6.9 Aftermath

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more about it and a list of instalments, see right.

Around lunchtime the hospital decided it was time for me to go home. I’d had nothing to eat for 24 hours and, when I tried to stand, I fell back on to the bed again. Thank goodness for Frog, who vanished and returned shortly with a sandwich.
    ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘It was all I could find.’
    It was ham in white bread. Not the sort of thing I normally ate, but I stuffed it into my mouth, hardly chewing.
    Frog then half-carried me to the car.
 
The next day the local midwife came to see me.
    ‘You’re very pale,’ she said, ‘I think we need to give you some iron injections.’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘No more injections.’
    I took a week off work and lay in the garden, reading novels. I felt as if my insides had been wrenched out.
    I received telephone calls and reams of kind letters from family and friends. When I did venture down to the village, people I hardly knew greeted me with kind words.
    The only bum note originated from the fertility charity when I rang them to tell them what had happened.
    ‘Oh no,’ they said. ‘The poor baby.’
    Then the guilt kicked in. I followed my usual course of action when in trouble – walking – and on my walks I contacted Thomas through the ether – or my imagination – and said sorry to him over and over again. He forgave me. He was a handsome young man by now. I prayed to God, and an answer bounced straight back to me. It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t need to shoulder the blame. It was the way society was. Society as a whole was responsible.
    The crematorium put on a special service for babies who hadn’t made it. Attending the service with Frog and me was one other couple who’d had a miscarriage. We all cried all the way through. I spoke to the vicar afterwards and he too said I didn’t need to feel guilty. We laid Thomas’s ashes to rest in a special garden for babies.
    My parents – who were very sympathetic – gave us some money and in September we booked two weeks on a Greek island, Greece being our favourite holiday destination. It was probably too soon. I had a lot of trouble with blood and other discharges (I won’t go into detail) which was frightening and difficult, especially where beaches and swimming were concerned. We did a lot of walking as there was a map of the island’s footpaths drawn by a British geographer who’d holidayed on the island for years. We drank a lot of wine in the evenings and stumbled back up the path to our room. I used to arrive at the top with white knees from all my falls into the powdery soil.
    Back in the UK, I started to read up about the loss of babies, and cried through every book and leaflet. I made myself do it. I wanted all the feelings out. I wanted to cry. I wanted to rub my nose in everything that had happened. I didn’t want any weeds left.
    In October I received an SOS from the Dorset publisher. They were short-staffed. Could I possibly come in three days a week and help them out? They would pay my travel costs and a generous hourly rate. I agreed. I’m not sure why as, again, it was too soon. My emotions were still all over the place and I acquired an obsessive (unreturned) crush on one of the people I was working with. This was something I did from time to time as crushes were safe – unlike Frog. Frog was upset. The journey was long – about an hour and half – and not much fun in the icy winter weather and the dark.
    By Christmas I was a wreck and I didn’t go back to Dorset in January.
 
It took a year for my body and emotions to return to something like normal, by which time I felt that my life was over. What else was there left to experience? I’d done it all, hadn’t I?
    How wrong I was.

To be continued

6.8. Thomas

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information about it, see right.

I loved being pregnant. I felt better than I did normally because my migraines stopped. I didn’t feel sick. I could eat what I wanted without worrying about putting on weight because I was putting it on anyway. I could lie around in the sun doing nothing because I wasn’t doing nothing – I was making a baby – and me relaxing was good for the baby.

    I put the charity’s comments out of my mind. What did they know? I was going to be fine. All was fine. Everything was going to be OK.

    We went to Kent for a weekend to tell my parents the good news and for once I seemed to have done something right. My mother fed me up, buying new potatoes especially for me.
    She of course had known, she said, as soon as she saw me, before I even spoke to them, that I was pregnant. That made me feel slightly uncomfortable. What else did she see, I wondered.
 
