The Fruit of the Tree (9 page)

Having spent most of the day in bed, I came into the lounge and lay with my feet up on the settee, in front of the log fire, covered with blankets. Towards the end of the day, my mother left me to catch her train home, and before Michael returned that night, I watched the traditional celebrations of Hogmanay on the inadequate television. As far as I was concerned, 1970 came in, not with a bang, but with a whimper of self-pity on my lips.

‘And I thought it was going to be such a great year!’

But I had not lost heart entirely, and when Ruth telephoned a day or so later, her words filled me with a ridiculous hope.

She had hoped to call in; she and Roger were going to be in the area. I would have loved to have seen her, but I told her the present situation—then she told me her news—she was expecting a baby at the end of July. I was convinced then, quite irrationally, that I would not miscarry—that it was fated that our second children would be born at around the same time, just as Robert and Lawrence had been.

As the week wore on, little changed. I lay in our lilac-coloured bedroom with the radio as my companion, watching squirrels, silhouetted against the matt white sky, playing on the naked branches of the trees.

Michael was to be seen periodically with screwdriver, switch, plug or wire in his hands, reporting to me, ‘I’ve done the kitchen/hall/bedroom’ and so on.

Without pain, and with only a small loss of blood, I began to feel adventurous. Towards the end of the week, I got up once or twice to prepare meals for us. It’s impossible to ask a woman to stay in bed indefinitely, particularly if she is unsupervised.

The climax came one morning. I awoke to find myself haemorrhaging. And with the haemorrhage, came recognisable regular contractions, just as if I was in labour. To the layman who does not know how much blood her body is meant to lose, there is nothing so frightening as the feeling that she is going to bleed to death. The doctor, with his superior knowledge, knows that the sufferer can certainly hold on till the end of morning surgery, and no amount of panic-stricken calls will shake his faith. Despite my previous experience, I was no less fearful on this occasion.

Eventually, however, the doctor arrived and promptly rang for an ambulance to transport me to hospital. This time, I made sure my suitcase was adequately packed.

The houseman arrived at my bedside without his bedside manner.

‘Rustle me up some scrambled eggs,’ he shouted to the staff nurse. ‘I haven’t had any lunch.’ He examined me, glaring as though it was my fault. Perhaps he thought I’d done it deliberately.

A red spot on his cuff contrasted with its otherwise immaculate whiteness.

‘You’ve got blood on your sleeve,’ I told him maliciously. My blood!

I was surprised that they didn’t rush me off to the theatre, as they had done before. This time a nurse arrived with a saline drip.

‘What’s that for?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Oh, just in case we have to give you any blood. We’re going to keep you on bed rest for a little while.’

My heart leapt at the words ‘bed rest.’ There was a chance that they were going to save the baby. A simple urine test apparently confirmed the possibility that I could still be pregnant. My hopes, which had been dashed by the explosion of blood from my body, were raised once again.

Hitched up to the saline drip, I became a virtual prisoner. I was aware that my left arm did not contain a good vein, so I was not surprised that the drip was attached to my right arm. This was strapped to a foot long splint, which happened to be the only one they could find.

Thus I was incapacitated by my immovable right hand and my inefficient left hand, and forbidden even to sit up, so that at mealtimes a young nurse had to feed me in a semi-supine position. There is a limit to the amount of cosseting that even I find acceptable.

I put up a bit of a fight when it came to bedpans, and they were kind enough to bring me a commode, for which little dignity I was most grateful.

I had little discomfort and I refused a sleeping pill, but when night fell, I was restless; my stomach seemed to be heaving about. A nurse bent over my bed.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps I should have taken a pill,’ I replied. Then I confided: ‘I keep thinking I can feel the baby moving.’

She seemed to shudder.

‘Oh, how awful,’ she said. She didn’t seem to understand.

‘Perhaps the baby’s all right,’ I explained to her. ‘Please tell someone, so they won’t take it away.’

She went away; I heard her talking to another woman. I heard the reply echoing back from the quiet corridor.

‘Absolute rubbish! She can’t feel the baby yet.’

I wanted to explain to them that perhaps my dates were wrong. Perhaps I was 16 weeks pregnant, not 12 weeks.

The young nurse came back with a sleeping pill, and I settled down to sleep.

In the course of the next couple of days I acquired a new neighbour, a young woman who was also in danger of miscarrying for the second time, and who, like me, had one child already.

We compared notes and it was amazing to discover that we had experienced the same emotions—the same feelings of guilt, of inadequacy as well as anger and sorrow. Marooned, as we were in our beds, we had nothing to do but rest and talk, and for those few days, we became as sisters in the sharing of our mutual experience.

One morning the consultant arrived, with his respectful entourage in attendance. Unsmiling, he conducted his examination. Immediately afterwards, he informed his staff he would carry out a ‘D. & C.’

Flabbergasted, I protested stutteringly and inarticulately.

‘But what about the pregnancy tests—they were positive. I felt the baby moving!’

‘I am sure the foetus has broken up during the haemorrhage,’ he replied unemotionally.

As a parting shot, he ordered: ‘She’s very constipated; give her an enema before the operation.’

They left me in the curtained off cubicle. I was glad they had not opened the curtains, because now that I was alone, the tears poured from me. Why had they allowed me to believe the baby might be saved? Why had they given me extra care for two days only now to rob me of my child? Why had they not taken it away the first moment I entered the hospital?

