That's Another Story: The Autobiography (38 page)

I was thrilled to be pregnant. It felt right in every sense. I had begun to feel empty on occasion during the couple of years prior to meeting Grant, wondering what my life was for. What was the purpose, apart from earning money, of rushing, in a whirl of stress, from project to project, never standing still long enough to really take a lie-in?

A few months before I met him, I was shooting the series
The Secret Life of Adrian Mole
, in which I played Adrian’s mother. I came on to the set one day and, whilst waiting around to start filming, I picked up a copy of
Punch
magazine. Just inside the front cover, on page one above the list of contents, was a cartoon. In it there was a man sitting in front of a television set, with a newspaper in his hand, shouting to someone in another room: ‘Oh, look! There’s something on television tonight that hasn’t got Julie Walters in it!’

I was stunned and although I joked with my fellow actors about it, I felt hurt and upset. The point of the cartoon was punched painfully home as I raced off that night, heavy with exhaustion, into the West End after filming, to appear in Sam Shepard’s
Fool for Love
at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. I began to question my life of constant work, the gaps filled with wild socialising that too often was fuelled by too much drink. It suddenly felt shallow, selfish and somehow fairly meaningless. I knew that cramming my life with work was partly due to the actor’s insecurity about never working again, and the drinking was a simple blotting out, and that both meant that I didn’t have to think about anything, but it was getting tiresome. I knew there was more and that night in the Fulham Boulevard, even through the fog of too much champagne, I knew somehow that I had found it.

Once the morning sickness, with its unpredictable bouts of throwing up - one of them on the bonnet of a Ford Fiesta whilst crossing the King’s Road - was over, with textbook timing at spot-on three months, I felt wonderful. For the first time in my life I was suffused with calm and sailed around in a luxuriously protective, fuzzy cocoon. I loved the way I felt, everything seemed to be in perspective and I loved the way I looked: the ever-growing pod of my body, my skin rosy, my hair lustrous. Even my eyes were different, seeming to have taken on a new intensity of colour and depth.

‘I’ve had a premonition!’ This is Nora, a big Irishwoman and one of the dressers on
Buster
. She is hovering in the doorway of my trailer with a bit of a smug smile on her face.

‘Oh . . . what . . . What’s that, then?’

She has caught me halfway though getting into my costume, in which I am trussed up in a big pointy 1960s bra with a huge pair of matching knickers, not also pointy, you understand, and I am trying to cover my modesty. The reason for this modesty is that we are parked on a residential road and curious members of the public are gaping in through the open door behind her as they pass by.

‘You are going to have a boy!’ The smirk stretches into a big toothy grin.

‘Oh . . .’

‘Yes, oh definitely! It came to me in a flash.’

‘Excuse me, are you Tracy Ullman?’ This from a small, ginger-haired woman standing on the pavement outside and looking up at me from underneath Nora’s armpit. She is staring in that crazed, hungry way that people often have when they think they’ve spotted someone off the telly.

‘No, no, I’m not. Sorry.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m pretty sure I’m not Tracy Ullman.’

Nora now moves into the caravan so that the woman can enjoy an unimpeded view of me standing there in my bizarre-looking underwear.

‘Of course she’s not Tracy Ullman! This is Julie Walters!’

‘Who?’

I’m thinking: can this get any more humiliating, when the woman does not even wait for my name to be repeated and walks off. Just as Nora is closing the door, she pops back.

‘Oh yes! You do that show with Dawn French.’

‘Yes, that’s right, dear, and now we have to get on, we’ve a film to make and if Dawn catches her standing here gossiping, she’ll be for the high jump!’ And with that Nora closes the door so swiftly that I just catch a glimpse of the resultant draught lifting up the woman’s thin red fringe to reveal a high freckled forehead. Nora cackles wickedly into the palm of her hand, then says, ‘Yes, it’s a boy! Here, let me hug you!’

I was shocked by this news and somewhat discombobulated. I had always felt that it would be a girl. Long before I got pregnant, I had thought that, if I ever were to have a child, no matter what, I would have a girl. This wasn’t a longing, or even a preference for a girl as opposed to a boy, but I suspect that somewhere at the back of my mind the thought lurked that because I had had a bit of a prickly relationship with my mother, a daughter would help me understand and heal this to some extent, so Nora’s news threw me completely. I began to imagine tiny boys with Grant’s face running around the sitting room in St Dionis Road and every time I did so I found it so unbearably moving that I would want to cry.

However, these odd little crying sessions soon came to an end because two weeks later an amniocentesis test proved that Nora was talking out of her considerable backside. I was definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, having a girl. The consultant had asked whether we wanted to know what the sex was, or whether, like a lot of couples, we preferred to be surprised at the birth. This I simply didn’t understand; for a start, I imagined the birth was going to be enough of a surprise all by itself, and second, the thought of a doctor and some laboratory technician somewhere knowing my baby’s sex when I hadn’t a clue seemed both ludicrous and out of the question. I felt that refusing to know was like refusing to accept that the baby was a valid entity until it was born, and that surely it could only be an advantage to know, as the unborn baby had more of an identity with which we could relate.

The little bump that was now starting to kick had lost its anonymity; it was now a ‘she’ instead of an ‘it’, and we were thrilled, as it was what Grant wanted, so we set about discussing names. Clea came up, but put together with Grant’s surname, Roffey, we could see that it didn’t perhaps work. I suggested Anya; he said over his dead body; he suggested Kelly and I said over mine and then some! I then went out on a limb and suggested Coco; Grant went quiet on this one, but a friend talked me out of it, saying that to name a child after a nighttime drink was almost tantamount to abuse.