Because of my age, my GP and the local midwife advised me to have the full battery of tests. Reluctantly, I agreed. I could see that they were a double-edged sword and I wasn’t that keen on conventional medicine anyway, except for emergencies. After all, it had never cured my migraines.
    A blood test showed that my baby had a one in ten chance of being born with Down’s Syndrome and the doctor at the hospital was pretty insistent that I had an amniocentesis.
    ‘You don’t know how disabled your baby will be,' she said. 'There can be all sorts of serious complications with Down’s Syndrome.’
    Amniocentesis was an invasive test that involved sticking a needle into the womb and drawing out a sample of amniotic fluid. It sounded horrible, and dangerous for the baby, and I was reluctant to have it. However, after extensive talks with the delightful hospital midwife Nesta, I agreed.
    The test was every bit as bad as I expected, if not worse, as the needle was long and thick and it went straight through my stomach with only local anaesthetic. It was both psychologically invasive and painful.
    Then we had to wait for the results. It was summertime and I did lots of walking over the hills with Brindle, trying to still my anxious mind.
    One afternoon about ten days after the test, I arrived home to find the local doctor sitting in our garden surrounded by our flapping washing, with Frog busying around outside in his usual practical way looking both angry and worried.
    ‘He wouldn’t tell me anything,’ Frog whispered to me. ‘He said he couldn’t. He had to speak to you directly.’
    The doctor had been there for a couple of hours apparently.
    I appreciated him coming to speak to me in person instead of telephoning, but the result of course was yes. Our baby did have Down’s Syndrome, and now we had to decide what we wanted to do about that. Time was running out as I was by now eighteen weeks into the pregnancy.
    Nobody said anything to me but I sensed that people were divided. Most thought a termination was the right option, but one or two strongly disapproved. I was terrified at the thought of it because at this late stage it would involve an induced labour. The clincher however was that I knew without a doubt that Frog was on the side of termination, even though he didn’t say anything either, and I had a horrible feeling that I risked our marriage if I went ahead and had the baby.
     So a week later, one beautiful sunny day in August, we trekked to the maternity hospital in Exeter and checked into our five-star accommodation - a twin room with en-suite bathroom. I was impressed.
    I was to be given oxytocin pessaries once an hour to start contractions and after the first one I changed into my dressing-gown and wandered the hospital’s beautiful gardens with Frog, feeling very strange. I’d detached myself from the proceedings, knowing they were going be unpleasant.
    When the nurse arrived for the next pessary I asked her how she felt about what she had to do.
    ‘It goes against my beliefs’, she said, ‘but I can see you guys are really upset and I want to help you.’
    I appreciated her honesty.
    My waters broke and then the pain started. I was given a TENS machine to use and when that stopped working they injected me with pethidine, an opiod. Normally they had to be careful with drugs because they would pass to the baby but in my case that didn’t matter. I could have as much pain relief as I wanted. Then the pethidine started make me feel violently sick and they injected me with an anti-nausea drug.

    And so it went on, through the night. My temperature rose and they gave me paracetamol and directed a fan on to me. 
    In the morning the baby still hadn’t arrived so I was taken to another room and a doctor jiggled around inside me until suddenly with a great gush something happened and the doctor cried out in great distress, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
    Then I was wheeled into an operating theatre. I was still detached from everything that was going on, but when I watched them put another needle into my arm I could see that I was shaking.
    The next thing I remember was someone touching me gently and telling me to wake up. I opened my eyes to see a nurse was standing over me.
    ‘We’re just going to wheel you back to your room,’ she said kindly. ‘Will your baby be waiting for you?’
    My mind spun. I hardly knew where I was, let alone what was happening. I raked my brain for the correct answer. At last I found it.
    ‘I . . . I think he’s dead,’ I said.
 
Frog was pacing the room when we arrived back. They slid me into to bed – the wrong one, the one that Frog had been sleeping in - and I lay on my back, drained of everything except relief. Nesta, the midwife who I’d spoken to light years earlier, appeared, took one look at my face and kissed me.
    They brought the baby in, dressed in a bonnet and shawl, and let us hold him. It was a boy and we called him Thomas. Frog cried and cried.

To be continued

6.7 Fertility

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information.

Maybe we wanted to do something to mark our ‘newness’. Maybe we were fed up with being pariahs, with people thinking there was something wrong with us or saying that we were ‘selfish’ - not that many did, but I could feel them thinking it. Whatever the reasons, we dived head-first into our quest, or rather I did and Frog followed behind without saying much.

