping-cough through half a dozen boys” to pay the doctor’s bill when little Wackford was born, and did the same with the scarlet fever to recoup himself for the vinegar and brown paper made necessary by his thrashing at the hands of Nicholas. The parent is spared one thing: it is one of the compensations of being grown-up that mumps and measles can seldom happen again. There is nothing for it but courage, and a clinical thermometer.
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