Behind the Scenes at the Museum Kate Atkinson

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CHAPTER TWO

1952

Birth

IDON’T LIKE THIS. I DON’T LIKE THIS ONE LITTLE BIT. GET ME out of here somebody, quick! My frail little skeleton is being crushed like a thin-shelled walnut. My tender skin, as yet untouched by any earthly atmosphere, is being chafed raw by this sausage-making process. (Surely this can’t be natural?) Any clouds of glory I might have been trailing have been smothered in this fetid, bloodstained place.

‘Get a move on, woman!’ an angry voice booms like a muffled fog-horn. ‘I’ve got a bloody dinner party to go to!’

Bunty’s reply is inarticulate and indistinct but I think the general gist of it is that she’s just as anxious to get the whole thing over with as our friendly gynaecologist. Dr Torquemada, I presume? The midwife angel sent to preside at my birth creaks with starch. She raps out her orders – ‘PUSH! PUSH NOW!’

‘I am bloody pushing!’ Bunty yells back. She sweats and grunts, all the while clutching onto something that looks like a small shrunken bit of mammal, a furry locket round her neck (see Footnote (ii)). It’s a lucky rabbit’s foot. Not very lucky for the rabbit, of course, but a talismanic charm of some potency for my mother. I’ve gone off her actually. Bunty that is, not the rabbit. Nine months of being imprisoned inside her hasn’t been the most delightful of experiences. And recently there’s been no room at all. I don’t care what’s out there, it has to be better than this.

‘PUSH, WOMAN! PUSH NOW!’

Bunty screams convincingly and then all of a sudden it’s over with and I slip out as quietly as a fish down a stream. Even Dr Torquemada is surprised, ‘Hello, what have we here?’ he says as if he wasn’t expecting me at all. The midwife laughs and says, ‘Snap!’

I’m about to be shipped off to the nursery when someone suggests that Bunty might like to have a look at me. She takes a quick glance and pronounces her judgement. ‘Looks like a piece of meat. Take it away,’ she adds, waving her hand dismissively. I suppose she’s tired and emotional. She didn’t specify what kind of meat. Rolled brisket? Spring lamb? Hand of pork perhaps or something unnamed, raw and bloody. Well, there you go – nothing surprises me any more. After all, I’m surely not a novelty – she’s already produced pale Patricia and cross-patch Gillian from her loins, and I’m so well behaved in comparison with the latter. Gillian was born angry, bustling out of the womb, little arms and legs angling furiously while she screamed her head off, just in case nobody had noticed her. Fat chance.

My absent father, in case you’re wondering, is in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster where he’s just had a very satisfactory day at the races. He has a pint of bitter in front of him and is just telling a woman in an emerald green dress and a ‘D’ cup, that he’s not married. He has no idea that I’ve arrived or he would be here. Wouldn’t he? In fact, my gestation has neatly spanned the old and the new, for I’ve arrived just after the King’s death, making me one of the first babies born into the new Queen’s reign. A new Elizabethan! I’m surprised they haven’t called me Elizabeth. They’ve called me nothing. I’m ‘Baby Lennox’, that’s what it says on my label anyway. The midwife, who has red hair and is very tired, carries me through to the night nursery and deposits me in a cot.

It’s very dark in the night nursery. Very dark and very quiet. A dim blue light shines in one corner, but most of the cots are just black coffin-like shapes. The darkness stretches out to infinity. Space winds whip through the icy interstellar spaces. If I reached out my tiny, wrinkled fingers that look like boiled shrimp, I would touch – nothing. And then more nothing. And after that? Nothing. I didn’t think it would be like this. It’s not that I expected a street party or anything – streamers, balloons, banners of welcome unfurling – a smile would have done.

The midwife goes away, the neat tip-tapping of her black lace-up shoes on the linoleum of the corridor gradually fades and we are left alone. We lie in our cots, wrapped tightly in white-cotton cellular blankets, like promises, like cocoons, waiting to hatch into something. Or little baby parcels. What would happen if the little baby parcels lost their labels and got mixed up? Would the mothers recognize their babies if they pulled them out of a baby bran tub?

A rustling of starched wings and the red-haired nurse reappears with another baby parcel and puts it down in the empty cot next to me. She pins a label on its blanket. The new baby sleeps peacefully, its top lip curling with each small inhalation.

There are no more babies this night. The night nursery sails on into the cold winter night freighted with its delicate cargo. A milky vapour hangs over the sleeping babies. Soon when we’re all asleep, the cats will creep in and suck our breath away.

