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A Passion for Birth

Page 15

by Sheila Kitzinger


  In contrast, the mothers’ behaviour was all tenderness. The babies sat on their laps, thumb sucking, stroked, petted and caressed. Occasionally a child would slip its hand down inside its mother’s dress to lift out her breast, at which she would laugh. If babies could speak, the mothers vied with each other at producing baby talk – ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ even if ‘Papa’ was not a permanent feature of the household and changed his identity rather often. But if a nurse had her eye on a baby a mother might quickly take the thumb out of its mouth and say lightly, ‘You suck you thumb too much’.

  The nurse’s task was to train ignorant mothers in correct baby care. The mothers always agreed with everything the nurse said. For the nurses, work was tedious and rewards few. In the rainy season they had to walk miles in mud, slush and driving rain. In fine weather the sun beat down as they covered vast distances to reach recalcitrant mothers who failed to attend clinic appointments. The surroundings were dirty, flies, mosquitoes and other insects abounded, and they had none of the equipment they would expect in a hospital or clinic in town.

  Much of the advice the nurse gave was negative: ‘Stop feeding him at night.’ ‘Stop feeding him so many times in the day.’ ‘Stop feeding him whenever he cries.’ ‘Don’t give the porridge in a bottle. Thicken it and give it to the baby in a spoon.’ But under the stress of family living in overcrowded conditions it was obvious that mothers were going to give the baby what it liked rather than obey the teachings of an expert.

  To all these mothers, the nurses, doctors and other medical personnel, teachers, social workers and enquirers from University and the Government are ‘Them’ – members of that other world of the middle class who lived in undreamed-of luxury. Colour was secondary to this, and it did not really matter much what a person’s colour was; white or black, a member of the middle class who patronised the poor and gave them advice and tried to help them, who criticised their behaviour and the ways in which they reared and fed their children, who asked ‘What did you give him for his meal?’ and ‘Why don’t you come to the clinic?’ and said ‘Don’t give the baby condensed milk’ when that was what the baby liked best - whatever her colour, she was one of ‘Them’.

  Discipline

  From the age of about four a child was progressively and sometimes sternly disciplined. He was expected to be bowel and bladder trained, and might be smacked or ‘slashed’ with a belt if he made a mess. Until now he had just been left ‘to dirty him baggy’.

  The boisterous, rebellious child was ‘rude’. He whistled behind his teeth or sucked in his breath, pulled the little girls’ pigtails, answered back and is ‘facety’ (impudent) and precocious, wanting to ‘turn man’ or ‘turn woman before time’. Bad children ‘lick one another’, and the treatment for this was to ‘catch them and flog them with a strap’.

  A girl was ‘easier’ than a boy, and mothers often said they preferred to have daughters for this reason. When I told them I had five daughters they often told me how they envied me.

  After a seven or eight-year-old boy first joined the gang of neighbourhood children his contact with home was minimal, except on Sundays. He picked up food as best he could, stole with members of his gang, and took his luck.

  The mythological folk hero for these children was Anansi, the little spider man, crafty, cunning, thoroughly amoral, and triumphing over the strong by his wit and wiles. He was really the same hero as Brer Rabbit or the ‘signifying monkey’ of Afro-American and Akan-Ashanti origin. Anansi represents the poor and powerless who win by deceit. The girls and I were often treated to a spell-binding array of these folk tales when Carmen Manley, the Prime Minister’s sister, used to drop by in the early evenings introducing us to the fables and songs of her own childhood.

  The nine months in Jamaica were in extraordinary contrast to life in an Oxfordshire village. I valued the warmth and vitality of the friends I made and the sheer joie de vivre of the carnival. I also met poverty face to face for the first time in my life, and was struck by the dignity and generosity of women who struggled against terrible odds to bring up their children and give them a life worth living. I got to know Rastafarian brethren who took me to their camp and let me take part in their religious services and listen to the drums saying, ‘Death to the white oppressor and his black allies!’ I once asked them why they welcomed me and discussed ideas with me. The reply came: ‘You have a white skin, but a black heart.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  OUR HOUSE

  Back from Jamaica in 1966, we felt that the Toby House in Freeland was too small for seven people and fell in love with the Manor House at Standlake. It was perhaps foolhardy to pay four times Uwe’s salary, but we have never regretted it; we are still here, feeding the great fireplaces with logs from trees we planted 45 or more years ago.

