Hilda's Meningitis Story
A brief beautiful story of Hilda Bell. An amazing woman and a Meningitis survivor. Born in 1919, Bell grew up in London, which must have resembled the Londontown of our storybooks more than the modern city of today.
With that quaint charm the British have with the King's English, she described childhood scenes that could have stepped right out of a nursery rhyme:
"As a child I can remember, we had gas streetlights and I can remember a lamplighter going along with a long rod and lighting the streetlamps. And I can remember the muffin man coming around on Sunday ringing a bell, selling his muffins. And the cat meat man came around and he used to give you a lump of meat for the cats. you a lump of meat for the cats.
About the age of 14, when many children of that time left school to work in factories or go into service, Bell took what was called a Junior Award exam which, if passed, would provide a scholarship for continued education. "My dad said if I didn't pass the scholarship I wasn't going into the factory and I'd have had to go into service. Well, I didn't want to go into service so I put my best foot forward and passed," she recalled.
With the scholarship, she studied commercial subjects such as typing, shorthand and bookkeeping and afterward worked for a time in the office of London's colorful Billingsgate fish market...
After the war broke out, Bell worked as a shorthand typist for Lebus Aircraft, which manufactured RAF Mosquito bomber planes. These were dark days for the British people and Londoners in particular, as Nazi war planes relentlessly and mercilessly bombed them day after day and night after night. But the work of the country had to go on and through it all Bell was at her post, doing her part. How did she actually feel during those terrible nights in the bomb shelters when they counted the bombs dropping closer and closer and an uncertain fate hung in the balance?
She thought about it a few seconds and then replied, rather matter of factly, "Well, everybody was in the same boat... so you're not frightened are you?" God save the Queen. And God save Hilda Bell and the British whose wonderful stiff upper lips have so much about facing the challenges and uncertainties of life.