Lorraine Townsend

Heaven's Special Mum Lorraine Townsend

"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."