Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

by Barbara Comyns

  Charles said he had borrowed some money to send telegrams to his relations saying we had a boy of six ounces. I told him it was six pounds not ounces, but he said a few pounds either way wouldn’t make any difference. But Charles’s telegrams caused a huge sensation, and his family was most disappointed when in due course they discovered we had had quite a normal baby.

  I felt more easy in my mind now I knew the baby was alive, and later on, when they brought the babies in for their last feed that night, mine came with them. When the nurse gave him to me I just looked and looked at him, to make up for all the time I had missed. He was very like Charles, except for the red hair. Charles was fair and my hair was almost black, so I can’t think where the red hair came from. I thought he was the best baby I had ever seen. I looked at his little fingers and toes and they all had perfect nails. He even had eye-lashes; nothing had been forgotten. He was dressed in the most frightful clothes, a short flannel night-dress, all washed hard and yellow, and a piece of old blanket for a shawl, and a fragment of sheet for his napkin. He was just a rag-bag for old bed-clothes. His tiny feet were frozen and his hands, too; I held him to me to warm him. The nurse came and said I was to try to feed him, but he made grunting noises and would not wake up, so they took him away, and almost before he had left the ward, I had gone to sleep.

  12

  I left the hospital after nine days. The nine days were not very happy, but interesting. I liked to watch and listen to the other mothers. They were all working-class women. Some of them were very poor. In bed, with their hair hanging over their shoulders, they looked gentle and pretty, but when they dressed to go home they looked completely different. The older ones screwed their hair in untidy buns at the back of their heads, and their faces became all hard and haggard, their skirts hung down behind and their backs were bent and their poor feet had bunions. The young ones changed, too, when they were dressed. They did not look so shabby, but their faces were almost brazen. One was only sixteen. There was a little dark woman whose husband was a costermonger. She had had six children and they had all died at birth, now at last she had a living baby; but every time she fed it, it was sick, and it was discovered it had a kind of appendicitis. They operated on it and when I left the hospital it was recovering. I hoped very much it would not die.

  My baby was beginning to grow very pretty, but was thin and delicate. He wasn’t hungry like the other babies. He just went to sleep over his meals, but he never cried. Instead of growing, he became smaller and smaller, and now only weighed five pounds. This worried me immensely.

  I asked Charles what he wanted the baby to be called, and after a little thought, he said ‘Pablo’, after Picasso, would be a good name. I thought ‘Pablo’ sounded rather impressive, but could imagine how tired one would get hearing people say ‘Why do you call your baby Pablo? Is it a boy or a girl?’ The other babies in the ward were all called Maureen, if they were girls, and Peter and John for the boys. They called mine ‘Ginger’, which I did not like very much.

  Next time Charles came he suggested Sandro and Augustus. I was so happy he was taking an interest in the baby, I did not want to hurt his feelings, although I didn’t like any of these names much. I felt you couldn’t call a tiny thing that grew smaller every day Augustus, so I said it had better be Sandro. The next day a registrar visited the hospital and the mothers who had chosen their children’s names had them registered, so I had mine registered Sandro Thomas Hardy Fairclough. I added Thomas Hardy because he was my favourite author at the time. I was not sure if Charles expected Botticelli after Sandro or not, but left it out because of spelling difficulties.

  When Charles came to visit me on Sunday, he brought Eva with him. She was staying at our flat. I guessed she must have found it in an awful mess, but Charles said the mess was much worse after she left — the sink had blocked and had overflowed all over the kitchen floor and the saucepans were burnt and there had been another row about the bathroom. Eva was most interested to see the baby, but detested the name Sandro and was shocked at the dreary, rather smelly clothes he was wearing. I was glad I was dressed in my own night-dress, not the evil grey shirt. I had had to keep it on for twenty-four hours, and it had been all covered in blood and horrible.

  Eva was quite kind on this visit and gave me some grapes and flowers, the first I had had. All the same, I hoped she would have left the flat before I came home, but I rather thought she would not put up with the discomfort for more than a weekend, and in this I was quite right.

  The nine days before my return home passed very quickly, I suppose because they were all more or less the same. The red-letter days were the ones we had visitors. If Charles was late and part of the visiting time was wasted, I would cry with disappointment, but he always came in the end. Sometimes he brought Ann with him. She liked to see the baby — her first nephew, but was inclined to make remarks about the other visitors. She seemed to think they were deaf.

  The other excitement was the morning post, but I did not receive many letters. One came from Paul saying he was glad I had had a son to carry on the family name. I turned the envelope inside out to see if there was a cheque that had been mislaid, but it was empty. There was a letter from my brother John’s wife, renewing my invitation to visit them when I had recovered.

  The day started at five, when they used to bring the babies in for their first feed, and ended at eleven, for their last meal. Although that sounds a long day, it really passed very quickly. It was not very pleasant being woken up so early in the morning, but there were other things I disliked much more. The worst thing of all was the dirty bed linen and general roughness. The food was very poor, too. All they provided for breakfast and tea was three thick slices of bread and hot water for the tea and a jug of milk. Charles had brought in a packet of tea but he had no money to buy me butter and eggs and jam and things like that, so I just had to eat the dry bread. We did get two pounds from the insurance people I had been insured with when I had worked in the studio, but we had to give the hospital that. I can’t help feeling if we are all the King’s subjects the least he or the Government could do is to pay our birth expenses.

