More Than Just Coincidence

by Julie Wassmer

  A few days after this crisis I have a visitor. It is June, thinner and more frail than ever, dressed in crushed velvet and wearing a headband tied across her forehead. In her carpet bag she carries a collection of books, not Tolkien now but Camus, Kerouac and Sartre. She tells me that she is off on the hippy trail. She is going to hitch-hike her way to Marrakesh to sample life on the road. She feels bad about not being with me for the birth, but…

  I understand completely. June has to follow her own path and I am glad she has found the courage to break away from the East End and her difficult home life to go in search of the world of opportunities we’ve read about and talked about constantly since we first became friends. When it’s time for her to go, we stand up and she smiles a little sadly. I step forward and hug her, holding her close. Her long, auburn hair smells of patchouli oil and cannabis. I wish her the best of luck and tell her to keep herself safe.

  At the end of May, as I attended my final pre-natal appointments at the Mothers’ Hospital, ‘In the Summertime’ by the previously little-known band Mungo Jerry seemed to be playing everywhere I went. Within a fortnight of its release it would top the charts, going on to become the bestselling single of the year. Something about this bluesy shuffle, with its hypnotic riff and jaunty lyrics, encapsulated the carefree days of summer, and everyone was singing along to it. I wanted so much to join in but I was in the grip of a rising sense of panic. I had so little time to go now. I just needed to keep my secret for a few more weeks, but if I grew any bigger, my parents were going to find out whether I wanted them to or not.

  Chapter Six

  Ten Short Days

  A black plastic zip-up suitcase, normally used for family holidays, was already packed and safely hidden under my bed. It contained all I thought I would need for my stay in hospital—nightwear, sanitary towels, wash bag, towel and face cloth, Astral soap and as many baby clothes as I’d been able to afford to buy with my weekly pocket money and donations from Martin. Everything had been planned with military precision. As soon as I went into labour I would take myself off to the Mothers’ Hospital, sneaking out in the middle of the night if need be. Martin would come round to see my parents, collect the suitcase and break the news to them. We had every angle covered. Or so we thought.

  What we hadn’t foreseen was that my mother would not go to work that day. But when the time came, for some reason she felt unwell and stayed at home. My mother was seldom unwell, and never took a day off, even when she had a terrible cold. This was the woman, remember, who was heaving massive sacks of coins around at the Royal Mint only hours before giving birth to me and, physically at least, she was made of strong stuff. Perhaps some sixth sense had told her she should remain at home—my father had always said she was psychic, after all.

  By lunchtime, I was aware that something was happening. I felt a sudden gush of blood, unfamiliar to me since my periods had stopped. I went upstairs to investigate. I had no pain and the bleeding had ceased but I knew this was a ‘show’. I had to get to the hospital.

  I walked down the stairs as casually as I could and picked up my jacket from its hook near the front door. My mother’s voice followed me from the kitchen.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  I paused. What should I say?

  ‘To the hospital.’

  My mother appeared, wiping her wet hands on a tea towel. ‘To see your friend?’

  She knew that Hazel had recently had her baby, a little boy. For a moment I considered just nodding my head and walking out of the door, telling her I’d be back later. But my hand was frozen to the door handle. Everything was frozen. My mother and I would be suspended in this tableau until I decided what to do.

  ‘No,’ I said eventually. ‘I’m going to have a baby myself.’

  The words were out—like the baby soon would be—but it was clear that my mum could have had no premonition because her face crumpled before my eyes, as though she’d been slapped. And in a way she had been.

  I heard myself reeling off the matter-of-fact speech I had rehearsed in my head so many times. Everything was going to be all right, I told her. I was fully prepared. Martin would drop round later for my suitcase, the baby would be adopted and no one would ever have to know. I was still talking but I was out of the door now and my legs were carrying me along the balcony. Glancing back, I saw that my mother was crying. ‘No one needs to know!’ I called out to her.