  The village is set in the flood meadows of the upper Thames. It has its roots in the Iron Age, and in the Roman occupation was used as a base for waste disposal. When I mentioned that I lived in Standlake, Uwe’s friend George Forrest, the Wykeham Professor of Ancient History, remarked, ‘Ah yes! Standlake, the midden of the Roman army!’

  Our home

  A lofty medieval mud and straw one-room hall with a thatched roof, a hole in the roof for the smoke to go through – beams in the attic are blackened by smoke – and a rush-strewn oak floor. Cotswold stone, Plantagenet timber, wattle and daub, Stonesfield roof slates – they all come from the people who lived in the house. But people are shaped by houses, too.

  Standlake flowered briefly in the thirteenth Century when it was described as a town. The Lady of the Manor, Eva de Grey, daughter of the Lord of the Isle of Wight, who survived four husbands, secured the right to a Friday market and a fair every year in honour of the parish church’s patron saint, St Giles. This made trade for the village. She also had a licence to hold a court in the Manor. Over the years, four families descended from her husbands took it in turn to provide the living for the priest, and had to prove their right to install a new rector.

  During the Reformation the Lords of the Manor provided hiding places for priests. The wall at the side of the great stone fireplace in our bedroom is hollow. It was probably a priest’s hole. There is just enough space to hide a man.

  When I show American guests round they usually exclaim, ‘Wow! Before Columbus!’, because this is the most significant event in their time. The world didn’t exist before.

  No-one knows exactly when the Manor House was built but it was extensively modernised in 1492–1495. An upper floor was put into the old open hall and the fireplaces and first floor porch were added by Edmund Yate, who left his punning heraldic badge – a gate – on one of the beams. A timber porch was installed with a small room above it, which is now part of my bedroom.

  Decorative symbols were also carved in the stone fireplace in the sitting room: the Tudor rose of Henry VII and his crown, the cross keys of the Abbey of Gloucester, and the ragged staff in bend sinister of the Boyes family. Boyes is derived from Bois, indicating that the family was Norman. It was later anglicised to ‘Wood’. The ‘ragged staff in bend sinister’ shows that this branch of the family came from the wrong side of the sheets. The Lord was having it off with a serving maid who became pregnant. He acknowledged paternity so that the descendants could carry the emblem of the family, but it was adapted to slant the other way.

  Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, bought the Manor in 1537. After he had advised Henry VIII to marry Anne of Cleves, he was executed in 1540 for high treason and the house was confiscated by the Crown. But not for long.

  Henry VIII was shocked when he met his fourth bride, Anne of Cleves, to find that she didn’t look anything like Holbein’s painting with which he had been presented. She was rather toothy, and he called her ‘the Flemish Mare’. On the wedding night he exclaimed, ‘God, what I do for England!’ In fact, he could not perform, and there was a divorce. She was to stay quietly in England and given the title of ‘the King’s Sister’ and as part of the divorce sett
lement received seven manors, one of them the recently confiscated manor of Standlake.

  Fast forward to the Second World War. A retired headmaster, Captain Sir Henry Chittey, lived in the house, at that time in a very run down condition. When it rained he used to wash the dishes in the scullery, the roof of which was in very bad repair, wearing his tin helmet because water was pouring through. He was an obvious choice to command the Standlake Home Guard.

  A Nissen hut headquarters was erected on his land as its base. Exercises consisted of battle between the Home Guard in Northmoor and the one in Standlake. Northmoor had to defend its village against Standlake and each village lined up troops and built barriers at the bridge on the road to Northmoor. The Northmoor men were to attack Standlake and Standlake built a strong defence on the road. But the men of Northmoor decided to go through the fields, invaded from the south, liberated the Standlake headquarters Nissen hut in which all the beer was stacked, and were drinking copious amounts whilst Standlake Home Guard waited for the invasion at the bridge.

