Read Judith O'Reilly's Wife in the
North blog
Tuesday, August 23, 2005: As we drove out of the city’s fabulous
sprawl last night with our two boys in the back of the car, I wondered
whether I could kill my husband and plead insanity. I knew it would be
slightly unfair - I had agreed to the move, although I had not meant it.
“Hormones ate my brain, Your Honour.”
I love London - it is where I want to be. He thinks we will move to
Northumberland and life will be perfect. Life is never perfect. If I had not
been pregnant I would never have agreed to this ridiculous experiment in
country living.
I rested my hands on my pregnant belly and turned my head away from him. I
stared at the fake diamond of my engagement ring, nestled next to my wedding
ring, which is missing a diamond chip.
I thought: “If I kill him, how will I explain it to the children? ‘Boys, the
good news is we are going back to London; the bad news is your father is
staying here. In this lay-by, just under that bush. Look, we’ll tie a bunch
of flowers to the fence. Wave bye-bye to Daddy now’.”
I do not care that much for holidays, all that expectation and dislocation,
but he does. Every year we would take a cottage in Northumberland for a
week. On one of those holidays, nearly five years ago, he saw an advert in
the paper: “Cottage for sale”.
It was in a row of eight, on a slight rise overlooking hedged fields. We stood
together in the empty master bedroom, looking out into the twilight and
towards the striped, blue-grey horizon. My husband said: “Let’s do it. After
everything we’ve been through, let’s just do it. We promised ourselves we’d
do things differently.”
I agreed to it because it made him happy. I was pregnant then, too. My brain
must shrink to the size of a walnut when I am pregnant. I remember the exact
words my husband used. He wrapped his arms around me and said: “Don’t worry.
This is not the thin end of the wedge. I’m not going to ask you to live
here.” Hah.
Sunday, August 28: If Northumberland does not work out for us, if it is
not a “fit”, the deal is this: we go back to London, go back home. D-Day is
December 31, 2007, when we make our decision to stay or go. I said out loud:
“I am never going to get out of here. He is never going to let me leave.” He
must have slipped some date-rape drug into my latte, but he did not want to
remove my panties, he wanted to remove my life.
Monday, August 29: One of my part-time neighbours popped in to see how
I was getting on. She is a hospital consultant. She sat down in a rocker by
the door and gave me a warm smile.
“How are you?” she asked. I am enormously pregnant, cumbersome, shattered,
old, tired beyond belief. I have abandoned the city of my heart. My husband
is about to leave to go back to work in London. He has not yet left and I am
already as lonely as I have ever been. I cry. Loudly. I cannot find the
words. The consultant comes over and sits next to me on the bed. She rubs my
back, says: “There, there.” And I feel better.
Monday, October 24: The midwife was running through questions on her
booking-in form when she casually inquired: “Are you and your baby’s father
blood relatives?”
I thought: “You mean, is he my brother?” I sat up straighter and asked: “Does
that happen often up here?”
“No,” she said reassuringly, her head bent over my notes, “not now.”
Thursday, November 3: The midwife handed the slimy morsel across to my
husband. He laid it warm and slippery on my breast. The child heat was
enough to sear straight through my skin and mould the babe on to my ready
heart. I held the warm skin bundle close. The tiny boned head and pink
ribbed face. I thought: “Ah. Child of mine.” Beauty in an instant.
I never thought to ask. My husband whispered: “She’s a girl. She’s a girl.” I
have a daughter. My first, last and only daughter. My beloved.
Friday, November 4: The boys were desperate for a girl. I think they
would have insisted I sent back a tiny, rival brother. Generous, they
forgive a sister. My four-year-old looked at his sister - soft-smiled,
enchanted, in love with her already. That is how long it took. A moment.
Monday, December 19: Had to go to the doctor with mastitis. Feeling
appalling. My breasts look like armed and dangerous weapons.
Saturday, January 7, 2006: The nights have been bad lately. None of my
babies ever sleeps through the night. I hate women who smile at you with
their sparkling eyes and say: “Gerald was only three weeks when he slept
straight through.” It makes me want to bludgeon them about the head with
Gerald’s redundant baby alarm.
