Birth

I was born in Fant Hospital near Maidstone in 1966. The day after I arrived there was a fire, and everyone on my mum’s ward had to be evacuated; somewhere I still have the old newspaper clipping about it.

My mum was 40 when she became pregnant with me, at a time when that was considered unusually old and risky. Looking back now, I can understand her desire to seek to end the pregnancy, and how overwhelmed she must have felt.

She told me that when she went to the doctor, he said that if she was supposed to have me, she would. It all happened just a year before the UK law changed, when safe, legal options to end a pregnancy were extremely limited.

My beginnings were tangled up with fear, uncertainty, and chance, but also with survival: a difficult pregnancy, a hospital fire, and a baby who arrived for a reason.