Towards the end of his holidays in Snape, just a few days after the Thorpeness cricket match he now remembers so vividly, Steuart was struck down by a very high fever, abdominal pain and chronic diarrhoea. A doctor was called, then an ambulance, and Steuart was whisked off at high speed to Hendon Isolation Hospital in north London, over a hundred miles away. The initial verdict was that Steuart had contracted dysentery, but eventually the Harley Street gastroenterologist (and editor of the medical journal Gut) Francis Avery Jones gave a diagnosis of salmonella typhinurium.

I was put in a ward with some old men and a smaller child. There was a nurse whom I remember as being quite hideously cruel. I wasn't allowed any visitors and I was forced to drink vast quantities – it seemed like a gallon a day – of some disgusting, green medicine called ‘Hartley's Liquid’. Eventually, after two weeks, my parents kicked up a major fuss and almost removed me by force. I think there may even have been an enquiry; I don't know what happened. I was taken home to Hampstead Garden Suburb and lived, quarantined in my bedroom, where our GP came every day to give me cortisone injections.

In Aldeburgh, still remembering the cricket match, Britten was kept abreast of Steuart's illness and treatment, although the full severity of his condition wasn't yet clear.

I do hope that works, & that finally after all this time dear Stewy will be returned to complete health, for him, for you, & for all of the family. It has been a most beastly time, & I hope the end is now in sight. It was lovely to catch a glimpse of them all a week or so ago. It was a curious, if amusing, occasion […]

Maybe I will catch a glimpse of you the next two weeks in London? I do hope so.

It was a while before Steuart was well enough to start his first term as a music scholar at Lancing, joining the school several weeks late. His abiding memory of his first days is seeing sugar in paper packets for the first time, after rationing had been lifted.

The illness would recur regularly in the years ahead, often causing long periods of quarantine.