  I turned away and hurried down the stairs, past the rubbish chute and out on to the street. It was only then that I realised Martin would be at work and I wouldn’t be able to reach him immediately. This wouldn’t have mattered if I’d managed to get to the hospital without my mother finding out, but now I needed to warn him that she had.

  The chaos of that day illustrates just how out of our depth Martin and I really were. Our childlike scheme had more holes in it than a leaky watering can. How could it have been otherwise when my overriding concern was that I shouldn’t have to be the one to tell my parents? That was the worst thing I could possibly imagine. Now the unimaginable had happened and my mother knew. But Martin didn’t. Everything was the wrong way round. Nothing was working out as we had planned. I was in a panic and worried about Martin. The only way of getting a message to him was through Bridie. Telling her wouldn’t be so bad—I’d cleared the worst hurdle, and she was less uptight than my mother—but even so this wasn’t the kind of news I could break to her from a public callbox. So I walked the half-mile to her flat.

  Bridie should have been sleeping in readiness for her night shift but when I rang the bell she opened the door straight away. We went upstairs to the living room and had sat down on the sofa before I told her I was having a baby. Martin’s baby. Right now. She gaped at me, stunned. How could we have kept this secret for so long? I gave her the same speech I’d given my mother. She wasn’t angry but there was sadness, so much sadness that she wept a little. ‘My first grandchild,’ she said tearfully, ‘and I shan’t even see him grow up.’

  Any apprehension I might have had about the birth itself was draining away now, to be replaced by a crushing guilt about the pain I was causing. The two worlds I’d been struggling to keep separate—truth and pretence—had collided catastrophically and amid the fallout everything seemed so more starkly real than it had before. I left Bridie crying and took a bus to Clapton Pond. I had no idea what the labour was going to be like but one thing of which I could be certain was that there would be drama to follow.

  At the hospital I was examined by a busy doctor who decided I was overdue. She explained that the membrane surrounding my ‘waters’ had hardened and would need to be perforated with an instrument called an amnihook to fully induce labour.

  My legs are strapped in stirrups and I feel so vulnerable—especially when I see something resembling a crochet hook in the doctor’s hand. The agony is far worse than anything I will feel during labour. After the procedure, I am put in a room on my own but I can still hear women’s voices screaming all around me. The pain from the induction subsides and metamorphoses into a new ordeal. Although I am in full labour now, I am strangely relieved to be alone. I tell myself that everything I am experiencing is natural. I am not ill, I am just going through a process. It will be all right. I will survive.

  A few hours pass. I can see the light beginning to fade outside the window. The room is suddenly busy. I am given gas and air and more people come, telling me what to do. I obey. I push and push. Now they are warning me, saying they need to cut me. The episiotomy is performed and, eight hours after I have entered this room, a baby is born. Not a boy, I am told, but a beautiful little girl.

  I feel the tidal wave of afterbirth, a flush of warmth. Relief. But someone calls for an incubator and there is alarm in her voice. I feel tremendous guilt. If the baby isn’t well it must be my fault. I have failed to take proper care of myself and of her. How could she be a girl? How could Martin and I have got things so wrong?

  Someone says forget the incubator. I wait,
breathless. There is only silence. Then something ethereal: the sound of a baby crying, not insistently, but just enough to declare she is alive. She is placed in my arms. I look down at this stranger. She is nothing like I have imagined. Not a big, bouncing infant like the babies in my schoolfriends’ homes—but a frail, fragile creature with an expression as old as time itself. She looks at me, passive. No temper, no demands, her mouth making ‘O’ shapes like a goldfish.

  A few moments later, Martin was there, looking comical in a white gown and face mask. He had brought with him the zip-up suitcase from under my bed so I knew that he had confronted my parents, and understood now how much courage that had taken. We both stared in bewilderment at our creation. I was dazed, from gas and air, from exhaustion and from the shock of finding that my secret was now out and lying beside me. It occurred to me that I knew absolutely nothing about how to take care of her. Something more painful than labour kicked in: the realisation that when I walked out of the Mothers’ Hospital I would do so leaving our baby behind.

