My daughter hadn’t been in nursery for an hour when the phone call came. My darling child, I was informed, had head lice, and I was to collect her at once.
At pickup, they pointed at her head and told me they’d seen something ‘wriggling’. Pathetically, I examined her scalp and insisted I couldn’t see anything. This was my first experience of head lice since childhood, so I will admit to being embarrassed.
Lice are resistant to water, soap, shampoo, bleach, chlorine and stearyl alcohol, but knowing their presence bears no relation to a child’s hygiene did little to assuage my feeling, however foolish, that I am a dirty person who has raised a dirty child. Even from lovely and non-judgmental nursery staff who’ve seen this a thousand times before, it felt as much an accusation as a diagnosis.
Regardless, the diagnosis had been made, and we were off.
En route home, I popped into the pharmacy to pick up the necessary treatment, which turned out to be an odourless ointment that you rub all over the hair and scalp. This was in marked contrast to the stuff I remember from my own childhood, when outbreaks seemed ubiquitous. Back then, the rigmarole was as regular as taxes; one of us would get a letter from school about an outbreak in their class and, since as many as six of us attended the same primary school at any one time, we would all end up getting treated to stop it spreading elsewhere, whether we’d felt a single itch or not.
This involved spending dozens of evenings heads-down in our bathroom sink, while something that was definitively not odourless was scrubbed into our scalps. It smelled more industrial than medicinal, like something that had no business making contact with a child, something that had surely been concocted to melt horses’ hooves, or clean tiger cages. It didn’t help that it also stung like acid and had to be left in overnight. The next morning, as if in a morbid spin on the tooth fairy, we would discover whether we had lice by the presence of their vanquished corpses on our pillow.
No such Victorian misery for my daughter, fortunately, who had to endure just 15 minutes of suffusion, then a shampoo, rinse and thorough combing. ‘I bet we won’t even find anything now,’ I said confidently to my wife, at the exact moment she tracked the fine-toothed comb through our little cherub’s hair to pull away a veritable menagerie of small, dead critters.
Half an hour later, still shuddering but finally satisfied her head had been denuded of microbeasts, we began the process on ourselves. We treated, washed and combed, preening each other like chimps, happily finding nothing at all, as with our son when he came home to find us poised and ready for his own delousing. And then the sheets, towels, and clothes that might have been affected were scoured and washed into the bargain.
All was well. Or it should have been. Funny, isn’t it, how little difference the proof of action makes a difference to the mind? Even now, days later in our spotless house, I can no sooner refrain from scratching as I write, dear reader, than you can while reading these very words.
