Roam Birth, The Sydney Morning Herald, Extract from Hunting the Famous, 1992

From Hunting the Famous:

​

ROAM BIRTH

John Stapleton

Everything had come together. Everything was right.

Making stories out of one’s own life came naturally enough; and I wrote a piece for example on the birth of my daughter.

“That could only happen to you,” people in the corridors commented the day it was published.

The story, published in 1992, began:

“It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had more than four months worth of holidays built up, my partner and I were sick of the house we were living in, and, believe it or not, sick of Sydney.

“Thus it was that we decided to take 18 weeks off and have our second child overseas.”

The story records the perhaps natural instinct of looking for somewhere to nest as we traveled through Spain and Morocco.

“Nowhere was good enough, everywhere out of the question. So the money con$nued to disappear, Suzy grew bigger and we con$nued to search, in a strangely abstract way, for a place to have our baby.”

Suzy, and Sammy for that majer, loved Morocco, all the culture shocks you could ever want rolled into one. We travelled through the sub- Sahara with Suzy 32 weeks pregnant, up and down spectacular desert mountains, and all the time there was the thought, what if it happened here, what if it happened here?

So we were out of Morocco, through Barcelona to Bonn for two weeks with an old friend and more ultrasounds, to Amsterdam, here, please here.

But Suzy had determined she wanted to have the baby amongst the child loving peoples of Greece and, seeing she was the one who was pregnant, that's where we went.

I didn't want to go. I had the distinct feeling I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Twenty years before Greece had been a great place to visit. But with tens of millions of tourists a year, they were overwhelmed.

Just as mass tourism had done to many other communi$es around the world, hospitality had turned to hostlity with the influx of too many people ignorant of local customs and with too much money to flash around; emphasizing the poverty or the lack of financial opportuni$es of the locals.

The fact that we were traveling pregnant with a young child wasn't a source of wonder or concern; as it would once have been. We were simply another bunch of dumb tourists, capable of any madness.

Thus, in polluted, strike-stricken Athens, we approached some personal nadir. There was no-one around to help us, no friends, no relatves. The Australian Embassy was completely useless, unable to give advice. Unlike the Germans, who could see no problem with the fetus’s kidney, the Greeks could see spots and dollars everywhere.

Told that the people on Crete were friendly and the hospitals good, we flew there, deciding that this was it, we had to settle there, find a charming house overlooking a beach, wait for the child to come.

Birth seemed imminent. Suzy was 37 weeks pregnant and Sammy had been born at exactly that time – three weeks early.

Of course the people in the main town of Iraklion weren't friendly at all.

It was just another tourist infested joint ruined by package tour operators. There were only two humidicribs on the whole island. The few foreign residents holding out for the winter filled us with horror stories about the state of the hospitals which, to our by now inflamed imaginatons, sounded alarming.

The first night on Crete we were the only guests in a giant hotel which curved around the main harbor.

We found an open restaurant; returned to the Gothic cathedral of a hotel and tried to settle into our room; with its curved windows looking out across the wind whipped Mediterranean.

At exactly the moment our one-year-old Sammy threw up moussaka and milk all over the double bed, a partcularly strong gust of wind smashed the hotel window, raining glass all over us.

I knew then more than ever I was in the wrong place at the wrong time; and said so rather fervently in the Greek Orthodox Church where I went the next morning.

Shortly after my unusually sincere visit to the church, came a scene in the main square of Iraklion. Sammy was clinging to my leg while Suzy sobbed on my shoulder. “I've made a mistake, I've made a mistake.”

There was, I thought, nothing else for it but to hit the phones and head for the so-called mother country – that was, for England.

It wasn't our own lives we were mucking around with here. There was a baby due.

I phoned home, got a list of numbers of the few people I still knew in England, and began ringing.

The first to answer was an old friend in Yorkshire Christine Waterer, who I hadn't seen for years. She listened with astonishment as I detailed our predicament. The chances of my having children were not high last time

we had been close.

But before long, burning up even more precious dollars, we were on a KLM flight to Manchester.

Travel after 28 weeks was against airline regula$ons for pregnant women, but luckily it was winter. We wrapped Suzy up in as large a jacket as we could find and nervously tried to conceal from the airport authorities how heavily pregnant she was. In the end no-one even noticed.

My friend Chris$ne, good old social worker that she was, had found us a tourist cottage in the Holme Valley above Holmfirth – the Bronte parsonage was 40 minutes away – and we sat inside watching the British

elections on TV. Despite our personal backing of Labor leader Neil Kinnock, conservative John Major, who had taken over aeer the resignation of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, managed to win easily.

From being in crisis on Crete, we were becalmed in a Yorkshire cottage.

