Editorial

I was born in March 1948 and contracted polio at ten weeks. I was admitted to Chailey Heritage for Girls for manipulation to my right ankle on 16 May 1949 at the age of fourteen months. My discharge date was 19 September 1950 (a duration of sixteen months). I was re-admitted on 27 November 1951 for a further two weeks.

Once a fortnight the sister on the ‘Toddler Ward’ would send home to my parents a postcard with a 2-3 line message about my ‘progress’. My Mum kept these cards until I was in my twenties, and I read them only once. The sister complained, on several cards, of my rages, temper tantrums, incessant crying, and noise. I put up a determined fight over several weeks before lapsing into withdrawal, apathy, and head-banging behaviour.

Many people believe that it is not possible to remember events before two or three years of age. This is not so. One remembers in a different way. A perception of time is the key to cognitive memories, because without time it is not possible to remember a sequence of events. I can remember individual visual images with accompanying feelings, as follows. Image: myself standing crying and rattling at the cot-side (feelings: loneliness, desperation, feeling abandoned); image: being force-fed cornflakes with ice-cold milk (‘I'm too sad and angry to eat!’); image: drowning in the bath (terror, choking, ‘I can't trust anyone’); image: being shouted at for upsetting the other children on the ward, and contributing to the death of an older child (horror, guilt, fear, ‘I am evil’). I cannot tell when these things happened or in what sequence. All I know is that they did happen at the preverbal stage before I could articulate them. This would correspond with right brain dominance until the cognitive abilities of the left side take over at the verbal stage. Interestingly, I cannot access these preverbal feeling memories in therapy, but I can in writing, so I have kept a journal for many years.

It is generally agreed that the only thing one can