My oldest was 18 months before he slept through a night; my three-year-old was
14 months. It is my own fault; I think tragedy may lurk in every night; I
have to keep checking them to make sure they are still breathing. If I am
unconvinced, I poke them. Quite often, they wake up with a start; look, as
if to say: “You terrifying nutter.” They scream very loudly for at least an
hour after that.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007: This afternoon, when I got home, fatigued
and city-worn after haring off to London for meetings about work, a torn
cream corner of my heaviest paper was propped against a wild dog and a
soft-furred cheetah which both sat on a plastic stool.
“Welchm homw mummey,” the letters tumbled across the page, hasty to escape.
Later, my eldest, urgent boy hurtling in from school, threw himself at me.
“Did you like my note?” he demanded. “They were my spellings. I might,” he
pulled away slightly, “have got one of them wrong.”
“No,” I shook my head and hugged him mother-tight, “it was entirely perfect.”
Friday, February 16: There are some days so bad that the only thing
which could redeem them is a proposal of marriage. Today was one of them. As
I hunkered down by my pyjama-clad four-year-old to start cleaning his teeth,
he gazed intensely into my eyes. “When I’m big, I want to marry you.” He
paused. “If you’re still alive.”
Friday, March 2: The album which holds my baby photographs is worn and
grimy with the years - a bit like me. The inside cover, once virgin cream,
is now a rusting and unpleasant brown, as if one day I snatched it from a
hearth where it was smouldering.
On the first page, a suited man relaxes, leaning against the rails on the
windy prom at Blackpool, a cigarette between his fingers. You can only lean
so long. Look again, he is sitting down on a wooden bench, my mother’s
leather handbag and a parcel beside him.
The snaps are of my father, who should perhaps have tossed the cigarette into
the cold black-and-white sea behind him. My mother tells me I was six weeks
old when she left with him for three or four days in Blackpool. My brand-new
father had not confessed to coughing blood, but pleaded for a seaside break.
“I didn’t want to leave you,” she tells me, “but I knew he wasn’t well and
so we went.”
One year and eight snap-filled pages later, the cigarette has quite gone out,
the coughing stopped and there is no more suited man. Instead, the camera
shutter closes on a young matron in a tilted, black straw hat with her
solemn fat-faced babe. My widow-weeded mother holds me for ever in her arms
in front of roses, river, bridge and church. He may be gone but I am her
victory over death, a triumph in pantaloons and bonnet. I think she may be
sad. I’m sure she is, as she carries me around with her, a memory of him,
until, in the way of things, she meets another kindly father man, marries
him and smiles again.
I opened the album up because twice lately I have had the sensation as I
looked at my own daughter that I was looking at myself. I never felt that
with the boys. My sons are my lions, terrorsome and grand. See how they go;
march and strut and shout. But the other day, as I gazed at my baby standing
proud in the grass, deciding should she walk or not, I felt: “That’s me. I’m
looking at myself.” Again today, I held her in my arms at the bathroom sink,
glanced up at the mirror and thought again: “That baby in my arms. That’s
me.”
So I dug out this relic of the past to see if my baby-self had escaped her
black sugar-paper prison. But no, she was still there, safe in her mother’s
arms.
Saturday, March 3: So you wake up and you stretch out an arm and find a
man in your bed. Your first thought as you wrap yourself around his warmth:
“Fabulous, there’s a man in my bed.” His hand slides down your smooth and
naked thigh and he murmurs something you cannot quite make out. Your second
thought, and it follows light-speed quick, bearing in mind the room is black
dark and you have only just made it to the surface of the day: “I can have a
lie-in.” You remove his fond hand as the baby starts to mew along the
corridor. “Darling,” you tenderly whisper into his ear, “you’re on.”
Tuesday, September 18: I had put the children to bed after the usual
two-hour performance involving baths, books and bollockings. I had lain next
to the six-year-old and said: “You make me so proud and I love you so much.
