Monday, July 05, 2010

Beating the odds

My mother was a very small baby, born prematurely to a teenage mother & a father not much older who was working in a cotton mill after having fought through the First World War. I was told that she weighed just 3 lbs.

The midwife saved her life. She was wrapped – quite literally – in cotton wool & her first crib was a shoe box placed by the side of the kitchen range for constant warmth – in exactly the same way that people were used to caring for orphan lambs.

She was fed from a doll’s feeding bottle, the milk initially dripped on to her lips. This bottle was made from thick glass, about the size of a ladies finger but curved like a banana. It had a tiny bright red rubber teat. I can describe it in such detail because my grandmother kept it & I played with it as a child.

I always simply assumed that the milk came from a cow, simply because when I was told the story I believed that all milk did, (or at least there was no way that a woman could be milked in the same way.)

Photos of my mother during her teens show a very skinny girl with painfully thin legs; although times were a bit tough, especially in the early thirties when the family had to move to find work during the depression, I am sure that this was not down to poor nutrition - my grandmother was a superb manager & cook. Also at 5 feet 4 ¼ inches she was the tallest member of the family.

My mother won the annual scholarship awarded to a girl from the village school so she got a secondary education at the grammar school which she left after obtaining her School Certificate.

She was fit enough to become a physical training instructor in the ATS (exercise for women was much more Eileen Fowler or League of Health & Beauty than aerobics in those days), though her main job during the war was as a telephonist.

After marriage & childbirth her body developed in the way we all took for granted was normal for a mother in those days – it gradually thickened out. At forty, having reached what in those days was a size 16 she began to take a more disciplined line about eating – cutting down the carbohydrates – but never went on a diet as such & could never be called fat.

Her eldest daughter - me - weighed in at a healthy 7lbs, despite being born during the privations of WWII to a mother who smoked.

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