Daring to Dream

by Sam Bailey

  When I was 32 weeks gone, the band went to do a gig at New Lodge Working Men’s Club in Barnsley. Craig came with us to do the lighting and we had to stop at every single service station so I could go to the toilet. I didn’t think anything of it because you always wee a lot more when you’re pregnant, but as soon as I went I wanted to go again.

  We went on stage and started the show and every time I sang a powerful note I thought I was going to wet myself. When we did the last number, a medley of rock songs, I thought I was going to have to leave the stage to run to the toilet. I’d never been pregnant before but I still had eight weeks to go and knew something wasn’t right. My trousers were soaked but Craig reassured me that everything was fine and we put it down to pregnancy bladder weakness.

  We drove back to Leicester, stopping wherever possible, and when we arrived home I called the Leicester Royal Infirmary hospital. They told me to head straight up there to get checked out. I had an internal and they broke the news to me that my waters had broken. It was crazy because I hadn’t experienced any contractions or anything and apart from the constant weeing I didn’t really have any other symptoms. My pregnancy had been so straightforward and all I’d experienced was some lower back pain. The doctor was telling me all of the things that could be wrong with the baby and I was like a terrified deer trapped in headlights because it all sounded so negative.

  We had everything ready back home for our baby. Her bedroom was all kitted out, the pushchair had been ordered and we had loads of little clothes ready for her to wear. And here we were being told that something could go wrong with my pregnancy.

  I had to stay in hospital so the doctors could monitor me. They were worried that the baby might be premature, which meant that her organs might not be fully developed. I was given a series of injections to speed up the growth process and a few days later a doctor told me that they were going to induce my labour and I was going to have the baby that day. The hospital phoned Craig to tell him to come as soon as he could, but he’s a service engineer and he was out on a job in Northampton at the time. He had one of those stickers on the back of his van that says ‘how am I driving’ and you can imagine the number of complaints his office got when he was tearing down the hard shoulder at 70mph to get to me.

  I was all over the place, lying in the bed thinking ‘What if this baby isn’t ready to come out yet? What if she’s not okay?’ Then all of a sudden the doctor said that her heart rate was dropping and I would have to have a C-section. Gary was by my side constantly and said he was going to come into the delivery room with me while I gave birth if Craig couldn’t get there in time. He was like a mum, holding my hand and saying soothing words to me.

  Thankfully Craig got there just before I was wheeled into theatre. He was gowned up, and after I’d been given a rather painful steroid injection, it was time. I had a screen covering half of me so I couldn’t see what was going on, but when I felt a tickle I knew they were cutting me. Next I felt a hand go inside me, and about 20 minutes later I heard a small cry. They held my little baby Brooke over the screen for me to see and she was so tiny, 4lb 14oz and like a little dot. I was stitched up and taken to a recovery area where I fell straight to sleep. When I woke up Craig told me Brooke had been taken to Leicester General Hospital by ambulance because she wasn’t feeding properly. I hadn’t even had a chance to hold her. I was told I could go and see her either that evening or the following day, but I needed to be with my child immediately.

  I got myself dressed and we drove to the General. I was being sick into a cardboard hospital tray for the entire journey and when I arrived the staff were furious that I’d travelled without a doctor or a nurse after such major surgery. The staff at the General were amazing and my mum travelled straight up to see me. Because Brooke was so small none of the clothes we had bought fitted her, so she was wearing a hospital babygrow and this little blue knitted hat that had been donated by the local Women’s Institute. The hospital was right next to Mothercare, so Craig had to go and buy a load of early-baby clothes for her. When he brought them back they were like dolls clothes they were so small. It was hard to imagine that my baby could be so little.

  My milk hadn’t started to come through, so Brooke was being fed thought a tube and that mortified me. I felt like I’d failed her. I was trying everything but after two days the head midwife wheeled me down to see Brooke and told me take off her sleep suit. She explained that the hormone that’s usually released when you give birth to a baby hadn’t been because I’d had the caesarean. She told me to sniff the sleep suit and they took a Polaroid picture of Brooke for me to look at to try and stimulate the hormone. I thought she was playing a joke on me. I honestly thought there were cameras in the room and it was all a bit of a laugh. How on earth was that going to work? But I was willing to try anything.

