The Fruit of the Tree (3 page)

On a sudden inspiration I telephoned Susan, whom I recalled I had invited to tea on the following day, and she promptly drove over to escort me to the maternity home.

Before leaving home, I rang my mother-in-law to see if Michael had called in on his way home. I had the satisfaction of delivering my dramatic news to my mother-in-law with a calmness I did not feel. Michael was immediately dispatched homewards, to share some part of the night with me.

And a long and lonely night it was, slightly mitigated by Michael’s stay at my side for two or three hours, and a restless slumber induced by an injection in the early hours of the morning. Michael was dismissed at this point and, with obvious relief, returned home to get some sleep himself. He was completely out of his element in a situation where there was nothing he could physically do to improve it.

I awoke some time before dawn, writhing and tossing just like a character in a television drama. It was the worse moment of labour, for once in the delivery room the contractions were hardly strong enough to encourage me to push.

‘You’re wasting the contractions!’ bemoaned the nurse, and suddenly I remembered that babies must not take too long actually being born. I glanced at the clock and saw that I had been in the delivery room for nearly an hour.

‘Soon they’ll get out the forceps.’ I thought. And I pushed!

‘That’s it! That’s it! Come on!’ exhorted the nurse.

And suddenly with a slithering sensation, my baby was born and I saw his tiny silhouette, as the nurse held him aloft; and then he was in my arms, a small round bundle with a screwed up face.

My son Robert!

3. Muddling Along

Motherhood did not come to me with a great burst of maternal emotions. Sad to say, my initial feelings were far more related to pride in having done the production job without too much fuss, than any great love for the small human being who purported to be a very close relation.

I was surprised at the frequency with which he was presented to me for feeding and I did not immediately warm to this time-consuming stranger, for I had difficulty believing in my role as mother to him.

Nevertheless, as I got to know him, I was full of admiration for him, for he blossomed before my eyes, and showed signs of becoming a beautiful baby. My hackles rose, therefore, at the statement of one of the nurses, who made what I took to be a rather derogatory comment in the first couple of days of his life: ‘Isn’t he funny? He looks like a little old Jew.’

Huffily, I replied, ‘Well, he is. At least, he’s Jewish.’

I had never been a lover of babies as a group. Nor had I really known any as individuals, and my expectations were low. It came as something of a surprise to me therefore to find that I had produced what must surely be the most perfect baby in the world. During the day, he lay in a cot at the foot of my bed. Most of the time he slept contentedly, and there was rarely a tear from him.

I took full advantage of the fairly leisurely time in the maternity home, which remained so until the seventh day of my stay, when I received instruction in the skills of nappy changing and baby bathing, with a carte blanche to try them out on my own squirming infant. I was also told to make my own bed with the help of the nurse, and this was a rather rude awakening. By the time I was finished, I was puffing and blowing after the strenuous effort. But it had one great advantage; I learned how to make ‘hospital corners’ and I became quite obsessional about them after that. Michael’s toes never poked out of the bottom of the bed again.

I had arranged to stay with my parents on my departure from the maternity home. However, when I mentioned this fact, I fell foul of Sister, who it seemed had already summed me up as idle and immature.

‘You can’t go gallivanting off to London with a young baby.’ she told me.

She must have had some vision of me doing the rounds of nightclubs, theatres and parties, and I didn’t know how to convince her that I really wasn’t going to gallivant, just to be cared for by my own mother while I mastered the complicated skills of mothercraft.

I enjoyed my return to my own territory with baby Robert, who maintained his placid behaviour pattern. True, he awoke in the night for his feeds, which I considered to be a form of Chinese torture, but this could not be classed as naughtiness. My two married sisters-in-law, Sonia and Karla, each with a son of their own, assured me I was extremely lucky to have such a contented baby.

Nevertheless, once we arrived back in Guildford, I suffered from total exhaustion, causing me to fall asleep after the six a.m. feed and awake to discover the office below my bedroom full of activity and noise, and Robert all ready for the ten o’clock feed.

Day after day, I muddled through the baths, feeds and nappy changes, finding little time for anything else, for the carrying out of these tasks seemed enormously time-consuming. Any faint resemblance to a routine was based on a suggestion from my old school-friend Pam: ‘Look after the baby, feed the family, keep up with the washing and don’t worry about anything else.’

It was difficult to obey the last order, but I knew her set of priorities was correct, and Robert, sleepy and well satisfied after each feed, was the proof of the pudding.

Only one cloud marred his otherwise untroubled babyhood, when at six weeks old, he developed an ugly breast abscess. After a week of antibiotics, this was removed by general anaesthetic, and special tiny equipment had to be brought into the casualty department where the operation took place. The nurses made a great fuss of baby Robert when he was brought in during the next few days; they said they were used to seeing much bigger children with scrapes on their knees.

Despite the varying times of my arrival at the casualty department for dressings of the wound, the receptionist was brisk but sympathetic. Her conversation suggested she imagined the baby was playing me up, and I perpetuated that injustice, rather than admit that I just couldn’t get up in the mornings, after the dreadful night feeds.

The whole abscess episode was a bit of a nuisance, disrupting what little routine I had. But I didn’t really worry about Robert, because I’d heard so many times what hardy creatures babies are. Four years later, I had cause to doubt that generalisation, and remembered wryly my simple faith that all would be well.

The months went by and we progressed through breast-feeding to mixed feeding and from incisors to molars, and still Robert was happy. Now he chose to eat at more civilised times and we all breakfasted together on boiled eggs. The days of the hurried slice of toast in a vertical position were over. We had become a family!