Do you know that?” And he said: “No. How much do you love me?” And I said:
“I love you brighter than the stars.” He said: “Do you love me more than
Daddy?” I said: “Yes. That’s just the way it is.” He said: “More than
Granny?” and I said yes and thought: “Don’t tell her, though.” “More than
television?” No contest. “More than your make-up?” More than that even.
Tuesday, September 25: I said to the baby girl - and I know you should
not ask such questions of children - “Who do you love the most?” She stared
back at me, her face all truth and beauty; hazel-blue eyes and her mouth
which looks like mine at the corners. I whispered again as I bunched her to
me, settling in to the rocking chair: “Who do you love the most? The best?
Who in this world?” She lay back into me, raised up her plastic cup of milk
as if to make a toast. “Granny,” she confided.
Wednesday, October 24: I became quite desperate to go down to London.
Maybe it is because the end-of-year deadline is approaching when we decide
whether we stay or go back. We have been up here more than two years now. If
I think about London, I miss it. Therefore I try not to think about it. Try
not to picture myself living there. I find it easier that way.
Wednesday, November 14: I love my children. All four of them: there is
one I cannot hold. Not true. I hold him in my heart. I just cannot hold his
hand in mine. He would be eight today.
Two days before he was due to be born, he stopped moving. I did the things you
do: ate vanilla ice cream for which I had no appetite, climbed awkwardly
into a hot bath, dribbled water on to my still belly, fell silent, thought:
“F*** and buggery.”
My husband drove me to hospital. I spoke. “I’m sure it’s fine, but I can’t
feel the baby move.”
The midwife took me in, laid me down, wired me up, turned off the light. She
cold-gelled and swept the veined mound with ultrasound. I thought: “Now’s
the time to wave, baby.”
No wave. She could not find a pulsing beat in the grainy black and white. I
thought: “I shan’t ask for a picture then this time.”
She said: “I’m going to get someone else to have a look.”
I thought: “That’s not what you’d call a good sign,” as the door shush-closed
behind her.
A brief pause before an older woman came in. Kind. Experienced with bad news.
Sweep and look again to find death, tragedy, horror and desolation. She
leant in towards me, said her prayers for the dead: “I am very sorry to have
to tell you . . .”
My husband and I clung together as if our world had ended. Our world had
ended. I can tell you the exact sound a heart makes when it breaks. It
sounds like a wolf. Both of us heard it.
If you have a stillbirth, they do not cut you up, rip out the babe, sew you up
and send you away, almost whole again. Lick split. Instead, they say: “Don’t
swallow this,” and hand you a torpedo, connect you to a drip and “start you
off”.
They say: “This isn’t going to hurt,” and lie. “We’ll break your waters,” and
take up a crochet hook but not to make a table mat. “Let’s give you
morphine. Usually, we don’t do this.”
The morphine helps but not enough. “Not long now” and “Push” and “Stop” and 60
hours later: “Well done,” and you see how your life could have been.
My baby boy was beautiful. These babies often are. My baby boy was dead.
Stillbirth can be like that. Lying on a paper blanket, the bones in his
skull all pushed around, misshapen.
The dead, they do decay. Yet, when I felt his head push out from me, he had
felt wet, warm and wonderful. Don’t look now. The skin, already flayed from
his neck, came off at a too tender touch.
I do not know the colour of his eyes, but his fingers, tips tinted in scarlet,
folded to hold my finger. The first and last time I held his hand in mine.
My hand splayed on his chest, his left hand curled round my little finger;
my thumb tucked in the other. I felt along the Babygro for his feet, the
curve of his calf, the better to remember his body. We had time with him,
but not enough; I kissed his rosebud mouth, but not enough; I showered him
in tears, too many.
I know how death smells. We lit candles in tins. One for vitality. It did not
work. We took endless photos of a subject who never moved. As my husband
slept for an hour through the London night, I sat with my baby, told him
about Christmas and birthdays and jungle animals and Northumberland which
his father loved and where we holidayed each new year. I swear he heard me.
