Early morning

 It's early in the morning and still dark.

This is just me sitting chatting with you, because I'm awake.

Furry purry Clarence was up well before first light, full of love and affection. Then for a while he sat on the windowsill, just a pointy silhouette against the moonlight and the light from the far-off streetlights, watching the garden. Then he was ready to start the day. It begins (for him) with a small plate of food on the back doorstep, the terms on which he agrees to leave the house in cold damp February. He's more willing to go out now he's confident he can call this home and he'll be allowed back in. Later on, when I make my bed and get dressed, he'll have returned to the back doorstep, to come in for a BIG plate of food then a long sleep, curled up on the chair in my bedroom.

Meanwhile, I've made a cup of tea and gone back to bed. It'd half-past five, very dark outside.

Later this morning my friend Carole is coming to see me. She and I have known each other since I first moved to Hastings in my early 20s — we met through the National Childbirth Trust, back in the day when it was challenging hospital practice and revolutionising women's experience of birth and breastfeeding. We were all reading Ina May Gaskin and Michel Odent, Frederick Leboyer and Sheila Kitzinger. Ground-breaking times. I was expecting my first baby and Carole her second. Those babies are in their forties now, very capable people, friends on Facebook, holding together the connections made even before they were born.

There's something about those relationships that go back a long way. When you meet up, it's within a context of shared memory, and what you used to be when you were young is still present in the conversation; no need to mention it or reminisce, it's just there, understood. We remember.

Even thinking about it sets off memories. Going up to London on the train to hear Sheila Kitzinger speak, when our Grace was a new baby. Instead of carrying her in the sling I took her in a Moses basket, with spare nappies and wipes and muslins, so she had somewhere to lie down and sleep because it would be a whole day. I still think that was a good idea. I remember being in the hospital (for a whole month!) before our Rosie was born, where I met Nan (in the next bed). Nan had a dream one night that the obstetrician tried to burgle her house but she wouldn't let him in. When they tried to induce the birth of her baby, Nan's body absolutely refused. Nope. 

That month was a good one — we women in the ante-natal ward got on like a house on fire; the nurses used to come and tell us off for laughing, sternly reminding us we were there to rest. The woman who was there before Nan arrived was on her 17th pregnancy, desperately hoping for her first live birth. 😭 So very sad. Then there was a fragile (looking) little lass with great big eyes and dark curly hair, petite and quietly spoken. But she was fiery. Her husband came to visit her, big and brawny and tattooed. We all sat in our beds quietly and looked at him, because we'd heard she pushed him down the stairs 😲. 

At the time I was reading a book by Rudolf Steiner — his book Occult Science which sounds creepy but isn't. One of the midwives came by and saw it by my bed. "D'you think that's going to help you?" she asked, somewhat aggressively. "With what?" I said. "Well . . . childbirth," she replied. But that's not what it was about. My horizons hadn't shrunk that much!

When my baby was born, another woman who had been in the ante-natal ward got very scared, because I went off to the delivery suite and shortly after she heard someone screaming, and thought it was me and that birth must be terrible because I looked so calm when I left. It wasn't me, and I continued calm. 

That baby — Rosie — was born on a beautiful March morning, so clear and bright. An induced birth, as they mostly were in those days. My understanding was that the midwives were there to take care of the physical aspects of birth, and my job was to hold the spiritual energies, to maintain it as a sacred space, a holy event. I'm not so sure they did their part so very well — I had a midline episiotomy that extended and altered my physical structure ever since — but yes, it was holy and quiet, and Rosie looked like a little buddha when she was born, a peaceful, perfect face, soft and pink.

In the post-natal ward the obstetrician came round and said, "What did you have?" I resisted the temptation to say, "a baby," and politely said, "A girl".

"Ah!" said he. "Another one to argue and fight with the doctors." So I just said, "Yes."

I met him one more time when I was expecting Grace, my second child — Mr Alaili of "one more Caesarian and I get my Mercedes" cocktail party fame. After the first go round I resolved I'd rather have a baby in a ditch than an obstetric department; I wanted a home birth but my doctor at the time didn't do that. So I settled for what was called the GP unit — with births assisted by community midwives with family doctors as back-up. When I went for an ante-natal check-up, the obstetrician was doing his rounds. He wanted to see me. He sent the midwives out and spent several minutes lecturing me on why I should choose the obstetric unit over the GP unit. When he'd finally finished I said, "Thank you. I'll bear that in mind," and off he went in a puff of green smoke. The midwives came back into my cubicle chortling " 'I'll bear that in mind!' " They thought it was hilarious. I was quite surprised, not grasping that it was expected I should treat him like God. I suppose I might have done if he'd reminded me of God, but he didn't.

Then there was the woman — Ajax's mother, was her name Letitia? I can't remember — who painted a face on her pregnant belly. You know how the umbilicus protrudes when you're pregnant? She made that the nose and did eyes and a smiley mouth to go with it. Mr Alaili examined her with no comment at all. Jeepers.

Later, when my twins were born, I'd changed my GP to Dr Mitchell, who was happy to do a home birth; but the community midwives were worried about it. So my twins were also born in hospital, on the proviso that I would come straight home afterward, not go to the postnatal ward where they'd be put in a nursery and fed cow milk. There was an argument about that, too. Our Hebe was born with chin presenting, and came into the world very bruised, and they were born a month early. So when I said I was going home, they refused to let me get dressed, and I had to walk down our street where the ambulance dropped me off, holding my babies and still wearing a nighty. 

My midwife for that birth was the lovely Amy Noakes, such a superb midwife. It was the first time I met her. My labours would slow right down when I went into hospital, because I deeply distrusted the environment — the same happens to a goat (or any other animal I suppose) if you disturb her in labour). When I finally got my home birth on my fifth baby, it was all done and dusted in four hours. But with our twins we were up all night, doctor very weary, husband very weary, me sustained by that spiritual energy that powers through you when you give birth. And at six in the morning the shift changed and Amy Noakes walked through the door and I could tell it would all be all right. Some junior doctors wanted to come in and see twins born and she told them to clear off. She said to my doctor, "Haven't you got a morning surgery? Yes? Well, go and do it, then." And she turned and looked at me and said, "Right. Let's get these babies born." And that's what we did.

So many memories from so long ago. There's another memory, too, from that time, of a friend carrying twins at the same time as I was, but hers came too early and she lost them. So desperately sad. Very, very bravely, she came to see my twins in the first few days of their life, and looked at them, and held them, and quietly went her way.

And also a memory of my aunt (who was my godmother), married to an abusive and controlling man who kept her as a virtual prisoner. But every year he came down from Yorkshire to the south coast for a trade union conference, and she asked if she could come with him to see my babies. He allowed her just twenty minutes to come in to my home (where she'd never been ) and see them. She looked at them very carefully, and held them, and she had tears in her eyes. I didn't know at that time that she'd been pregnant but he made her have an abortion, said she'd be an unfit mother. Nobody would have made a better mother than my auntie Jessie. Lord, the world is full of sadness, isn't it?

Well, now it's an hour later. I hope your day is going well. Did it bring back your own memories, all this talk of babies being born?

Later on Carole will come by, and we'll have a cup of tea together, and we won't talk about these times that are gone, but the silken web of them is what wove and carried our friendship clear through almost fifty years.