1952 U.S, explodes first hydrogen bomb in pacific.
1953. Eliz 11 crowned.
My labor started around 6:30 on a Saturday morning, just after Hal had left for work. I lay on my side in bed, watching Monsieur le Pussy Cat’s paws darting in and out beneath the crack under the bedroom door.
I got up and wandered down the hall to the kitchen to make a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of tea and found the cramps interesting.
“Why do women make such a fuss about little twinges like this? “ I asked the cat.
I called my sister-in- law, Dodie, who was excited and said my brother Bob would drive me to the hospital when it was time.
“Uh, Dodie, we live only three blocks from the hospital. I’m sure we could walk.”
Dodie wouldn’t hear of it and phoned Bob at work, many miles away, to tell him to stay close to the phone.
I called Hal and told him to stay where he was and said I’d call if the twinges were closer together than the present eight- or- so minutes.
Dodie called for regular updates and then each time called Bob, who had to rush from one end of the warehouse to the phone to find out nothing had changed.
In the early afternoon, the spacing was a more regular four minutes but those were no longer twinges and I stopped thinking about peanut butter sandwiches.
When Hal got home at three thirty, I was making a serious attempt to break the fireplace mantel in two.
“Call Dodie, “ I gasped.
Bob made amazing time and reached our place quickly for the one- minute drive to the hospital but despite the haste the baby took his time.
Mark was born ten hours later, just after one o’clock on Sunday morning. Although the contractions ran together, my labor hadn’t progressed. A student nurse sat with me and we listened to a couple of screaming women down the hall.
I wondered how they managed the extra energy.
I was given a complete anaesthetic for the forceps delivery and didn’t see my baby for several hours.
I was too naive to ask why the use of forceps and I'm guessing he was in posterior position, as were most of my other babies.
When the nurse brought him in the next morning I couldn’t believe I was a mother. There was this squirming seven pound one ounce little stranger who had found room inside me for all that time. He had enormous owl eyes and the nurses spotted signs of red hair resembling a halo on his seemingly bald head. He looked perfectly content to be on the outside at last and I fell instantly and permanently in love.
I can’t remember why but I chose not to breastfeed. No one in the hospital ever made me feel guilty about my choice, although most mothers did breastfeed. My mother-in law considered it her duty to comment that if she hadn’t breastfed she wouldn’t have felt like a real mother and I refrained from snapping back, “Motherhood does not depend on the mammary glands.”
That was the only negative moment.
We had after all, the pressure cooker. I mixed the Dextra Maltose and water, bottled it, stuck the nipples inside the cap-covered bottle and cooked the whole thing for, I think, about seven minutes. Yes, there were times when I forgot I had used the last bottle and had to mix up a new batch at three in the morning.
We were parents.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Monday, March 15, 2010
Chapter 6- Life Below Ground
Horse meat stores were the craze for a brief time and Hal got caught up in the low prices.I dutifully cooked him steaks, chops and even liver, always using tongs to avoid contact. I wasn’t girl-horse crazy but they had such nice eyes so I stuck to scrambled eggs.
I also mastered meat loaf and pot roast and when we had enough chairs, we began inviting people for dinner on Sunday evenings, using the silver meat platter and covered silver vegetable dishes. It was tacitly agreed that horse meat would not be on the menu.
One flaw in our perfect little apartment was the regular- as- clockwork Sunday activities of the eight children upstairs. Those children lived exemplary lives from Monday to Saturday; in fact, we used to wonder if we had dreamed their existence. But not on Sundays. We knew where they were on Sundays.
This was the day that we could sleep in until dark if we wanted to, or that’s what we thought. Instead, at the first faint ray of dawn we were snapped awake to the beating of seven million wooden spoons on the door located squarely over our bed. Nothing kept those children from their favorite Sunday pastime and our only comfort was the knowledge that they would be dragged off to mass for one glorious hour.
Someday, we solemnly promised one another, we would have children who spoke only in whispers and knitted for recreation.
It occurred to me years later that their devout and bossy grandmother who lived next door might have considered it unseemly for us to remain indoors when the church bells were ringing. She probably egged on those children.
Three months after our September wedding I was pregnant and blissful with joy while Hal managed to hide his panic, wondering how we would cope on one small salary and no health insurance. Each morning I optimistically poached a breakfast egg, quickly lost it and trudged off to catch the streetcar for the one-hour ride to work, my hormones protecting me from serious worry.
Fleet Street slowly disappeared into the background as we coped with small exigencies of our new life. A more pressing notion was that life would be less expensive if we saved for a refrigerator and scrapped the second- hand wooden icebox we kept in an unlit storage area. The problem wasn’t just hauling the fifty pound block of ice from the ice house many blocks away without a car. Once we got it home one of us had to shine the flashlight into the icebox while the other, the one who wasn’t pregnant, eased it into place around the margarine and milk. This was usually the time that the stench invading our nostrils reminded us we’d forgotten about the fresh crab we bought two weeks before.
