How To Be A Woman

Chapter 12




Why You Should Have Children





A Bad Birth

It was no surprise at all to me to discover I was terrible at giving birth. No surprise at all. All that I know about birth is what I’ve seen from my mother – returning after delivering every sibling as white as death; hobbling into the house seven times with a bad story: a breech, an emergency Caesarean, a trapped nerve, a tangled cord. For her fifth – Corinne – the placenta didn’t come away, and an inexperienced midwife simply took hold of the umbilical cord and pulled it, like a dog lead attached to a recalcitrant beagle. My mother haemorrhaged so badly they had to give her four pints of blood, and when they sent her home, it was like having someone return, shell-shocked, from a war.

I was 11 – I carried the baby around like a cross between a doll and a baby monkey. We were all in fear of Mum suddenly collapsing again. She fainted in the supermarket; halfway up the stairs. It seemed like the baby was something that was essential to her, and should have stayed inside. She seemed broken without it.

The next baby – Cheryl, two years later – was worse. Mum came back with a trapped nerve in her shoulder, and couldn’t move – she lay in the front room with the curtains drawn, through a long hot summer, crying, as the house descended into a hot soup of mould, ants and scared children. Thirteen now – I fed the family on tins of cheap hot dogs, and crackers and jam; the new baby monkey in a cardboard box at my feet, along with the old one. It was awful until late September, when the hot weather breaks, and Mum finally started to walk around again, slowly; killing the ants with hot water and bleach.

So when I become pregnant at 24, I both know how to look after a baby – you put them in a cardboard box, and eat tinned hot dogs – and dread one coming out. Frankly, I don’t think I can do it. I don’t know how you do it. I’m insanely, wilfully ignorant. At my six-month check-up, I comment on an odd, modern sculpture above the bed. In white plastic, it seems to show ten pupil-less eyes getting gradually wider, as if in alarm.

‘What’s that?’ I ask, cheerfully. ‘Is it a rip-off Jeff Koons?’

‘It’s the stages of cervical dilation,’ the midwife says, puzzled. ‘From nought to ten centimetres.’

‘The … cervix?’ I say. ‘Why does the cervix dilate?’

‘That’s how the baby comes out,’ the midwife says, now looking like she’s talking to a madwoman. ‘That’s what labour is – the cervix gradually dilating, to let the baby out.’

‘The cervix?’ I repeat, wholly alarmed. ‘A baby can’t come out of that! It’s not a hole! I’ve felt it! That’s a solid thing!’

‘Well, that’s why it’s all a … bit of an effort,’ the midwife replies, as diplomatically as she can.

At that point, I know I can’t have a baby. The me-maths just aren’t adding up. I can’t open my cervix. I wouldn’t even know where to start.


So all the way through pregnancy – through the jolly doctors and can-do midwives – I feel pityingly sorry for them every time they refer to my forthcoming labour. It’s not going to happen, I say to myself. I feel as if they’ve all – nurses, obstetricians, my husband – been told that, in nine months’ time, I am going to put on a magic show, and will miraculously fly around the room like Peter Pan, or – almost literally – make monkeys fly out of my butt. The chairs are all set up and the audience is patiently waiting.

But I, of course, know I am not magic. I know I don’t have one single half-ounce of enchantment in my entire body. I’ve tried everything I can to encourage magic to happen – the birthing pool is set up in the front room, surrounded by candles waiting to be lit. I have herbs and music and things to burn. I am ready to cast the spell – but as I go first one and then two weeks over my due date, I feel like a failed shaman pointing my staff at the sky, shouting ‘BEHOLD! THE RAIN!’ as the crops continue to wither in the fields and the womenfolk wail.

When my contractions finally start, they are painful, yet useless. The baby is in the unfortunate posterior position – her skull grinds against my spine – and the midwives sadly explain that although the magic has started, I have accidentally, in my ignorance, called on bad magic, instead: posterior labours are long, arduous and unsatisfying. After 24 sleepless hours, they suggest hospital. I cry. They insist.

And in the brightness of the ward, confronted with the modern, sleek, beeping wonder of technology, the magic disappears completely. The shaman is revealed just to be an old man with a stick, and shuffles away, never to be seen again: the contractions stop entirely.

A sour-faced Swedish midwife assesses me as I sit on the bed, weeping.

‘This is what often happens with the mummies who say they want a home birth,’ she says, with some satisfaction, as she opens my legs, and inserts a hook – to monitor heart-rate – into my baby’s head. Poor baby! Poor baby! I’m so sorry! This is not what I dreamed your first touch to be! ‘They end up having to come in here, and get their tummies cut open.’

