Somewhat naively, I thought antenatal classes would teach me how to look after a baby. Off I trotted to Stockwell, seeking some sort of finite information. I knew where babies came from. I really did not want to think too much about how they came out.
The midwife, though, had other ideas. She had a chart and some props.
“I have knitted a uterus,” she announced, rummaging around in her bag.
She pulled out a piece of sock-like knitting.
“I’m afraid I only had navy blue wool.”
She then got a tennis ball and pushed it through the sock, explaining that the ribbed bit was the cervix. I was about seven months pregnant and felt ever more perturbed.
At that time, I was young enough to carry on my life as completely normal. Going to college. Going out every night to gigs. This was not to make any kind of point, it was just how things were.
The second week a different midwife appeared and she was French. One woman asked about how much we could drink while pregnant. It had not occurred to me not to drink, because the pregnancy police were fledgling then, not the full-scale militia they have now become.
But the French midwife surprised me.
“Non. Non, you must not drink, ladies. Only ze wine wiz ze dinner and ze brandy after.”
Phew.
By week three, though, I’d given up, as we had to bathe a doll and its head came off in my hand. Someone suggested that I go to an NCT class. Jesus, they really were the Provisional Wing of the whole natural childbirth movement. I must have been on drugs when I signed up to that.
What I really wanted was classes that would teach me what to do with an actual baby. But they didn’t exist.
“Linda” did. She was the girl in the bed next to mine who I will never forget. We both had our babies on the same day.
Her labour had been shorter and she had apparently been quieter than me, as I did have a natural birth (?!).
When the nurses came and told me that my daughter’s nappy needed changing I was mortified. I imagined that was what the nurses did and that was why I was in a hospital.
Linda came over in the night because she could see my panic.
She picked up my baby and showed me how to change a nappy. She was so kind, so gentle, so capable.
And then she told me.
“This is not my first baby. No one knows. Not even my boyfriend. I had one when I was 14. My parents made me have her adopted. I had her for six weeks. I loved her.”
The next day she lay on the bed and sobbed choking sobs all day. The nurses asked me what was up.
“It’s the hospital food,” I said. “It’s getting us down.”
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