Willie, John’s son, and his wife Isabella had triplets – born at home of course. One died at birth, but Martha and Mary survived.
Willie’s sister, Hannah, had a daughter outside marriage, Grace. On the birth certificate the father is named as ‘Hugh Love’. There was an agricultural labourer of that name at a nearby farm. He would have been about 15 when the baby was conceived. Hannah married Robert Lauderdale before the baby was two years old and went on to have eight more children.
The Aunt Hannah I knew, Father’s aunt, was very tall and handsome, and wore her hair in thick plaits across her head. She was a dairy farmer at Mochrum. One day, when shopping with us, she tripped and fell over my brother David, who was two then. I remember that mother was very frightened for him, but after a good cry he was fine. It seems to have been a characteristic of the Webster family that they were sturdy and bonny, with wide shoulders. As we were exploring the family history we met an elderly man who had known Willie Webster and pointed to Uwe’s new Mercedes and said to me, ‘I could tell you were one of them, because they all had shoulders on them like the front of yon car.’
Reality And Imagination
Uwe was in the Diplomatic Service, Secretary to the Economic Committee of the Council of Europe, and went back to Strasbourg, and I returned to Edinburgh where I was doing research in race relations for an Oxford Research Degree. I commuted and at the end of every term travelled to Strasbourg, became a diplomatic wife, made love intensively and had ‘honeymoon cystitis’ for a year!
In the summer after we were married we went out to the Rose Revived, a sixteenth-century coaching inn at Newbridge, near Witney, and swam in the river. I wore a new gold satin stretch bathing costume. The water sparkled, leaves glistened in the sunlight.
I have never been a great party-goer but Uwe enjoys social occasions of every kind, loves meeting new people, and has high expectations. In 1953 the Oxford Group, otherwise known as the Buchmanites, invited me to visit their international HQ at Caux, outside Geneva. It came about through a fellow undergraduate, Louis Ozanne, who, like me, was active in the Society for the Study of Eastern Religions. Uwe thought we should grasp the opportunity. The Buchmanite movement developed in Nazi Germany, but by this time had embraced ideals of charity and peace.
We found ourselves enveloped in a ‘holier than thou’ atmosphere where devotees held the leader not only in great respect, but in reverence – and we were terribly bored. Uwe’s thoughts were that we should escape and he had the idea of visiting one of the Geneva nightclubs as an antidote.
We skipped off feeling like naughty children, only to encounter a dismal scene in which an overweight, ageing erotic striptease artiste manipulated a huge python round her body and limbs, sticking it between her thighs, kissing and stroking it, and doing just about everything which she might do with a penis. It went on and on – tedious, predictable, crude and unappealing. Uwe muttered under his breath that this was dreadful and though we couldn’t draw attention to ourselves by getting up and leaving at this point, we should escape at the first opportunity. But we were trapped, and had to put up with it.
I whispered that he ought to take off his glasses, leaving something to the imagination. It was an amazing and instant success! Everything went fuzzy and the erotic dancer became glamorous in that moment. This is an important lesson – imagination is the essence of pleasure. If you want to enjoy yourself, make space for fantasy!
A Miscarriage
Writing to a friend in December 1954: ‘We leave Strasbourg this coming week-end for England – first to Garston, then all of us to Taunton for the actual Christmas, and then back to Garston for the New Year. I think I am more excited about Christmas this year than ever before because although Toby (or Anna) isn’t born yet I look at all the gay Christmas shop windows, the bright lights and the twinkling decorations as if through his eyes, and it all seems very wonderful and new, as if I had never seen it so sparkling or colourful before.’
There were only two drops at first, and I persuaded myself that some bleeding was common in early pregnancy. But then there were more – and more. A French gynaecologist examined me, said the fetus had a beating heart, and prescribed hormone supplements to keep the pregnancy going. I was reassured – wrongly as it turned out. I took them assiduously. Then one day blood started to pour out. Obviously I wasn’t going to have this baby. I had thought I was 24 or 25 weeks pregnant. I even believed I felt movements. But the baby had died much earlier.