Finally, I have met someone who realises what I have known all along. This bitch sees me for what I am: incapable.

From Saturday night until Monday morning, the NHS slowly and dutifully goes through its list of actions to bail out failed women. My waters are unbroken – they break them with a crotchet hook. My contractions have stopped – they jump-start them with a pessary. My cervix is unyielding – painfully, they sweep it, just as a contraction starts. It is a sensation a little like being diced, internally, at the start of slow murder.

They are helping me because they have to, of course: these are all things the female body is supposed to do, automatically, and without fuss – like precipitation, or season change. My waters breaking, my contractions starting – these are all things my body should have done itself, with its innards hidden, like a music box.

But due to my incompetence, they now have had to prise the casing off, and a roomful of increasingly worried doctors are playing each note by hand – strumming flatly on the teeth of the mechanism. My labour has no rhythm at all. Every beat is being forced.

Of course, after two days of this bad dance, the baby started, very tentatively and apologetically, to die. On the monitor, her heartbeat sounds like a tiny toy drum. As each contraction squeezes her, you can hear the drum getting fainter – as if the Having A Baby parade was passing by in a distant street, or maybe moving away all together.

I know what comes next – intravenous oxytocin. The Drip. I have read about The Drip. Every book on childbirth teaches you to fear it. When you contract naturally, the body generally does it at a pace and intensity you can handle. The Drip, however, has no such compunction. It only has one speed: fast. It is a brutal machine – a metronome for the unrhythmic. An unstoppable atomic clock that makes you explode into contraction every minute, unfailingly. It is a pace-maker for the womb; like the red shoes in The Red Shoes. It makes you dance until you drop dead.


The pain was transformative – like going from agnosticism to evangelism in a single hour. The sky was suddenly full of God, and He had biblical pain for me. The breaks in between contractions were like licking a dripping tap in a burning house – a second of relief, but, when you turned back, it was so hot that the moisture burned from your lips; the walls had gone up, and there had never been a door or window in the first place. The only way to get out was to somehow turn inside out, like an octopus, and fly out through the magic doorway in your bones.

But I was meat and pain, pinned in place by monitor wires, and my mother had never taught me how to turn inside out.

And in the end – because I wasn’t magic and couldn’t fly monkeys out of my butt, and I’d been three days and nights in this place of failure – the doctors had to strap me down and cut me open. Instead of Lizzie coming out of me in a soft, spurting burst of magic and Milky Way, Dr Jonathan de Rosa pushed my kidneys to one side and hauled her out of me, upside-down by her feet, like a shit-covered rabbit on a butcher’s hook.


Of course, I haven’t told you the half of it. I haven’t told you about Pete crying, or the shit, or vomiting three feet up a wall, or gasping ‘mouth!’ for the gas and air, as I’d forgotten all other words. Or the nerve that Lizzie damaged with her face and how, ten years later, my right leg is still numb and cold. Or the four failed epidurals, which left each vertebra smashed and bruised, and the fluid between them feeling like hot, rotting vinegar. And the most important thing – the shock, the shock that Lizzie’s birth would hurt me so much; would make me an animal with my leg caught in the trap of my own bones, and leave me begging for the doctors to take a knife and cut me free.

For the next year, every Monday at 7.48am, I would look at the clock and remember the birth, and tremble and give thanks it was all over, and marvel that we both survived.

Lizzie was born at 8.32am – but 7.48am was when they gave me the anaesthetic, and the pain, finally, stopped.


Now, it’s Monday morning. I am on my narrow hospital bed, with everything suddenly quiet and calm, and a saline drip in my hand, and a morphine shot in my leg, and my husband on a chair, and my daughter in a glass cot, and not even flowers on the cabinet, it’s still so early and new. My eyes are huge with morphine. When I look at the photographs later, I look gorgeous. Like Stevie Nicks, wasted, on Mulholland Drive, but incongruously next to a baby.

Pete looks like shit. I didn’t notice it at the time, because, without pain, everything – even old, brown blood stains and the punishing strip-lighting – looked beautiful; but the picture that Caz and Weena take of him when they arrive, ten minutes later, shows a man with cried-red eyes and pale green skin, from exhaustion and fear and drinking all my Lucozade.

His eyes are filled with tears, he can only look at me like I am going to die, and he is going to miss me more than he could ever explain.

