Put That On The Fire

By the time I was ten I knew the story off by heart.

When Mum was five months pregnant with my little brother she started having back ache and bleeding. Probably, you see, she should have rested and that might have saved it, but she had the three year old me to look after so she couldn’t rest. The doctor told her the baby was dead, she went into labour, and had him in our sitting room. While she lay there the doctor, his arms full of something, turned to the nurse and said ‘put that on the fire’. As Mum told it, she nearly died while she watched the nurse put her baby on our sitting room fire. The nurse later told her that it had been a perfect, dead little boy.

My memory is going into the sitting room to see Mum briefly as they carried her in the stretcher, out to the ambulance and to hospital. All I remember is seeing Mum’s pale, blotchy face. I remember Mrs Dennis, who came to do our housework and mind me while Dad was at work over the next few weeks. I don’t remember being told what had happened. I suppose I must have known she was pregnant, but I don’t remember that either.

Neither do I remember when she first started telling me the story. There was a preamble to it. When I was born, they ’left her too long’. Apparently this meant that something happened to her insides. Her friend Audrey, who was a radiologist at the hospital, was told by the doctor there that my mother would never have another child. They didn’t tell my mother that until after she lost my brother.

As I grew up it never occurred to me to ask exactly what it was that had happened to my mother’s insides. It never occurred to me to question any detail of the story. My father never talked about it. I never heard him refer to it in any way, shape or form until many, many years later. I absorbed the story and took the obvious lesson from it: my brother’s death was all my fault. I killed my mother’s baby.

I wasn’t melodramatic about it. I never said anything to her. I just quietly accepted the reality. It was my fault something happened to her insides, because I took so long to be born. It was my fault she couldn’t rest, because I needed looking after. It was perfectly simple, and there was nothing to be said.

I grew up in the fifties and sixties, and only children were rarer then. We were different, and we were regarded with a mixture of pity and envy. It was assumed that you were an only child by accident or misfortune; the idea that a couple might choose to have only one child was not as accepted as now. In my case, I always knew that my single status was second best for my mother. She was one of five children and my father was one of three, and it had always been her intention, she told me, to have at least two of her own, possibly three, probably no more but she hadn’t ruled it out.

My mother knew life had been unfair to her. It had given her sight in only one eye, so during the war she had been rejected for the Forces. It had given her psoriasis, not the crippling kind that lands you in hospital, but the unsightly kind that makes you self conscious about showing your knees and elbows in public. Whenever we went to the beach or the swimming pool, my mother would make it clear that she loved to swim, it was the one sport she liked and had been good at. But she could not do it any more because of her psoriasis. The psoriasis had started when she was in her teens, but had become markedly worse after my birth. Throughout my childhood there were experiments with coal tar creams, special wraps and, later on, steroid creams. The steroid creams worked but thinned her skin; this meant that she could not use any form of scented bath oils or salts, or certain perfumes, or any of the body lotions and potions that other women used. She gave up playing Bridge and Mahjongg because she was sure people looked at her hands, which were often red, but simply looked as though she had forgotten to use her rubber gloves when washing up.

My mother never had a job after I was born because my father disapproved of mothers working. We travelled all over the world because of his work; each place, she felt, was worse than the last and the travelling cut her off from her family. She had always quoted her childhood in the slums of London’s East End as an example of acute deprivation and, during the Blitz, nightly terror. As years went on, the East End became a shining example of community, belonging, and comfort from which my father had torn her, to live a meaningless life with servants, fine clothes and leisure. Finally, when she was in her fifties and sixties, it was discovered that years in hot climates had given her a mild form of skin cancer, which was not fatal but which did necessitate surgery.

By this time my parents’ marriage had hit the rocks, and she made no secret of the fact that she loathed my father. However, she was unable to leave him because…he wouldn’t let her. As he grew older he was found to have a progressive disease similar to Parkinsons, and now she couldn’t leave him because if she did he would ask me to look after him, and she wasn’t going to put me in that position. Her life was over anyway, she declared, and she would do whatever was necessary to protect me from having to care for my father.

I was quite young when the words ‘martyr complex’ crept into my mind. But it seemed to me obvious what had brought about my mother’s dissatisfaction with her life: the appalling trauma, not only of losing her baby, but of seeing that terrible disposal of the body. I owed her, not only for the child she had lost, but also for the life she had lost as a result.

I became a high academic achiever. I forged a successful and happy relationship. I had a beautiful baby boy, and when he was three became pregnant again with no trouble. And lost my baby three months into the pregnancy.