Then, some months down the line I came across a reproduction of a Victorian music-hall poster and in the corner was the name Maisie. At last, after endless car journeys with each of us pinging out names only to have them roundly rejected, and months of us suddenly screaming something like ‘Tallulah!’ during some entirely unconnected task, such as feeding the cat or cooking the dinner, we had happened upon a name that didn’t put Grant in mind of a female wrestler with a moustache and didn’t remind me of some rough, scraggy-arsed girl from down the end of our road who, as my mother would have said, ‘had gone bad’.

During the latter part of my pregnancy, partly as an antidote to all the serious and alarming books on the subject - such as those by Penelope Leach and Sheila Kitzinger, to name but two, which I had previously devoured and which mainly left me feeling that I’d already got parenthood wrong and she wasn’t even born yet - and also because I wanted this precious and unique period not to be lost and clouded by time, I decided to keep a diary. This turned into a small and slightly daft tome titled
Baby Talk
. It helped hugely to keep everything in perspective and through it I discovered the joy and power of writing.

While I was writing it, lots of friends recounted their birth experiences, which I duly recorded. There follows two of my favourites.

Our cleaner has become a Jehovah’s Witness. She announced this startling fact only this morning. I say startling, because Benita is an Italian Catholic and her grasp of the English language is slight to say the least. It happened, she claimed, a few weeks ago when a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses, neither of whom spoke Italian, came and knocked on her door. They left her with a huge, leather-bound tome printed in English and I would rate at zero her ability to read the language, because she ignores all the notes we leave her, and the ones she leaves for us are for the most part, unintelligible; for instance, ‘A cup I crack. Don’t bless you with this. Sorry!’

She talks about her conversion in a very offhand way, as if it were from electricity to gas, which makes me think that she may well have misinterpreted what it is she has become caught up in, and now thinks she belongs to some club, or that she is now a representative of Freeman’s catalogues. However, I didn’t want to get too involved for fear that she might take it into her head to convert me, so I steered the conversation towards my own obsession, which, of course, was my condition.

Benita then said that her own daughter had been an enormous fourteen pounds at birth and had broken her pelvis. I think I’d rather be converted.

G was calm as she felt the ache in the small of her back come and go. She had mastered the breathing techniques that had brought about vital relaxation. She felt that now, after months of concentrated yoga, relaxation was at her beck and call, to be summoned at the very mention of the word ‘contraction’. For the first time in her life, she knew what being relaxed meant. She had prepared for the day and now that day had come. There had been a little blood, she had been sick, but using her newly found knowledge she had achieved calm.

She timed her contractions and even managed a light meal.

The contractions soon became very painful, but she steadily got her things together. Her nightie, some joss sticks, a collection of tapes of Indian sitar music, and some fruit juice that she and her husband might sip during the forthcoming proceedings. Eventually the contractions were coming every five minutes and had become almost unbearable. It was time to leave. They bundled their belongings into the van after notifying the hospital that they were on their way, with G exercising supreme control over the pain. On arriving she could hardly resist a little smile in between contractions - a smile of total pleasure. Her first child would be born at any moment and she was handling it with practised serenity.

The midwife examined her and in a loud, matter-of-fact voice said, ‘Well, you’re so tense I can’t even see your cervix, let alone see if it’s dilated!’

She was put in a bath for two hours, after which it was discovered that her cervix had dilated half an inch. She gave birth some twenty-four hours later with pain that made the aforementioned contractions seem like mild discomfort in comparison. Not a joss stick had been lit, not a note of Indian sitar music played - they were still in the back of the van.

In fact the only sound to be heard, apart from human voices, was the ward clock, which had so jangled their nerves in the small hours with its incessant ticking that G’s husband had ripped it from the wall.

G told me this story over lunch today. I joined her in her laughter as she remembered, and as we resumed our meal I found my appetite had quite disappeared.

 

The story of my own daughter’s birth turned out to be far less traumatic. It was and is the most important event of my life and as it cannot be topped, the telling of it will round off this tale. I was to have a Caesarean section a couple of weeks prior to the due date. This was decided by the consultant obstetrician because I had suffered high blood pressure in the last week or so of the pregnancy and it was also discovered that I was diabetic, so for the last couple of weeks I was forced to have insulin injections every day; both conditions miraculously disappeared at the moment of birth. The consultant was concerned that I would either have a big baby, due to the diabetes, or a small one, due to the high blood pressure. Added to his concerns was the fact that Maisie was in a frank breech position, meaning that not only was she upside down and refused to turn - he had tried to turn her manually, a procedure that had the effect of making me feel like a kind of bizarre glove puppet - but also that her legs were up over the back of her head. When she was born the paediatrician unwrapped her from her blanket and gently flattened out her legs, but when he let go of them they sprang straight back up around her ears. He said I would be relieved to know that this would go in a day or two, adding that, after all, it was not the sort of habit you would wish her to have as a young woman.

On the Sunday night before she was to be delivered at approximately eight-fifteen the next morning, I sat on the bed of my hospital room, overcome with inexplicable sadness. I ran a bath and soaked in it for a good hour. I tried to picture what my life would be like from eight-fifteen onwards the next day, but, as anyone will tell you, nothing on this earth prepares you for life after birth, no matter how many stories you’re told. The sadness continued as I lay there and I began, as I had so often done, to gently rub my distended abdomen and talk to the little person inside. After a couple of minutes of explaining to my unborn daughter that in a few short hours her world would be opened up, she would be brought out into this one, and that it would be all right, that we couldn’t wait to meet her, my sadness was suddenly thrown into focus. We had already bonded, and knowing her sex and giving her a name had made that bonding much more intimate. We were now on the eve of a kind of parting; she would be no longer physically part of me and it was a forced and unnatural parting at that. Somewhere, I guess, I felt I had failed her by not giving birth to her naturally, which seemed to be the root of my melancholy.