‘Pete,’ I say, putting my hand out to him. It has a drip in the back of it. Pete looks scared to touch it.

‘Everything they did hurt you,’ he said, and started crying. Really awful crying, with his mouth all liquid; strings of spit between the lips. ‘I couldn’t do anything. Every time I thought it was going to get better, they just did something that made you worse. When they put that thing in your back [the first of three failed shunts for the epidural] they were saying the pain would stop – but it went in wrong and you screamed, and wet yourself. They ran with the trolley down the hall. You were making this terrible sound.’

I look into the glass cot, and tap my finger on the side, like people do on goldfish bowls. Lizzie opens her eyes for a second, and stares, with wrinkled monkey brow, at me. Her face looks red against the hospital sheet. She still looks like an internal organ. She has no white in her eyes – just black. Just huge pupils – two big holes in her monkey head, that lead straight to her monkey brain. She stares at me. I stare back at her.

Pete and I look up at each other. We both know we want to smile at each other; but we cannot.

We look back at the baby.


Pain is transformative. We are programmed for it to be the fastest lesson we’ll ever learn. I learned two things from the first baby I had:



1) That being very unfit, attending only two NCT birth classes, and genuinely believing that I would probably die was not a good way to prepare for labour, all things told.

2) That once you have experienced that level of pain, the rest of your life becomes relatively easy. However awful an experience, it’s really not wasted.


Because you know what you get along with 27 stitches in your belly, or seventh- to second-degree tears in your perineum? Perspective. A whole heap of perspective. I do not mean this in a – to use the technical term – ‘wanky way’. But in many cases, a furious, 24-hour dose of wildly intolerable pain sorts out many of the more fretful, dolorous aspects of modern life.

It is like a mental bushfire. You get rid of a lot of emotional deadwood. Do you currently get wound up about poor customer service, or ill-made sandwiches, or how your legs look? You won’t when you’ve been dragged backwards through the brightly burning gates of hell during a 48-hour labour!

In that respect, childbirth is far superior to Sertraline, or therapy. Fairly early on in the event, you will have the most dazzlingly simple revelation of your life: that the only thing that really matters, in this whole goddamn crazy mixed-up world, is whether or not there’s something the size of a cat stuck in your cervix, and that any day when you do not have a cat stuck in your cervix will be, by default, wholly perfect in every way.

Around the time that a man with giant hands comes towards you with some forceps the size of BBQ tongs, you think, Perspective. Yes, yes I do have some perspective now. I doubt that I will get angry about Norwich union   changing its name to ‘Aviva’ ever again.

To be frank, childbirth gives a woman a gigantic set of balls. The high you get as you realise it’s all over, and that you didn’t actually die, can last the rest of your life. Off their faces with euphoria, and bucked by how brave they were, new mothers finally tell the in-laws to back off, dye their hair red, get driving lessons, go self-employed, learn to use a drill, experiment with Thai condiments, make cheerful jokes about incontinence, and stop being scared of the dark.


In short, a dose of pain that intense turns you from a girl into a woman. There are other ways of achieving the same effect – as outlined in Chapter 15 – but minute for minute, it’s one of the most effective ways of changing your life. If I compare how I am now to who I was before I gave birth for the first time, the transformation is almost total. Opening my cervix opened my ‘doors of perception’ more than drugs ever did – to be frank, all I learned from Ecstasy was that, if you’re caned enough, you can dance on a podium to someone saying ‘Time to go home now, ladies and gentlemen’ over and over again on a PA.

Birth, on the other hand, taught me a great many things. Before my first labour, here’s a list of what I was scared of: the dark. Demons. UFO invasion. The sudden dawning of a new Ice Age. The often-reported phenomenon of ‘The Hag’ – where a sleeper wakes up to find themselves paralysed, with a hag sitting on their chest. Scary movies. Pain. Hospitals. General anaesthetic. Insanity. Death. Going up or down a very tall ladder. Spiders. Speaking in public. Talking to people with very strong foreign or regional accents. Driving lessons – particularly changing gear. Cobwebs. Going bald. Lighting fireworks. Asking for help, unusually rapid incoming tides, and ever being sent, in a professional capacity, to interview Lou Reed – who is infamously very grumpy.



After I had the baby, here’s what I was scared of: waking up, and finding out that the baby had somehow got back inside me, and needed to be heaved back out again. And that was it. Although I don’t recommend anyone have a three-day posterior labour, concluding in an emergency C-section, if you are going to have one, it’s good to know it’s really not a wasted experience. You basically come out of that operating theatre like Tina Turner in Mad Max: Beyond The Thunderdome, but lactating.




