what I was expecting. Stiff and red, he screamed from the first moment he met the world, and his cries echoed around the room as the nurses took him away to look at him because he’d swallowed meconium; his head had also been misshapen as his tiny body squeezed down the birth canal. I couldn’t help but feel a little worried. I thought babies came out smiling and smelling of talcum powder.
When they brought George back a few minutes later, the nurses suggested giving him a bottle of water and Mum took the baby because I was still so shaky I didn’t trust myself to hold him. But as he was lowered into Mum’s arms George just carried on screaming, and as I looked at them together I could see she was struggling to feed him. I wondered how I was ever going to do it if Mum couldn’t. She was an expert after four children but even she was having trouble.
‘He’ll learn,’ Mum said with a smile as she looked at George wrapped up in his blanket, his face red and blotchy from wailing. ‘These things take time, but it will come naturally. Don’t worry, Ju.’
I didn’t know it then, of course, but this was something I would hear again and again over the weeks, months and years that followed. Mum was only being kind, but hers was the first of a thousand explanations about George.
‘His hips are a bit stiff, so he might be a bit uncomfortable,’ one nurse said as he screamed and screamed in the days after he was born.
‘It was quite a difficult delivery, so he needs time to settle,’ another told me.
I’d be a rich woman today if I had a pound for every time I heard the words ‘It will take time.’ Back then I believed what I was told and was sure George would be calmer when I took him home. I’d read all the books and knew that some babies take a while to adjust to life. He’d settle when he was surrounded by love and warmth instead of a clinical hospital ward. But even when we got home to Hounslow and I started giving George warm baths or putting him in his pram, walking him up and down the garden, draping him over my shoulder, lying him on his back or rocking him in a bouncy chair, nothing calmed him.
You see, I loved George from the moment I saw him and wanted to do my best for him. He was my baby, a tiny, defenceless creature I had created and would be responsible for forever; a part of me that I would do anything to love and protect. But as the days turned into weeks, I began to feel as if he didn’t want the love and care I had to give him. It might sound silly to say that about a tiny baby, but George would scream even louder whenever I went near him and I just didn’t understand it because I thought babies loved to be cuddled.
When the midwife visited, she said that I should take him to the doctor, who referred me to the local hospital, who said George might be suffering from constipation and gave him some medication. But still he didn’t stop crying. Then the midwife suggested that massage might help, but George went rigid the moment I touched him, as if the feel of my hands burned his skin. Later he’d lift his head when my skin made contact with his and jerk the moment I touched him. It was the same if I tried to calm him by rocking him or laying him against my chest. He just didn’t want to be close to me and screamed night and day.
Each day I told myself that things would get better, but they didn’t. I hung a mobile over George’s cot, thinking he’d like the bright colours, but he stared past it. I wiggled brightly coloured toys in front of his face, but he turned away and cried. The hardest thing was his sleeplessness, because he would only nap for half an hour at most; day and night, he was awake.
I could see my kindly midwife thought I might be being impatient when I told her he didn’t rest. ‘All babies sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s important that they do.’
But George didn’t.
‘He’ll have to drop off in the end,’ Mum would tell me. ‘He’s been fed, he’s warm and he’s got a clean nappy. He’ll go to sleep.’
But George’s screams would echo around the house all night as people tried to sleep. Our home had four bedrooms: Tor was in one, Nob in another, and both had to get up for work every morning. Then there were George and me in the third, and Mum and Dad had the last one with my nephew Lewis, who was three and a half. My brother Boy and his girlfriend, Sandra, had had Lewis when they were only teenagers and were too young to cope when he was born at just 22 weeks, weighing two and a half pounds. Lewis was christened during his first few hours in the hospital because the doctors didn’t think he’d survive, but he did. He came home nine months later to be looked after by Mum and Dad, because he still had such bad lung problems that he needed permanent oxygen, which is why he still slept in their room so that he could be checked every hour. George’s screams meant no one was getting any sleep though, and it’s one thing trying to calm an unhappy baby but another when you’re worrying about everyone else too. So I started staying in my room more during the day, because I thought that at least people would get a bit of a break then with a couple of walls between them and George’s cries.
‘Don’t worry, Ju,’ Dad would say as he opened the door to see me holding the baby, who’d gone rigid and red as I lifted him up. ‘It’ll be all right. He’ll grow out of it.’
On days when Mum could see I’d just about reached the end of my tether, she’d strap Lewis into one side of the back seat of her car while I put George in the other and we’d go out for a drive, hoping the rhythm might send him to sleep. Hounslow is just a couple of miles from Richmond Park, a huge green space where Charles I took his court to escape the plague. It’s a beautiful place and we often went there for a picnic or a walk, so it held many happy memories for me. But all those seemed to fade as we drove through the park with George screaming.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Mum would tell me. ‘Some babies just take a while to adjust. Things always get better.’
But as I stared at packs of deer running across the park with the skyline of inner London far in the distance, I began to wonder if they ever would.
Even when you live on £85 a week you can still afford a tin of paint, so that’s what I bought when I moved into my own flat with George, because I wanted to brighten up the place. I had left Mum and Dad’s, because families are a bit like balloons, in that they’ll expand and expand to fit but there comes a point when too much pressure might make them pop. I knew that everyone I loved was getting stressed by George, however much they didn’t want to tell me. So by the time he was six months old, I had decided to put my name down on the council housing list, because our house was packed to the rafters.
Mum didn’t just have Lewis to worry about now, either. My dad had developed rheumatoid arthritis when I was a teenager, but I hadn’t known then just how much his illness affected him because my parents never hinted at their problems in front of us. I thought life was perfect as I sat on the sofa watching Superman. But as I got older, I could see for myself just how much Dad was suffering. By the time I got pregnant he had given up full-time work, though he still sometimes had huge steroid injections to stop the pain for long enough for him to get out of bed and into a cab to earn a few quid. But even that had stopped when I brought George home. By then Dad’s hands had curled in on themselves like claws, his back was arched and he had to use a stick to walk.
That was why I knew I had to get a place of my own, however much I hated the thought of being a single mother living on handouts, and in January 1997 I was given the keys to a two-bedroom house on an estate a couple of miles away. I arrived with a pram, a bed, a fridge and cooker Mum and Dad had bought me and a sofa covered in blue cord. I was happy to find the house immaculate. The old man called Bob who’d lived and died there had kept it well – if I
