Fever

One's literacy tastes mature with age, they say, but there are several books that make the same impact when I read them now as they did when I first read them. One that I have already mentioned in a post is Kipling's Jungle Book. Another is Laurie Lee's autobiographical "Cider with Rosie" which was a set book in the early years of secondary school. Laurie Lee's way of expression strikes a chord with me and I find myself identifying with him. Whilst I cannot claim to have suffered such childhood illness as he did, nevertheless much of what he described tallies with my own childhood illness experiences:

"With the fever still fresh …by nightfall I was usually raving. My limbs went first, splintering like logs, so that I seemed to grow dozens of arms. Then the bed no longer had limits to it and became a desert of hot wet sand. I began to talk to a second head laid on the pillow, my own head once removed… Such a night of fever slowed everything down as though hot rugs had been stuffed in a clock… Between this sleeping and waking I lived ten generations and grew weak on my long careers, but when I surfaced at last from its endless delirium the real world seemed suddenly dear. While I slept it had been washed of fever and sweetened, and now wrapped me like a bell of glass. For a while, refreshed, I heard its faintest sounds: streams running, trees stirring, birds folding their wings, a hill-sheep’s cough, a far gate swinging, the breath of a horse in a field. Below me the kitchen made cosy murmurs, footsteps went up the road, a voice said Good-night, a door creaked and closed – or a boy suddenly hollered, animal-clear in the dark, and was answered far off by another. I lay moved to stupidity by these precious sounds as though I’d just got back from the dead."

I can remember laying in bed and considering the proposition of my head, as if it were outside of me, a great spherical ball immensely heavy and dense and with a frightening pressure inside as if it should explode. And the eventual recuperation, painted so well by Lee: the first taste of dry cream-cracker and Ribena (I can still hardly allow myself to drink Ribena unless I am sick) and, later, the first proper meal of boiled fish, so soft, so good.

And so I find myself writing from bed - I am suffering (along with several others here) from a particularly virulent cold that brought with it about 24 hours of fever now more or less subsided. I still have the thick-head-feeling and head-ache that reminds me of those times. Ali told me to stay in bed so I obediently obeyed. And so here I am...