Child Rearing

Indeed, in the early years of motherhood, all the similes I could think of involved pugilism, battle and mettle. Those with no children are apt to think of parenthood as some winsome idyll, primarily revolving around warm milk, bubble-blowing and hugs.

For those engaged in it, however, the language is often military; bordering, at times, on Colonel Kurtz in Vietnam. Many consider Marlon Brando’s turn in Apocalypse Now as one of the bravura performances of Hollywood. Personally, I suspect he’d recently looked after colicky three-month-old twins for a week, and based it on that.

The parallels to war are multiple: you wear the same clothes, day in, day out; you keep saying, hopefully, ‘It’ll all be over by Christmas’; it’s long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror; you get repeatedly infested by vermin; no one seems to know what’s really going on; you will only talk about the true realities of your experiences with other veterans; and you often find yourself lying in the middle of a field in France, at 4am, crying for your mother – although the latter tends to be because you’ve contracted mastitis on a Eurocamp holiday, and realised you’ve only packed one sandal for the six-year-old rather than because you can see your exploded, trousered leg, 20 yards away, and know Wilfred Owen has already started writing a poem about you.

But whilst it’s easy to slide into a gin-sodden, decade-long bout of Lego-stippled self-pity, I prefer to look at the whole business of being a mother from a more positive angle.

Firstly, and most obviously, there is the sheer emotional, intellectual, physical, chemical pleasure of your children. The honest truth is that the world holds no greater gratification than lying in bed with your children, putting your leg on top of them, in a semi-crushing manner, whilst saying, sternly, ‘You are a poo.’

￡15,000 bottles of vintage champagne; hot-air balloons flying over wildebeest migrations; sharkskin shoes with a diamond on the sole; Paris: these are all, ultimately, consolation prizes for those who don’t have access to a small, ideally slightly grubby child that they can mess around with, poke and squash a little – high on ridiculous love.

It’s the silliness – the profligacy, and the silliness – that’s so dizzying: a seven-year-old will run downstairs, kiss you hard, and then run back upstairs again; all in less than 30 seconds. It’s as urgent an item on their daily agenda as eating, or singing. It’s like being mugged by Cupid.

You, in turn, observe yourself from a distance, simply astonished by the quantities of love you manufacture. It is endless. Your adoration may grow weary but it will never end: it becomes the fuel of your head, your body and your heart. It powers you through the pouring rain, delivering forgotten raincoats for lunch-time play; works overtime, paying for shoes and puppets; keeps you up all night, easing cough, fever and pain – like lust used to, but much, much stronger.

And the ultimate simplicity of it is awe-inspiring. All you ever want to know – the only question that really matters – is: are the children all right? Are they happy? Are they safe? And so long as the answer is ‘Yes’, nothing, ultimately, matters. You come across this passage in the The Grapes of Wrath, and go cold at the truth: ‘How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can’t scare him – he has known a fear beyond every other.’

There is a black and white picture in my hallway, of me, Nancy and Lizzie in the bath, when Nancy was eight months old, and Lizzie two-and-a-half. I am gently biting Lizzie. Nancy, in turn, is gumming my face. All eyes are on the person taking the picture – Pete, who was, as the slight camera-wobble shows, laughing. There we are – a tangle of half-shared DNA, all inter-locking with each other; all being watched over by the one who loves us best. If I had to explain to someone what ‘happiness’ is, I would show them this picture.

‘It’s biting some kids in a bath, as their dad shouts “Bite your mum’s face! It’s more sensitive there!”,’ I would say.

But it’s not as if we don’t know about the oozy, woozy sunrise love of becoming a parent. The spangled, Care Bear world of mothering has been long documented. But – whilst the almost indescribable joys of selfless love are not to be underestimated – it does a woman good to ponder parenthood from this, alternative angle, too: ‘What’s in it for me? What’s the good stuff? What am I going to get out of this?’ Like you’re mooching past the Shop of Sperm, ovaries in hand, wondering whether to go in.