Day stretched into day, the daffodils were just coming out along the edge of the lanes, but it was too cold to spend much time outside. It seemed as if the baby would never come.

Unfortunately we had to move from our idyllic cottage two and a half weeks later, it being previously booked, and we ended up in what could best be described as a squat.

The house, owned by friends of friends, had been abandoned for six months. There was no central heating and it was far from ideal, but at the end of our trip and finances being what they were, we couldn't afford

anything else.

We had been through a whole rigmarole with the local hospital, which wanted to charge us the equivalent of $500 a day up front to have the baby, a Thatcher legacy.

Neither the Australian Consulate in Manchester nor the Embassy in London could tell us whether we were covered under Medicare to have a baby in England. Indeed they could hardly have been less helpful. For this

we paid taxes. For this the country spent billions of dollars a year on the Foreign Affairs Department. For this we had staff sta$oned around the world.

Thankfully a doctor in our local village put us on to the famous midwives of Yorkshire.

It was a freezing cold bleak night, windy and pouring rain outside, when Suzy said: “It's happening”.

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure.”

I poured coal on the fire and promptly put it out. I then mislaid the coins for the phone box, having had them ready for weeks, and had to wake up some neighbors.

The first midwife came. She was thirtyish, very professional. A couple of hours later came Ivy, an older woman, children of her own, a thick Yorkshire accent.

And the upshot was: they were fantastc. In the end, after all our worries, we got far better treatment than if we had stayed at home.

After a very long morning, with Suzy shouting “It’s all your fault” with each contraction, Henrietta was born at 1 pm.

To be truthful, there wasn't the same sense of profundity as there was with the first. I wasn't staring out the window thinking of new life and the universe. I was thinking of all the practical problems, of the responsibility, that there were people dependent on me now.

While the follow-up service in Yorkshire was excellent, with a mid-wife coming every day for the first 10 days, there were other problems to come, such as gelng Henrietta a passport. I must have cut a funny sight holding an 11-day-old baby up in the photographic booth of Manchester railway station. After a three-hour wait, the consul rejected the pictures anyway, claiming that the baby’s head was flopping, which of course is what baby’s heads do at that age.

The Consulate, with all their taxpayer funded helpfulness, refused to offer any advice on where I could get a picture taken that would satisfy their requirements. That would be offering commercial advice. Outside

the consular offices, Manchester was its typical winter self, freezing cold.

Eventually the problem was resolved and I headed back to the train station with Henrietta and Sam. I put my son on the ground for a moment while I perused the timetable. Then looked down and he was gone. Completely vanished.

There had been a series of particularly hideous child murders the English seem to specialize in during the previous days and I was in a complete panic; running around the sta$on holding Henrieja and shouting to anyone who would listen; “Have you seen a blond boy, one-year-old?”

Eventually I found him, several hundred yards away, trucking along.

Heaven knows where he thought he was going. I couldn’t have been more relieved.

We travelled back to Australia via Bangkok with a gorgeous month-old baby girl – the first time I had stayed at that beau$ful hotel by the Chao Phraya River, The Shangrila.

The article concluded:

“Would we do it all again?

“Not on your nelly. If you're thinking of doing it: don't.”

My children would make the occasional appearance in newspapers over the years; once my son appeared looking pathetic, staring at the ground while sittng in the gutter, supposedly a homeless inner-city child, at

another time as a hyper modern computer child with digital patterns super-imposed over his always photogenic face.

Sometimes their friends, partcularly as they entered age brackets difficult for journalists to access, would be quoted as the examples of one particular trend or another amongst young teenagers.

And a transcript of the story:

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had more than four months worth of holidays built up, my partner and I were sick of the house we were living in, and, believe it or not, sick of Sydney.

Thus it was that we decided to take 18 weeks off and have our second child overseas.

"You'll be right, they've been having babies over there for thousands of years," the early childhood sister declared.

So we bought three tickets to Europe and four tickets back, returning with we didn't know who.

The entire adventure was given an alarming spin the day before we left when the hospital informed us that they had found an irregularity in the ultrasound - there could be a blockage in the child's kidney.

All packed and geared up to go, we contemplated abandoning the trip. But with that particular condition, rare but not unkonwn, there was little that could be done until after the baby was born.

So, with the doctor's approval, we were off.

How good it felt to be there, but with the drama of unborn kidneys looming large in our minds we skated through Spain and then Morocco.

We were travelling as a unit, and ion that there was a certain comfort, but all the time, in the natural way of things, we were looking for somewhere to nest.

Nowhere was good enough, everywhere out of the question. For a start, most places were just far too expensive to settle for months on end. Gone were the days when I was happy to sleep under cars and bridges and in cheap flea-pits, for travel was all part of a grand adventure of being anywhere but Australia.

