The agony and the ecstasy - wasn’t that some
film title? Or book? - whatever, it just
about summed up this place on a Wednesday afternoon.
Baby clinic.
Barbaric really - all infants being stripped
off down both sides of on one long table and taking it in turns to be placed in
the scales, under the beady eye of Sister Weston - called herself Sister but
who knows what she really was, when she’d just sort of insinuated herself a few
months before the war ended, when everyone was too tired to care very much
about anything.
And when the very existence of babies was a
cause for suspicion, and counting back and trying to work out when hubby had
last been on leave. And there’d been
more than enough coffee-coloured babies for it not to be a shock any more. Cause for gossip, yes but shock - no.
Anyway, the agony, if your baby hadn’t put on
weight, the ecstasy if it had, never mind if it was looking a right ugly little
bruiser.
Every bloody fortnight.
The day wasn't supposed to go like this, let’s face it my
whole bloody life wasn’t supposed to
go like this but some things just seem out of your control. And it’s no good doing the ‘if only’ stuff
because you can apply that to almost every day of your life and believe that
things could’ve been different – and yes, they could – but the point was now, where you were now that mattered,
that was real. The you had to get on
and deal with.
So. Here we were
again at the bloody baby clinic. Here I
was sandwiched between two women, one of whose husbands claimed flat feet and
the other was a pen pusher in some government department so neither of them had
been anywhere near any fighting. Their
babies were of the bruiser variety too – well fed, because it certainly wasn’t
their genes. And me in the middle with
my skinny little cocoa-coloured Leon.
No ring on my finger and his father ... well, I told everyone he was
dead, but the truth is I only ever saw him in the dark (and he wasn’t that easy to see then!). And now, like the Sea of Galilee, every
woman in the place was moving away from me as Sister Weston bore down on me,
with the vicar’s wife in tow. Jesus.
Prompts from Thinking Ten
On Location (Monday)
a health clinic
Take It Away
(Tuesday) The day wasn't supposed......
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