Currently, ten years down the line, I can tell you what I’ve got out of it, so far. It’s a surprisingly good deal:


ONE: A superlative understanding of how long an hour is. Before I had children, I could spend an hour doing absolutely nothing. Nothing. Indeed, an hour was chickenfeed. I could spend whole days with absolutely no achievement at all. Ask me how my week had been, and I would puff my cheeks out and go, ‘Phew! I have been flat out! There is no rest for the wicked! It’s end-to-end stuff! I am burning the candle at both ends, my friend’ – when all I had really done was maybe write a single article, and then half-heartedly started sorting out the kitchen drawers, before Big Brother came on, and I left all the egg whisks on the floor, for Pete to tread on.

Three days after having Lizzie, however, I suddenly realised the riches I had squandered. An hour! Oh man, what I could do with an hour now! Sitting on a rocking chair, holding a fitfully sleeping newborn – remote control tantalisingly out of reach – all I could do was watch the huge railway clock on the wall, slowly ticking away each second; thousands of them, in which I could do nothing at all. Now, of course, all I could think of was how busy I would be, if I could have my life back, and someone else were holding the baby.

Oh man, I could be learning French now, if I didn’t have this baby, I would think, dolefully. In an hour, I could learn how to order a coffee, a cab and a pancake. Just an hour! If my mother wasn’t so sodding selfish, and simply gave up her life to come here and babysit, I could learn how to tie sailor’s knots! Bag a Munro! Take in the exhibition of ancient maps at the British Museum! Finally buy a curtain for the bedroom instead of thinking it would be a ‘fun thing’ to do ‘when the baby comes’. WHY did I waste all that time before? OH WHY OH WHY? Now I’m not going to be able to do this for years. I will be 50 before I speak French. I am a fool.

This sudden, hurtling realisation about the fleetingness of time often comes hand in hand with:


TWO: A sudden, hurtling increase in ambition. Hey, work is for bread-heads, and squares, I used to think, before having kids. You won’t find me selling out my soul to The Man! No – I am happy doing bare minimum, and spending all my spare time on my fascinating hobbies of smoking marijuana, hand-making Christmas cards, fannying away nine hours a day on internet chatboards, having long breakfasts with friends, and watching Cheers. Stroll on, The Man – and take all your ephemeral trappings of success with you!


Within three weeks of having Lizzie, my opinions on this had taken a 360 degree turn. When people ask my children ‘What does mummy do?’, I don’t want them to look embarrassed, and say ‘She knows Cliff Clavin’s mother’s name’, I thought, sadly, looking down at Lizzie’s soon-to-be embarrassed face. I want her to say, ‘She is the CEO of the international imagineering company that brought peace to the Middle East. And she knows Cliff Clavin’s mother’s name.’ Oh Lizzie, I have let you down. I tell you what, little dude – if you just have a three-year-long nap, starting now, I’ll sort it all out. I get it now. I have to get on with stuff. I am going to be a high flier.

So, in the tiny windows of time that your child is asleep or someone else is looking after her, you find yourself becoming almost superhumanly productive.

Give a new mother a sleeping child for an hour, and she can achieve ten times more than a childless person. ‘Multi-tasking’ doesn’t come near to the quantum productivity of someone putting in an online grocery order, writing a report, cooking the tea, counselling a weeping friend on the phone, mending a broken hoover – all within the space of a 3pm nap.

The aphorism ‘If you want something done, ask a busy woman’ is in direct acknowledgement of the efficiency bootcamp parenthood puts you through. People with twins can even throw their voice into an adjacent room, whilst having an ostensibly uninterrupted conversation with an older child. It really is quite magic.

If you employ a parent in your place of work, yes, they may occasionally have to take the day off, to nurse a child through Dengue fever. But my God, I bet they’re the only people who know the correct way to kick the photocopier when it’s broken, and can knock you up a six-month strategy plan in the time it takes for the elevator to go from the 24th floor to the lobby.


THREE: Nothing is impossible any more. One thing’s for sure: by the time your child is two years old, you will look back at what you were like before you had a child, and regard yourself as a weak, spineless, dandified, pampered, ineffectual, shallow time-wasting dilettante – essentially Hugh Laurie in Blackadder, coming into a room and screaming, ‘Row row row your boat gently down the stream/Belts off trousers down isn’t life a scream WOOF!’

Every parent has their particular moment where they realised that, since they’d had a child, nothing really fazed them any more. For me, it was the day that potty-training Lizzie went wrong, and I had to kick a poo, across a falconry display, in a marquee, at Regent’s Park Zoo. I had the left foot of Beckham, the icy composure of Audrey Hepburn on a catwalk, and the quick-thinking disposal nous of whoever it was that first thought of entombing radioactive material in concrete.

