The Fruit of the Tree Read online

  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 whet
her 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.

  I visited the hospital and, after a cursory examination, was dismissed with the usual statistics that two in five pregnancies or was it one in four spontaneously terminated. My visit to my G.P. was much more satisfying; first he reassured me about the bumpy ride from Brighton.

  ‘If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else,’ he told me, suggesting one or two other innocent pursuits that might have caused it just as easily.

  And looking back, it is difficult to see why I felt quite so guilty, for if every woman could expect to miscarry as a result of the things I had done, there would be hordes of women taking fast car journeys and lifting heavy objects, instead of taking the proverbial hot bath and bottle of gin, or indeed instead of queuing up for abortions.

  My main concern now, however, was the next pregnancy.

  ‘As soon as you know you are pregnant,’ he said. ‘Come and see me. We will help you through it from the beginning.’

  After that I put it out of my mind, knowing I must now wait, and when Ruth and Roger arrived for a weekend, with Ruth well into the middle of her pregnancy, I do not believe I felt too many pangs of jealousy.

  The other all important event in January was the sale of our old home and office, and despite the great relief both to us and the Bank Manager, this was something of an anti-climax to me, since I was hardly involved in it. As a result of the sale, Michael now spent quite a lot of time at home, although he was looking around for a small lock-up office.

  With the house now in some semblance of order, I felt able to invite my parents to stay and we chose a sunny weekend in June, when the countryside would be at its most pleasant. My timing proved to be faulty, for only a few days before the Visit, the washing machine went wrong, and when they arrived, we were once again living on naked concrete floors.

  I was accustomed to the washing machine being a little temperamental, and how much this was to do with having to wash Michael’s entire rugby kit, including his boots, in bygone days, I never really knew. Every now and then, it would literally blow its top and emit froth and water in a thin stream. All that was needed was a speedy twiddle of knobs and sanity would usually be restored, and mopping up operations could be commenced.

  On this occasion, I was following my normal routine, or lack of it (for things hadn’t changed dramatically in three years of married life) when I became aware that the machine was still filling with water, when I should have expected it to have stopped. Rushing to do the necessary twiddle, I found indeed that there was a shallow puddle forming on the kitchen floor. Going into action with squeezy mop and bucket, I soon noticed that the volume of water on the floor was increasing despite my efforts. This was an unexpected development, so I turned the washing machine off completely.

  I had been working for a full ten minutes on swabbing the decks, when I realised that the noise that kept on and on in my ears was the sound of the mains water running and running, and it came to me that for reasons best known to itself, the washing machine had continued to fill and spill throughout the entire floor washing session. I rushed to turn off the mains, and even as I did so, saw the dark stain of water spreading insidiously over half the hall carpet.

  No time for independence or emancipation now. The important question was ‘Where’s Michael?’

  A few phone calls to likely places unearthed a couple of the plumbers; they came over to see if they could help, but by that time, most of the water had been cleared up, leaving only a damp and soggy carpet, and…

  One other thing, which I didn’t discover until I tried to boil a kettle for tea, for plumbers are great tea drinkers. A fault on the wiring under the concrete kitchen floor which operated all electricity in the kitchen, lounge and boiler room! No electricity—again!

  But Michael was not defeated, though he found me quite hysterical on the subject, when he finally arrived home. A few electrical miracles were performed and then he was able to find the time to say to me, ‘How many times have you told our customers, “First, tur
n the water off at the mains.”?’

  He never let me forget it!

  That’s the trouble with being impractical in patches; it doesn’t matter how sensible you are in the matters of child-care, feeding the family, home economics or economies, there are certain occasions which are forever remembered in the annals of the family history whilst your normal exemplary behaviour is forgotten.

  Take, for example, my driving. From the very beginning Robert regarded me as some kind of inferior being when it came to driving, and in that respect was trained as a young ‘male chauvinist’ from a very early age. Robert himself was a natural driver and would whizz round the house on his little tricycle, missing items of furniture and my toes by fractions of inches by virtue of his impeccable steering, and performing elaborate 3-point turns with a finesse unexpected in a normally rather clumsy two-year-old.

  When I first started driving the Consul to the village for shopping, which was only at weekends, because Michael drove the car most weekdays, Michael and Robert would stand by the front door and watch me depart—or try to. For some reason, I was afraid to put my foot down as I turned round our circular drive. I always felt that I would be unable to follow the curve of the drive and shoot straight forward instead. So each little gentle tap on the accelerator would be followed by a stall and a restart of the engine. At each new start my sarcastic husband and his adoring sidekick would break into solemn applause and cries of ‘Good old Mummy—Well Done, Mummy!’

  However, after several months of this I became quite accomplished at driving to and from the village. One day when the lane was dappled with spring sunshine, I drove back home feeling relaxed and happy. A bird hopped across my path and I allowed my eyes to follow it, feeling in tune with nature. A grating sound reminded me of the existence of a huge horse chestnut tree on the corner of our lane, whose enormous roots protruded about two feet on that corner. Considerably dampened, I took the injured beast home, and owned up to its scratched side.