This article was first published in the West Sussex Gazette on 23rd June 1994

In the previous chapter on Peter Longhurst's early recollections we had a taste of what life was like for the working class during the Great Depression, and we saw how the better-off assisted poor children at Christmas.

But how did those poor, or what we would call today deprived youngsters receive health check-ups and treatment in the pre-NHS 1930s. The answers lie within this third instalment.

Their Clifton Road home, opposite the Odd Fellows Hall, consisted of living accommodation behind and above a lock-up shop --- Jay's second hand furnishers --- in a terrace of about four shops running south from Anglesea Street, the corner shop being Clouts general stores. The terrace, which was later demolished about 1960, included a watchmakers' as well as an ice cream retailer.

'The family treat in the early 1930s was a weekly Sunday stroll, mum pushing the pram with my baby brother John while my two younger sisters Betty and Beryl walked. We enjoyed walking along the streets and glancing over the fences and hedges at people's gardens.'

Then a dangerously contagious illness struck Peter about one month before Christmas 1932. Stricken with Scarlet Fever he was taken to Swandean Isolation Hospital and put in a ward with about 20 other boys. Delirious and semi-conscious much of the time, ice was packed on him to try and get his high temperature down, and nurses bathed him in disinfectant. No contact with the outside world; even visitors were not allowed inside the ward; their only communication with kinfolk was through a closed, exterior window from the grounds, as they filed past along the veranda there. Peter was detained there for a full 10 months until it was felt safe to discharge him back into the community. When their release was imminent, patients were allowed out into the extensive grounds which were largely untamed. 'It was a wonderful place to be, playing in the high grass interlaced with wild flowers and daisies.'

Shortly after returning home in 1933, whilst playing in Victoria Park one sunny September Sunday afternoon he saw a pall of smoke drifting high in the sky. It was coming from the pier's Southern Pavilion which was being destroyed by an accidental fire.

At school the next day, Peter and the other pupils were given their annual dental check-up. 'If they found a problem you were given an appointment card to attend the newly-built clinic behind the new town hall. There were two different types of card --- a white one and a pink one. If it was pink it meant you needed an extraction under gas. So very often we didn't take pink ones home to our parents --- we tore them up and didn't go.'

There was no children's' ward at Worthing Hospital in those days and so 'simple' operations such as tonsillectomies were carried out at the same Stoke Abbott Road clinic where, with no overnight stays, conditions could be crude by today's standards. 'I was so frightened when they strapped me down in an operating theatre to have my tonsils and adenoids out. I remember steam rising from the surrounding sinks where utensils were being sterilised. They knocked me out with chloroform anaesthetic. After you'd come to, they gave you a white bowl to vomit in and you were taken straight home by ambulance, still with the bowl for continued use on the way. The best bit about it was when your parents were instructed to buy ice cream to ease your sore throat afterwards.'

In the next instalment Peter remembers when cattle was herded through Worthing, before he moved again, this time into a house connected to the mains electricity which we now take for granted.