Bad Blood (33 page)

Although I was pretty sure that bottle-feeding had been
officially best for baby until recently, I didn't question the breast-feeding rule again, which was just as well, because my daughter brought out all the possessive zeal of the nursing staff. When I saw her next I didn't recognise her: she wasn't wearing her cowl of blood, she had on instead a mop of blonde curls like Shirley Temple's. Not only had they bathed her and shampooed her hair, they'd wound it round their fingers and fluffed it out. Every day she had a different hairdo, depending who was on duty. My favourite was a stand-up Teddy Boy quiff with a DA effect at the back, but after that first time I had no trouble recognising her whatever the style, since none of the other babies had any hair at all to speak of.

She was the ward's model infant: she weighed a (then) exactly average seven pounds seven ounces, she'd arrived precisely on schedule, her long hair – her freakish crowning glory – was the outward sign of this state of grace. I didn't share in the nurses' idolatry. I was impressed by the simple fact of her separate existence, which struck me all the more because I'd imagined her in the womb as a boy, although, as I now realised, I hadn't imagined a material baby at all. But then nobody else had either – my pregnancy had caused such a fuss none of us had been able to see past it – so now Vic dashed out to buy nappies, pins, vests, nighties, bootees and a sun bonnet, and my parents, suddenly finding themselves grandparents, were shopping around for a pram that could double as a carrycot for the baby to sleep in when I brought her home.

But when? Rumour and speculation were the only source of information, since any direct question was dismissed out of hand. People said that they usually kept you in five days or a week, but they'd only ever tell you you were leaving the day before, when the Sister would phone your husband or a number where they'd take a message so that he could come to pick
you up, and bring your outdoor clothes and shoes (which you weren't allowed to keep with you). Confinement was the right word, but it wasn't solitary. The curtains round the beds were only drawn for intimate examinations or bedpans – except for one bed where the curtains were always drawn, because the large, sulky girl in there was an unmarried mother. Her privacy was a badge of shame. When I made the mistake of saying to a Sister that I needed to get out to take my A-levels, I was told that I should
count myself lucky
(with a dark glance at the curtained corner) and that Doctor (whom we never saw) would discharge me at the proper time.

I had a sinking feeling they'd keep me in to punish me. There were empty beds and they always kept you longer then, said a woman who'd been in before, because they wanted to look busy. These women had very little reverence for the medical mysteries and told gory tales of incompetence. One woman who'd had a Caesarean had to go back for a second operation because they'd left some swabs behind. The young woman in the next bed to mine had come to Crosshouses because her last pre-natal examination had shown something strange, but it was only in the delivery room, after she'd given birth to a son, that they'd realised what. ‘One of them said, “There's something else in there,” ' she told me, ‘and another said, “It's twins!” ' They were her first babies and she wouldn't be sorry to stay a day or two extra to get used to the idea, because she and her husband lived in an isolated smallholding and she'd no one to help. Other older women felt the same, much as they hated the hospital they treasured the opportunity just to lie in bed, especially those with large young families. But I was desperate to leave. I'd been there a week, my stitches were healing, I'd been allowed a hot salt bath, it couldn't be long. Then suddenly my temperature shot up. I had an infection.

After a couple of feverish days, when I was more and more frustrated by the impossibility of revising – we don't feed our babies on books – sleepless and unable to read at night because my light would keep other patients awake, a Night Sister I'd never seen before and never saw again came like a good fairy to my bedside and said I shouldn't fret, she was married with children, it
was
all possible. But not according to daylight rules (they kept her dark). I had to leave. Screwing up my courage and trying to sound calm I said to the Day Sister that if they wouldn't discharge me then I'd sign myself out. She went off to confer with Matron and came back in fighting form. I couldn't, she said, I was under age. Yes I could, I said, I was married. Then I needed my husband's permission, she said. That's not true, I replied. In any case, she said, I wasn't well enough to leave, I had an infection. And where did I get it? I said nastily, in this foul hospital. I'll be better off if I leave. ‘If you leave,' she shouted, losing her temper, ‘you'll die!' But if she was in a rage, I was in a bigger one. ‘I'd rather!' I shouted back, and she spun on her heel and retreated.

Vic and I and baby Sharon

The wise women laughed and shook their heads: you shouldn't get on the wrong side of them like that, you can't win. I was shocked and elated. I'd never had a row as savage as that with anyone outide my family, in public. When Vic and my father came to visit, I told them what had happened. My father said he was sure they knew best, and Vic was dreadfully divided because he couldn't believe anyone would tell me I was in such danger if I wasn't, and he wouldn't promise to smuggle in my clothes. I didn't care. I had a nightie that looked enough like a dress, my slippers would serve and I'd resolved that if they wouldn't let me sign the papers the next day I'd climb out of the bathroom window, cross the fields and hitch to Shrewsbury. My daughter would be fine with the hairdressers
until we could claim her. I'd already washed my own hair in the sink when I had my salt bath and was waiting for it to dry when a nurse (looking the other way) announced that they were discharging me with a prescription for antibiotics and that Matron had already called my father. I was free to go.