    First stop the doctor, where Frog was discovered to have a low sperm count. This was not unexpected given his age and not unusual given the polluted environment we all lived in. He was advised to wear boxer shorts rather than tight underpants, which he did with much protest.

    Of course, a crucial step on the road to conceiving is to actually go about making a baby, which as you will know by now was something I had always struggled with.

    The way I saw it, we had four faculties – body, mind, emotions and spirit – and I could only make love with one at a time. To put them together was too terrifying. What if something went wrong? Where would I be then? I couldn’t possibly risk everything, not even for Frog. Especially not with Frog.

    So we muddled on.
   
Meanwhile I plunged into researching fertility - exploring self-help, what complementary therapies could do, and the pros and cons of conventional medical intervention. Hey, I thought as I pinged off yet another email requesting information or staggered back from the library with yet another load of books, what if I were to write about this? There was nothing around that actually dealt with the subject the way I wanted it dealt with.
    At the time I was freelancing for a publisher in Dorset which specialised in what were called ‘mind, body, spirit’ books and I was working on a series which dealt with the whole range of possible treatments – conventional and unconventional – for chronic diseases such as migraine, arthritis, asthma, back pain, diabetes and irritable bowel syndrome. Would they be interested in a volume on fertility?
    I put together an introduction, a chapter and a synopsis and sent them to the publisher, and yes they were very interested, but wanted to call the book ‘Infertility’ as that fitted better into the series than ‘Fertility’. I didn’t want to call the book ‘Infertility’ as I didn’t want people to think that was what I was suffering from. I wasn’t infertile, I was just old. But I could see the publisher’s point. So ‘Infertility’ the book became. They paid me a chunk of money, which was more than welcome, and I started writing.
 
During my researches I came across a charity (since disbanded) that specialised in helping people suffering from infertility, mainly by prescribing mega-doses of supplements. We went through their testing process which discovered that we were both suffering from too much heavy metal in our systems and deficiencies in certain vitamins and minerals. Again, this was unsurprising. It was simply a case of working out our specific needs.
    They also recommended that we be tested for sexually transmitted diseases which – given our history with Sam – we did. It was a horrible process and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Thankfully, we came out clear.
    So we bought a bucket-load of supplements (which didn’t come cheaply) and embarked on our journey towards reproductive health.
    At Frog’s next test, his sperm count had risen dramatically, so something was working, and we began to feel excited. Or, at least, I did.
 
Then about six months into our quest I missed a period and, when I did a pregnancy test, the magic second blue line appeared. I could hardly believe it.
    Presuming that our supplement prescriptions would need to be changed, I rang the charity in high excitement.
    ‘Oh no,’ they said. ‘You weren’t supposed to be trying for a baby while taking the supplements.’
    ‘You never said anything about that,’ I snapped back.
    Well, they hadn’t. I knew I would have remembered if they had. I was nothing if not thorough in everything, and especially in this. I was furious.
    They ignored me and said instead, 'You’ve risked either having a miscarriage or something being very wrong with the baby.’

To be continued . . . 

6.6 Extensions

This an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments with links, see right.

As with everything, Frog and I were polar opposites. Frog wanted a cave and I wanted an eyrie. We engaged Miles, a friend who worked as both a designer and builder, to come up with a plan.
 
We didn’t want to move as we loved everything about our house – which Frog had so cleverly found when following one of his whims.
    It was part of the village of Silverton where Frog had lived with his girlfriend for three years before we’d met, so when we moved in everybody already knew all about us. We weren’t locals – you had to have lived in Devon for several generations to be a local – but we were next on the ladder. And everybody certainly made us feel welcome, not least our lovely neighbour, Claire, and her family.
    But we weren’t in the village, we were a mile and half outside it, a thirty-minute walk across the fields, and that suited us both.
    Frog’s main criterion for a dwelling was somewhere he could play music outside and not disturb anyone, and he could certainly do that here.
    Mine was to be somewhere away from people, as people messed with my head. We had two near neighbours – the farm where Claire and her family lived and a newly converted barn where another family now lived – but both were far enough away for my brainwaves not to be disturbed by their brainwaves. Both houses were slightly below us and hidden by trees so we had 360-degree views of nothing but countryside, and the peace and space made me feel as if I was flying.
    On the other hand we were only ten miles from Exeter so Frog could indulge his love of shopping and get to work and I could check in with the main publisher I worked for.
    Where else would we find somewhere like that?
 
