Growing Up In Quarantineland

Margaret Atwood's most recent novel is The Testaments.

There are two kinds of nightmares. The first is the bad dream you've had many times before. You find yourself in a very familiar, sinister place: the creepy cellar, the murderous hotel, the dark forest. But since it's a nightmare you've experienced before, your focus is sharpened admirably: the pointed stick worked against the monster last time, so let's try again.

In the second nightmare, everything that ought to be familiar is strange. You're lost, there are no directions and you don't know what to do.

It seems we're living through both kinds at the moment, but which will resonate most with you will depend on your age. The second nightmare is a good fit for the young, who have never experienced anything like this before. What's happening? they cry. Life is ruined! Nothing will ever be normal again! I can't stand it!

But, for old folks like me, it's the first nightmare that is plaguing our sleep once more: We've been here before, or if not here, somewhere eerily like it.

Any child growing up in Canada in the 1940s, at a time before there were vaccines for a horde of deadly diseases, was familiar with quarantine signs. They were yellow and they appeared on the front doors of houses. They said things such as DIPHTHERIA and SCARLET FEVER and WHOOPING COUGH. Milkmen – there were still milkmen in those years, sometimes with horse-drawn wagons – and bread men, ditto, and even icemen, and certainly postmen (and yes, they were all men), had to leave things on the front doorsteps. We kids would stand outside in the snow – for me, it was always winter in cities, as the rest of the time my family was up in the woods – gazing at the mysterious signs and wondering what gruesome things were going on inside the houses. Children were especially susceptible to these diseases, especially diptheria – I had four little cousins who died of it – so once in a while a classmate would disappear, sometimes to return, sometimes not.

You were absolutely not supposed to go to public swimming pools in the summer, we were told, because there might be an outbreak of polio. Carnivals then had freak shows, and quite often one of the attractions would be The Girl in the Iron Lung, who was stuck inside a metallic tube and who could not move, even to breathe: the Iron Lung did her breathing for her, with a gasping sound that was amplified over the P.A. system.

As for lesser diseases such as chicken pox, tonsillitis, mumps and the common kind of measles, kids were just expected to get them, and they did. When you were ill you were, of necessity, at home and in bed, and when you were recovering you risked boredom. No TV or video games; what you were given instead, in addition to the ginger ale and grape juice, was a pile of old magazines, a scrapbook, and scissors and paste. You cut out the more interesting pictures and pasted them into the scrapbook. One Lysol ad showed a woman up to her waist in water labelled Doubt, Inhibitions, Ignorance, and Misgivings, with the caption: Too Late to Cry Out in Anguish!

Me: "Why is she crying out in anguish?"

Mother: "I need to hang out the wash."

Magazine ads showed germs hiding everywhere, especially in sinks and toilets, equipped with devilish horns and malignant, evil little faces. Soap, toothpaste, mouthwash, drain cleaner and household bleach were what you needed, and in vast quantities. Germs caused many illnesses, but they also caused personal tragedies such as halitosis – "Always a bridesmaid, never a bride," the ad mourned, because the lovely lady in the pretty dress and the sad face had Bad Breath – and B.O., which meant Body Odour. Horrors! It was worse than a disease! As the forties shifted into the fifties and adolescence swept over us, we went around sniffing our underarms and investing our baby-sitting money in deodorants and floral-scented cologne, because Even Your Best Friend Wouldn't Tell You.