  The midwife left the room and I sat there looking at the photo and sniffing the sleep suit, feeling utterly ridiculous. I’m not joking, within an hour I could physically see my boobs getting bigger and filling up with milk. Within about three hours I looked like Jordan. I phoned Craig laughing my head off and said, ‘Oh my god, my boobs are massive! They’re like pillows!’

  As soon as my milk came in I felt so much better but Brooke still wouldn’t latch on. I was allowed to go home after a week but Brooke had to stay in and be monitored, which I was gutted about. I was told that I had to express milk for her so I was sat in front of the TV with these two breast pumps crying my eyes out because I wanted to be with my baby. I desperately wanted her at home with us so we could start being a proper family.

  I went and visited her every day to take milk in and be with her. Craig used to sit in the armchair next to the tiny bed with Brooke on his chest for hours. After she’d been in there for about five days I got a phone call asking if I wanted to ‘room in’ with Brooke that night. Rooming in is where you share a bedroom with your baby and all being well take them home the following day. The night went brilliantly, so at long last Craig and I got to bring our baby home. She was still so small but she was really good and barely cried. We set up a camera and a monitor in her bedroom but I still couldn’t relax. I guess all new mums must be a bit like that. I used to sit staring at her Moses basket all night making sure she was okay. I hardly slept but I had to make sure she was safe and had everything she needed.

  I loved being a mum and I didn’t mind doing the night feeds; I just napped as and when I could. Craig was brilliant and he helped me with the cooking and cleaning and looked after Brooke when he wasn’t working. Things were still a bit of a struggle for me because I still had stitches and I was walking a bit like John Wayne for a while. I must admit the tiredness did get to me a bit sometimes. But it was well worth it. She was so beautiful.

  Not surprisingly after everything we’d been through, I didn’t feel much like going out for a little while. But when Brooke was a couple of months old Craig and I got invited to a party at our local rugby club. My mum and my brother Danny came to stay to look after Brooke and I decided to brave my first social event since I’d had her.

  Craig was in the garden just before we were due to leave and he heard a massive crash and then the sound of a car horn. We both ran through the alley near our house and we were faced with the most horrific scene. Two cars had crashed into each other and this elderly couple were involved. I saw this old lady lying on the pavement and I went over and started talking to her. I knew that she needed to stay conscious, so I was asking her where her pain was and if she was on any medication or had any allergies. I was telling her all about Brooke and I assured her that her husband was okay. I didn’t even think about it; it was just instinctive. I know that pain makes you go into shock and once that happens it can be fatal. We covered her in coats and when the police and ambulance arrived I said, ‘This is Beryl, she’s 72. She’s complaining about pain in her left hip. She’s allergic to so and so and she’s not taking this medication.’ The medic looked at me really seriously and said, ‘Are you a doctor?�
� and I replied, ‘No, I just watch Holby City mate!’

  Beryl was taken off in an ambulance and when Craig and I walked back to the house I felt like I’d been in some kind of dream world. I didn’t know I was capable of doing something like that. I bumped into a friend a few days later and he said, ‘You know you’re in the Leicester Mercury don’t you?’ The Leicester Mercury is our local paper and Beryl had written a letter thanking me for helping her and wishing me good luck with Brooke. She also sent a letter to me with a cheque for £25, so I cashed it and went straight to the florists and sent her a bunch of flowers. I didn’t help her for any other reason than because I could and I certainly didn’t want any kind of reward. It turned out that she’d broken her hip, but thankfully she did make a full recovery afterwards.