  The day before we left the hospital, we had an examination by a doctor. The old mothers said this was a most painful and dreadful examination, and we all dreaded it, but as a matter of fact, it hardly hurt at all. After that we would get up and help in the ward a little, and the nurses were supposed to give the mothers a lesson in bathing the baby. But they were usually much too busy to do this.

  The day of going home was almost as exciting as the last day of the school term. There was a certain amount of anxiety in case your husband did not bring the right clothes for yourself and baby; otherwise all was happiness. The proper procedure, after you had had a bath and dressed to go home, was to return to the ward carrying the baby in its best flowing robes and a large lace veil over its face, then go to each bed and say goodbye and show the baby in all its splendour. When it was my turn to leave the thought of doing this made me feel awfully shy. But when the nurse came to dress Sandro it was discovered Charles had brought three vests and two white petticoats and no frock; he didn’t look very grand, so I solved the problem by standing at the ward door and shouting Goodbye and leaving very quickly.

  The Austrian woman artist had sent a large hired car to take me home and I felt very grand and happy to be going home again. Charles seemed pleased to be with me, but kept looking at the baby with disgust. He said the thing that made him dislike it most was the resemblance to himself.

  When we arrived home the first thing I noticed as we came up the stairs was the frightful smell of fish, and when we reached the living-room I saw the reason. Charles was in the middle of painting a picture of some herrings on a newspaper, and they had gone most high. He said they must not be thrown away until he had finished the painting. Already they had changed colour considerably, so we had to sit in the bedroom, and you could still smell them there.

  Charles made me some tea. He said he had
got quite used to doing things for himself while I had been away. The flat was in a beastly state. I noticed when he opened the food cupboard there was a pink blancmange I had made before I went away, but it had gone green now. I tried not to notice any of these things, because I didn’t want Charles to think I was all womanly and fussy and how peaceful it was without me.

  During the next few days people kept calling to see the baby. I think they must have thought I had had a mermaid instead of a baby — the smell of fish was so strong. The old woman with the twisted hands came and she said, ‘He looks a very poor baby to me. You should take him to a clinic,’ and she sniffed reproachfully.

  As a matter of fact, Sandro had improved a little since he came home. He didn’t behave like a dormouse at meal-times any more. But in spite of this slight improvement I was very afraid he would die. I kept looking in his cot every few minutes; even in the night I had to do this to make sure he hadn’t died. The first bath I gave him was simply terrifying. His head wobbled about so, I thought it would fall off, but it didn’t, and in a few days he loved me bathing him and would kick and stretch himself in the water.

  Now Sandro was eating better he was often sick after I’d fed him and I felt rather alarmed in case he had an appendicitis. Then I recalled what the old woman had said about a clinic and thought maybe it would be a good thing to take Sandro to one, so I asked several motherly-looking women with prams if there was one near and they told me the nearest one and the time to go. So the next Wednesday at two-thirty I went. I knew it was the right place as soon as I drew near. You could hear the babies screaming, and there was a mass of hooded prams at the door. Some of them smelt. I went upstairs to the room all the noise was coming from. It was a large, dreary room, rather dirty. I had expected everything to be white and bright posters on the walls of children drinking milk or playing in the sun, but it was not like that at all. There were about twenty-five mothers and their children, and several middle-aged helpers. None of the windows were open. The helpers gave me a great welcome and soon I was sitting on a low chair waiting to have Sandro weighed. Most of the babies were healthy and clean and nicely dressed, but there were a few sickly-looking, dirty ones. I saw one of these drop its dummy, and the mother, a toothless old hag, picked it up from the floor and put it in her own mouth to clean it, and gave it back to the green-faced baby.

  After Sandro was weighed I had to wait to see the doctor. The doctor was a woman. The other mothers did not like her much, perhaps because she was very quiet and firm and not in the least gushing, but I found her very helpful. She said the reason Sandro was so sick was that he was overfed at each meal, and she gave me quite a lot of good advice and put some plaster on his tummy because his navel stuck out too much and told me to bring him to see her again in a month’s time. When their babies had been seen to mothers could have a cup of tea and a bun in the basement if they liked, but I was too scared of the matey heartiness of the helpers to do this. After this first visit I took Sandro to the clinic nearly every week. I felt the advantages outweighed the disadvantages. Charles was very scornful of the whole business.

  Charles still disliked him, but in spite of this made some drawings of us together, so I hoped eventually he would get used to him. At the moment I felt I had most unreasonably brought some awful animal home, and that I was in disgrace for not taking it back to the shop where it came from.

  13

  We had no money at all and the milkman wouldn’t leave any milk because we hadn’t given him any money lately. He was quite nice about it and said we could have some free milk every day if we applied to the council. Mothers with new babies were allowed one pint a day if they had no money. The council went up in my estimation when I heard about this. Up till now I had thought it was almost a criminal offence to have a baby. All the same I did not apply for the free milk, because I was afraid they would take the baby away and put it in a home on the grounds of its parents having no visible means of support.