The only thing was to accept it and let my body do its work of emptying and cleaning out the uterus. We were on holiday with my parents in Northern Italy and I took to bed, nestled in an impressive and very comfortable four poster, with detective stories, and marvellous, lavish meals sent up on ornate trays. That’s where I discovered white truffles. My memories are of sitting in bed in luxury in a beautiful room eating the best food there is in the world while losing a baby. It was sad, but at the same time this was self-indulgent gourmandising and an intense sensory experience.
Mother once wrote to Uwe, ‘Father looks after his pigs when they are pregnant better than you do Sheila.’ I had no complaints! I didn’t seek cossetting when pregnant. The important thing to me was freedom.
Uwe and I travelled a lot and also lived abroad because of his job at various times. He was often off to other countries leaving me wherever I was based, too, and the relationship was kept fresh. We were never a couple to ‘settle down’. I was lecturing around the world and usually extended the engagement to do research in other cultures – a condition I made when I accepted a booking. He usually moved in superior circles and saw more picturesque or impressive aspects of a country than I did – parliamentarians, colleagues at Harvard University, or working with all the big wigs in Brussels, for example, whereas I was with the poorest of the poor.
So we had a complex and colourful view of societies around the world but our frequent absences produced some confusion among our daughters. They weren’t certain where we were or what we were doing. Tess, in her mid-teens, answered Uwe’s phone since he was abroad. ‘And who shall I say called?’ she asked.‘Winston Churchill,’ came the reply. She snorted and said ‘And I’m Florence Nightingale!’ It was Winston Churchill’s grandson.
CHAPTER THREE
HOW BIRTH WAS FOR ME
The first time she has a baby, it is difficult for any woman to know what to expect or how she will feel. A large question mark hangs over the whole experience of birth: ‘Is it possible that I can give birth to a normal baby?’ ‘Shall I really be able to manage without drugs for pain relief?’ ‘Will I make a fool of myself?’ ‘Is my body capable of giving birth?’ For many of us, that first birth is viewed in terms of how well we cope personally and whether or not everything turns out ‘all right’. Political awareness and social action usually come later. That is how it was for me.
When our first daughter was born in October 1956, we were living in Strasbourg, France, where Uwe was Secretary to the Economic Commission of the Council of Europe and in the Diplomatic Corps. As a ‘diplomatic wife’ in Strasbourg, I felt under pressure to conform and not draw attention to myself by challenging behaviour or stepping out of line in any way. It applied to how I had my first baby, too. There was a choice of two private maternity hospitals, one Catholic and one Jewish, and it was simply a matter of deciding which.
So when I was pregnant I went to look around each. I was horrified to see the delivery rooms in the Catholic home with a high, flat delivery table opposite an enormous painting of Christ on the cross, blood pouring out of wounds in his chest, side, arms and legs. The message for the mother was ‘you are suffering incredible pain, but Christ was in greater agony. Endure your pain in a Christ-like spirit. There is no escape. This is your cross.’
I attended a birth in that hospital and was shocked when a nun determined to get the baby latched on the breast correctly stood at the door with one in her arms and shouted, ‘Brace yourself, mother!’ and then ran full tilt, the baby’
s startled mouth gaping, and clamped it onto the breast.
Another diplomatic wife, Pat Beesley – a close friend – recommended the Jewish hospital where she had given birth. When I researched that I discovered that it was highly prescriptive, and mothers had to follow instructions and accept whatever intervention was proposed.
Either way, I realised that I was handing my body over to be managed by an institution that imposed a concept of birth very different to mine. I was determined to avoid this. The answer I decided was to give birth at home with a midwife who knew how to help women labour as naturally and spontaneously as possible. In France that was called ‘accouchement sans douleur’. My best bet was to get one who had some training in what was then newly introduced as a method of conducting childbirth, psychoprophylaxis.
