The Fruit of the Tree

by Jacquelynn Luben

  This was the only occasion when I can recall actually feeling nauseous at my own cooking, although a crop of spots which appeared on the following day revealed that I had chicken-pox rather than food-poisoning.

  Unfortunately, as a result of this, our regular trips to our parents had to be temporarily curtailed until the quarantine period was over. We still sought the warmth and welcome of our parents’ homes, for we had not yet created a home for ourselves. We were still, after three or four months, two individuals full of obstinacy and dogmatic ideas, disappointed in each other’s inadequacies. Michael’s bouts of sarcasm frequently sparked off tears and tantrums in me. Living together for twenty-four hours a day only accentuated our differences, and I returned at last with relief to my letters on infant care and baby food.

  Within a very few weeks, however, came the realisation that possibly I too, might be joining the ranks of worried mums writing for advice from the ‘Medical Department’ on the virtues of ground rice or chopped chicken. According to the calendar I must be pregnant.

  It had all seemed so easy, it was difficult to believe it was true, but the pregnancy was duly confirmed and since the doctor was unconcerned about the chicken-pox attack in the early weeks, the next few months passed without problems.

  In the middle of the pregnancy, we were able to spend a dreamy holiday in Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia, reputedly Ulysses’ island of the lotus-eaters.

  This holiday was memorable only for the amount of time spent doing nothing, but in my pregnant state, it seemed ideal. Bedrooms at our hotel were lines of chalet bungalows served by a central dining room and various bars. In our case, we could step out on to an almost deserted beach, where few people could view my ‘bulge’ housed in a swimsuit. A small group of Bedouins were permanently stationed on the same beach, ready to hire out a horse or camel for a ride, but I at least did not feel obliged to do anything so energetic. The tensions of our honeymoon were gone and the pressures of fractious infants were yet to come.

  By night we sat and occasionally danced in the hotel club. Often I felt the early movements of my child, strangely awakened by the beat of the music.

  But just as Ulysses’ men were dragged reluctantly from their idle pleasures, we too soon had to face reality once again. Reality that included my new temporary job in an accountant’s office, a lack of money in the bank, an unbuilt bungalow and a house that was very far from being a home.

  2. Unto Us

  Possibly one of the least practical things that Michael ever did was to marry me in 1966, not two years after he had invested most of his money in a new business. Two may live as cheaply as one, for all I know, but not when they venture into the purchase of land. For all the money we had saved, and some we didn’t even have, had been spent on that bare expanse of land, and now as the months rolled by, our efforts were devoted to filling up the increasingly huge chasm that was our overdraft. My somewhat mean salary went straight into that seemingly bottomless pit, never to be seen again. Any additional money spent on building was a drain on our meagre resources, so at first it was limited to making use of the talents of our plumbing team during slack times. In the winter of 1966, they laid a solid new layer of road on to the muddy footpath leading to ‘the site’ as we called it, so that, in the course of the next few months, heavy lorries could deliver their loads of pipes, bricks, cement and so on.

  Our present home was sparsely furnished and lacking in frills, for we begrudged every penny spent on our premises at the office. We abided by a policy of ‘make do and mend’ and had acquired from our families a couple of old armchairs, a gate-leg table and some unwanted strips of stair carpet to furnish our living quarters.

  I always welcomed our trips to London, the cosiness of my parents’ home and the return to my roots. Sometimes it was possible to see my old school-friend Ruth, who also made such periodic excursions to visit her mother and freckle-faced student sister, Rita.

  Ruth, a slim, dignified girl with auburn glints in her hair, who had married a month before me, was now, like me, expecting her first baby in the Autumn. Our friendship of fifteen years’ standing was impeded by the distance between us, for she had moved some fifty miles away from home to Maidstone, and our occasional visits to each other involved a long drive. Nevertheless, we and another school-friend, Pam, persuaded our husbands to take us on these trips when we could, inspecting with interest each other’s first domestic efforts. Ruth and Pam had each acquired newly built estate houses, which I viewed with a pang of envy, despite all sophisticated comment about ‘little boxes’. Our bungalow, when completed, would no doubt be just as neat and immaculate, but that event seemed far in the future, and in any case, I had no idea how I would adjust to country life and was happy to put it out of my mind.