  I didn’t do any gigs for a long time after having Brooke because I wanted to stay at home with her. I’d started a childcare course while I was pregnant, so I carried on with that and settled into life as a mum. Brooke had quite bad reflux issues – I’d feed her and then two minutes later she would projectile vomit across the room. I was on the phone to NHS Direct a lot and we had ambulances coming to the house quite frequently. When she was about eight months old she had to go back into hospital because she had a really high temperature. It was a very scary time, but it turned out she had a virus and she was fine again within a few days. I think because she was my first child and she’d been premature I was so much more aware of every tiny little scratch or rash. But she grew up to be a strong little girl and she’s hardly ever ill now.

  Craig started working with Gary and Tony on the road quite a lot, helping out at the gigs. He used to pretend to play keyboards on stage but he was actually controlling the lights. People used to compliment him on his piano skills but he didn’t even know to play! It was like the tables had turned and instead of me being on stage in front of a room full of people, it was him. Not that I was in the right place to be getting up on stage at that time. I put on a lot of weight with Brooke and had severe water retention. It was the first time I’d ever had cankles. My calves and feet were as one; you couldn’t see my ankles at all. I wasn’t rushing to get back to my pre-baby weight but I became very aware that I was bigger. I remember Craig doing some filming of Brooke and I, and when I bent over he genuinely had to zoom out with the camera to get Brooke and my backside in the same shot. I was so upset when I saw it that I deleted the footage. I used to make jokes about my seven chins and bingo wings but I really wasn’t happy.

  In my eyes I looked huge. I’d been a size 8–10 before I got pregnant and I really did balloon. I asked Craig to buy me a gym membership for my birthday so I could get back into shape but I was too tired to go. I was still doing loads of night feeds, so during the day I’d be like a zombie and not really in the mood to get on a treadmill or lift weights. My weight eventually went down naturally but it took months and months. Even when I did lose the pounds (well, stones) I didn’t go back to a size eight. I kind of resigned myself to the fact that those days were over and I was fine with being a slim size ten.

  Tony always said I was welcome back in the band but I didn’t rejoin them until a good six months after I’d had Brooke. I didn’t feel ready before then. Of course the outfits that I’d worn pre-pregnancy were no longer suitable for me. There was no way I was going to parade around in a red sequined bikini again! We had to go out and buy some new outfits, so I was wearing smart suits and dresses and I soon started to feel more like my old self. We changed the show a lot and it was like we entered a new phase, which reignited my interest.

  I did need to be working and bringing money in but it was hard when the band had to go away for long periods of time. I did a week of Christmas parties up in Scotland that December and when I came home Brooke almost looked right through me. She wasn’t excited to see me at all. She was about eight months old but she barely batted an eyelid and instead crawled over to Craig. I vowed then that I would never go away for that long again. I loved singing but it was more important for me to stay at home. I cut right back on the gigs and if I really needed to get a singing fix I’d go to one of my local pubs and do some karaoke so I could get it out of my system.

  In 2007 my life changed forever when my dad became very ill. He was always petrified of the dentist, much like I am, so when he thought he had an abscess in his mouth he didn’t do anything about it for some time. When he eventually did go to the dentist he was told he needed to go to hospital and have it looked at as soon as possible. It turned out to be mouth cancer, which was a devastating diagnosis, and he was started on a course of radiotherapy. He had a big lump in his neck and his mouth and the next time I saw him he looked like a different man. It was so sad to see him like that and all I could do was pray that the treatment would work.

  I’ll never forget getting the phone call from my nan in the spring of 2007 telling me that my dad’s cancer was terminal. I was devastated. They didn’t give us any idea of time but I couldn’t imagine him not being here. He’d always been such a huge part of my life and I think I almost went into shock and tried to stop myself thinking about the inevitable. My nan kept me up to date with how he was in between; she went round to his house every day to deliver him beer, which may not have been the most sensible thing for him to have, but it was like his medicine and it was how he got through each day.