I can assure you, compared to that, the day I had only 27 minutes to get from my house, in North London, to 10 Downing Street, to interview the prime minister – then received a phone call telling me the taxi was arbitrarily cancelled – was nothing.

And, of course, I made the interview on time. And you know why? Because I’M A MUM. I technically outrank Barack Obama in at least nine categories.




A Good Birth

Two and a half years later, I’m doing it all over again: I’ve put a baby inside me, allowed its head to grow to an inadvisably large circumference, and now I have to trouble my cervix with that whole dilation thing.

This time around, though, I’m doing things differently. For starters, I haven’t spent the last two months of my pregnancy thinking, Let Christmas last forever! Every morning can start with two mince pies, served with cream, six Miniature Heroes and some Pringles! It’s Crisp-mas! Hurrah for pregnant me!

As a result, I haven’t put on three stone, and I’m capable of things like ‘walking’, ‘standing’ and ‘getting off the sofa without making an Oooof! sound’. I’ve attended all my birth classes – including a birth-visualisation course, in which a hypnotically voiced woman repeatedly reminds me that my cervix really is a trapdoor, and that mentally jamming a chair against it whilst going ‘Yeah – like that’s going to happen’ is not useful for anyone – least of all me. It’s taken me until I’m 27 years old, but I now genuinely believe that a cervix really is a hole.

And finally, this time, I have acknowledged something that I just couldn’t before: it’s not going to kill me.

Deep down, this is what I really believed, the first time I was pregnant. That was the Kraken my birth was sunk by. I found labour and birth truly beyond imagining and – like a medieval peasant, denying anything beyond their conception – presumed this must mean that I would simply, and sadly, have to die when it happened. I was pleased – if incredulous – that other mothers managed to get through it alive; but nobly resigned to my own, poignant gravestone in a churchyard: ‘Died in childbirth. 2001. Like Miss Melly in Gone With the Wind.’

There is no such virgin fear now, though – no maudlin nine-month dreams of coffins, widowers and wailing babies. I am not penning my own eulogy to myself – ‘She was a reasonably fair person, who could always accessorise well with gloves’ – whilst weeping.

Now I know how birth works – now I’ve been talked through labour, by that quiet-voiced woman – I feel I’ve finally been told what my task is. It’s simple – so simple I’m amazed I didn’t know it before. One morning I am going to wake up, and before I sleep again, I will have to tick off a long list of contractions, one by one. And when I get to the last one, I will have my girl. Each one of these will be a job in itself – a minute-long experience which would alarm anyone suddenly struck by it, without warning – but I know the one fact that makes it easy: there is nothing awry. Everything is as it should be. Unlike all other pain on earth, these don’t signal something going wrong but something going right.

This is what I did not realise the first time, when I prayed wildly for the pains to stop. I didn’t know then that these pains were actually the answer, and that their every alternative was much, much worse. Now I know what they are, and what they’re for, I greet each one with calm cheer: 60 seconds to breathe through, as limp as a sleeping child, so that there is nowhere for this wash of sensation to snag – no tensed muscle it can get caught on. I am a clear glass of water; leaf-smoke blown sideways in the wind; empty space, for a moon to sail through.

By the time I get to the hospital, I’m contracting so hard I dramatically drop to my knees in the doorway, and clutch at the nearest object – a lifesize statue of the Virgin Mary. Four nurses have to run to stop it toppling, and crushing me.

For this birth, I don’t lie on a bed, helpless – waiting for a baby to be delivered, by room service. I’ve been told to walk, and I do – I pace miles and miles, like I’m on my way to Bethlehem. I use the hospital corridors like the world’s slowest, fattest race track. I walk for four hours, non-stop. Oh Nancy! I walk from St Paul’s to Hammersmith for you, barefoot, quietly sighing, from Angel to Oval, the Palace to the Heath. Your head is like stone against bone – a quiet pressure I can’t stop now, and neither can you. Gravity is the magic I couldn’t find before, strapped to the bed, two years ago. Gravity was the spell I should have invoked. I was looking in all the wrong grimoires.


After four hours of pacing, everything changes, and I know I have walked far enough. I climb into the pool, and push Nancy out in five, short bursts. As her face appears – a purple Shar Pei puppy, with a lard-slicked ’fro – even I can see it’s too late to go wrong now.

‘That was easy!’ I shout, the first words out of my mouth, before she has even left the water; as the midwives stand by with towels, waiting to wrap her. ‘That was easy! Why doesn’t anyone tell you it’s so easy!’