Waiting for Apollo 11 – Part 2
To return to the story of my late wife’s first pregnancy. This tale was started under Waiting for Apollo 11.
I stayed all night at the Middlesex Hospital and about midnight, the contractions stopped and I think I fell asleep with my head on her bed.
She was sharing the room with another lady, who was perhaps a ten years older than my wife’s then 21 years. I can’t remember much about her except that she was dark-haired and she had a wedding ring with a buckle in it. But at least my wife had some pleasant company whilst I was not there.
In fact, I remember going to work on that Monday in Welwyn Garden City. You had to do that in those days, as there was no such thing as paternity leave. But at least my bosses were fairly sympathetic.
I returned to the hospital on that Monday evening and nothing had happened.
I seem to think that the hospital had decided that if nothing happened on the Monday, they were going to induce the baby on the Tuesday morning. I probably got a good night’s sleep at my mother-in-law’s in Barnet.
There are other things that I can’t remember. Did I drive up to the hospital in our elderly Morris Minor? Did my mother-in-law visit before the birth? Oh! How you wished you had wrote it all down.
Waiting for Apollo 11
Not many people know where they were on the 13th of July, 1969. I do because my late wife and I spent an enjoyable but apprehensive day in St. James’s Park in London in the sun.
I say apprehensive. Why apprehensive? Because she was just expecting our first child and we did not have a hospital to go to.
So how did we get into this predicament?
We had been living in Liverpool and I was working for ICI, whilst she completed her studies at the University. But soon after we got married in September 1968, her father died and we decided that we needed to be near her mother in London. It was probably not a good idea, but you do things like that when you are young. She had also got recently pregnant, which again was probably not a good idea, but looking back having our three children young was for the best. For the last twenty or more years of our marriage, we were unencumbered by family and were free to do what we enjoyed most; travel!
So, I transferred to ICI Plastics at Welwyn Garden City and we bought a house at Melbourn near Royston. But horror of horrors the house wasn’t ready and we had to move in with her mother in Barnet.
My late wife was adopted and was actually born in the Victoria Maternity Hospital in Barnet. So there was no way she was going to have our first child there, as it had too many bad connotations for her.
So we found ourselves without a hospital to deliver the baby.
I should also say, that on that Sunday, the baby was about three weeks overdue, so even if she didn’t think things were serious, I did.
Late that afternoon, she said that she was having slight contractions and that we perhaps ought to go to A & E somewhere. She preferred the old Middlesex Hospital, as it had a good reputation.
So we presented ourselves at the hospital and after about twenty minutes, she was seen by a doctor and because of her imminent state, they decided to admit her as an emergency.
It didn’t really matter, as they weren’t very full, because everybody was excited about the first moon landing with Apollo 11, scheduled to take place in a few days. And having babies and other important things was far from peoples’ minds.
The Anonymous Widower 