Then the smell got too much and we buried him. I have the bill yet. Keepsakes
are hard to come by when a baby dies.
Supply of a small white coffin and transport: Fee: £150 Extra mileage: £80
Gravediggers: £60 They were toothless. The gravediggers, standing too close
and anxious to get on with the job, leaning on their spades as we buried our
future. In his coffin we put a teddy bear (cruel of us to bury a teddy), a
photo of a kiss, a crucifix (I have its mate), a tulip and a letter. Hardly
room in there for the baby.
We printed the letter on the order of service for the funeral. It said: “We
knew you before you were born and we wouldn’t have missed a moment of our
time together as a family. Wherever we go in life, you will be with us and
part of us. You will always be the little blond-haired boy running alongside
us on a Northumberland beach and the sound of your laughter will always fill
our home.”
No reason for the death. As the hospital report said: “No malformations or
obvious infection.” Often the way. His heart weighed 19g. Not a heavy heart.
Mine weighed more. No medic in rubbered hands can weigh a mother’s love,
though.
The fact my husband touches me reminds me not to die and he pulls me through
the anguish of the days and nights and days. And we whisper a promise to
each other that we will not compromise; we will think differently, do what
it takes to strive for happiness together.
Thursday, November 15: Bad day yesterday. I went for a walk on the
beach at one point. I do not know if that made it worse. My husband was in
London - unavoidable - and it was the first time we have been apart on the
anniversary.
I clambered down the dune path and on to the shore. I walked along to where
the earth has pushed up a curved rocky road through the sands and into the
sea.
I looked out into the water and the clouded sky and shouted out my son’s name
as if to call him in from play and to my side. I thought: “Can you hear me?
Do you know I’m here? That I still love you?” and called out to him again,
this time louder.
I do not know what made this year so very hard - my husband’s absence, or
perhaps the fact that every year since our first son died there has been a
pregnancy, a baby, a prospect of another baby and another redemption, but
that time is over. Our family is done - no more babies.
I looked out to the moving mirror which is the sea. My salt tears falling,
more mirrors dropping into the sand, smashing into the white water foaming
over my boots, I thought: “I wish I could be pregnant again. Pregnant with
him again. Do it all differently, have it end differently for him. Make a
better job of it this time,” and from the pain I would say that my scarred
heart tore and bled awhile as damaged hearts occasionally do.
Sunday, December 30: If we go back, we return to old friends and the
place I love most in the world, but can you ever really go back, and could I
live with the guilt of dragging everyone along with me when we have made a
life here for all of us?
Monday, December 31: Luckily it was the four-year-old’s birthday, so I
could divert everybody’s attention from the grinding noise coming from my
head, still busy with “Do we stay or do we go now?” with birthday cake and
the information that in this part of Northumberland, they do not call it New
Year’s Eve but Old Year’s Night. We decided to stay. My husband never
shifted from loving Northumberland, the boys love school and their muddy,
sandy outdoors life, my girl loves horses and I love all of them. The house,
too, is set up to accommodate my parents as and when they need it, which
gives me comfort and a sense of the possible.
The decision to stay was not an easy one and part of me will always yearn to
be back in London. I am still a Daughter of the City - but it is time to
grow up and leave home. Every day I find myself surprised by a suspicion
that I “belong” more than I did the day before, that I am being claimed
somehow.
The past 2½ years have indeed been an adventure, during which I made friends
and intend to make more, learnt country ways, tasted at least the beauty and
power of this place and grew to appreciate the kindness and warmth of those
I now live among.
Perhaps now I will always be pulled between Northumberland and London, between
heart and soul, between the wife and mother I am and the memory of who I
was. I will visit London and miss it as long as ever I am away, but, for the
moment, this is where we stand. Who knows? Things change.
Not long ago, my husband said: “Let’s face facts. If I was dead, you wouldn’t
be here.”
I looked at him. I picked up my coffee cup and held it in both of my hands,
slightly obscuring my face. I said: “Let’s face facts. You’re not dead.”
