Letter From America: Some Baby!
...Unlike modern, more humane, maternity facilities, in nineteen fifty-eight, the practice was to remove babies from the mother’s side and put them in a nursery that resembled a place where battery hens were raised. Row on row of little cots covered with downy blankets, some blue, some pink, filled the room...
Writing with wonderful warmth and humour Ronnie Bray tells of the birth of his first-born child, and "eight stone'' baby girl.
A recent revelation of an important and long prayed for happy event set me thinking about the birth of my first born child, Andy, and the wonderful and confusing world of babies that this introduced me to before I had learned anything about babies except that they were small, helpless, needed careful tending, competent nurturing, and, above all else, loving. It wasn’t hard to love Andy because she was a beautifully loveable baby, as indeed, all my babies have been.
I have described her unparalleled beauty elsewhere, so I will not repeat it here. However, there were a couple of hurdles in being a new father that caused me to stumble. The first fence I tripped over, aided and abetted by my wife Esmé, was the name.
We agreed that she would be called Andréa Lesley. Some haste in selecting and agreeing on her name was essential, because in the New Forest town of New Milton, where the maternity hospital was situated, the local Registrar made hospital visits and registered all live births.
I sat on the edge of Esmé’s bed and we agreed on her name, and agreed that the spelling of her second name would be Leslie. It seemed right to both of us at the time, and we were happy with our choice.
Unlike modern, more humane, maternity facilities, in nineteen fifty-eight, the practice was to remove babies from the mother’s side and put them in a nursery that resembled a place where battery hens were raised. Row on row of little cots covered with downy blankets, some blue, some pink, filled the room.
At the appointed hour, I presented myself at the door of the nursery, gave my name, and a nurse carried my firstborn to me wrapped in a blanket, releasing her with what seemed to be aggressive reluctance into by trembling arms, with a stern, "Support her head and don't drop her!" Dropping her was the last thing on my mind.
As she nestled in my arms, I felt a thrill of the intensity of a father’s love for his child. It penetrated my soul, and brought unspeakable joy to my heart, and continues to do so. I have been fortunate enough to repeat this experience five more times.
I can see her beautiful peaches and cream face topped by a mass of copper hair surrounded by a halo of woollen blanket, and smell that delicious and indescribable newborn smell, whenever I revisit that scene through the blessing of memory. Two minutes was the longest a father could hold onto his newborn, and one minute was hospital standard. I machine-gunned kisses on her tiny brow and soft cheeks and lips as the nurse pulled her from my grasp in the customary retrieval ritual.
Mothers and children were kept separated from each other except when the Matron, a tour de force, decided that it was time to feed the little ones, and they were carried by a nurse or an auxiliary into their mother’s room for a length of time considered suitable for it to receive mother’s nourishment. Then it disappeared again until the next feeding time.
It is this divorcement that led to our nomenclatural spelling mistake not being discovered until it was too late, and which was also the cause of the Registrar making out the birth certificate for our darling girlchild in the name of Andréa Leslie, and specifying her gender as ‘Boy.’
Had she been where she ought to have been, that is by the side of her doting mother, the Registrar would have seen the pink blanket and challenged our spelling. But that did not happen.
Esmé pointed it out and he destroyed the first certificate and made out a new one for her showing our darling to be a ‘Girl.’ She had been, legally, a boy for the first part of her short life, but became an official and legal girl soon afterwards, and has remained under that description ever since.
I spoke of two hurdles, and the spelling of Leslie was the first of them. The second was of less consequence but illustrated my unfamiliarity with the world of neonates. It was my happy lot to fill out the birth announcement cards, and post them to our kin and friends. I sat alone in our flat on Burleigh Road, Southbourne, and with pen in hand, wrote out the first card.
She had been a good birth weight, eight pounds and seven ounces, so we got our money’s worth. But, as I put down 8 lb. 7 oz on the first card, it struck me that sweets and small bags of sugar were weighed out in ounces, and this was a baby. I amended my script to read 8 stones and 7 lbs. The emendation both looked and sounded more correct than the trifling weight I had first written down. I had held her in my arms and knew that she weighed more than a few bags of sweets.
I was so filled with joy that it did not strike me that eight stones was a hundred and twelve pounds - a hundredweight! I believed that I had cleared up the ounces problem and did not look as far as the pounds. Anyway, it will be no surprise to learn that arithmetic, even the basic stuff, is one of my perennial weaknesses.
Out went the cards carried by liveried servants of the Royal Mail to their various destinations, and back came the guffaws at the weight I had inscribed for our dear babe. Once the penny dropped, I joined in the laughter at my foolish mistake. A baby that weighed about the same as its mother I never did see, and it certainly wasn’t the case with Andy, as we called her from the beginning. In later years, she changed her name to AnnDee, an Americanisation that I struggle to remember, and still call her Andy, and still see the tiny babe in the grown woman, and love her the more for it.
Copyright © 2007 – Ronnie Bray
Other stories at:
http://www.2theheart.com/author_ronnie_bray
http://www.meridianmagazine.com/voices/011024summer.html
