The Hurt Locker
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 31, 2013

I still have a big scar on my right knee from falling off the verandah at primary school. The drop from balustrading to bitumen was four foot but it felt like four storeys. Blood ran in rivulets down my shin as a crowd of girls in blue-checked dresses gathered round me in staring silence.

In sick bay, I sat on the edge of the starched white bed, jaw clenched, while the nurse picked out the gravel with her tweezers. She painted my gashed knee an even brighter shade of crimson with mercurochrome. That stuff stains the memory of every graze and scrape from childhood.

Whatever happened to mercurochrome? We always had a bottle in the cupboard. Didn’t everyone? It might have contained mercury, but who took notice of labels back then? Mercurochrome was the only antiseptic that didn’t sting like blazes.

I lived in my grandmother’s house the year I turned 8. She wore pearls and drank Bovril and treated all my childish ailments with common sense: “Only call the doctor when you need a stretcher.” Nan relied on a cupboard full of strange potions with exotic names and whiffy smells. The top shelf of her pantry was stacked with mysterious brown glass bottles, unguents, salves and liniments.

There was Savlon for her chilblains and Milk of Magnesia for indigestion. If one was stuck up, intestinally speaking, one took Carter’s Little Liver pills, (which played fast and loose and bypassed the liver altogether). 

A plume of talcum powder followed in her wake after a shower. I was doused with it after mine. So much talc rained down on the bathroom floor that I would trace patterns in it with my fingers.

Nan believed in home-style remedies like Billy Graham believed in the Bible. I went to bed wearing her soft white driving gloves, tied firmly round my wrists with ribbon. Those gloves stopped me clawing at the eczema that itched uncontrollably in the creases behind my knees and my elbows. In the morning, it was my job to put Nan’s gloves back on the dashboard of her Morris 1100, ready for the day’s outing.

But her favourite tonic came in a tall, square bottle and was called Hypol. It was a fish oil emulsion that reeked like a tin of sardines left out in the sun. She would pour out a tablespoon of Hypol’s greasy white glop, and I would hold my nose and force it down, trying not to gag. “You won’t get rickets after that,” Nan would say, and then pour one for herself. “Mmmm, delicious!” I could never tell if she was pulling my leg. (She also had a thing for Peck’s fish paste on toast.)

Every few weeks she’d announce:  “This afternoon I’m going to the chiropodist to get my feet done.” I tried, and failed, to imagine what “done” meant, but I didn’t like the sound of it.

When I had a head cold, Nan would make me a tent out of a couple of towels and I would sit steaming my blocked nose over a basin of boiling water. It worked a treat. She soothed mozzie bites with calamine lotion and I trooped off to school covered in pink dots.

In the 70’s, Band-aids were brown and fibrous and coated in industrial strength adhesive. I’m sure they were designed to torment eight year old hypochondriacs. Mum would stride over as I lay soaking in the bath and declare: “Rightey-ho, time that thing came off!”

In my panic I still had to choose: the slow torture of having the Band-aid peeled off bit by bit, or the jolt of pain as Mum got a firm grip on the edge and tore it off. I would plead for the slow torture method. The Band-aid, like a tick clinging to a dog, would refuse to lift. And then it dawned on me I was going to endure this persecution twice. “Close your eyes!” she’d say, and the Band-aid and I were ripped apart amid my shrieking. I used to cry that bit louder as Mum waved that wet parasite in a victory flourish, to me an extra dose of cruelty.

Now I patch my own children with Wiggles plasters that can barely hang on in a gust of wind. I watched a new Dettol ad on telly the other night. Some glamorous housewife was telling me my children would catch plague if I didn’t douse every surface with disinfectant. I harrumphed in the style of my nanna.

I remember boys at school would compete at enduring pain. They’d take turns to see who could poke themselves the hardest with a drawing pin. Or take bets on who could tolerate a chinese burn the longest.   

Are kids today just as tough? Just as resilient? I’d like to think they are. But if one of my brood came home pricked with drawing pins, I’m not sure if I’d reach for the aloe vera or ring the school psychologist. Perhaps it’s me who has gone soft.