Quick, Boil Some Water by Yvonne Barlow

Author:Yvonne Barlow [Barlow, Yvonne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-9555630-3-4
Publisher: Bookline & Thinker
Published: 2007-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Joan

1949

I was 23 when our first child was born. I knew absolutely nothing about childbirth and had no idea what was ahead of me. There was no antenatal care, but I saw the district nurse on a few occasions.

We’d recently moved to a small village and our parents were around 100 miles away. Toward the end of my pregnancy, my mother and 14-year-old brother came to visit. On their last evening we sat up very late chatting. When we did eventually go to bed, I couldn’t seem to get to sleep. But my husband and I decided it was just indigestion.

After another hour we decided we had better waken mother but we didn’t seriously consider I might be in labour. I still had 10 days to go and I wasn’t having any real pain. But we started timing the bouts of “indigestion” and discovered they were coming every ten minutes. Like almost everyone else, we didn’t have a telephone and my husband had to get dressed and cycle down to the phone box in the village to call the midwife. But she flatly refused to come out. She said she had examined me only a few days before and she was sure I was going to go my full time or even longer. She said we were just first-time parents worrying about nothing and we should go back to sleep.

We were very concerned when my husband returned with this news, as the pains were now coming every five minutes. So off my husband cycled to the phone box again. It was about 4 a.m. by now, and the midwife was far from pleased to have another call. But she condescended to come. When she examined me she was amazed at how far advanced I was and apologized for not coming earlier.

Our son arrived safe and sound at 5.50 a.m. It was nowhere near as painful as I’d expected it to be. My brother was astonished when he woke up in the morning to discover he had become an uncle. He hadn’t heard a sound and had slept through all the activities.

The saddest thing for me was that my mother and brother left that very morning. My parents ran a village post office and getting away was always difficult. My father expected them back that day, and a little detail like my giving birth counted for nothing. He was a difficult man and crossing him was not advisable. We all knew and accepted it but hated him for it. If we didn’t toe the line, we knew that he took it out on mother and made her suffer and we couldn’t allow that.

It did present us with problems though. In those days, a new mum had to stay in bed, and that was difficult as I had no one to help me. My husband wasn’t allowed any time off at all. In fact, on the morning of the birth, he cycled down to telephone to explain the situation. He planned to stay home and help.

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