My baby was my baby, and I wanted to get to know my child from the earliest moment on. I felt that I could trust my body. I realised that my choices seemed to be in very bad taste and friends told me that I was behaving ‘like a peasant’.
Although a doctor was in the background and saw me for several prenatal visits, I was looked after during my pregnancy by a young midwife who had attended a course in psychoprophylaxis run by Lamaze in Paris. I told her about Grantly Dick-Read’s teaching and the pioneering work of Kathleen Vaughan in India; we discussed books I had read, especially those by Minnie Randall and the physiotherapist Helen Heardman. We agreed to see if we could combine the best aspects of each of these approaches. We didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye but it seemed the neatest solution. I read everything I could find about birth – anthropology (in which detailed accounts of birth were few and far between), my mother’s books, and any other literature that could give me some understanding of the birth experience.
I wanted it to be as natural as possible and was absolutely convinced that I could birth in my own way, in my own time. Uwe shared my confidence and gave me strong emotional support. I loved being pregnant, exercised, breathed, relaxed, and was in peak physical and emotional condition. I could not wait for labour to start!
One evening when the Council of Europe was in session we attended a gala dinner. The wines and food were splendid. When I climbed into bed that night, I said, ‘I hope the baby doesn’t come tonight; I’ve eaten too much!’ Two hours later I woke with a delicious, warm sensation, and as I drifted out of sleep, I had the satisfying feeling of having wet the bed. The waters had broken.
This occurred long before the vogue for water births. Nevertheless, I made for the bath and soaked in warm water, breathing at first slowly and fully, and then lightly and quickly, over the waves of the contractions, revelling in the swelling power of my uterus. Lying there, I started to time the contractions and realised that they were coming every three to four minutes. I was in the full swing of labour. I was exultant! It was like jumping into a river and finding that I could swim after all. I could do it! There was nothing unfamiliar, nothing that I could not handle myself. The pain was a by-product of the work my uterus was doing so efficiently, but it was pain with a glorious purpose, pain at which I marvelled because it was quite different from the pain of injury.
Once out of the bath, I helped Uwe get the room ready for birth, made the bed, boiled the water, and rang the midwife. We wanted to tape-record the sounds of birth and our baby’s first cry and intended to borrow equipment from a friend, but I suddenly realised I was feeling low pressure and said to Uwe, ‘I don’t want you to leave me.’ I bent my knees and went down spontaneously, holding on to the big, bulbous leg of a heavy table in the study. Every two minutes, with each contraction, I squatted on the floor. I still remember the garish yellow, black and purple stripes of paint I had applied to this ugly Victorian secondhand furniture. I rocked and tilted my hips as each contraction built up, climaxed and faded.
I had never been any good at games at school and was put in goal in the hockey team because with my bulk I might at least stop the ball in a more or less stationary position. But even that didn’t happen often, as other girls darted round the pitch. Not me. Sports were a misery and I felt a complete failure. Yet working with my body in childbirth I was able to dance my way through labour. It was amazing! I suddenly thought, ‘Wow! This is a sport I can do!’
The midwife came in, assessed the situation quickly, examined me, and said, ‘You can push now’. Push? Push? I did not want to push. I told her so and said I would rather wait until my body told me to push. My body seemed to be telling me to relax and let the baby’s head slide out gently. She looked worried: ‘Lie on your back. Push or I’ll cut you.’ I was really frightened of having an episiotomy, or being surgically mutilated, so I took a deep breath and pushed, and after a second stage of only 10 minutes, I felt the prickling sensation of the baby’s head crowning. Like a pea popping out of a pod, a head slipped out, and then I felt a warm, amazingly strong baby kicking between my legs. This was what it was all about – a baby! She was gorgeous. I put her to my breast immediately, and she suckled as if this were all she had been waiting for. The birth had been three hours from start to finish.
Meanwhile, the midwife examined me and said that I had a second-degree tear and that she would call the doctor to come and suture my perineum. He came in, slapped a cloth soaked in ether over my face, and tried to suture me while I was moving restlessly about. As I returned to consciousness, I heard him announcing that his handiwork was not good enough: ‘Bring her to the hospital, and I’ll redo it under proper anaesthesia.’
