Tuesday September 13, 2005

This is my daughter Henrietta, now 13. It's hard to believe she's suddenly become a teenager. She talked me into taking her to Sydney's famous Luna Park last Saturday when her brother was off at the movies with friends. Like a lot of parents, I find myself a bit taken aback to suddenly be the parent of teenagers; who are of course an entirely different species to children or adults. It was a fun day, except for some of the rides which I just find terrifying. But gone are the days when the kids thought I was God. They're more likely to think it's a serious lapse of taste if the radio drifts of Sydney's coolest station, Nova 96.9. I've been cleaning up and reorganising the house, and found the following story, which I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald, about her birth. It was called Roam Birth and was accompanied by a picture of her peering over the top of a blow up plastic globe. People who read it at the time just went, oh my God.

Here's the story, originally published July 1, 1992:

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.