after that, I was lying quietly under him, loving him.
‘Thank you, Briney. You are wonderful.’
‘Thank you. Love you.’
‘Love you, my husband. Briney. Where’s your cat? In Cincinnati? In Rolla?’
‘Eh? No, no. In Kansas City.’
‘Here? Boarded with someone?’
‘I don’t know:
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You haven’t picked it out yet, Mo. It’s the kitten you’re going to give me. Bride’s
present to the bridegroom.’
– ‘Oh! Briney, you’re a scamp!’ I tickled him. He tickled me. It resulted, by
stages, in Maureen being disgracefully noisy again. Then I got my back scratched.
Having your back scratched is not the only reason to be married, but it is a good
one, especially for those spots that are so hard to reach by yourself. Then I
secratched his back. We finally went to sleep all tangled up in each other like a
basket of kittens.
Maureen had at last found out what she was good for, her true destiny.
We had champagne for breakfast.
Chapter 7 – Ringing the Cash Register
From having read candid autobiographies written by liberated women in the twentieth
century, especially those published after the second phase of the Final Wars, c.
195= et seq., I know that I am expected to tell in detail all aspects of my first
pregnancy and of me birth of my first child – all about morning sickness and my
cyclic moods and the tears and the loneliness… then the false labour, the
unexpected breaking of the bag of waters, followed by eclampsia and emergency
surgery and the secrets I spilled under anaesthesia.
I’m sorry but it wasn’t that way at all. I’ve seen women with morning sickness and
it’s obviously horrible, but I never experienced it. My problem has always been to
`stay on the curve’, not gain more weight than my doctor thought was healthy for me.
(There have been times when I would have killed for a chocolate éclair.)
With my first baby labour lasted forty minutes. If having babies in hospitals had
been the expected thing in 1899, I would have had Nancy on the way to the hospital.
As it was, Brian delivered Nancy, under my direction, and it was much harder on him
than it was on me.
Dr Rumsey arrived and retied the cord and cut it, and told Brian he had done an
excellent job (he had). Then Dr Rumsey took care of the delivery of the afterbirth,
and Briney fainted, poor lamb. Women are more rugged than men; they have to be.
I’ve had longer labours than that one but never a terribly long one. I did not have
an episiotomy with that first one (obviously!) and I did not need a repair
afterwards. On later births I never allowed a knife to be used on me down there and
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so I have no soar tissue there, just undamaged muscle.
I’m a brood mare, built for it, wide in my thighs and with a birth canal made of
living rubber elastic. Dr Rumsey told me that it was my attitude that made the
difference but I know better; my ancestors gave me the genetic heritage that makes
me a highly efficient female animal, for which I am grateful… as I have seen women
who were not; they suffered terribly and some of them died. Yes, yes, `natural
selection’ and `survival of the fittest’ and Darwin was right -stipulated. But it is
no joke to attend the funeral of a dear friend, dead in her golden youth because her
baby killed her. I was at such a funeral in the twenties and heard a sleek old
priest talk about ‘God’s will’. At the graveside I managed to back away from the
coffin such that I got him proper in his instep with a sharp heel. When he yelped, I
told him it was God’s will.
Once I had a baby in the middle of a bridge game. Pat it was, Patrick Henry Smith,
so that makes it 1932 and that makes it contract we were playing, not auction, and
that all fits together, as Justin and Eleanor Weatheral taught us contract after