  We bought the house and six acres of grounds from a failed mink farmer. Mink cages littered the area – and tiny skulls and bones of the departed. He had hung the pelts in a large shed which is now transformed into Uwe’s study and dressing room. The walls are thick with nails from which they were suspended. Elderly villagers told us that the smell of dead mink seeped into the High Street. It was strong and revolting. Occasionally mink escaped and ravaged neighbours’ poultry.

  The Manor House Garden And Paddock

  The paddock and garden at the rear of the house facing the back of my flowery courtyard are now packed with bay trees and herbs, hanging flower baskets, pot plants, climbing honeysuckle and brilliantly coloured creepers. One arm of this courtyard leading to the main garden we closed in to make a conservatory and library to connect our two studies. Walls and ceiling are resplendent with vines that produce heavy bunches of grapes which our entrepreneur grandson Sam turned into juice and wine. I stencilled vines all over one wall where the trunk is to encourage the grapes to grow.

  We don’t know when the garden, ‘the football field’, and the paddock were laid out in their present form. In 1860 we realise from the auction particulars that the Manor House had 233 acres of land attached – but by the time we bought it in 1966 all but a little over six acres had been sold off.

  In the 1930s there were several magnificent box trees in the upper garden: but when we took over only the lovely old walnut tree remained. It used to give us masses of nuts in the 70s, but then a bad summer drought marked the end of that bounty. The white and red roses of York and Lancaster climbed up the Cotswold stone walls.

  The ‘football field’ became far more interesting when Jon, Tess’s partner, dug a pond for Uwe. It is visited by all sorts of birds, often a pair of mallards, but mainly pheasants. They are almost domesticated. One winter when only three cocks survived we gave them six hens for Christmas – and if there was snow on the ground they pecked at the back door to make sure Uwe didn’t forget to feed them.

  The paddock has had no weed-killer or fertiliser on it for decades, and when the girls were young it was inhabited at various times by Shaggy the shetland pony, Tinker the old horse, Hetty and Hannah the goats, and then by a Jacob ram called Joshua.

  There have always been birds, too: doves, busy, scuttling bantams, peacocks and peahens. I was once attacked by a peacock as I emerged from the house into the garden putting up a multicoloured parasol. He obviously thought I was competition and wasn’t letting me get away with it.

  We planted the paddock with expert help from the Kingston Bagpuize Wildlife Gardening Centre to develop it as a habitat for insects, birds and other creatures. Their idea was to spread out a wide diversity of native plants, so there are white and silver birch, wild cherry and crabapple, hornbeam and hawthorn, holly and goat willow, guelder rose, dogwood, rowan, hazel and alder buckthorn. They planted a variety of native herbs and flowers, too – water mint by the old well near the middle of the paddock, pimpernel, woodruff, bugle and hellebore.

  The tree trunks left rotting helped provide worms and bugs for the birds, and in the evening there is a white owl and lots of bats. Ground level there are hedgehogs, moles, foxes and squirrels and also some muntjac deer given to raiding the vegetable patch and anything they can munch in the garden.

  Gwen Rankin, my long term friend and colleague, writes: ‘I remember one happy encounter with Sheila which came out of the blue. My route took me near Oxford, so the opportunity was there to drop in and see her – if she was home that day – and that was a chance not to be missed, to catch up with a valued friend.

  ‘I rang the door bell. No response, but remembering how casual the family were about locking doors, I tried the handle – and it opened at once, allowing me to walk in, and shout “Sheila?” No response – and now I began to worry that she might be in need of help. I walked round, calling her name, until I reached the kitchen; and there was evidence of her being at home, as a breakfast tray was on the side, ready to be carried – where?

  ‘A quick search upstairs showed me that she had just risen, and left the bedclothes thrown back. Only the garden now remained as a possible place for her to be, so I went back downstairs and opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the garden. And there she was! In nightdress and gown, walking back to the house from the garden shed (where they kept goats). She looked at me, and simply said, “Oh hello Gwen, so sorry not to be there to greet you. I’m in bed with flu.” I started to laugh, and said, “I see you are!” She began to explain that one of the goats was in difficulties giving birth and she had to help it out – but that was all now resolved. Her response was pure Sheila, unafraid and welcoming.