  I slept for hours after the birth. When I awoke, on the ward now, a nurse brought my baby to me and showed me how to put her to my breast. I didn’t know what I felt: the sense of cold, hard reality I’d had at Bridie’s house had gone and I couldn’t be sure whether any of this was actually happening or whether I was imagining it. I remembered the scene in The Grapes of Wrath in which Rose of Sharon, after giving birth to a stillborn child, allows an old man dying of starvation to suckle at her breast…

  A panicked voice cut into my thoughts. Another woman on the other side of the ward was shouting that she had been given the wrong baby. Our infants were inspected and swapped over. This time I checked my baby’s wrist tag and saw that it read ‘Baby Wassmer’.

  When I tried again to feed my baby the ward sister ran in and stopped me, whispering that, because of my circumstances, I should not breastfeed. She gave me pills to dry up my milk. I took one, then watched the other mothers holding their babies close. After a while I put a plastic teat to my own baby’s lips and she began to suckle, looking up at me all the while.

  Martin visited me the next morning and we decided to name our daughter Sarah Louise. He wanted to give her his surname, knowing it would then go on to her birth certificate. He sat beside my bed, looking first at me and then at his little girl. I could see that, however lost he felt, he was still desperately trying to do the right thing.

  Left alone with Sarah Louise, I talked to her, planting soft kisses on the top of her head. Her skin was pale but she was perfect, with long fingernails and wise eyes. She had exceptionally long legs, like her father. It felt as if no one and nothing could touch us, but I knew that was an illusion.

  When my parents came to visit me there was a wall of embarrassment between us. There was also a baby’s cot. My father looked into it first. I saw his face soften. My mother’s, however, was still etched with anxiety. We were casting around for something on which to pin our conversation. How was the food in the hospital? Did I have everything I needed? Much of what we communicated to each other that day remained unspoken. When my father left the ward for a cigarette my mother confided that he had told her I must keep my baby if that was what I wanted. But it seemed significant that he wasn’t here, voicing his opinion for himself. Was he too shocked to do so? He had gone off to work the previous morning and returned to find that, out of the blue, his daughter had given birth to a baby. How would he talk to me now? What would he think of me? I looked at my mother. Her eyes entreated me to stay strong and stick to my decision.

  ‘I’m not going to change my mind,’ I told her.

  She seemed able to breathe again. She would, she assured me, be there for me the day I was discharged.

  For ten days I sought refuge in the hospital routine. My new world smelled of milk and nappies, and in my head I heard the voices of my childhood friends: ‘Hold my sister for me!’ Now the child was mine. There was a camaraderie among the mothers which in some ways reminded me of the school camp I’d gone to with Mrs LeWars’s class. We were here only temporarily but each of us knew how special this time was and we were making the most, and the best, of this hiatus in our normal lives. No longer a child, I was adjusting to being a recovering mum, learning how to take care of a baby who looked to me to supply what she needed to live and thrive: food and love.

  One day I was holding Sarah Louise, gently kissing her head as I talked quietly to her, when I felt a hole in her skull. Convinced I had blown my kisses clean into her brain, I was filled with panic. For a while I said nothing to anybody but eventually, burdened by guilt, I confessed to another mum. She smiled and told me about the fontanelle, the soft dent in the top of the head all babies have until the bones in their skull knit properly. It would close in time. I listened to her in wonder, relief giving way to a recognition that since her birth there had been nothing between my daughter’s mind and the thoughts that I had been planting there in whispers. For a few brief, magical days there had been no barrier between us at all.

  In a small room off the ward we were instructed in how to hold our babies properly, how to wind them, change their nappies and bathe them. I remembered the girls at my primary school who had gone on to secondary moderns. Those who had ended up in the layette class would be streaks ahead of me now. I paid attention to everything the nurses told us, acutely aware all the while that this information was going to be of limited use to me, whereas the other mothers would be putting the skills they were learning into practice in the months to come.