It was not, of course, like her miscarriage. I did not have to go into labour. I was admitted to hospital and scraped out under general anaesthetic. I received counselling afterwards and, although there was no baby to see or hold, my partner and I, with our son, held a quiet farewell ceremony at one of our favourite outdoor places.

I explained to my son that there had been something very wrong with our baby and it had died. It was no-one’s fault and there was nothing anyone could have done.

Two things happened shortly afterwards. I was visiting my parents and we noted that my son was almost exactly the same age as I was when my mother lost my brother. My mother said her miscarriage had happened in March.
‘It was May,’ said my father.
‘No, it was March, wasn’t it?’ she said.
‘It was May,’ he said, quietly. ‘May the tenth.’
‘Oh,’ she said, airily. ‘May, then.’
My father got up and left the room.

After I left them I thought about the real tragedy of their loss, about a man who remembered the exact day he lost his son, but who had never been able to say a word about it, not even to his wife or surviving child. About a couple who, in the 1950’s, had not been allowed to see or hold or mourn their perfect little boy. About the terrible distortion of life that had followed.

A few days later I was talking, emotionally, to a friend, about how hard it must be for both of them, but especially my mother, to have to relive all their own feelings because of what had happened to me. And for the first time I told somebody the story of the bundle the doctor had put on our sitting room fire.

My friend stared at me open mouthed. ‘My God,’ she gasped. ‘But wouldn’t that have been illegal, even in that day and age?’
I had never thought of that.
‘Dear God,’ she went on. ‘How long would it have taken to burn a body, even a tiny one, on an ordinary grate fire? And, oh God, the smell…’

I sat, in shock.

Of course no doctor, even in the 1950’s, would have chucked a five month foetus onto a domestic fire. Would Mrs Dennis have had to sweep out the ash and bones in the morning? How could my father have come back from the hospital that night, into a house stinking of the roast flesh of his child? Would they have allowed a three year old into a room where her dead sibling was slowly cremating?

The story was nonsense.

I could see, immediately, what had happened. Another memory came back to me. A pile of bloodied sheets, on the sitting room floor, and the doctor suddenly standing in front of me and saying, gently, ‘Just say bye bye to your mummy, now.’ There would have been soiled dressings, maybe, gauze, cotton wool, possibly even newspaper, all sorts of bits of stuff. A bundle in the doctor’s arms. ‘Put that on the fire.’

The body of my baby brother would have been taken away and incinerated, as all miscarried babies were in those days. If my mother had thought, allowed herself to think, about the implications of what she believed…if she had talked about it with my father…

I read quite a bit about miscarriage over the next few months. I discovered that ‘rest’ is rarely a remedy for threatened miscarriage. I never did discover exactly what damage could be done by ‘being left too long’ in childbirth, but I have several theories about what might have happened to my mother’s insides. I did try to ask her once exactly what the problem had been, but the conversation snapped to a close. I realised then that she did not know and had never known. Perhaps she had been told, had not taken in the information at the time, and never had the courage to ask the doctors again.

I looked at my own three year old and imagined telling him that our baby had died because of him and his needs.

I had two further miscarriages before having a second child, who also nearly miscarried, almost died at birth and at three months old, but who is now a healthy and beautiful twelve year old. My partner left me five years after she was born. My own psoriasis started after my first child was born and permanently worsened after my miscarriages. I swim, use bath salts, and now and again dollop on some cream when it’s too unsightly. I work in a job with the public, and no-one has ever remarked on the patches of psoriasis on my knuckles. My children know about my miscarriages, know it was a great sadness that could not be helped, but I have always told my daughter, she was the one we were meant to have, the others were not meant to be.

I have never spoken to my mother about her story. On one occasion I did cautiously broach the subject, but she saw it coming and took swift action, launching in to a denunciation of the way my father never let her talk about it, about how no-one ever offered her counselling, and how lonely she was after a lifetime spent moving around, never finding the community she had known in the East End. She speaks frequently about how dreadful life with my father is; having spent years telling me how lucky I was to have such a good relationship, something she had never known, she now tells me how lucky I am not to be growing old with someone who might need looking after, and how glad she is that it is she who has this burden, rather than me, who will never know such travail. I overlook her assumption that, at fifty two, I am beyond any new relationship.

In one reality, it was only a bundle of used dressings that was put on the fire that day. In another, it was so, so much more.