Unspoken: A story of secrets, love and revenge T. Belshaw (good books to read for beginners txt) 📖

‘PUSH!’ she cried.

I pushed.

‘Well, that’s a start but now put some effort into it,’ she encouraged.

‘PUSH!’

I screwed up my face and pushed again.

‘Come on, let’s have a bit more OOMPH!’ she demanded.

I grabbed a lungful of air, gritted my teeth, and gave it my best shot.

‘PUSH!’ she yelled.

I looked over my bulging stomach at the bun on the back of her head.

‘I am bloody pushing,’ I yelled back.

‘You can do better than that, Missy,’ she said, without looking up.

‘PUSH!’

Occasionally she would order me to pant, but I didn’t even do that correctly.

‘No, pant like a greyhound who’s just done three laps of the track.’

And so, it went on.

The baby came quite unexpectedly in the end. I was tiring fast, but after half an hour of pushing, Elsie announced that the head was out. I tried to have a look myself, but Elsie must have felt me trying to sit up, and one of those huge hands arose from between my thighs and pushed me back again.

‘PUSH!’

I don’t know if it was the last big effort I could manage, or just the fact that I was sick of hearing Elsie’s voice, but I managed the biggest heave I’d done all day, and the rest of the baby slid out.

‘It’s a girl,’ Elsie announced.

She picked the slippery baby up like she’d been catching slithering eels from a bucket, all her life. She held her by the ankles and slapped her backside. The baby opened her mouth but refused to cry. Elsie tried again. The infant wriggled about in her vice-like grip, but again refused to cry.

‘We might have a mute, here,’ said Elsie, in a matter of fact way.

‘She’s probably just stubborn. I wouldn’t cry when I was born either,’ I said.

Elsie told me to bare my breasts. I wasn’t going to argue, I was too worn out to raise a smile, let alone my voice.

Elsie introduced the baby to my left breast but she refused to suckle. My midwife tried the other one, but again with no real response. I thought I’d help her out a bit, so I squeezed my breast until a trickle of liquid seeped out. The baby licked at it, pulled a face, looked me in the eyes and screamed the place down.

And that was the start of my relationship with my firstborn. She wailed for fifteen minutes as she lay across my chest with Elsie trying to encourage her to feed. Eventually she gave up. The baby was scarlet-faced, I was falling asleep and Elsie’s experience told her to give us both a breather. As soon as she lifted her from my chest, she stopped crying. Even when Elsie laid her between my legs and did the necessary with the umbilical cord, she was quiet as a mouse. Once the cord was cut, Elsie wrapped her in a towel and handed her to me. I looked down at my daughter with, I have to admit, a bit of indifference. She looked back at me with loathing. Before that day I wouldn’t have believed a baby could do that, but she proved me wrong. She began to scream again almost immediately. Miriam took her from me and once again, she stopped her temper tantrum. All was quiet when Edna held her granddaughter for the first time, but when she was passed back to me, the inevitable happened.

‘Will you take her for a while,’ I asked Miriam, as Elsie began to clean up the detritus.

I lay back in my pillows and watched her walk around the kitchen rocking and cooing to my baby while an adoring Edna impatiently waited her turn.

‘We’ll have to get her to feed soon,’ Elsie said.

I lifted my heavy breasts in my hands.

‘Well, the pantry is well stocked,’ I said.

‘We may have to express the milk and feed it to her in a bottle. It happens quite regularly although I’ve never seen a reluctance to feed, quite like this before,’ replied Elsie. She opened her bag and took out a box of powdered milk. ‘I’ll leave you some formula milk just in case. I’ll show Miriam how to mix it before I go.’

‘I suppose a wet nurse is out of the question,’ I said, only half-jokingly.

Chapter 58

June 1938

My baby weighed in at five pounds and seven ounces. Edna told me that was a nice weight for a first child and as I hadn’t needed stitches, I was a lucky girl.

‘Frank came out at seven pounds,’ she said.

Elsie chipped in with her first at six pounds even.

Miriam topped the weight poll. ‘My first weighed in at nine pounds eight ounces.’

I winced. How could something that big ever squeeze its way through such a tiny place? Mine felt like a rugby player was trying to force his way out, and she was tiny compared to theirs.

In the early evening, I had a strip wash in the new bathroom, and hobbled back to the kitchen where I had unburdened the table of my presence, and had taken up my usual spot in the chair by the unlit stove. There had been no sign of Frank. He hadn’t telephoned us, which surprised me a little. I wondered if he was staying away, in case I had a long, tortuous labour like my mother had suffered, or whether he was scared of coming back until the bossy midwife had departed.

Elsie left at seven, with a promise to return the following morning. The still unnamed baby was feeding well from the formula bottle that Elsie had provided. All I had to do was pump out the milk every few hours and try to persuade the baby to take it. I was happy with that solution, it seemed far easier than fighting with a baby that didn’t want anything to do with my milk-laden breasts. Edna gave her granddaughter a kiss on the forehead and rushed off to catch up with Elsie.

At seven-thirty, Miriam came in from changing my father’s nappy and set about changing