  In the last couple of months of my pregnancy, our journeyings ceased. I gave up my job to make preparation for the great day. Despite my lack of enthusiasm for housework, it was my intention to spring-clean, for the house would no doubt be neglected during the early months of the baby’s life. I had no romantic illusions about motherhood. I would feel a flutter of fear at the thought of the baby’s birth, in spite of the course of relaxation classes I had attended, and as to its eventual presence in my life, I could really only imagine it yelling, particularly in the middle of the night. So in a way, I set rather a great value on those last two months. They were the end of an era, as had been the end of my single life, and in addition, I felt they were the end of my freedom, for perhaps the next fifteen or twenty years.

  Consequently, I felt rather cheated when Michael’s secretary, Maureen, broke her arm within three days of the end of my employment. For a full month, my secretarial skills were needed in the office, and then there was only one month left and so many things to do and to buy.

  I had a list, which weighed heavily on my conscience, issued by the hospital, with orders to bring nighties, bath towel, a crepe bandage, a piece of old linen and other faintly eccentric items. But by the time I eventually made the trip into Guildford for my purchases, there was a mere week left before the Expected Day of Arrival.

  In spite of waking with a backache, I could not postpone the pilgrimage any longer and Michael left me in the town centre before he himself set out for London. Having been remarkably fit during the whole of the pregnancy, I was irritated now at the thought that I might be plagued with backache for a whole week until the baby was born. But as the day progressed and my acquisitions grew heavier, the backache too increased in severity. In my innocence, I had not imagined that the baby would be born early, but I now realised that my labour was imminent. Even so, I frenziedly continued my search—nappy bucket—pins—roller towel material—(what could they possibly want with that?), and eventually I caught a bus home right in the middle of the rush-hour, not even having the good sense to get a taxi. Determined to get a seat, on this day of all days, I placed myself and stomach squarely in front of a seated male and my pointed look (and rounded tum) had the desired effect.

  On my arrival home, I hurriedly packed my suitcase. Then, lonely and desolate in the empty house, aware of the first regular contractions, I sat wondering what to do next. I was afraid too—afraid of unknown pain, afraid of the adventure I must face entirely on my own.

  In the next three hours, my sense of isolation remained unabated and indeed aggravated by the maternity home’s reluctance to receive me. There was no sign of Michael, who had anticipated a late arrival home from London, and the only neighbour who had befriended me had herself been taken into hospital a few days before. Even my mother, who telephoned during the course of the evening, could not become my confidante on this occasion. If I had told her I was in labour and on my own, she would have worried all night.

  On a sudden inspiration I telephoned Susan, whom I recalled I had invited to tea on the following day, and she promptly drove over to escort me to the maternity home.

  Before leaving home, I rang my mother-in-law to see if Michael had called in on his way home. I had
the satisfaction of delivering my dramatic news to my mother-in-law with a calmness I did not feel. Michael was immediately dispatched homewards, to share some part of the night with me.

  And a long and lonely night it was, slightly mitigated by Michael’s stay at my side for two or three hours, and a restless slumber induced by an injection in the early hours of the morning. Michael was dismissed at this point and, with obvious relief, returned home to get some sleep himself. He was completely out of his element in a situation where there was nothing he could physically do to improve it.

  I awoke some time before dawn, writhing and tossing just like a character in a television drama. It was the worse moment of labour, for once in the delivery room the contractions were hardly strong enough to encourage me to push.

  ‘You’re wasting the contractions!’ bemoaned the nurse, and suddenly I remembered that babies must not take too long actually being born. I glanced at the clock and saw that I had been in the delivery room for nearly an hour.