  ‘We drank tea, caught up with family news, and I went on my way, leaving her back in her warm bed, with a hot drink, and a telephone to reach; I drove home laughing and happy to have been with a unique woman for a few valuable hours.’

  Depression

  When Jenny was six weeks old in 1963, Uwe had been depressed. He had always experienced mood swings, and this was an especially bad time for him. We decided to have a holiday, so I asked my parents to look after the older children and we booked a week at the very comfortable hotel on Tresco in the Scilly Isles.

  We flew from the mainland of Cornwall in a bi-plane constructed of balsa wood and painted canvas, patched up with what looked like sticking plaster. There were just the pilot, Uwe and me, and the baby in her carrycot – and a large bunch of flowers tucked in behind the pilot. The plane shuddered into life, running down-hill for the take-off, and we rattled our way across to St Mary’s, landing going up-hill, and coming to a safe stop. As we disembarked Uwe asked who the flowers were for. ‘Oh, that is for my co-pilot who is in hospital in St Mary’s. He crash-landed yesterday.’

  We went by boat to Tresco and settled into the hotel. Little sailing boats bobbed all around in a sparkling sea. It was like a Dufy painting. I suggested that Uwe look after Jenny for a bit while I went across to the big island to the book shop. I came back with a Penguin introductory book on sailing by Peter Heaton. Uwe read it avidly and the next day asked the fisherman if he would give him a lesson. He asked for another lesson but the fisherman said, ‘From now on you will teach yourself. Hire a boat and get sailing.’ So that is what he did. Once he had got the hang of it I decided to join him, and we left Jenny asleep under the watchful eye of another friendly guest, the editor of Nursery World, who seemed a very suitable guardian. We sailed in sight of the shore, so she could hail me if Jenny woke for a feed.

  From then on Uwe was a sailor, with boats on the Solent and in the Mediterranean, and a dinghy in France. His identity underwent a radical transformation. He was a happy man! Depression conquered without pills!

  Bages

  In 1968 we decided to look for a holiday home in France. Uwe is a great Francophile and wanted the children to absorb French culture. It also had to be a place where he could keep a boat and sail.

  So
we drove along the coast from Nice south towards the Spanish border, buying local newspapers and checking out the obituaries to get hot news about who had died and find likely properties. We found the ideal place in Languedoc just south of Narbonne, a ‘village perché’ (a fortified hilltop village) among the vineyards on a salt water lake that connected with the sea, the Étang de Bages, crowned by an old church. There was a placard announcing its presence: ‘Village d’Art’. It had been a base for pirates who raided ships bringing goods from the Eastern Mediterranean. It looked like a quiet fishing village.

  Only it wasn’t quiet. The fishermen shouted from boat to boat across the water and along the cobbled streets, elderly women dressed in black sat on straight-backed chairs outside many of the houses, watching the world go by and exchanging local news. Everyone coming along the road shouted greetings, and conversations took place from window to window across the narrow alleys and from upstairs windows down into the street. It was a hive of activity and vibrant community life. Cats of all shapes and sizes roamed along the gutters as fishermen cleaned the slippery eels. When water rushed down open gullies at the sides of the road with tiny crabs, oysters and sprats bobbing in the flood stream, cats slithered and sprung to capture them, and then lay replete and glossy in the sun digesting their feast. Children played freely in the open, and as dusk descended there was the heavy clump-clump of boules. Festivals such as the Sardinade, which were held throughout the region in summer, involved everyone, villagers and visitors, and fire crackled as fresh sardines were cooked on open fires down by the shore to feed them. It seemed that every saint’s day was celebrated with a dance in the village square and often with appearances from rock singers. The songs of Johnny Hallyday regularly livened things still further till the early hours of the morning. To all this was added the raucous cries of seagulls fighting over tit-bits and the clacking of marsh birds as the sun rose. The concept of noise pollution did not exist and you had to organise your life around these things.

 

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