My tears spent, I waited patiently while a middle-aged nurse fumblingly tried to administer an enema. She had to get help from some other nurses, and after their eventual success, I was reduced to an exhausted, limp rag. I half wondered if the doctor had only specified it to knock all the fight out of me, and indeed with the administration of the injection, I lay there unresisting and uncaring, as I was wheeled to the operating theatre.

The familiar tableau of green-overalled, masked figures met my eyes.

From a long way away, a voice asked, ‘Have you any children?’

‘Yes, a boy of two.’

The gap was widening; I had wanted a two-year gap between my children, and now I would have to wait another year.

I drifted away into sleep.

When I awoke, I found I was no longer attached to the drip and I was allowed to sit up for the first time. As soon as the haziness of anaesthesia had left me, I conducted an animated conversation with my neighbour, which went on into the night. From the far corner of the ward came the shout: ‘Aren’t you two ever going to get to sleep?’ and I was reminded that the bulk of my fellows in the ward were recovering from major surgery, whilst I was practically fit. The removal of my potential blood supply served to underline my now even less important status in the ranks of the sick.

By the next morning, I discovered that I would be discharged in 24 hours, and after the more intensive care of the first couple of days, my speedy dispatch from hospital was an anti-climax. No guidance, no advice—just an appointment with out-patients in six weeks’ time, and out into the world.

I was no more than a body, whose parts had not been working properly. Like garage mechanics, they would put me back in working order and send me home. After all, what car ever receives an explanation from the repairman?

The anger I felt after this miscarriage lasted quite a long time. Apart from the self-directed anger at my own possible lack of sufficient caution, I felt I had been very badly treated by the hospital. For a while I half believed that they had robbed me of a living child, but even after I had returned to sanity, and doubted not that their physical treatment of me had been impeccable, I could see no reason why they should have allowed my hopes to be raised, causing me so much more distress than I had experienced during my first miscarriage.

Even if the consultant, presumably the decision maker, could not see me until a particular day, an explanation—a warning—given by the sister or staff nurse might have been a little help.

I had given up expecting the right sort of reactions from Michael. It was obviously a blind spot in his make-up. But I expected better understanding from the medical profession. They did not provide it whilst I was in hospital, and they did not provide it when I got home, neither after this nor my first miscarriage.

One day I was a pregnant woman, receiving the maximum care and attention. The next day I was an unpregnant woman receiving no automatic care, whatsoever. For the next six weeks, I would be regarded as a fit person, and no health visitor or other medical official would darken my door to determine whether I needed any help on an emotional level. The woman who has lost her baby has already received a blow undermining her confidence. She believes herself to be inadequate, and she believes her husband feels the same way, and quite possibly he does.

At this low point in her life, she is
dropped
by the Health Service, to the extent of removing her right to free prescriptions from the very day she leaves hospital. To a woman potentially at the edge of depression, this is a negation of her worth as a woman.

Luckily, I did not at any time reach the state medically known as depression. Of course I got depressed and disappointed, and I got angry, but, perhaps because I was aware of these emotions, I was not overwhelmed by them at any time. Once again I was told not to try to have another baby too soon; we had waited for about five months after the first miscarriage, and even that had apparently been too soon. Once again I faced that longing to be pregnant again—not even to have a baby—just to be in that blissful state of carrying around a wonderful secret—but this time I knew that the longing would fade in time and take on manageable proportions.

And anyway, there was the advent of electricity in our home, which, despite all, could not be belittled.

There was also a bout of flu which struck us down, one by one, starting with Michael, who was almost as bad a patient as he was a nurse. None of us had been ill for ages; in fact it was quite remarkable how fit we had remained during the entire period when we had virtually no heat in the house—until now when comfort and warmth were returning.

Funny how I always thought that our house would be turned on magically, like Blackpool illuminations, and instead, it was a light bulb here and a power-point there. Even on the very day when one of the powers-that-be from the Electricity Board came to check the completed work, Michael was working at fever pitch to get everything ready. And even after his work had been passed, there were sealed up wires tucked away in cupboards, waiting for the day when a surfeit of energy on Michael’s part would cause them to be connected and the opening of a cupboard would automatically switch on a light within.

The very first circuit that Michael had tackled had included the immersion heater, and what bliss it was to sink into a hot water without the prior water-boiling preparations.

One of the last connections was the electrical aspect of our oil-fired boiler. It was interesting to realise that the passable heating system in our old home, fired by an old-fashioned oil burner, could have worked without electricity (requiring only the lighting of a wick with a match), whilst our new automated one could not. It left us with a distinct feeling that we should not put ourselves totally at the mercy of automation. We had already demonstrated the value of an open fire and chimney, at a time when many people were boarding up their chimneys, and new homes were being built without them. Now, having learned to live with bottled gas, we retained our three-legged gas cooker while we gave a good deal of thought to our next step.

It was the middle of January when the lights went on, and despite the miscarriage, 1970 began to look pretty good from then on.

9. I and the Infernal Combustion Engine, etc.

It was so luxurious to have light and warmth once again, and now that we were actually living like a normal family, I invited everyone we knew to visit us. From March through to December, almost every weekend seemed to be occupied by someone coming to us or vice versa. My cousins came for the first time, and the brothers and sisters came in turn and even stayed the night. Lots of our friends visited us too; everyone was subjected to a healthy march over the large area of common and woodland which we treated as our country estate. They all had a tour of inspection of the house too, and now that my faith in impossibilities really happening was restored, we blithely showed them the hole where the swimming pool would be, the gap where the built-in oven would be built in, the bare bathroom wall, and the roll of wallpaper that would in due course be stuck to it. Uncynically, we almost believed that they could see the finished picture that we could visualise in our mind’s eye.