  ‘Soon they’ll get out the forceps.’ I thought. And I pushed!

  ‘That’s it! That’s it! Come on!’ exhorted the nurse.

  And suddenly with a slithering sensation, my baby was born and I saw his tiny silhouette, as the nurse held him aloft; and then he was in my arms, a small round bundle with a screwed up face.

  My son Robert!

  3. Muddling Along

  Motherhood did not come to me with a great burst of maternal emotions. Sad to say, my initial feelings were far more related to pride in having done the production job without too much fuss, than any great love for the small human being who purported to be a very close relation.

  I was surprised at the frequency with which he was presented to me for feeding and I did not immediately warm to this time-consuming stranger, for I had difficulty believing in my role as mother to him.

  Nevertheless, as I got to know him, I was full of admiration for him, for he blossomed before my eyes, and showed signs of becoming a beautiful baby. My hackles rose, therefore, at the statement of one of the nurses, who made what I took to be a rather derogatory comment in the first couple of days of his life: ‘Isn’t he funny? He looks like a little old Jew.’

  Huffily, I replied, ‘Well, he is. At least, he’s Jewish.’

  I had never been a lover of babies as a group. Nor had I really known any as individuals, and my expectations were low. It came as something of a surprise to me therefore to find that I had produced what must surely be the most perfect baby in the world. During the day, he lay in a cot at the foot of my bed. Most of the time he slept contentedly, and there was rarely a tear from him.

  I took full advantage of the fairly leisurely time in the maternity home, which remained so until the seventh day of my stay, when I received instruction in the skills of nappy changing and baby bathing, with a carte blanche to try them out on my own squirming infant. I was also told to make my own bed with the help of the nurse, and this was a rather rude awakening. By the time I was finished, I was puffing and blowing after the strenuous effort. But it had one great advantage; I learned how to make ‘hospital corners’ and I became quite obsessional about them after that. Michael’s toes never poked out of the bottom of the bed again.

  I had arranged to stay with my parents on my departure from the maternity home. However, when I mentioned this fact, I fell foul of Sister, who it seemed had already summed me up as idle and immature.

  ‘You can’t go gallivanting off to London with a young baby.’ she told me.

  She must have had some vision of me doing the rounds of nightclubs, theatres and parties, and I didn’t know how to convince her that I really wasn’t going to gallivant, just to be cared for by my own mother while I mastered the complicated skills of mothercraft.

  I enjoyed my return to my own territory with baby Robert, who maintained his placid behaviour pattern. True, he awoke in the night for his feeds, which I considered to be a form of Chinese torture, but this could not be classed as naughtiness. My two married sisters-in-law, Sonia and Karla, each with a son of their own, assured me I was extremely lucky to have such a contented baby.

  Nevertheless, once we arrived back in Guildford, I suffered from total exhaustion, causing me to fall asleep after the six a.m. feed and awake to discover the office below my bedroom full of activity and noise, and Robert all ready for the ten o’clock feed.

  Day after day, I muddled through the baths, feeds and nappy changes, finding little time for anything else, for the carrying out of these tasks seemed enormously time-consuming. Any faint resemblance to a routine was based on a suggestion from my old school-friend Pam: ‘Look after the baby, feed the family, keep up with the washing and don’t worry about anything else.’

  It was difficult to obey the last order, but I knew her set of priorities was correct, and Robert, sleepy and well satisfied after each feed, was the proof of the pudding.

  Only one cloud marred his otherwise untroubled babyhood, when at six weeks old, he developed an ugly breast abscess. After a week of antibiotics, this was removed by general anaesthetic, and special tiny equipment had to be brought into the casualty department where the operation took place. The nurses made a great fuss of baby Robert when he was brought in during the next few days; they said they were used to seeing much bigger children with scrapes on their knees.

