When five-year-old Benedict Blythe woke up on the morning of 1 December 2021, he was excited that Christmas was coming. He came downstairs to open the first box in his Advent calendar containing a plastic springy frog and a dairy-free white chocolate (Benedict was allergic to milk, along with many other foods including soy, sesame, eggs and nuts). It was Benedict’s first term at school – Barnack primary in the English town of Stamford in Lincolnshire – and he loved it so much that he had cried when he learned that there were no classes at the weekend. That morning, he went off cheerfully to school with a small packet of dairyfree McVitie’s Gingerbread Men for snack time. He seemed happy and healthy when he arrived but by the afternoon, he was dead, having collapsed with anaphylaxis.
I meet Benedict’s mother, Helen Blythe, in a hotel not far from Stamford where she lives. To start with, there’s another person in the room, but when he hears what we will be talking about, he offers condolences and leaves. The random pity of strangers is just one of the many things Helen has had to endure since the death of her son. She tells me that when she meets someone new, she has to decide whether to say that she has one child or two (Benedict’s younger sister, Etta, also has multiple allergies).
Having never suffered from allergies themselves, it was a shock to Helen and her husband Pete when Benedict had his first violent allergic reaction at four months old. On Christmas Day, he had a mouthful of baby rice then, two days later, baby porridge containing traces of whey powder and immediately went very red in the face and started blowing “bile bubbles” out of his mouth. They phoned 999 but by the time the paramedics arrived, the bubbles had stopped and Helen had the impression “they thought we were dramatic parents”. A few weeks later, they tried him on a tiny bit of formula milk and he started crying loudly and vomiting until every last drop of the formula was out of his body. Despite these extreme reactions, Benedict’s GP insisted it was probably a virus causing his symptoms and Helen – a management consultant – had to fight to get him referred to an allergy clinic and eventually diagnosed. “Milk and eggs are part of everyone’s everyday culture,” Helen says. “It’s a hard mindset to see milk through a dangerous prism.”
One of the great dilemmas of parenthood is learning how to avoid driving yourself crazy with worry when there are dangers to your child all around. Babies are a defenceless bundle of