  The nurses treated us all equally. They must have known I would be giving my baby away but they didn’t acknowledge it and there was no overt disapproval. Although they were kind to me I was always waiting for their reproof. One hot afternoon I was on the other side of the ward, talking to another mum, making her laugh, as if I were still the class clown, when a nurse came up behind me and told me to go back to my bed. My baby might need me.

  I am a bad mother. I am no mother at all. I am a mother in body only. Sweet liquid continues to seep from my breasts in spite of the tablets I am taking but I’m playing a role. My secret may be out but I am still pretending, and if there were no world beyond these walls I could go on pretending forever.

  I was living in the moment, not thinking about the future or even what was happening outside the Mothers’ Hospital. The real world invaded when my mother next visited. She brought fruit and filled me in on some of the gaps in the day I had left her on the landing of our building for Bridie’s house and the hospital. She recounted how she had run, distraught, to a couple who lived on the floor below us. They were my mother’s friends as well as our neighbours: she trusted them not to tell a soul. ‘They’ll keep your secret,’ she said.

  Looking at her, I knew it was less my secret than hers. She cared too much about what people thought, especially the people on our new estate.

  She then told me something my father had said to her on the night I’d given birth to my baby. ‘Poor kid. To have to go through that all alone.’ His words didn’t make me feel sorry for myself, only for my mum. I understood that she would have taken them as a criticism of her parenting. In our own ways we were both bad mothers. She felt she had failed me and I, in turn, was failing the tiny girl in the cot between us, a child who hardly ever cried.

  Technically, I was still in control. I had not signed any documents apart from the birth certificate. When the registrar visited the ward, Martin had dutifully attended and, as we had discussed, gave Sarah Louise his surname. Mine was there too. What is written cannot be unwritten and we were recorded as ‘mother’ and ‘father’ for all time. Even though our daughter would never know us as her parents, I was comforted that somewhere a document would always exist, a testament to these days before her new life began.

  The June weather grew increasingly hot, French windows were thrown open and I stepped out on to the lawn beyond the ward. It was the first time we had been outside the walls of this hospital since giving birth. I could hear the
buzz of traffic on Clapton High Street: the real world out there, calling us back to it. This was the last day I would spend with these women. One by one we were leaving. Tomorrow it would be my turn.

  The following morning, I opened my black suitcase, already packed for my departure, and took out a plastic bag. Inside was a tiny white dress ruched with frills and lace. I had seen it in the window of a shop on Roman Road market—the prettiest dress I had been able to afford. I was determined that my child should have at least one beautiful thing to wear so that her new parents could tell her, one day, how much she was loved.

  Sarah Louise lay on the bed looking up at me as I peeled off her cotton suit and put on the white dress. Spotless, stainless, perfect: she was already beginning to look like someone else’s baby. I returned to the bag for a pair of matching bootees and a woollen shawl so light and soft I could barely feel it. Now swaddled in white, Sarah Louise gazed up at me, content, unfocused.

  A nurse arrived to tell me everything was ready. Seeing my hesitation, she took control. ‘It’s all right,’ she said gently. ‘Just follow me. Everything will be fine.’

  She lifted my suitcase while I gathered up Sarah Louise. I followed the nurse into the room outside the ward where I’d learned how to care for my baby. Today there was no one there, and no baths or towels or talcum powder or nappies, just a single cot.

  The nurse put down my case and looked at me calmly, holding out her arms. ‘You can give her to me now.’

  I know that all I have to do is hand my baby to the nurse. She stands there like a drawbridge between me and my child’s new parents. Once I have let go of Sarah Louise, the drawbridge will be pulled up forever, allowing us to go our separate ways.

  I notice the nurse’s eyes dart towards the door. Someone is there. I hesitate, turning my head. It is not my baby’s new parents but my mother, waiting for me on my side of the bridge. She gives me a nervous smile and picks up my suitcase. ‘Come on,’ she whispers, her voice hoarse with emotion.