In late November we tried out the heat registers for the first time and found they were all card- carrying virgins. The spiteful coal furnace flatly refused to send warmth our way, and instead spewed its bounty to the sweltering closely packed family upstairs, forcing them to open doors and windows to keep breathing while we huddled below in layers of sweaters.
This was a mixed blessing of sorts because it gave us the incentive to move. Our options were slim; we could build a bomb shelter, which was gaining some attention in those days, but we settled for a move closer to the city centre, even though the rents were higher. Admittedly this was not particularly logical, now that we would soon be reduced to one salary. We would look for a place near a park to wheel the English pram I was borrowing from my sister-in law who was between babies at the time. And there had to be windows. We would seriously consider outdoor plumbing before we would do without windows ever again and that took care of any bomb shelter thoughts.
For seventy-five dollars a month rent we found a lovely little one- bedroom apartment in a converted mansion in the South Granville area, complete with fridge and stove.
On moving day we were dismayed to find that the odds and ends we had collected to furnish Stalactite Heaven were not going to fit.
The enchantment of hand painted tiles surrounding the working fireplace in the new living room distracted us from studying the actual size of the room. I’ve seen larger sentry huts. We advertised the extra oak table we had planned to cut down into a coffee table and a few other odds and ends that wouldn’t fit and netted enough to buy a tiny wardrobe-dresser, which squeezed into one of the two hall cubicles, and a bathinette that just fitted beside the bedroom closet door. Hal’s brother made the crib and it fitted in beside our bed with a couple of inches to spare.
I quit my job in my eighth month and we were managing despite the higher rent. Maternity benefits were available by this time but we reckoned that the baby was our responsibility and not that of the government, so I didn’t apply.
I felt like a duck, a fat duck and distracted myself by perching on a sturdy crate and painting baby-like fairies and animals on the crib and baby dresser.
My doctor had been around long enough to deliver me twenty-odd years ago and judging by reports through the family grapevine, his methods hadn’t changed in the intervening years. Luckily, just before my due date he retired and left me in the hands of much younger Obstetrician.
I also mastered meat loaf and pot roast and when we had enough chairs, we began inviting people for dinner on Sunday evenings, using the silver meat platter and covered silver vegetable dishes. It was tacitly agreed that horse meat would not be on the menu.
One flaw in our perfect little apartment was the regular- as- clockwork Sunday activities of the eight children upstairs. Those children lived exemplary lives from Monday to Saturday; in fact, we used to wonder if we had dreamed their existence. But not on Sundays. We knew where they were on Sundays.
This was the day that we could sleep in until dark if we wanted to, or that’s what we thought. Instead, at the first faint ray of dawn we were snapped awake to the beating of seven million wooden spoons on the door located squarely over our bed. Nothing kept those children from their favorite Sunday pastime and our only comfort was the knowledge that they would be dragged off to mass for one glorious hour.
Someday, we solemnly promised one another, we would have children who spoke only in whispers and knitted for recreation.
It occurred to me years later that their devout and bossy grandmother who lived next door might have considered it unseemly for us to remain indoors when the church bells were ringing. She probably egged on those children.
Three months after our September wedding I was pregnant and blissful with joy while Hal managed to hide his panic, wondering how we would cope on one small salary and no health insurance. Each morning I optimistically poached a breakfast egg, quickly lost it and trudged off to catch the streetcar for the one-hour ride to work, my hormones protecting me from serious worry.
Fleet Street slowly disappeared into the background as we coped with small exigencies of our new life. A more pressing notion was that life would be less expensive if we saved for a refrigerator and scrapped the second- hand wooden icebox we kept in an unlit storage area. The problem wasn’t just hauling the fifty pound block of ice from the ice house many blocks away without a car. Once we got it home one of us had to shine the flashlight into the icebox while the other, the one who wasn’t pregnant, eased it into place around the margarine and milk. This was usually the time that the stench invading our nostrils reminded us we’d forgotten about the fresh crab we bought two weeks before.
In late November we tried out the heat registers for the first time and found they were all card- carrying virgins. The spiteful coal furnace flatly refused to send warmth our way, and instead spewed its bounty to the sweltering closely packed family upstairs, forcing them to open doors and windows to keep breathing while we huddled below in layers of sweaters.
This was a mixed blessing of sorts because it gave us the incentive to move. Our options were slim; we could build a bomb shelter, which was gaining some attention in those days, but we settled for a move closer to the city centre, even though the rents were higher. Admittedly this was not particularly logical, now that we would soon be reduced to one salary. We would look for a place near a park to wheel the English pram I was borrowing from my sister-in law who was between babies at the time. And there had to be windows. We would seriously consider outdoor plumbing before we would do without windows ever again and that took care of any bomb shelter thoughts.
For seventy-five dollars a month rent we found a lovely little one- bedroom apartment in a converted mansion in the South Granville area, complete with fridge and stove.
On moving day we were dismayed to find that the odds and ends we had collected to furnish Stalactite Heaven were not going to fit.
