{"id":1424,"date":"2016-11-13T17:41:59","date_gmt":"2016-11-14T01:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/?p=1424"},"modified":"2016-11-13T17:41:59","modified_gmt":"2016-11-14T01:41:59","slug":"the-red-stain-of-near-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/?p=1424","title":{"rendered":"The red stain of near disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Blackberry<\/a>

Blackberry cane<\/p><\/div>\n

Whenever I see old blackberry canes, dark red as the stain of their summer juice, I remember blackberrying in England when my son was small, and a dark red guilt sweeps over me. I described our expedition in a letter to parents:<\/p>\n

8 Oct 1965
\nWe went blackberrying on St. Ann\u2019s Hill, not far from here. Got a lovely lot\u2014have been busy making jelly, pies, etc. David had a wonderful time\u2014it was so sweet to see the solemn single-mindedness with which he set about collecting his berries\u2014and he didn\u2019t eat a single one until Tony offered him a handful\u2014to comfort him when he tumbled down a slope into a patch of brambles.<\/em><\/p>\n

Modern American parents would probably be horrified at how lackadaisical we young mothers in England were about supervising our children\u2019s play. Once the daddies were gone to work, our little close of twenty-eight row houses was almost completely free of traffic. The kids, twenty of them under school age, ran in and out of each others\u2019 houses and romped together across the grassy front yards.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Monday after our blackberrying expedition, I went out to gather up two-year-old David for lunch. I found him and his little friend\u00a0 in a still-rough corner between the housing blocks. His mouth was stained red. \u201cI picking blackberries, Mummy,\u201d he announced cheerfully. I took one look at the berry-laden plant, then rushed back to the house. My Oxford Book of Wild Flowers<\/em> confirmed my guess: Deadly Nightshade.<\/p>\n

While Tony, who had come home from work for lunch, went to tell the mother of the other child what had happened, I tried everything I knew of to make our baby throw up. Nothing worked. We called an ambulance. Since I was within a week or two of giving birth to our second child, a neighbor, seeing the ambulance, came over to wish us well. I am still grateful that when she learned the story, she called the police, and still guilty it hadn\u2019t occurred to me that other children might be involved. Some days later I wrote to parents:<\/p>\n

\"Nicholson<\/a>

Watercolor illustration by Barbara Nicholson in The Oxford Book of Wildflowers, Oxford University Press, 1960. Shown are: Comfrey, Common Mallow, Musk Mallow, Deadly Nightshade, Duke Of Argyll\u2019s Tea Plant, and Woody Nightshade.<\/p><\/div>\n

13 Oct. 1965
\nThe police organised all the rest of the kids in the close whose parents couldn\u2019t prove they were somewhere else that morning into another convoy of ambulances for a mass stomach pumping session. About a dozen altogether involved, of which four (including David) were confirmed cases, though they decided to keep the whole lot overnight for observation, just in case.<\/em><\/p>\n

Meanwhile the newspapers had got hold of the story. We refused to see them at the hospital, but when we got home about 7:00\u2014completely exhausted, & having had nothing to eat since breakfast\u2014we were invaded by a posse of reporters. A highly garbled & exaggerated account appeared the next day. I suppose it\u2019s not every day one makes the front page of the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, & the BBC News, but I shouldn\u2019t care for the honour to happen again.<\/em><\/p>\n

Anyway, the story ended well\u2014all the kids were discharged the next morning, with none but the hospital staff any the worse for wear\u2014in fact the sister-in-charge of the children\u2019s ward where the confirmed cases were confessed that she hadn\u2019t known that four such tiny boys could get so involved in riots and punch-ups all up and down the ward, and they were very pleased to see the back of them.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever I see old blackberry canes, dark red as the stain of their summer juice, I remember blackberrying in England when my son was small, and a dark red guilt sweeps over me. I described our expedition in a letter to parents: 8 Oct 1965 We went blackberrying on St. Ann\u2019s Hill, not far from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,100,329,389,41],"tags":[391,392],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1424"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1452,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions\/1452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}