“Would you like this footballer rabbit? He’s called Robert,” said Mummy showing me a knitting pattern. Rhetorical question. Of course I would; we had very few toys. Little Cubby, so miraculously rescued at Dolaucothi Hall, belonged to my brother John. This was during the last summer we spent in Swansea before our return to Croydon.

Anyway, although I had no interest in knitting myself, nor indeed in football, I longed for Robert. I watched fascinated as he grew on knitting needles. Robert was ‘dressed’ in yellow and blue football stripes and black knitted football boots. Miraculously, one morning, long before I thought he could be finished, there he was on my pillow when I woke. I was miserable and ill with chickenpox and my mother must have stayed up half the night to finish him. I kept him for years and years, till eventually the moths got him and I had to send him to the great football pitch in the sky. I must have been in my twenties by then.

A little time before we came back to Croydon I developed eczema of the scalp. It itched and oozed and made me miserable. It began to spread until it covered my whole head. My mother was always very deferential to doctors, even though she was one. The medical powers decided that it was so bad I must be admitted to hospital. I have terrible, if farcical memories of the Gulag which was Gorseinon Hospital. Don’t forget that this was about 1944. Attitudes to children in hospital were still stuck in 19th-century mode. In addition, most of the younger nurses and doctors had been called up or were doing war work. Terrifying elderly ogresses had been conjured up to look after the little victims. That makes it sound as if I was beaten or starved. Of course not. This is not misery lit. But I remember the insensitivity and – once again – the sense that even my parents were powerless in this alien, angry world at war.

Nobody explained anything. My hair was roughly and painfully cut off, right down to my scalp. Conversations went on in loud voices over my sore, medicated head. For days, I didn’t dare have a poo because there was no toilet paper. When, in pain, I conjured up the courage to say, “Is there any toilet paper?” the nurse gave me some paper, laughing and saying, “What a goose you are!” Of course I was, but it hardly helped. I didn’t want to eat but there was no kind daddy to spoon it in, they just scolded me and took the tray away again. Or said the world’s most hateful phrase, ‘Many a poor child would be glad of that.’ I remember the boisterous older children, who teased me unchecked, the busy rush of the nurses passing by. If I did pluck up the courage to ask for something it was no use – they’d gone before my timid words had reached my trembling lips.

I also vividly remember being woken up in what seemed the middle of the night and all the bandages being stripped off my head for a mysterious visit by a ‘specialist’. After he went, the nurse forgot to come back to replace the coverings. I was terrified of getting into trouble if I fell asleep and soiled the pillows with my nasty head and I tried desperately for what seemed hours to stay awake. Unsuccessfully of course, and no one mentioned it next morning.

I remember, worst of all, that when we were sent sweets from home they were instantly taken into common use, locked away in a big tin in a cupboard and distributed to all the children once a week, after lunch. The sweets themselves didn’t matter so much, I was a very well-brought-up child who would have handed mine round without complaint. What hurt was that we never knew which sweets would have been ours: one tiny, direct contact of love from my parents, withheld.

I know, I know, the nurses were much too busy to label packets of sweets, sugar is bad for you, what about the poor children who didn’t have any, ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,’ blah di blah. Try convincing a homesick five-year-old that communism is a just and humane system! What with Hitler trying to take over Swansea and the ogresses of the Gorseinon Sweetie Collective, I suppose I had the advantage of being inoculated against both fascism and communism at an early age!

My mother to the rescue!

These things may seem a little trivial when written down, but of course, they are the whole of the child’s world, particularly when separated from home, in my case, for the second time. The real trauma was that my parents were not allowed to visit. It really was believed in those days that a child wouldn’t miss its parents if they were excluded and that ‘spoiling the child’ by allowing visits would be disastrous. I was supposed to be left alone for the full six weeks I was there. To my mother, who as a psychoanalyst knew what it was doing to me, particularly after my time as an evacuee, this was torture, for her as well as me. She pushed her way into the ward every Sunday afternoon, claiming medical privilege. I remember quite a big fuss, raised voices and a ripple of disapproval at the ward entrance the first time. Then my mother appeared at my bedside, flushed but smiling.

I know now what an effort it must have been for her. Deferential by nature, gentle of temperament and lacking confidence, my mother’s action was truly a mouse confronting lions in defence of her mouslet. Lions are afraid of mice, but mice don’t necessarily know this, certainly not the first time. After I had been there six weeks, with my scalp getting more repulsively covered in oozing sores by the day, she had the necessary courage to sign me out against medical advice and take me home. She took off all the bandages, abandoned the ointments, put me to bed in front of an open window for the healing sea breezes of Swansea Bay to get to my head and spoiled me rotten with tender care and nourishment. The eczema went, defeated by her love. The morning my mother came for me in Gorseinon Hospital, I remember one of the ogresses in a very grumpy mood dressing me, saying snappily, “Your mother’s coming for you”. I certainly picked up the disapproval and hardly dared believe I was going home till Mummy walked in. It was one of the happiest days of my life. She had knitted two little pixie hoods in a red and black plaid so that I could always have a clean one to wear when we went out and not get cold, nor look strange, because of my lack of hair.

I remember holding Mummy’s hand and skipping in joy as we walked out of the dark hall, then tiptoeing along the narrow stone edging between lawn and drive, bursting with relief and happiness. Even my mother’s choice of wool was a sign of her sensitivity and secret ability to buck the system. Little girls at that time were invariably dressed in pastel colours, which didn’t suit me nearly as well as the dramatic black and red she had chosen.

It was in 1952 that the influential film, ‘A Two Year Old Goes to Hospital’ was brought out. It beautifully and heartbreakingly showed a child left in hospital for a week, charting her progress from grief and rage to despair. Eventually, she becomes apathetic and passive; the ‘good child’ who has ‘settled in’ of the institutional myth. The film gradually changed the practice of paediatrics forever. I saw it as a medical student some 15 years later, when it had become a classic, and found it extraordinarily moving and therapeutic.

As a little coda. It had been good of my mother to try and shield me from teasing but, alas, nothing could save me when I recovered and started at a new school before my hair had grown. “You’re a boy, you’re a boy. You shouldn’t be in our school!” sang some of the girls to my grief and mortification. “I’m not a boy, I’m a GIRL!” I shouted back.

Never mind. Some 65 years later my hair became very short, stuck up in hedgehog spikes and was bright purple and maroon in stripes, remaining like that until I was well into my 70s. I wonder how that happened?