Miles produced a daring scheme to connect the current house with the extension by means of a conservatory, to build into the eaves for my study and dig down under part of the garden to create a semi-underground music (and general detritus) room for Frog.
    We engaged Miles as project manager and builder, and work started.
 
Meanwhile, Frog and I started to ponder the subject of children. We’d reached our early forties so time was running out. Would we regret it if we remained childless?
    Frog’s motives for not wanting children were simple. He was the middle child of three with a brother, Simon, who was five years younger than him. Not only did he have to share a bedroom with Simon for a while, but he had to look out for him much of the time. This was, I’m sure, difficult, as Simon had a mad and wilful streak which led him to do dangerous or stupid things just for the hell of it.
    ‘Never again,’ Frog would say.
    Mine were complicated.
    For some reason, even though I’d imagined myself married, I’d never imagined myself with children. This was just one of the many ways I didn’t feel like a normal woman, another being my height, and the reason it was such an enormous relief to meet Frog and find someone who related to the real me deep deep down.
    Being the eldest of five children, all born within six and a half years, I found myself, or took it upon myself, or had it thrust upon me, to be cast in the role of their minder and I took my role very seriously. I could remember often longing to be able to take part in the games as an equal instead of having to keep the peace all the time and make sure no one was getting into trouble.
    One cousin later told me a shocking story. He remembered us all being on holiday at a Norwegian seaside village and we children were playing on the beach with a load of cousins. The adults left the beach and, when one of them queried whether the children would be all right on their own, someone said, ‘Oh, they’ll be fine. Belinda will look after them.’
    It made me feel sick even to think about that and, as I said to the cousin at the time, it was obviously the reason why I’d been avoiding responsibility ever since.
    I’d struggled desperately when Brindle was a puppy, feeling that I had no nurturing left to give to any other young creature.
    On another level, Frog and I had known from the very start that our relationship wouldn’t be easy. Because it went so deep, we knew that it would pull every last kink and shadow out of us. We knew that we would need every ounce of our energy simply to deal with each other. We wouldn’t have anything spare for children.
    And on yet another level, I’d been concerned about the environment since my early teens and now thirty years later, that pain had only increased. Did the world really need more human beings?
 
In spite of all that however, we decided to embark on that perilous quest: trying for a child.

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6.5 Work etc

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more, see right.

In spite of Sam’s words, I felt that whatever strength I had arose from Sam’s kindness to me, from her holding her hand out to me on the night I first met her. She’d shown me that I’d not so much lost Frog as gained a friend.
    All through her relationship with Frog she’d only wanted to help. I knew that both from what I saw of her and from what Frog had said.
    ‘I didn’t have anyone else to talk to,’ he said. ‘I knew we needed help and I didn’t know where else to find it.’
    I supposed that was a problem for men. They didn’t have friends they could talk to about emotional problems. They turned to women for that.
    What’s more, Sam had an AIDS test before she and Frog started having sex together. That meant a lot to me because I knew how difficult and frightening it must have been.
    Nor had either of them told anybody about their relationship before Frog told me.
    And once he did tell me, he was kind to me – more so than he had been before.
    So my strength – such as it was - came from him too.

In some ways, Sam was uncertain of her sexual identity. She’d had a fling with another woman at some time in her past but hadn’t pursued it. As a child she’d shadowed her father rather than her mother, learning practical jobs from him. She and Frog, for instance, had worked on her car together. She didn’t model herself on the female role, such as the one I’d been brought up on – where your life was centred on being beautiful for men and being a ‘wife’.
    Sam’s way of being was a revelation to me and I saw how much of a doormat I’d been. I resolved never to be a doormat again.

As well as being academic, Sam was creative - she painted and she wrote – and this awoke creativity in me. The Bohemian life had always held such attraction for me – it was so romantic - and secretly, deep down, I’d always wanted to be an artist of some kind myself. That was another of the parts of me that I’d buried because I knew it was unacceptable to my conventional parents. I now started to un-bury it.
    I followed up my small book on the folklore of Dartmoor with a bigger book on macabre stories from Devon as a whole. I was to take the photographs for the book as well as writing the copy, and I had a wonderful time travelling all over the county in my little Mini, researching the stories with my camera and notebook.