Despite a large and well-justified inferiority complex about my inability to run the home, I felt I had made a fairly successful job of bringing up the baby, and for the first time in my married life, I gained some confidence. Baby Robert appeared to be a credit to me, and Michael often said, ‘I always knew you’d be a good mother.’

But although I spent much time reading articles on babies, on aspects of feeding and weaning, teething and toilet training, I did not really build a relationship with Robert when he was a tiny baby. Perhaps I would have been better advised to put away the books and get down on the floor to play with him, but I was too guilty about my inadequacies as a housewife to spend time in the enjoyment of play.

It was Michael who had a special relationship with Robert. As the oldest of four children, Michael was totally at ease in the presence of little ones. Immediately recognised by small boys as a ‘romper’ and ‘rough-and-tumbler’, and by larger boys as the sort of uncle-figure who would allow them to help with pasting, tarring or whitewashing jobs, he could in addition communicate with this foot-long creature, at present devoid of any appreciable powers of mobility or conversation. He would pick the little boy up with two hands and, holding him a few inches away from his face, address him solemnly, carefully articulating his words.

‘Say, “Dad-dy, Dad-dy”.’

And the baby, no more than a few months old, would watch goggle-eyed and form shapes with his mouth in imitation or response.

In time, he learned to recognise the pale blue Wolseley which Michael drove and would shriek with delight at the sight of his father approaching, and howl at his often speedy departure, en route to another job.

When Robert was in the middle of his first year, the plumbing business began to take up more of my time. Michael’s secretary had left and one of the plumbers had been installed in the front office. In theory, he would be a clerk-cum-emergency plumber. In practice, there were so many emergencies that the telephone rang incessantly, calling him away, while the bookkeeping ground to a halt.

For the next few months, I answered the telephone more than a dozen times a day, and became an expert on ball-valves and leaks, often advising panicking housewives to ‘…turn the water off at the stopcock, and make a small hole in the ceiling, to prevent the ceiling coming down.’ I don’t suppose a single housewife ever took notice of my advice, and while I dispensed it, Robert sat poised—mid-bosom (mine) or bare-bottomed (his)—awaiting my attention.

Luckily for me during this period, Robert had an easy-going temperament. He had become an attractive baby with dark curls, blue-green eyes and a dimple in one cheek. It was a period in his life I later looked back on with nostalgia, for his personality had developed, but he was not yet old enough or accomplished enough to be mischievous. He would speed from room to room on all fours, but his agility had not yet become a source of danger. Sometimes he rode on Michael’s shoulders, sitting proudly, his back erect like a young horseman, surveying the scene around him. But he was happy to sit in the pram too, watching traffic and people passing by. Indeed, because of his shrieks of joy when he recognised a familiar face, he made more friends than I had amongst the local people. Both my elderly neighbours were to be seen talking to him from time to time, and in fact, he created a small feeling of warmth between them and me, which had not previously existed.

Our neighbours on one side had never had any children, whilst the elderly couple, the Birds, on the other side, had a handicapped son of around forty. Like Robert, he was always outside watching the world on fine days, and was tanned and as fit as he could be in the circumstances. Once, the Queen went through our street on her way to the Queen Elizabeth Barracks not far away and gave Gerald a special wave.

We were sad to hear one day that he had died. Michael and one of the plumbers, Reg, who lived two doors away, went to the funeral, and I, with trepidation in my heart, felt it was incumbent upon me to visit the mourners very soon afterwards. They had devoted their lives to him and the reason for my reluctance was because I imagined I would have to face some sort of emotional scene. Perhaps I recognised even then the poignancy of the death of a child during the lifetime of its parents.

Despite my lack of rapport with my neighbours and my fears of embarrassment, I could not let the occasion pass without acknowledging Gerald’s death. This would set up a barrier between us, and my embarrassment at any later meeting would have been all the greater.

I knocked on the kitchen door (it was not usual for neighbours to use the front doors) and was welcomed in. I was surprised at how glad they were to see me. They gave me a sherry and showed me letters and talked about Gerald. They were relaxed, and even happy, perhaps, because he had not outlived them, and would never have to spend his days in a place where he was not loved. Far from being hysterical, they were very glad to talk about him. I recognised with satisfaction that I had made the right decision.

By this time, we had lived in our so-called temporary home for well over a year. I wasted little time now on worrying about how I would adjust to living in the country, for I really wondered whether the dream bungalow would ever be completed.

The laying of foundations had appeared to be a slow process, for much work was carried out under the ground. Twelve courses of bricks were laid and drain pipes put in place, followed by hardcore and a waterproof layer, but at the end of the first year’s work, all that could be seen was a rectangular slab covered in concrete.

Then came a much more exciting era when the bricklayer, Mr. Dean, arrived and laid brick on brick with speed and skill, and within a few weeks there were walls and window frames, and we could walk giggling through the various holes which would become doorways, and point to the kitchen and bedrooms.

All our visiting friends and relations were taken on a tour of the site until it became quite a bore, and still, as far as I was concerned, totally divorced from reality. The reality was our bare little semi, with its dusty corners, second-hand armchairs and uncarpeted bedrooms. The luxuries we would enjoy in our future home were a pipe dream—in which I did not really believe.

Whenever we had visitors, the drabness of our present abode was accentuated, and despite the usual frenzied burst of tidying and polishing, at the end of the activity, I could always see it clearly for what it was.

However, we were not unhappy there. We had made it a home, albeit an unglamorous one, and it was only when I looked at it with the critical eyes of an outsider that I found real dissatisfaction with it.

While Robert was a baby, we were still fairly mobile. Visiting our friends, our parents in London and the in-laws was a major part of our social life.

When money became tight, we ceased to run the Wolseley and drove to our visits in one of the vans, installing pram, high chair, and other baby paraphernalia in its convenient empty back.