Clair Walton was just 21 when she married her husband Bryan in 1983. He was a haemophiliac but they didn’t think for a moment it would stand in the way of their happiness. Two years later he was called in for tests after it emerged he had been given tainted blood. The couple found out he had HIV.
“We had hopes for a future, hopes for a family and that was completely cut out and that is something I live with today,” she says. “I don’t have children, I didn’t remarry. It’s a sadness I have, but you live with what life deals you. You find your strength, you find your way of being.”
The pair had been together since 1979 and wanted to try for children. As Walton had been clear of HIV when her husband was diagnosed, they sought a doctor for advice.
“We wanted to have children and they said ‘it’s not a good idea, but if you want to go ahead we’ll monitor you’. That was it, literally. We were young and stupid, we got no support around ovulation or the sorts of things you would think about now,” she says. In 1987, Walton was also diagnosed with HIV.
“People said to us afterwards ‘You were adamant about having children’, but we weren’t,” she says. “We were just young and wanted children and we were given poor, damaging and negligent advice. But that is something that I have lived with, I carried on with my life.”
The pair were offered no counselling or support, she adds. “It was basically ‘here you go, you’ve got it, off you go’. At that time you were told you will die.”
The couple struggled to cope with the stigma associated with HIV and Aids, she says. “Anyone who lived through the 1980s will understand just how appalling it was to live with HIV. The whole stigma around it was something no-one would tolerate today.”
“We faced all sorts of discrimination, in accessing doctors, dental care – he was supposed to be given a transfusion after an operation and they wouldn’t touch him. The people who were diagnosed with HIV all those years ago have lived with this and have suffered but you don’t hear from them, because of the stigma associated with HIV. And that silence lives with you.”
Walton’s husband took experimental HIV drugs which she believes contributed to his death in 1993, when he was just 34. “He said ‘I don’t want to die, I’m too young’. He said that to me: ‘I’ve got too much to do’.”
She hopes that all the people who were affected by the longstanding scandal will now be heard. I hope that some kind of relief, grieving and an acknowledgement of what happened will now be heard.”
“There has to be an investigation into the aftermath. What happened, why it happened and how they dealt with it. They have kept us begging for scraps for 28 years, I think they just expected us to die.”
