birth stories and bringing up children

During the war maternity wings of London hospitals were evacuated to country areas. For Sue's birth in 1947 I had registered with the City of Lodon hospital, but even though the war had been over for two years I was sent out to Hertfordshire to Brocket hall. Lord Brocket had been exiled to Isle of Man because of his pro-German leanings and his home had housed many leading Nazis and had been commandeered for the hospital.
Worried that they might not get us to the delivery room on time all the way from London, the authoritied put us up in a hostel for the week before the baby was due. It was a small village close to Brocket Hall. All the women hated it there and we were desparately trying to bring our labour on early. Nearby the hostel there was a very steep hill leading up to a wood, and we decided on the Saturday night to sneak out of the hostel and run up the hill in an effort to speed up our babies' entry into the world.
What a sight - six hugely pregnant women in the dead of night running up a steep hill. But an even stranger sight was us all flying down again screaming and coverin our heads with our arms because we had heard bats squeaking.
On the Sunday afternoon I went into the early stages of labour and was transferred to Brocket hall. The house was still a fine buuilding and had all the original wallpaper in the main room, our ward. The wallpaper had huge malignant looking peacocks strutting across lawns, and each of them fixed you with an evil eye. I had horribly lurid dreams. Whether it was the bad dream or the bats squeakig I do not know, but Sue was born with lots of dark hair stood straight up on end.
When Joan was born we lived in a bungalow near the Welsh Harp, Wembley. To us it seemed sacious after the cramped conditios we previously lived in. So I decided to have the baby at home. The midwife had long talks with jerry about the preparations for the event and he appeared to be calm and quite certain he could cope with the boiling water bit.On the Friday I had prepared, as always, our weekly chicken soup and barley in my one large cooking pot and the rest of the meal was almost ready when I went into labour. I had hardly got the words out of my mouth when, to my horror, Jerry rushed into the kitchen, picked up the steaming pot of soup, rushed into the garden and threw the whole lot over the forsythia bush so that he could fill the pot with boiling water. I nearly cried as I saw our supper scattered over the garden, but ended up laughing hysterically as Jerry started scrubbing everything in sight. He had forgotten to phone the midwife.
When she came and examined me the verdict was "That won't arrive until morning. I'll see you then." Poor Jerry was horrified but tried hard to hide his fears. He put Sue to bed and then came and lay down besdie me to comfort me. It was not the calmest night of our lives but we lasted out until 8am when the midwife arrived. By 9.20 am Joan was born, the very same time of the morning that Sue had been born.
Jerry brought Sue in to see her little sister. She took one look and rushed out of the room screaming. Soon after I heard a tap on my bedroom window. It was my mother. She had a cold and wouldn't come in for fear of infecting us. I lifted Joan up for her to see and off she went to the shop. I looked out of the window and there on my front lawn were a group of crocuses, blue and white oes, the first of the year. A lovely greeting for my new baby.
When Sue was born current thinking on child care was Bowlby oriented. The media and everyone around me insisted that a child needed its mother's total attention for the first five years of its life. There was no substitute for a mother's love in bringing up a baby. That was the line of the Communist Party too at that time.
The hospital where Sue was born trained mothers into firstly 3 hourly and then 4 hourly breast-feeding. One didn't feed the baby in between even if she was screaming with hunger.
Nor did you give her comforting cuddles. Everything as done by the book. There was a prescribed time for everything, especially potty-training, and you were a failure if your child's developpment didn't conform to the Bowlby standards. What a worry it all was. But luckily Sue did develop just as the book predicted. My mother had famously informed me that I was lucky to have a mother who had had children! Bt despite this, I had no real guidance or help and certainly no real knowledge of how to raise a child. Woman's Hour and the women's magazines were my instructors. They made it quite clear that you shouldn't worry your bread-winning husband with your child problems, or you would lose him to another woman. I always had the children tucked up in bed before Jerry came home from work, and his supper was always ready for him. I was such a good wife - no magazine could fault me.
Sue was a Mabel lucy Atwell baby, pretty, chubby and with curly hair. She was a laughing girl. Complete strangers would come over to me to comment on how sweet she was. From the start she liked books and would sit happily in her cot pretending to read them.
By the time Joan was born Dr Spock's books on baby care were fashionable. What a relief! He gave mothers permission to respond to the child's needs and not to be a slave to prescribed times for this and that. He gave you norms but set no absolutes for children's develoopment. So one didn't ever need to feel a failure. He helped us to relax and enjoy our babies more.
Joan was a very active baby. She seemed in a hurry to grow up. Not only was he walking when she was only 11 months old, but she also climbed up the rails outside our local post office, which sent me rushing to her rescue. From an early age she was drawing and painting bright pictures. I have no idea why, but trains were her favourite subject and there were always people waving. One summer evening Joan went missing and just as i was getting frantic, she turned up pushing her doll's pram, wearing a pair of my high heeled shoes, with a policeman in tow. He had found her purposefully pushing her pram about a mile away from our hoe. Her repy when he asked her where she was going was that she was following the moon. Sue was more practical in her adventures. One day when she was playing shops I joined in saying "I'd like a pound of steak please". The next time I looked up from my chores I rrealised she was nowhere in the house. he had taken my ration book and purse from my bag and walked to our local butcher across a couple of roads. On her insistence that mummy wanted a pound of steak the butcher had given it to her and taken the money and ration stamps proffered - putting the rest on the slate. I had to rush it back to him and explain, as I couldn't afford steak!
The girls were always good friends. With three and a half years between them, Joan looked up to Sue and followed her into mischief. They were very different in character,, which meant that i was able to love each of them equally for their differences as well as their similarities. No favourites.
As they grew up it always worried me that I had saddled them with a dreadful burden. Not only did they have to contend wth being Jewish, but they had a factory worker for a father and a communist party member for a mother. Not the best of backgrounds for young grammar school girls. They came on every political march and every demo with me. They helped me canvass during elections and they were active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. We all nursed our blisters together after the Aldermaston marches.
Sue played guitar and sang all the peace songs at socials and our house was always filled with youngsters Then came the teenage parties. One time we came home to find that there had been a fight. Blood was smeared on the walls and trailed down the stair carpet. The phone was pulled from the wall and the front garden was full of broken bottles. One boy had been knifed and Sue had managed to get him to hospital. The police arrived soon after we got home and began asking pertinent questios. Apparently a gang of rough youths had tried to gatecrash the party and when refused entry they started the fight. We discovered that some of our belongings had been stolen, including Jerry's open razors. That event started a long-running row between jerry and i about how much freedom the girls should have. He couldn't cope with his feelings when Sue and joan started to be sexually active and have lots of boyfriends. Those late teenage years were very problematic and played havoc with our already strained marriage.
He became very angry towards Sue and I could never understand why. I knew he loved her, yet he would say the most hurtful things and swear at her in language I had never heard him use before. How she coped with it I will never know. I could not stand it and for a while I left him. But that was even worse because not a day went by without him threatening either to kill himself or to kill me. He would phone me first thing in the morning before I went to work and cry. He put pressure on my mother to make me go back to him and she took his side; and he put pressure on Joan, which was the last straw, so I returned after a lot of discussions as to how we could best live together