Six Little Miracles by Janet Walton

Author:Janet Walton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473503236
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

28

Registering the Births

For decades one of the most important offices in Liverpool was situated in a building known as Brougham Terrace. Originally the first mosque in England, it had eventually been converted to the principal registry office of the area. It was here that Graham would register the births of our six precious girls.

Every day that passed, the girls were getting stronger; and the danger to me from potential blood clots had been reduced by the anticoagulants I was now receiving under the care of Sam and the nursing staff. With us seemingly out of the woods for the moment, we now wanted to have the births registered without delay.

There was no danger whatsoever of any last-minute changes to the names. Even after only a couple of days Hannah, Lucy, Ruth, Sarah, Kate and Jenny were so familiar in our minds that even the order in which we said their names had almost become second nature. Besides which, there was also the rather obvious fact that by now the names had been transmitted in one form of media or another around the world at least a dozen times.

On his way to register the births, Graham stopped off at the hospital.

‘Where is this place again? I’ll have to ask one of the nurses.’

‘Why don’t you take a taxi?’ I suggested.

‘I’ll be alright,’ he said, with typical male confidence when it came to not knowing where a place was. ‘I’ve got my A–Z in the van.’

‘A taxi will take you straight there, wait for you and bring you back. That way you’ll keep your place in the hospital car park …’ I said.

The car park place swung it and he nodded.

‘Have you got all the details?’ I checked.

‘Names and all our details, no problem, all sorted.’

‘What about the time?’

‘There’s plenty of time. They don’t close till four-thirty.’

‘No, I mean the time of birth! You’re going to need to have the time of birth as a record on each register entry.’

The girls were officially born in four brief minutes. Whichever way you tried to work it out, there was never going to be a way for all of the girls to have a full minute next to their names. One of the girls’ births was always going to fall in the middle of the four minutes. Graham and I pondered the issue.

‘Just a minute, let’s check with the hospital record,’ I said. I took the hospital’s certificate of the births from the bedside table and there it was, clearly written next to Ruth Michelle – time of birth: seven fifty-six and thirty seconds!

I waved Graham off with all the documents.

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