  I’d applied for The X Factor a few months before, and I had my audition a few days after I found out about dad. I didn’t want to go along and use my dad’s illness as an excuse in case people thought it was some sob story, so I didn’t tell any of the researchers what was going on. I went along to Birmingham NEC wearing a ladies’ Leicester City tracksuit and after singing ‘His Eye Is On The Sparrow’ by Lauryn Hill for about a minute I was given a firm ‘no’. They told me to keep practising and come back the following year. I was so deflated when I walked out of there, I vowed there and then that I would never do it again. I was totally myself and I sang my little heart out and it wasn’t enough. I honestly wondered if I’d have fared better if I’d mentioned that my dad was unwell. I was so sceptical that in my head I believed you were only successful if you had a sob story, but I wasn’t about to try and use a horribly sad situation to try and get ahead. As far as I was concerned The X Factor and I were done.

  In January 2008 my nan called me to tell me my dad had passed away. She’d gone round to see him and found him in bed, looking like he was fast asleep. When my nan told me about my dad I remember falling to the floor and shouting, ‘No, no, no, no.’ My neighbour Yvonne came running in and she called Craig at work to let him know. I was supposed to be doing a gig that night but I had to cancel – there was no way I could get up on stage.

  I was in bits. Yvonne offered to look after Brooke for us, so Craig took some time off work and we drove straight to my mum’s house. By the time we got there Dad’s body had been taken to a funeral parlour, which was a few doors up from Mum’s house. They had already closed by the time I got there but I walked up to the window and pressed my nose up against it. I could see a door at the back of the room and I knew his body was being stored behind it. I remember counting how many metres away from me he would have been in that moment and it broke my heart.

  My nan went round to start sorting out his belongings, and she found more than 300 full cans of Special Brew hidden away in various places. He obviously hadn’t been drinking all the beer she’d been taking him, after all. She also found a note he’d written saying ‘I want a ’kin wake’, meaning he wanted ‘a fucking wake’. He also said he wanted his guitars shared out between his sister Jackie and I, and he also wanted a brass band playing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ so it would be an uplifting day, not a sad one.

  I still feel guilty now that I didn’t see him more when he was ill. I didn’t realise how sick he was. My nan told me that the hospital had upped his morphine in his final few weeks, but no one told me about it. Had I known I would have suspected he didn’t have much longer left and would ha
ve taken time off work to go and be with him. I’ve still got dad’s journals up in my loft. He was writing down his thoughts and ideas but I can’t bring myself to read them. Maybe one day I will, but right now it still feels too raw.

  Going back to dad’s house for the first time was so strange. My nan was there, but it still felt empty somehow. I went up to Dad’s room and saw that my nan had picked out a suit for him to wear for the funeral. My dad hated wearing suits. It was hanging over the back of the chair and all of a sudden it fell to the floor. I just thought, ‘I’ve got to do something here’, so I went downstairs with dad’s favourite grey collarless silk shirt and said to my nan that I thought he should wear that instead. I was waiting for her to go mad at me because she was very fierce, but surprisingly she backed down. I took the shirt into the funeral parlour later that day, along with a smart pair of trousers. I also took along photos of my mum and dad, some of me, Danny and Charlie and some of the grandkids. I asked the funeral director to put them in his pocket on the day of the funeral. If my nan had found that picture of Mum and Dad together she would have gone crazy because Mum and her didn’t get on at all; they’d had a massive fallout years before. There was a lot of slapping involved and they hadn’t spoken since.

  Dad’s funeral didn’t take place until three weeks after he died and those three weeks were some of the worst of my life. I hated the fact my dad, who I’d worshipped, was in a bloody fridge. The day before the funeral I went round to my nan’s to help sort everything out for the wake and she told me that she’d given Jenny, the woman my dad had that affair with, one of dad’s guitars. It was the only one I wanted and I was so angry. Dad had been given that guitar after his best friend, who I called Uncle Mickey, was killed in a car crash. I knew how much it meant to him and I knew he would want it to stay in the family. My nan was like the don of our family. She was in charge of everyone and everything and you didn’t mess with her. I was so furious my blood was boiling, but I didn’t have the energy to say anything to her because I knew it would lead to a row. To be fair to Jenny, she was the one who really helped look after my dad when he was ill, but I was still really upset that the one thing I really wanted – and my dad wanted me to have – had been given to her.