This is the first of a two-session interview. It took place on February 5, 1997. The second was requested by the interview subject herself. This was only the seventh interview we had done. By the time we found a mutually agreeable time for the second, on May 28, we’d done thirty.

Mrs D had three children. There is some confusion at the beginning as we sort out who was born where, so I’ll summarize here: Her first baby was born at home, her twins were born in the hospital.

MARYANNE: Can you tell us how old you are?

MRS D: I am seventy-five.

MARYANNE: And you had your babies at home? (Surprised that she’s so young.)

MRS D: Not all of them, no. I have three children and two of them are twins so that means two births. But the first one was born at home. When we were first married it was just in the 1940s, just after the Dirty Thirties, and we had no money. We had nothing actually, we were in an old place, an old unfinished house. You could see through the ceiling. You could stick your fingers through the crack in the ceiling. No insulation anywhere, so at night there was ice everywhere, no matter what you left out. There was no place to put it, except the cellar which was not very good either. So when my first baby was coming, that was in ’42, we didn’t think we could afford to go to a hospital or go to a doctor. We were in Hanley which was, oh, how far from here? About thirty-five miles out in the country, maybe forty miles out of town, and we had no car, just horse and buggy. So we decided, I was feeling fine, I had no morning sickness, I had nothing, I was just okay, so I just went along my merry way till the end of time. (Not quite, perhaps, but we get what she meant!)

MARYANNE: So had you seen a doctor at all?

MRS D: No. Nothing. Just my own mum helped, told me to be careful, not to do this, do that. And, of course, my grandma used to be sort of a midwife in her community when she was in Poland and so she offered to come when my baby was due. I had her come the end of… No, the middle of February and she stayed on and on and on and on and on. And the baby didn’t come till the 22nd of March. “Oh,” she says, “What’s the matter with you?”

MARYANNE: Did you have an idea when the baby should be due?

MRS D: Well, yes, I thought the baby should be due in February. And she was a pretty big baby. We just had one of those hang-up scales and grandma weighed her on that and she was over nine pounds on that. It was quite a long birth. The pains started Saturday morning and I thought, “Oh well, I’ll just go on with my work.” I was baking bread so I kneaded bread, and I got the bread baked, and lunch came along and still nothing happening, just the odd pain. And then supper was through and still nothing happening. So it carried on till about, oh, early in the morning, about nine o’clock Sunday morning since the Saturday night. She was born on Sunday morning. And, I think if I’d had a doctor I probably would have had stitches because I couldn’t sit for a long time.

MARYANNE: So, through the night, when your labour got a little more intense, was your grandmother helping you at all?

MRS D: Oh, she’d tell me how to push and I kept pushing my head back and she said, “Don’t do that. You’ll get a thyroid.” (sic — I have no idea what grandma might have meant by this.) But by the time the baby came I was wishing I could have died.