  To my great relief the artist I had been sitting for before Sandro was born wrote and asked me to sit for him with the baby. He wanted to start the painting right away if I was well enough to pose. So I went the very morning the letter arrived. I was still feeling rather weak — Sandro was only two or three weeks old — and I found the long bus journey to Chelsea rather trying. I had a stupid idea you had to take babies upstairs in buses, like dogs, and this made travelling more difficult, but when I once arrived at the studio I did not find the posing trying. It was a joy to sit down and collect my strength for the journey home. On the return journey Sandro was sick right into a woman’s umbrella. It wasn’t a rolled-up one.

  Fortunately, the picture took some time to paint, so we did not have to worry about money so much. And when it was finished Edmund called and said he was going to Leamington on business by car and offered to take me to my brother John’s house, which was on his way. I felt rather guilty leaving Charles with only seven-shillings-and-sixpence. But I was feeling so tired, the thought of getting away from London and having plenty to eat seemed like heaven, so I sent a telegram to my brother and the next day Edmund called for me in his car. To my dismay it was an open sports model and I thought poor little Sandro would die from draught, but happily when he arrived at my brother’s house he was still alive, very hungry and wet.

  After a few days in the country he started to grow — you could almost see him doing it — and I felt better, too. John, my brother, and his wife had no children. They were careful people and said they could not risk having a family in case John died or lost his job. He had had the same one for fourteen years. They said only people with private incomes should have children. Perhaps they were right.

  John’s wife was called Joyce and she was very kind in a sensible, unimaginative way. She knitted Sandro some warm, rather stiff garments, and she gave me two of her frocks to wear — they had no shape in them and were fawn. She also gave me some lisle stockings and said I mustn’t wear bare legs while I was staying with them. This made me a bit sad. I wouldn’t have minded so much if they had been silk stockings she had given me, but she said it was common to wear silk stockings in the country. She did not like lipstick either, and asked me not to wear it during my visit, or the little gold rings I always wore in my ears. I felt very colourless and dull, but it was worth it to see how Sandro was improving. He lived in a clothes-basket in the garden all day, under an apple tree covered in blossom. One day a bird made a mess on his head and the old cook said it was a lucky omen. He hardly ever cried.

  I wanted to write to Charles, but had no money for a stamp, so I wrote a letter and made a sticky mark on the envelope, to look as if the stamp had come off in the post. It was difficult having no money. I began to need things for the baby — cotton-wool and baby-soap and powder. Joyce would say, ‘I am going shopping in Leamington, is there anything you need for Sandro?’ And I would say, ‘Oh no,’ then the next morning when he was having his bath she would see I had no powder.

  After we had been staying there three weeks, they started to say, ‘How is Charles? He must miss you,’ or ‘It has been nice having you to stay!’ so I knew they were expecting me to leave. I was beginning to miss Charles and would have been quite glad to go home, but had no money to get there. I wrote Edmund an unstamped letter (I didn’t bother to make a sticky mark for him) and asked him to take me back to London. He wrote back and said he would be passing that way again in a week and would gladly take me home again. So I told Joyce and I could see she was awfully relieved. I think they thought I was so comfortable I would just stay and never go home again.

  At the end of a week I packed all our things to be ready in case Edmund sent a telegram to say he was coming, but nothing happened and John and Joyce began to exchange glances, and they would ask me at breakfast if I had had any letters. One morning Joyce said, ‘Poor Charles, he has been on his own for over a month now. Are you sure you haven’t quarrelled?’

  After this I wrote Charles another letter, asking him to borr
ow enough money for me to return to London, but he wrote in return he had been so poor he had sold the rocking-chair and pawned the silver teapot. Another week passed and I felt so dreadfully I had outstayed my welcome. They never said outright, ‘When on earth are you going?’ but made remarks about spring-cleaning the spare room after I had gone. I tried to ask them for a little money to go home with — I only needed about fifteen shillings — but I did not want them to know how poor we were, they would have been so shocked. John was one of these nervy people who hate knowing the truth. Sometimes when he returned in the evening he would say to his wife, ‘Has anything awful happened while I’ve been away? If it has, please don’t tell me about it.’

  I suddenly thought the only thing to do would be to walk back. It was only one hundred miles and I would surely get a lift part of the way. So I packed all our clothes again and wrote a little note asking them to be sent G.W.R. C.O.D. I just left out a few nappies to change on the way. I planned to leave the next morning very early and take a loaf and two oranges to eat on the way. When I had finished packing the gong went for dinner and I ran downstairs feeling quite happy and determined to eat a good meal that would last a long time. When I reached the bottom of the stairs the maid was asking someone into the drawing-room and it was Edmund. He said he was in a great hurry, but if I could be ready in five minutes he would take me back to London with him, so I didn’t wait for dinner, but bundled Sandro into a shawl and got in the car. John and Joyce kept saying it was very odd to leave at that time of night, but they were so glad I was really leaving they did not protest too much.