AT THE end of the first act of Peter Nichols's play A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, the silent child you have seen hunched in her wheelchair comes skipping to the front of the stage and talks, like any normal little girl. It's a moment of almost unbearable emotion, because it expresses the dream of every parent of a handicapped child; that glimpse of the child who might have been.
There are about , children with cerebral palsy in this country. They are variously afflicted: their symptoms vary from mild weakness, through hemiplegia paralysis of one side of the body , difficulties with speech, damaged hearing and eyesight, to extreme physical helplessness: not able to sit, let alone stand, not able to hold anything in the hand.
Some have perfectly good brains working inside affected bodies; some are mentally impaired. Parents of all these children live with that sense of the child that might have been - the dancer, the footballer - and strain to restore their damaged child as close to the perfect image as they can. They are helped by paediatricians, nurses, physiotherapists, speech therapists, school teachers and other professionals.
Some parents have bad experiences. Parts of this country are poorly served. In any case, looking after a severely handicapped child is exhausting and isolating. Parents often feel they have descended into a nightmare world in which they trail from clinic to clinic, sitting for hours in depressing hospital waiting rooms, unable to get the information they want, not always spoken to as kindly or considerately as they should be, obliged to put their children into schools they consider second-rate, and to watch them bored, frustrated, going nowhere.
There are some first-rate medical centres and schools in Britain. There are some parents who are happy with what's on offer in their district. But orthodox medicine is not good at blowing its own trumpet; and the service is poorly co- ordinated and patchy. The parent of a handicapped child is very likely to be angry, and to need to put the blame for what has happened somewhere; where facilities are poor and under-funded, there is an obvious target for this anger and blame.
