Meningitis

A disease Back From the Grave?

The recent outbreak of Meningitis in Kent was both a surprise and a shock.  As I write, two people have died, and a further eighteen cases have been confirmed.  Wrongly, I had assumed this potentially fatal inflammation of the protective membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord had been eliminated in the UK.  One never hears it mentioned these days.  However, the very word Meningitis once struck terror in families with infants.  I know, because it killed my sister, Julie Ann Hutson, and in doing so, radically affected my own birth and upbringing.

Last week, on Thursday, 19th March, my wife and I were due to travel down to Kent, stay with her sister and partner, and attend a 70th birthday party for her step-mother.  This sudden outbreak, the two deaths and the rapid rise in the number of infected people led my wife to postpone our trip.  Although disappointing (I had been looking forward to it, especially using my new Brompton off-road bicycle along the coastal path to Broadstairs and perhaps doing some photography there), it seemed a very sensible decision.  The thought of bringing the disease back and infecting our young grandchildren was unimaginable.

I don’t know the facts behind this recent outbreak.  Judging by reports in the News, neither do the authorities, who seem baffled by the sudden infection of relatively large numbers of young people.  Since the COVID pandemic, there has been an expanding number of people who distrust vaccines, and even think there is some sort of conspiracy by the authorities to make people ill or somehow control them.  Anti-Vaxxers and Conspiracy Theorists are a phenomenon that did not exist to any significant degree a decade or two back.  Social Media has, no doubt, played a large role in this.

Julie Ann was born on 13th September 1946, a year after the end of the Second World War, and after Dad had been discharged from active service in the Royal Navy and returned home from Cleethorpes maternity hospital to Mum and Dad’s rented house at 17 Manchester Street, Cleethorpes.  She was baptised at Saint Aidan’s church on Grimsby Road, Cleethorpes.  Thirteen months later, she somehow contracted Meningitis and died on 21st October 1947.

My parents were devastated, particularly my mother.  Only a couple of years after the trauma of the war, they now faced an unimaginable loss.  My Dad buried Julie with other family members in a little white coffin at Trinity Road cemetery, on the hill overlooking Manchester Street and Blundell Park.  Mum was too distraught to attend the funeral.  I recall Dad blaming the damp house at Manchester Street.  Three years later, they had saved enough money to buy a brand-new semi-detached house in Dugard Road, on the Cleethorpes-Grimsby border.

I don’t know what happened with Mum in the intervening years before I was born on 20th January 1957, a whole decade later.  Was she physically ill?  Did she have problems with her reproductive organs?  Perhaps she just couldn’t face having another child for quite some time.  I suspect she was, at the very least, severely depressed.  I vaguely recall mention of treatment with anti-depressants, but maybe I’m just imagining that.  In the summer of 1948, Dad took Mum away for a recuperative holiday in Scarborough, staying at the Brunswick Hotel.

Apparently, it came as a great shock to my parents when our family doctor, Doctor Lavin senior, delivered the news that Mum was pregnant at the age of 33, quite late for a woman by the norms of that era.  Dad was 38.  Apparently, my birth was difficult, and I was delivered using forceps, which left a mark on my forehead.  Mum and Dad were both naturally nervous during my baby years, fearing a repeat of Julie Ann’s fate.  Fortunately, I survived, but that parental fear affected my upbringing.  It hovered in the background, an unspoken nervousness every time I became ill with measles, mumps, or chickenpox, for example, and led to me being a cosseted child into my teenage years when I finally rebelled.

One could easily argue that, because I was born a decade after my sister died, to relatively elderly parents, that I was brought up as an only child, loved and cherished, yes, but mollycoddled and somewhat spoilt, that these factors made me the boy I was and the man I am now, and all this as a direct result of Meningitis.

Saturday, 21st March 2026

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