We spent the next two hours enjoying the baby, called to tell English parliamentary friends that we had a daughter, and then drove to the hospital. It was there that the obstetrician, after injecting me with a general anaesthetic, dared to ask my husband (man to man), ‘How tight do you want her?’ Uwe did not know what to answer. I was duly sutured and then handed back to him with these words: ‘I’ve sewn her up good and tight.’ I was furious. He had given me the French equivalent of the American obstetrician’s ‘husband’s stitch’.
A couple of days later, I determined to go for a long walk in the woods so that I could work the stitches loose. It turned out quite an eventful outing. We set off in the car to the Black Forest, I got out and walked. It was snowing and I did rather more than walk, since the car stuck in a snowdrift and I had to push it out. I lifted the carry cot out of the car in case it slid forward over the edge of the mountain, got a grip and shoved and heaved. It wouldn’t budge at first, and then – triumph! It moved and the wheels shifted. For six months, I felt quite sore and did not enjoy intercourse; however, when my English GP examined me later, she commented, ‘I wouldn’t have known that you had a tear.’ I don’t recommend pushing cars out of snowdrifts on a mountainside, but it worked for me!
That was the beginning of my commitment to understand the spontaneous and unforced rhythms of the second stage, to learn how women could give birth without fighting their bodies or putting on a performance – could open up and deliver without injury. My experience sowed the seeds for my interest in the psycho-sexual aspects of childbirth, my concern about the unnecessary and mutilating surgery performed in both obstetrics and gynaecology, and my determination to challenge women’s powerlessness and victimisation by a male-dominated medical system.
Childbirth Education
When Celia was about nine weeks old the Health Visitor called with forms to be filled in to fit me into the health system. Pen poised over the questionnaire, she asked me, ‘What are you feeding her?’ ‘Breast milk’, I said. ‘Aren’t you giving her anything else?’ I said I wasn’t. ‘You need to give her mashed brains.’ I told her I was a vegetarian. She was horrified and delivered the authoritative judgement, ‘If you don’t give her any brains she won’t develop any.’
I had just come back to England from France two months after giving birth and wanted to use the experience so that I could reach out and help other women enjoy their birth-giving too. The Natural Childbirth Association, founded by Prunella Briance earlier that year to promote the teaching of Grantly D
ick-Read, had launched an appeal to find women willing to train to become birth educators.
Well into the 60s birth was considered ‘private, undignified and disgusting’, as my daughter Jenny illustrated in a chapter she wrote for a book The Politics of Maternity Care.4
Readers responded to birth photographs in the Sun in 1965 with shock and outrage. One woman asked in the Letters page ‘How many men were put off their breakfast?’
My colleague Gwen Rankin recalls that one man threatened legal action against the Natural Childbirth Association because he had been shown photographs depicting birth that he claimed had made him impotent.
One of the flaws in all methods of training for childbirth, is that they have tended towards salvationism, which does not take into account differences between women. This was the problem with the Natural Childbirth Association, the organisation which started it all off in this country, and though it was valuable as a protest movement of mothers against the failure of medical services to provide adequate antenatal education for women who wanted to know what was going on and how they could actively help themselves and even enjoy their babies’ births, it didn’t take into account that different women have different needs.
There was the woman who insisted that the midwife leave the bedroom door open so that her husband, downstairs having his tea, should hear her screams and realise what she was going through. Or one who decided to wash her hair when she felt the first faint contractions, and had to be delivered with her head swathed in towels and rivulets dripping down the back of her neck. Or the West Indian peasant women who call on Jesus with each contraction and are obviously obtaining satisfaction from the religious context of their suffering. There are women in Italian hospitals where they are fitted with earphones and press a button as a pain starts to be assailed by white noise – a cacophonous din like a thousand waterfalls, so loud that they hardly notice the contraction.
A Passion for Birth Page 8