The enchantment of hand painted tiles surrounding the working fireplace in the new living room distracted us from studying the actual size of the room. I’ve seen larger sentry huts. We advertised the extra oak table we had planned to cut down into a coffee table and a few other odds and ends that wouldn’t fit and netted enough to buy a tiny wardrobe-dresser, which squeezed into one of the two hall cubicles, and a bathinette that just fitted beside the bedroom closet door. Hal’s brother made the crib and it fitted in beside our bed with a couple of inches to spare.
I quit my job in my eighth month and we were managing despite the higher rent. Maternity benefits were available by this time but we reckoned that the baby was our responsibility and not that of the government, so I didn’t apply.
I felt like a duck, a fat duck and distracted myself by perching on a sturdy crate and painting baby-like fairies and animals on the crib and baby dresser.
My doctor had been around long enough to deliver me twenty-odd years ago and judging by reports through the family grapevine, his methods hadn’t changed in the intervening years. Luckily, just before my due date he retired and left me in the hands of much younger Obstetrician.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Chapter 5
1951
We pretty well stuck to the general style of weddings in those days, although a few couples branched out and hired a hall with a band and sit-down dinners.
Hal and I were as sophisticated as a couple of fruit flies so we opted for the standard Anglican service, including the word, "obey". It was meaningless then and now but we wanted tradition at any cost.
We had finger sandwiches and the ever-present petit fours,tea, lots of tea and the mandatory iced fruitcake.
The wine was reserved for the toasts. Heaven help me, I think it was Port.
It was quiet, formal and mercifully brief.
We had a brief honeymoon, brief because you can only go so far on a hundred dollars, particularly when one of us spent sixty dollars of it at the last minute renting a car, which precipitated a heated discussion. That was swiftly settled by my mother's vehement,
"I don't care if you never speak again for the rest of your lives; you're going to that church and you're going to get married and that's final. "
We drove to our honeymoon destination Harrison Hot Springs, a nearby resort town surrounded by breathtaking mountains and pine trees and we stayed in a bargain-rate cabin just big enough to hold a miniature kitchen,a double bed and a slide-in-sideways bathroom. The next morning when I was making the bed and tried to push it against the wall was the moment I painfully discovered the bed was bolted to the floor. it's fun to ponder what led the landlord to perform that action.
We ran out of money quickly and landed on the doorstep of good friends in nearby Chilliwack. They gave us their bedroom while they camped out in the living room with their baby and made us meals and it was a lovely honeymoon.
That’s quite a change, decompressing between engagement, marriage and finally, real life. It’s like breaking in a pair of new shoes designed to last a lifetime; you begin gently and wiggle about making adjustments until shoe and foot are a perfect fit.Eventually they get a bit scruffy, a little loose and at times you get good and sick of them.
But you age along with the shoes and if you’ve learned anything you’re not so quick to toss them out in favor of something brand new and un-tested.
We returned from our honeymoon to our basement apartment and unpacked the wedding gifts, then quickly repacked the silver rose baskets and nut dishes and anything else we wouldn’t be using for a while and we exchanged a few electric coffee percolaters for a pressure cooker.
This wasn’t so different from playing house as kids, but the china was real, the small appliances had working cords attached and it was okay to play doctor if we wanted.
Our furniture was sparse: we had a bed and dresser, three gift lamps, one of them a stubbornly unbreakable black panther with glittering green glass eyes, my carved oriental cedar hope chest, a card table and two chairs. We hauled out the wooden packing case containing my Shirley Temple doll and collection of movie star scrapbooks, draped one of our new Irish linen tablecloths over the box and declared it to be a coffee table.
In those days, refrigerators and stoves weren't supplied in flats so we began literally with only a kitchen sink.
We found a vintage electric stove with three working burners for five dollars and my father managed to find the parts to get the fourth one working. My parents donated the old familiar chesterfield suite from their den and we spent Saturdays prowling second hand stores for more bargains until the place had a worn but comfortable look. I’ve stuck with that look ever since.
Most evenings I’d study my brand new cookbook to see what I could do about my limited repertoire while my bridegroom pounded at his typewriter on the card table, working on any free- lance assignments that came his way. Sometimes his pay wasn’t much larger than the streetcar fare to deliver the completed work, but we didn’t think of it that way.
When we had a free moment one of us rolled out the cigarettes, a task I remember so clearly. The cigarette- maker was a clever piece of equipment. You stuff a handful of tobacco into the tube section, then peel off cigarette paper from a booklet, insert the paper somewhere, a twist and turn and presto—an extremely long cigarette eventually rolls out and you cut it into four. This is repeated until you have the quota for the next day.
My first married- woman crisis came when I set to work studying the pressure cooker manual to ensure an efficiently cooked meal after work. First I had to get over my terror that the cast-iron Mount Etna might explode. Wait until the steam squirts out the spout, snap on the gauge, lower the heat, rush to the bathroom, cower against the wall with ears covered and slowly count to fifty. After that, if the walls were still standing and they always were, it was safe to return to the kitchen.
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