Heaven's Special Mum

Just off the main building on the open verandah there are many more little patients. It's not a sunny veranda and it can be cold. The head of each bed is pushed up against the brick wall in a row down the veranda. Each child is fixed in place in some way. This was how Beryl Wyber spent much of her childhood in a hospital system which was overwhelmed by the polio epidemic of the 1930s: confined to a hospital bed at 17 months with spinal TB and allowed to see her mother for only an hour a week. On her release at 13 after 12 years in hospital she is mystified by things she had never experienced. No one had ever shown her a stove a carpet a chest of drawers or an electric fan. Beryl's story of discovery and her building a life in her teens is told by her daughter author Lorraine Townsend. My book Heavens Special Mum is a moving tribute to the triumph over adversity ending in tragedy which was my Mother's life.