  Despite the varying times of my arrival at the casualty department for dressings of the wound, the receptionist was brisk but sympathetic. Her conversation suggested she imagined the baby was playing me up, and I perpetuated that injustice, rather than admit that I just couldn’t get up in the mornings, after the dreadful night feeds.

  The whole abscess episode was a bit of a nuisance, disrupting what little routine I had. But I didn’t really worry about Robert, because I’d heard so many times what hardy creatures babies are. Four years later, I had cause to doubt that generalisation, and remembered wryly my simple faith that all would be well.

  The months went by and we progressed through breast-feeding to mixed feeding and from incisors to molars, and still Robert was happy. Now he chose to eat at more civilised times and we all breakfasted together on boiled eggs. The days of the hurried slice of toast in a vertical position were over. We had become a family!

  Despite a large and well-justified inferiority complex about my inability to run the home, I felt I had made a fairly successful job of bringing up the baby, and for the first time in my married life, I gained some confidence. Baby Robert appeared to be a credit to me, and Michael often said, ‘I always knew you’d be a good mother.’

  But although I spent much time reading articles on babies, on aspects of feeding and weaning, teething and toilet training, I did not really build a relationship with Robert when he was a tiny baby. Perhaps I would have been better advised to put away the books and get down on the floor to play with him, but I was too guilty about my inadequacies as a housewife to spend time in the enjoyment of play.

  It was Michael who had a special relationship with Robert. As the oldest of four children, Michael was totally at ease in the presence of little ones. Immediately recognised by small boys as a ‘romper’ and ‘rough-and-tumbler’, and by larger boys as the sort of uncle-figure who would allow them to help with pasting, tarring or whitewashing jobs, he could in addition communicate with this foot-long creature, at present devoid of any appreciable powers of mobility or conversation. He would pick the little boy up with two hands and, holding him a few inches away from his face, address him solemnly, carefully articulating his words.

  ‘Say, “Dad-dy, Dad-dy”.’

  And the baby, no more than a few months old, would watch goggle-eyed and form shapes with his mouth in imitation or response.

  In time, he learned to recognise the pale blue Wolseley which Michael drove and would shriek with delight at the sight of his father approaching, and howl at his often speedy departure, en route to another job.

  When Robert was in the middle of his first year, the plumbing business began
to take up more of my time. Michael’s secretary had left and one of the plumbers had been installed in the front office. In theory, he would be a clerk-cum-emergency plumber. In practice, there were so many emergencies that the telephone rang incessantly, calling him away, while the bookkeeping ground to a halt.

  For the next few months, I answered the telephone more than a dozen times a day, and became an expert on ball-valves and leaks, often advising panicking housewives to ‘…turn the water off at the stopcock, and make a small hole in the ceiling, to prevent the ceiling coming down.’ I don’t suppose a single housewife ever took notice of my advice, and while I dispensed it, Robert sat poised—mid-bosom (mine) or bare-bottomed (his)—awaiting my attention.

  Luckily for me during this period, Robert had an easy-going temperament. He had become an attractive baby with dark curls, blue-green eyes and a dimple in one cheek. It was a period in his life I later looked back on with nostalgia, for his personality had developed, but he was not yet old enough or accomplished enough to be mischievous. He would speed from room to room on all fours, but his agility had not yet become a source of danger. Sometimes he rode on Michael’s shoulders, sitting proudly, his back erect like a young horseman, surveying the scene around him. But he was happy to sit in the pram too, watching traffic and people passing by. Indeed, because of his shrieks of joy when he recognised a familiar face, he made more friends than I had amongst the local people. Both my elderly neighbours were to be seen talking to him from time to time, and in fact, he created a small feeling of warmth between them and me, which had not previously existed.

  Our neighbours on one side had never had any children, whilst the elderly couple, the Birds, on the other side, had a handicapped son of around forty. Like Robert, he was always outside watching the world on fine days, and was tanned and as fit as he could be in the circumstances. Once, the Queen went through our street on her way to the Queen Elizabeth Barracks not far away and gave Gerald a special wave.