So the money continued to disappear, Suzy grew bigger and we continued to search, in a strangely abstract way, for a place to have our baby.

Morocco - well it was cheap, it always has been.

Suzy, and Sammy for that matter, love it, all the culture shocks you could ever want rolled into one. We were crossing through the sub-Sahara with Suzy 32 weeks pregnant, up and down spectacular desert mountains, and all the time there was the thought, what if it happened here, what if it happened here?

So we were out of Morocco, through Barcelona to Bonn for two weeks with an old friend and more ultrasounds, to Amsterdam, here, please here. But no, Suzy had decided she wanted to have the baby in Greece and, seeing she was the one who was going to have to have it, that's where we went.

I didn't want to go. I had the distinct feeling I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Twenty years ago Greece was a great place to visit. Now, with tens of millions of tourists a year, they are touristed out. The fact that we were travelling pregnant with a young child wasn't a source of wonder or concern. We were simply another bunch of dumb tourists, capable of any madness.

Thus, in polluted, strike-striken Athens, we approached some personal nadir. There was no-one around to help us, no friends, no relatives. The Australian Embassy was completely useless, unable to give advice. Unlike the Germans, who could see no problem with the foetus's kidney, the Greeks could see spots and dollars everywhere.

Told that the people on Crete were very friendly and the hospitals were good, we flew there, deciding that this was it, we had to settle here, finding a charming house overlooking a beach, wait for the child to come.

Birth seemed imminent. Suzy was 37 weeks, and Sammy had been born at that time.

Of course the people in the main town of Iraklion weren't friendly at all. Yet another touristed our joint ruined by package tours. There were only two humidicribs on the whole island the hospitals, to our by now inflamed imaginations, sounded alarming.

Came t hat scene in the main square of Iraklion with Sammy clining crying to my leg, Suzy sobbed on my shoulder. "I've made a mistake, I've made a mistake.''

There was, I thought, nothing else for it but to hit the phones and head for the mother country. It wasn't our own lives we were mucking around with here.

I phoned home, got a list of numbers of the few people I still knew in England, and began ringing.

The first o answer was an old friend in Yorkshire I hadn't seen for five years. And before long, buring up even more precious dollars, we were on a KLM flight to Manchester.

Of course you're not supposed to travel on a plane after 28 weeks, so we nervously tried to conceal how heavily pregnant Suzy was. In the end no-one even noticed.

My friend Christine, good old social worker that she was, had found us a lovely tourist cottage in the Holme Valley above Holmfirth - the Bronte parsonage is 40 minutes away - and we sat inside watching the British elections on TV and waiting for the baby to come.

From being in crisis we were no in calm. It seemed as if the baby would never come.

Unfortunately we had to move from our idyllic cottage two and a half weeks later, it already being been booked previously, and we ended up in what could almost be described as a squat.

The house, owned by friiends of friends, had been abandoned for six months. There was no central heating and it was far from ideal, but finances being what they were we couldn't afford anything else.

We had been through a whole rigmarole with the local hospital, which was being transformed into a Trust Hospital, and wanted to charge us the equivalent of $500 a day up front to have a baby under the legacy of Thatcher.

Neither the Australian consulate in Manchester or the embassy in London could tell us whether we were covered under Medicare to have a baby in England. Indeed they could hardly have been less helpful. For this we pay taxes. For this we spend billions on our Foreign Affairs Department. For this we have staff stationed around the world.

Thankfully a left-wing doctor in our local village put us on to the famous midwifes of Yorkshire.

It was a freezingly bleak night, windy and puring rain outside, when Suzy said: "It's happening".

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

I poured coal on the fire and promptly put it out. I mislaid the coins for the phone box, having had them ready for weeks.

The first midwife came. She was thirtyish, very professional. A couple of hours later came Ivy, an older woman, children of her own, classic Yorkshire, you could barely understand her.

And the upshot was: they were fantastic. In the end, after all our worries, we got far better treatment than if we had stayed at home.

Henrietta was born at 1pm.

To be truthful, there wasn't the same sense of profundity as there was with the first. I wasn't staring out the window thinking of new life and the universe. I was thinking of all the practical problems, of the responsibility, that there were people dependent on me now.

While the follow-up service in Yorkshire was excellent, with a mid-wife coming every day for the first 10 days, there were other problems to come, such as getting Henrietta a passport. We must have cut a funny sight holding an 11-day-old baby up in the photographic booth of Manchester railway station. After a three-hour wait, the consul rejected the pictures anyway.

There were other problems, too numerous to mention. But finally we arrived back in Australia with a gorgeous month-old baby girl - who at the time of writing has just begun to smile.

Would we do it all again?

Not on your nelly. If you're thinking of doing it: don't.