before fireworks night, and the birth was
no less explosive.
I remember lying huddled in the dark in my
bedroom, hearing Mother’s wretched screams ring round the cottage. Her cries
were at times pitiful, pleading, then at other times so ferocious in their intensity
they were almost feral.
‘What’s
happening?’ I cried, alarmed, to my father.
‘Go to sleep, child,’ he
ordered.
I covered my ears with the sheets, but still
I could hear her bloodcurdling cries. My father slept in with me, well out of the way,
as the local doctor thumped up and down the stairs, helped by the neighbours. In 1922
there was no such thing as hospital care and the NHS was twenty-sixyears away from its conception. Women always gave birth at home with the help of a
doctor or midwife if they were lucky, and what friends and neighbours were around. The
Midwives Act had only become law twenty years prior to that, in 1902, after a group of
visionary women fought to have midwifery recognized as a profession. Before that,
anyone, and I mean anyone, could deliver a baby. Most of the time it was whoever
happened to be around and, in some drastic cases, prostitutes paid in gin could act as
midwives. Fortunately the Act became law, the Royal College of Midwives was born and
birthing standards improved.
The next morning I crept into the bedroom
where Mother would have the customary two-week lying-in period. It was then that I saw
the reason for her blood-curdling screams. She lay back against the pillow, her face
ashen with exhaustion. In her arms lay a healthy little baby boy, but her legs were tied
roughly together with rope!
Poor Mother had had a breech birth. James
had come out feet first. In those days, breech births were complicated, painful and –
without modern medicine – a major cause of death in mother and baby. They were
incredibly lucky to have survived, but so torn and damaged was she internally, the
doctor had bound her legs together to stop her moving and encourage her body to
heal.
A rope! Can you ever imagine such a thing
today?
‘Meet your baby
brother,’ she said, smiling weakly.
But my mother was nothing if not tough and
within two weeks she insisted the rope was untied and she was back scrubbing the
kitchen, blackleading the stove,baking, washing and completing the
countless other tasks that consumed her life.
As James grew up I longed to have a little
boisterous playmate to get into scrapes with, but it soon became obvious that he was a
quiet child who preferred to sit by my mother’s side.
‘You’re the boy and he’s the girl all right,’
Mother used to cackle as we grew older and the differences in our personalities became
obvious.
She was right. Tide nor time could pin me
down as I roamed the land looking for adventures and trying to avoid the clutches of PC
Risebrough.
The countryside was beyond beautiful. The
hedgerows, trees and dykes were alive with kingfishers, yellowhammers and blue tits and
on a summer day you could catch the tantalizing whiff of salt in the air off the Wash.
I’m sure that today there just aren’t the same number of birds
about. Back then the skies were black with birds and the noise of ’em all
going off during the dawn chorus could deafen you. I loved it though, it made me feel
glad just to be alive.
In the summer months the grass verges were
filled with rows of old brightly painted caravans belonging to the Romany gypsies who
came to hawk their wares in town. I’d gaze, intrigued, at the older ladies,
with their waist-length silver hair and faces as wrinkled as walnut shells. They
wandered door to door selling hazel-wood clothes pegs. I’d sit on my bike and
spy on them through the bushes. Gypsy folk fascinated me. Where had they come from and
where would they go to next? They washed up like tides on the River Great Ouse and the
next morning they’d be gone on the winds.
Father