Extracted from Wife In the North by Judith O’Reilly, to be published by
Penguin on July 3 at £7.99. Copies can be ordered for £7.59, including
postage and packing, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
Why bother saying anything if you can't say anything nice?? Why do these people think that they have to take everything to heart? This is a fantastic book! I have laughed and cried with Judith and she has kept me sane through sleep deprivation with a young baby my little 'me time' Bless you Judithx
jeanettte mitchell, Ammanfors, Wales
Fantastic. Although I no longer live there, I grew up in Belford and recognised every blade of marren grass ,every grain of sand and even the locals too. I love it. Hope that you coped with the strong accent and did not feel you had moved to a foreign country.Your book now on my wish .
Gilbert Crawford, Bromesberrow,
I moved here 9 years ago and wanted to read this as I miss London too. I was immediately upset she had mentioned the suicide of a local person I knew without very much sensitivity for her family and friends. Read on and lost interest half way through I'm afraid, I found her life dull.
Sharon, Warkworth, Northumberland
Think of what you and the kids are missing though. they won't be able to celebrate diversity and enjoy the rough and tumble playground mix with children from other cultures.
B Grant, Surbiton ,
This is a load of condescending, self absorbed tripe, written by a southerner and published in a southern based newspaper. I have always tried to let my southern friends keep their image of the north east as industrial and full of pit heaps to keep them away from a beautiful part of the country.
Michael Pearson, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Absolutely beautiful and beautifully written. Can't wait to buy the book. Thank you for sharing the story so poetically, so eloquently.
Susan, Seattle,
I can't imagine that the people writing such callous comments have read the article. very moving, very well written
Sarah, London,
Very moving - I shall look out for your book. 'The North' is not all gritty realism of belching factories and drug addicts. I grew up 9 miles from the Northumberland coast and although I currently live in London, the stretch from Newcastle to Berwick will always be home in my heart.
Erica, London, UK
i'm so moved by your story judith and will get my hands on your book as soon as i can. thank you. you write like an angel.
kate, herefordshire, uk
Get over yourself princess. Your only a 3 hour train ride away from the capital. Why would we want to read your opinion about Northumberland when you probably reside on Holy Island or in Alnwick. Try a 'working' town and your novel may be a tad more realistic.
Mark, Bristol , England
So beautifully written. Fantastic.
Georgina, The Hague, Netherlands
I hate bitter, inappropriate and just silly remarks from stupid people like "Rob" from Derby". There was nothing remotely spoilt about this woman, who in my view wrote very eloquently about the inevitable upheaval from a place she loved and was used to. Good luck to her.
Diana Brooke, Salies de Bearn, France
Lovely story, movingly written...can't wait to read the book
John Batten, London, UK
How heartless are these comments! All things pass, Judith. All things pass.
RW, London,
I'll have her life in that most beautiful part of the world. Pearls before Swines.
Moni, Sheffield, South Yorks
Very moving and fantastically well written; I just wonder WHY your husband is so keen on YOU living up North; HE doesn't ,after all;,not most of the time anyway;maybe he never got over that baby's death;maybe he can't cope with your grief and needs to get away...one thing is for sure,you're a writer
Isa, Lyon, France
Sam of Northumberland - clearly you dont have children otherwise you would no that all midwives ask if the mother and father are blood relatives!!!
Emma, Brecon,
i think you have used rather a lot of poetic licence when you say that your midwife asked if you and your husband were blood relatives. do not try to make northumberland more interesting by insulting its inhabitants.
Sam, Northumberland,
What a complete waste of time - spoilt, rich Londoner gets the chance to move to one of the most beautiful parts of the UK and thinks its all some huge adventure. Pathetic really
Rob, Derby, UK
Well it's not really about life in Northumberland is it? I moved to Northumberland from London myself seven years ago having sworn away the rest of my days as a Londoner. It was a decision that has enhanced my life beyond all expectation. Beautiful part of the country.
Sally, Newcastle, UK