I will disappear in this darkness, I will be extinguished before I’ve even got going. Sleet spatters in gusts onto the cold glass of the nursery window. I’m alone. All alone. I can’t stand this – where’s my mother? WAA! WAA! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! ‘The little bastard’s going to wake them all.’ It’s the red-haired nurse, I think she’s Irish. She’s going to save me, she’s going to take me to my mother. No? No. She takes me to a little side room, behind the sluice. A kind of cupboard, really. I spend my first night on earth in a cupboard.

The maternity-ward ceiling above our heads is painted in apple-green gloss. The upper half of the walls are magnolia and the lower half of the walls look like minced-up mushrooms. I would prefer a celestial ceiling of azure with golden, fiery-edged clouds, and peeping out from the clouds I want smiling, fat, rosy cherubs.

Bunty’s settled in well in the maternity ward. The mothers all lie beached on their beds complaining all the time, mostly about their babies. We’re nearly all being bottle-fed, there’s an unspoken feeling that there’s something distasteful about breast-feeding. We’re fed on the dot, every four hours, nothing in between, no matter how much noise you make. In fact the more noise you make the more likely you are to be relegated to some cupboard somewhere. There are probably forgotten babies all over the place.

We’re fed by the clock so that we don’t become spoilt and demanding. The general feeling amongst the mothers is that the babies are in a conspiracy against them (if only we were). We can scream until we’re exhausted, it won’t make any difference to the ceremonial feeding ritual, the time when all the little baby parcels are fed, winded, changed, laid down again and ignored.

I am nearly a week old and still nameless, but at least Bunty now takes a cursory interest in me. She never speaks to me though, and her eyes avoid me, sliding over me as soon as I enter her field of vision. Now that I am outside my mother, it’s difficult to know what she is thinking (nor am I any longer privy to the fertile inner world of her daydreams). The nights are still the worst time, each night a dark voyage into uncertainty. I do not believe that Bunty is my real mother. My real mother is roaming in a parallel universe somewhere, ladling out mother’s milk the colour of Devon cream. She’s padding the hospital corridors searching for me, her fierce, hot, lion-breath steaming up the cold windows. My real mother is Queen of the Night, a huge, galactic figure, treading the Milky Way in search of her lost infant.

Sometimes my grandmother, Nell, comes to visit in the afternoon. Hospitals make her nervous, reminding her of death, which she feels she doesn’t need any reminding of at her age. She perches on the edge of the hard visitor’s chair like a sickly Pet Shop budgerigar. She already has several grandchildren who all look alike to her so I can’t blame her for not being very interested in me. George brings Gillian and Patricia. Gillian peers mutely at me over the side of the cot, her expression inscrutable. George doesn’t have very much to say. But Patricia, good old Patricia, touches me with a wary finger and says, ‘Hello, Baby,’ and I reward her with a smile. ‘Look, she’s smiling at me,’ Patricia says, her little voice choked with wonder.

‘That’s just wind,’ Bunty says dismissively. I am not very happy, but I have decided to make the best of things. I’ve been given the wrong mother and am in danger of embarking on the wrong life but I trust it will all be sorted out and I will be reunited with my real mother – the one who dropped ruby-red blood onto a snow-white handkerchief and wished for a little girl with hair the colour of a shiny jet-black raven’s wing. Meanwhile I make do with Bunty.

Bunty’s sister, Babs, comes to visit, all the way from Dewsbury, with her twins – Daisy and Rose. Daisy and Rose are a year older than Gillian and are spotlessly clean. They’re exactly alike, not a hair nor a fingernail to choose between them. It’s uncanny, almost frightening. They sit on their chairs in complete silence, their dainty little legs dangling above the bile-green linoleum. Bunty lies in queenly splendour under her lily-white sheets and salmon-pink bedspread. Daisy and Rose have hair the colour of melted lemon-drops.

Bunty knits continuously, even when she has visitors. She’s knitting my future in the colours of sugared almonds. ‘Elizabeth?’ Auntie Babs suggests. Bunty grimaces.

‘Margaret?’ Auntie Babs tries. ‘Anne?’

They could call me ‘Dorothy’, or ‘Miranda’, that would be nice. ‘Eve’ would have a certain resonance. Bunty’s ack-ack eyes search the ceiling. She takes a deep decisive breath and pronounces the name. My name.

‘Ruby.’

‘Ruby?’ Auntie Babs repeats doubtfully. ‘Ruby,’ Bunty confirms decisively. My name is Ruby. I am a precious jewel. I am a drop of blood. I am Ruby Lennox.

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