LITMIR.BIZ

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chance to explore a bit. After that Allen had to go off on a training course and I went back down to my mum’s, so it was 16 December 1983 before we moved into our first marital home together, a lovely three-bed maisonette in Rosyth with views over the Firth of Forth. I found a job working at a local hospital and joined the fitness club for naval wives, and started to get used to my new life.

      We decided to get a dog as we both loved them. Allen had had pet dogs as a boy, and our shifts could be juggled so that it would never be left on its own for more than a couple of hours. We went to the Rescue Centre together and picked out a scruffy black Labrador cross, who was about four or five months old. We reckoned he was probably an unwanted Christmas present. No matter how much you tried to tidy him up, he always looked messy and disreputable, so the obvious name for him was Scruffy. He was a spirited and demanding dog from the start, but we enjoyed taking him for long walks in the surrounding countryside, and shared the responsibility for his care with each other.

      Around June 1984, they wanted to give me a routine chest X-ray at work and asked if there was any chance I could be pregnant. I had come off the pill and my periods were a bit erratic so I didn’t think there was, but they decided to run a pregnancy test to be on the safe side and, to my complete astonishment, it was positive.

      I couldn’t get through to Allen on the phone to tell him, so I went to Mothercare and bought a tiny babygro and when he walked in the door that evening I just handed it to him and said, ‘Guess what?’

      He was over the moon – we both were. We thought the Rosyth posting was going to last three years and Allen would be on shore so it was an ideal time for us to have a family. But only a week later we were told that the following April he would have to leave his job there and go to sea on a ship that was based in Portsmouth. I was beginning to experience one of the realities of life as a naval wife: unpredictability! Whatever plans you make for the future, you always have to be ready to change them at the drop of a hat.

      Almost exactly a year to the day after moving to Scotland, by now heavily pregnant, I turned around and had to move back down to Portsmouth in the week before Christmas. There was all the palaver of packing up our stuff, finding acceptable accommodation, transporting the dog and changing my antenatal appointments from one hospital to another.

      Baby Liam was born on Valentine’s Day 1985 and thankfully Allen was able to be with me. Nurses make terrible patients. As I lay in pain in the maternity unit, I noticed that the nurse looking after me had put the straps in the wrong place and I kept worrying about when they were going to give me the promised epidural. Would they be too late? Then the nurse confessed that she hadn’t delivered a baby for twenty years and was on a refresher course, which didn’t do a lot for my confidence! But all went well and I brought home my beautiful little boy.

      Allen was fantastic in those early weeks. I fed the baby and he did everything else: nappy changing, winding, housework, meals for us, laundry, shopping. He was always good around the house, and he obviously doted on Liam as well. He had a real knack with babies.

      Sadly, Scruffy the dog wasn’t quite so good. After the move he began chewing things and being generally obstreperous. If I was going out, I had to leave him shut in the kitchen, but the final straw came when I got home one day to find he had chewed up the entire base of the door frame in our rented house. I realized I just couldn’t cope any more. Allen was due to go to sea when Liam was ten or eleven weeks old and I knew I couldn’t manage a destructive dog and a new baby at the same time. We agonized over it but I was feeling very tired and run down after the birth and I didn’t have the energy to try and retrain a boisterous dog. If Allen had been there we would have managed together, but it just felt like too much for me on my own, so finally we agreed that Scruffy would go back to the RSPCA. When we phoned them, they were in no doubt that they would find another home for him quickly, and that settled it.

      Allen was quite upset about it, especially since he was away on the ship when the call came to tell me to take Scruffy in to their kennels so he never got the chance to say goodbye. I was sad too, but my overwhelming emotion was relief that I wouldn’t be clearing up the mess any more and could focus on my new baby.

      Liam was only a few months old when I discovered I was pregnant again. It was totally unplanned and a huge shock, if I’m honest. I was still learning how to cope with one baby and couldn’t imagine doing so with two. How did other women ever manage?

      I put my back out really badly during the pregnancy, while carrying Liam on one hip and wheeling a shopping trolley across a supermarket car park. My entire spine just seized up and I couldn’t even get Liam into his car seat. I had to place him on the floor of the hatchback boot and drive home really carefully, and then get a neighbour to carry him into the house. A midwife came round and told me I needed complete bed rest, which is easier said than done when you’ve got a one-year-old crawling around the house. Allen took some time off to help, but that meant he didn’t get so much leave when Zoe was born, which was very hard on both of us. My sister Marion came to stay for the first couple of weeks, and returned whenever she could take days off work, but I still had to manage most of the time on my own.

      Liam had been a lovely lazy baby, who slept through the night at five days old, took his feeds well and was happy to have a nap whenever you put him in his cot. Zoe was more difficult, though. She flatly refused to feed from me after about two weeks. I started to bottle-feed her, but if I took the teat away to wind her she wouldn’t have the same teat back again. Feeding her was a complex business, and she cried a lot.

      She’d had a very quick delivery and, looking back, I think she may have suffered some trauma during the birth, so perhaps she was in pain. Nowadays I might have taken her to a cranial osteopath but I didn’t think of that back then. All I knew was that she wailed endlessly and nothing seemed to calm her. At night I’d walk round the house holding and rocking her, then in the daytime I’d put her in the car and take her out for a drive to try and get her to stop crying and go to sleep.

      Meanwhile I had Liam crawling round my ankles, having to be watched constantly in case he tried to stick his fingers in an electric socket or bashed his head. Allen was away on a long trip right through this period and I had no idea when he would be back. I was sleep-deprived, my back still hurt, the housework started to pile up and I felt increasingly desperate. I’ve always been someone who copes, who just gets on with things, but I knew I was reaching my limits.

      Then one morning, Zoe just cried non-stop. She refused to feed, she didn’t want cuddles, her nappy was dry and I was at my wits’ end. I put both babies in the car and drove round for an hour but still she wouldn’t stop crying. I lifted her out of the car in her car seat to bring her back into the house, and suddenly it all got too much.

      ‘Will you just shut up?’ I screamed, and I shook the car seat as hard as I could. Immediately afterwards, I put the seat down and sank on to the floor beside it, horrified at myself. What if I had hurt her? She was still crying but not so loudly. It was then I knew I needed help. This couldn’t go on.

      I called the health visitor and she came round to visit. At first she tried to be reassuring, saying that it was normal for a new mother to find it difficult to cope, especially with two so close together. She said she thought it sounded as though I had post-natal depression and maybe I should get some antidepressants from my doctor. It was an interesting thought that hadn’t occurred to me. I’d assumed it was all my fault, that I was doing something wrong or I just wasn’t suited to motherhood, but maybe there was a physical cause. Maybe I wasn’t going mad after all.

      ‘I’m scared that I might really hurt her,’ I said, and told the health visitor about how I had shaken Zoe’s car seat.

      She listened quietly and asked me more questions about exactly what happened. I think she must have been seriously worried because she went off to make some phone calls then came back and said: ‘It might be a good idea to give you a break for a couple of weeks so you can catch up on your sleep and get your strength back. How would you feel if we took Zoe into temporary foster care?’

      I was shocked to the core. Did that mean she didn’t think I was capable of looking after my baby? Having a child taken into care seemed a terrible stigma.

      ‘Just

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