Breath of Life

The candles were blown out, the cake cut, but one little boy couldn’t begin eating his slice of birthday cake.

“I can’t eat it if it has nuts in,” he said politely, his lips deep mauve and his thin chest heaving. “If I do, I’ll stop breathing and die.”

The scene last week at my son’s birthday party gets repeated all over the country, and drives parents into agonies of apprehension. Nuts, kiwi fruit, strawberry jam, dairy, chocolate, wheat – the list of forbidden foods grows and grows. I know what it’s like, not only as a mother but as a child, because my own life was crippled by an allergy that gave me asthma.

Childhood asthma now affects 20% of children in this country, and it is on the rise. An estimated 4 million children under 18 had an attack of this illness, for which there is no cure, during the last year. Last week, a fifteen year-old girl died of it in Britain. Its triggers are many: cold air, viruses, smoke, exercise, even emotional stress can all bring it on, but by far the biggest cause seems to be allergy. One in three people in Britain now suffer from allergies, and of these over a quarter will develop asthma. In America and Canada, five children die a week from being unable to breathe. Asthma is the single biggest cause of school absenteeism, especially in large cities. It affects almost everything about your childhood: and it is what, above all, turned me into a writer.

From the time I was 6, I could not inhale or exhale without a big effort. Each breath felt like a needle plunged into my heart. I would cough and cough and cough, and eventually, a small pale blob of phlegm, like a mollusc without its shell, was heaved up. My eyes and nose streamed, and small veins broke in my nose from repeated efforts to clear it.

Nobody knew why I would get so ill. In long, warm summers I became a normal, healthy child - until the first cold day, when windows were shut and suddenly, mysteriously, it all collapsed and I was bent almost double like a crone. I could not run, I could hardly walk, and I could not sleep, dozing fitfully propped up on a mound of pillows. This went on for weeks and months every winter. The more you struggle to breathe, the worse it gets – but how can you not struggle? Every breath is life, and yet life hurts.

What fed my will to live was reading. Children in children’s novels are often ill, and their illness is also often the beginning of discovering a new world. My greatest hero, though, was probably Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi, a mongoose who arrives in an English family’s Indian garden, half-drowned. Well, I knew what that felt like. I dreamt repeatedly of the snakes that are Rikki’s enemy, as I had the breath squeezed out of me, and he rode with me all through those long horrible nights, when my own eyes burnt red like his, and I coughed up blood as well as phlegm.

Nowadays, a child as sick as I was would be whisked off to hospital to lie under an oxygen tent. Nowadays, I hope, a child would not suffer at all. Mothers are warned by health visitors to have as few carpets as possible. They are also told to investigate family pets if their child wheezes and coughs a lot.

I was highly allergic to cats, so much so that were I to be left in an unventilated room with one for 24 hours, I would be dead. And we had a cat, which had come with us to Italy from England, which it never crossed my parents’ mind to get rid of, although this was diagnosed when I was eight. I had Ventolin and antihistamines and a course of injections that were supposed to decrease my sensitivity. They didn’t: I was just painfully ill until I left home and went to boarding school at 12.

When I came to have children myself, I was terrified of passing this on. One feature of asthma and allergies is that they tend to be inherited. (My own mother is allergic to oranges and shellfish.) Both my children were ill as babies, and I was mortally afraid for them. I kept them in bed with us for far too long, stripped out carpets and invested in a special cotton sleeping bag and watched what they are like a hawk. Allergies haunt modern parents. None of us know what has caused the rise, but anaphylactic shock is a real danger if your child is allergic to anything. The “controlled crying” advocated by baby books doesn’t work if you have this kind of genetic threat hanging over you. I hardly slept for seven years, but although my son shows signs of being allergic to grasses, neither has experienced the streaming, wheezing prelude to a full-blown asthma attack. Even so, I followed the advice of the London Allergy Clinic, before getting their longed-for pet - a small, castrated dog because sexual maturity is what brings on the allergens in dander.

What is forgotten, in all the dinner-party talk about children’s allergies, is that this is a life-time condition. My beloved mother-in-law, who has three cats, thinks I’m a semi-invalid because no amount of anti-histamine totally suppresses the reaction. When we go to new friends’ house, I have to ask if they have cats: once, at a dinner given by the playwright Ranjit Bolt the other poor guests had to sit with the windows open on a winter night, because he had acquired one. Yet I refuse to see my condition as being a disadvantage.

Many authors, from Proust to A.S. Byatt, have been asthmatics and I do not find this a co-incidence. It taught me everything I needed, both about writing and about a necessary toughness of spirit – that you do not give up no matter how grim the odds – that in perseverance is survival and even, perhaps, triumph. Besides, my illness gave me what everyone addicted to books most craves, the solitude and leisure to read. I read, and re-read hundreds of classic novels, both English and American, because I was bedridden and bored. It is a cliché to call a work of art “breathtaking”, but it is perfectly true that when completely absorbed in a story you forget to breathe, and so, paradoxically, breathe more easily. I have read as if my life depended on it – because, in truth, it did.

I can remember exactly what it feels like to be a child, because my own childhood was won by struggle. In my new novel, Love in Idleness, there are three mischievous children who act on a quartet of adults as the fairies do in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was so easy to step out of my skin into theirs it was a shock, when I left my desk, to see my own middle-aged face. But the best thing of all was that these children, like my own real ones, have all the powers of strong imagination and none of the illnesses that, for better or worse, accompanied it.

The Evening Standard, July 2003