As I was leaving, they cooed over my daughter and said to Vic what a pity it was that her pretty hair would all fall out, baby hair always did. (It didn't.) Sunnyside looked wonderful, while I'd been away the leggy, overgrown rhododendrons had all flowered – scarlet, purple, pink, white. ‘Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her . . .' Nonsense, of course, but wonderful nonsense. Now I'd be in time to quote it. Certainly it was a lot easier to have a baby than to be delivered of the mythological baggage that went with it. Crosshouses was grim, but the fact that they were so much better at moral hygiene
than the other kind had taught me a lot. From now on I was making my way against most people's assumptions, I'd have to count my friends and fight back. True, for the moment I felt shaky and the antibiotics upset the baby's digestion, but my infection was soon cured and so was her windy pain. Grandma greeted me as though I'd come back from the Other Side and in a sense I had.

When I handed the baby to my mother she passed her straight back, saying she was afraid she'd drop her. She was only forty-two, could have had another child herself – she looked a lot younger than some of those mothers at Crosshouses – and she was reliving the reasons she hadn't, and the dread of children's vulnerability I remembered from when Clive and I were small. Everyone was a bit shaken as the generations were reshuffled, although she showed it most. She recovered herself to choose a name, however. Sharon was a pretty name, she said in the same faraway voice she used to muse over mother-of-pearl, wasn't it in the Bible, the Rose of Sharon? And it did sound romantic, a name that had blown in from America along with rock and country music: in 1960 hundreds of girls were called Sharon, although until that moment we'd almost never heard the name. Vic's father looked down on her in her pram and said, ‘She's a Sage, anyway.' Vic's mum, blushing for him, knitted cardigans, boots, a quilt. My father doubted that we were competent, although we managed the bathing, nappy-changing and getting up in the night. He'd probably have liked more children, but valued my mother's girlishness at a higher price. Grandma welcomed the baby as another member of the doomed race of blonde, blue-eyed females (doomed to sleep with the enemy, doomed to reproduce). Uncle Bill, who turned
up at Sunnyside with a suitcase full of leather bootlaces, the last remnants of stock from Hereford Stores, sat down on the
Daily Mail
s, asked why didn't we wipe our behinds with them and told me that motherhood didn't suit me. From then on he transferred his ideological attentions to Clive (who'd become an uncle himself and found it hysterical), but for purely political ends, since he didn't fancy boys.

For Bill I was a thing of the past, I'd missed the bus of history and reverted to mindless generation. Like most of the comrades, he had very conventional views on conventional sex. But I didn't believe him. I wasn't a realist, Vic and I lived in a different dimension of fantasy-freedom he couldn't see.

Four generations at Sunnyside: Grandma, my mother, myself and Sharon

When I turned up at the high school for the first exam I felt light-headed, although my fever had subsided. It was very strange to be back there in a summer frock and high heels,
only six months on but a world away, and when Miss Dennis, the headmistress, appeared at the gate, asking with pseudo-solicitude if I was quite well, shouldn't I be at home, I walked around her as if she were a mere personification of prudery. Her school was the local ‘open' centre, the lines she drew had lost their power, you could just step over them. And as if to compound the transgression, Miss Heslop came into the exam room halfway through with a cup of tea rattling and slopping into its saucer, and I drank it down – although it was the last thing I needed, I was already leaking milk. Miss Dennis, despite herself, was much more useful; she fuelled my conviction that I must
mean
something – although I don't think I realised quite how annoying my reappearance, undeterred and unrepentant, was. After that first day she ignored me and I played the outsider without her help, caught up in a kind of euphoria, scribbling for my life, high on the sense of being terminally out of tune with the school song – ‘Just the schoooo-ool for me.'

So the only exam I'd missed was the French oral and dictation, which had happened while I was in hospital – and which I didn't regret too much since my spoken French was hopeless. It didn't occur to me that I might have written to the Board and explained why I couldn't turn up.

Years later, when I marked A-levels, I'd find myself sitting on committees that tried to quantify the disasters that affected candidates' performance. One had found her grandfather hanging from a tree in the churchyard on her way to sit her Eng. lit. paper. How many marks was that worth . . . ? But perhaps having a baby would have seemed no excuse and alerted the Board, who mercifully knew nothing about me, to the fact that I was a freak. Dr Clayton certainly thought so. When I said I wanted to stop breast-feeding, he looked disapproving but
prescribed a course of diuretics and then – prodding my breasts dubiously – another course, trying to reduce them to flab and puzzled by his failure. One side effect was that I lost weight dramatically everywhere else and got my figure back faster than I'd hoped, and new, slender legs, but the district nurse told me I should stop taking the pills whatever the doctor said and I did, although I knew Byron had lost weight this way.

Next I went to ask Dr Clayton about contraception and braced myself for an embarrassing discussion of rival methods, but I needn't have bothered, because all he said was, ‘Now that you're married your husband will take care of that.' What he was saying (since he knew that Vic was only a year older than me and hardly on present showing an expert) was that he wouldn't aid and abet me in acquiring any control over my own fertility. In any case, he must have thought, I was now in all probability going to revert to white-trash type and have more babies, and in a way decorum demanded that I should; I was some sort of nymphomaniac, and mustn't be allowed to have my cake and eat it.