I was learning to love Devon. The people were kind – kinder than they were in London and the Home Counties – and their lives didn’t revolve around careers and money. Barter was the order of the day, and communities were tight. I met many people when I was out walking with Brindle (our labrador/springer cross), both other walkers and people in cars. It was perfectly normal – indeed, expected - to stop your car and chat if you passed someone in the lanes whether they were walking or driving and whether you knew them or not, and you never passed a person on the footpaths with saying at least hello.
    Rural Devon at the time was a strange mixture of farmers and artists and I began to feel that I fitted right in, something I’d only ever done before in Australia.
    Lindeman Island in Australia had been my golden time and I still hankered after it.
    ‘It wasn’t real life,’ said Frog, ‘but it showed you what life could be like.’
    I thought that was a valid assessment.

Meanwhile, even bigger changes were happening in Frog’s life.
    He’d finally fallen out with the university. They’d always objected to his erratic timekeeping, his refusal to wear a technician's white coat and his general uncontrollability. He objected to the hierarchy – the old-fashioned distinction between academics and technicians - and the stuffy people.
    A new regulation that every piece of electrical equipment had to be tested every year was the final straw. The university decided – much against Frog’s wishes – that he was the person to carry out this task. It was mind-numbingly boring (I helped him with it once, but never again) and it took over from the parts of the job he loved such as coaxing aged equipment back to life and inventing new set-ups for experiments.
    Eventually, by more or less mutual agreement, he left.
    He was now self-employed, repairing instruments one day a week for a music shop in Exeter and combining this with other jobs both regular and one-off.
    To start with, he was completely lost, having been salaried almost without a break since leaving school twenty-five years earlier. Luckily, with my self-employed experience I was able to help him structure his days and list tasks and goals.
    That was to set a pattern. With his dyslexic brain he worked by instinct (or whim). He both appreciated my lists and sabotaged them by adding new items like ‘Smile’ or ‘Have fun’ - to my lists as well as the ones I'd drawn up for him.
    So it was good for me too!
    I never let him leave on errands without something written on a piece of paper even if he was only going out to do one thing as he was more than liable to forget it or be distracted. Sometimes he even forgot the piece of paper. Drat. Sometimes, I even sympathised with the uni. I called him ‘flibbertigibbet brain’. He called me ‘daft’.
    He did willingly consult me on spellings however, using me as a walking dictionary and often ringing me from work to find out how a word was spelt.
    The university tried to replace Frog but no one came close to his genius with ailing technology and his deep historical knowledge of the department’s equipment, and in the end they invited him back. He agreed to two days a week, freelance – an unheard-of concession at the university.

At DevonAir, the local independent radio station, he was now doing two programmes a week: a rock programme, and a ‘Frog Prog’ where he played whatever he wanted - pop, rock, classical, folk, country, jazz, words. I kept encouraging him to try and take the ‘Frog Prog’ further and apply to national radio, but he was afraid of being curtailed and he didn’t have the necessary killer instinct. He was ambitious about his life – he wanted to make the most of it – but he wasn’t ambitious in a conventional sense, in the sense of status, money and so on.
    DevonAir was taken over by London’s Capital Radio and one Saturday night the head of DevonAir was entertaining the head of Capital.
    ‘You must listen to this,’ he said, turning on a ‘Frog Prog’. ‘No one else is doing anything like it.’
    Frog was playing some particularly obscure and gruesome track – jazz, I think.
    ‘I’m not surprised,’ said the head of Capital.
    So Frog lost his jobs at DevonAir too.

He carried on doing the ‘Frog Prog’ on the university radio however, and also managed to persuade the  'Guild' (the student union) to pay him for all the technical work he did for the student station. Previously, when he was working full time in the science department, this had been done in the university’s time and was another of their bones of contention with him.
   It was ironic that he now had life his way in both areas.
   He was lucky like that.

With two of us working from home, we needed more space. I needed a study and Frog needed a music room, somewhere to store his enormous and ever-growing collections of vintage hi-fi and records, not to mention his tools and machines.
    We began to think about expanding – in more ways than one.

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