An account
of one man's childhood experience in the UK, which resulted
in a lifelong leg-brace (calliper) fascination.
Names
have been changed.
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| I am sure that my fascination with braces and calipers began with my
mother
when I was very young indeed.
When she was a girl, somewhere around 1920,
my mother's younger sister had rickets, as did many children in those days.
The doctors dealt with the deformity by breaking her legs over what was
called an osteoclave - I assume she was under anaesthetic while this
happened. After the bones mended, she was fitted with calipers to keep her
legs straight.
I remember lying in bed one night - as I say, I was
very young - when my mother told me about my aunt's time in calipers. I'd
never heard the word before, so I thought she said "callipuses". I asked my
mother what they were. She described them as "leg irons" and then
walked around the bedroom stiff-legged to show how my aunt would have
walked.
I clearly remember the illicit thrill, the twist in the stomach
that I felt when she described my aunt's calipers. I'd seen children in
my home town with these heavy metal and leather cages on their legs.
I'd wondered what they were for, what it felt like to wear them.
I couldn't help but stare whenever I saw one of these crippled
children.
When I was five or six I sat in a front row desk in school. One
day, a woman came into the class pushing a pram with a girl lying in it.
The woman parked the pram in front of the front row of desks and left.
At break we clustered around the girl in the pram. Why was she such a baby
that she was still in a pram? We were all big children and didn't need prams.
But she did. Both her legs were strapped into long calipers from her thighs
to the heels of her boots. She wore the calipers over her corduroy
trousers.
"Why are you wearing those things?" we asked. "To keep my
legs straight," she said.
"Can you move your legs?" we asked. She
tried, but all she could produce were feeble twitchings inside the
calipers.
One day, when I was playing at my best friend's house, my
friend asked her mother what was wrong with Ann (Ann was the name of the
girl in calipers in our class). She'd had polio, my friend's mother
explained, and her legs were paralysed.
That was the first time I'd
heard the word "polio" and knew what it could do to children's legs. I lived
in a seaside resort in the West of England, and the town
seemed to be full of children with polio. I often saw boys and girls with
their legs in calipers - sometimes both legs, sometimes just one; sometimes
short calipers to the knee, sometimes long ones to the tops of legs.
And combinations of long and short calipers. Irons, my mother called
them sometimes. And the children in calipers wore boots, not ordinary
shoes like I did, but boots. Surgical boots, my mother called
them.
And there were adults in calipers as well. Polio could
affect grown-ups as well. I clearly remember one woman with
the characteristic dipping polio gait as she dragged one weakened leg in
a caliper along the High Street. But it was the children I mostly
noticed. |
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