Sunday 2 January 2011

Lost and Found While Breastfeeding

Catie Wilkins, comedian and writer, wrote a blog about leaving something on a train. Then, rushing away from the job hunting men, I left my hat behind. I don’t often forget to pick up my things (although I lose things in the house all the time) and I’ve been trying to remember times I’ve done it.

In the hot summer of 1990, a few weeks after Nina was born, we moved to Leeds. Considering how young and hopeless I was, I made a fair stab at parenting.  It was tough though, and perhaps sensing this, Nick’s mum G came all the way from Cornwall on the National Express Coach. She brought her apron and all of the finely honed housewifely skills that I expected to acquire on marriage, but which even now have failed to manifest themselves. Nick was happily surrounded with his three most loved women, two of them in unspoken competition to serve him his favourite food. He busied himself with his new job and left his wife and mum to make the best of the fortnight.

It has taken G a couple of days to clean the flat and tidy away the contents of the packing cases I had left in corners. She brought logic to cupboards, and a shine to every surface. After that, she would get up early ‘do around’ and sit reading romantic novels and cooing at her first grandchild. They were forming the bonds of love and mutual admiration that  leads them to write to each-other once a week now. We all liked to get out, and we had already seen the delights of Leeds, which, at this time before it became the cultural capital of the North, were limited to the markets and Kirkstall Abbey. That was how we decided to have a daytrip to York.

I don’t remember the day. I suspect it was hot, and like all the days of that summer made up of thirst, feeding, nappy changing, sudden all-consuming tiredness and strange pelvic sensations as my body post-childbirth body adjusted. We had taken the train, and I fed Nina on the way home, wedging her between the table and my breast, trying to be discrete as the non-feeding breast tingled and leaked and she guzzled noisily, attracting attention. The train was crowded and I had stuffed my bag to the side of me where it propped my elbow. It’s not a long way from York to Leeds, but still I fell asleep, baby attached. I don’t suppose G liked to disturb me. She approved of breastfeeding, but not so much of it in public where swapping sides is the most awkward. Perhaps she didn’t know how fast Leeds would come up. Who would want to kick a sleeping, breastfeeding woman? Even lightly with the toe of an elegant court shoe?

I was woken by the sound of the brakes of the train. We needed to get off quick, finding the pushchair and G’s shopping, squeezing between other passengers. It was after we had stood on the platform and I had tucked my breast back into my bra that I realised my bag was missing. The train had gone. Gwen was even tempered with me, but it was no small thing. The nappies and clothes could be done without, but my purse had all the cards and money Nick and I had. Worse than that, I had lost our only set of keys, including those to the communal entrance.

We queued at the enquiries desk, and were sent on to see the station master who had a small office in an oily back room up some stairs. I left G with the bags and the buggy, but carried grizzly Nina up with me. There’s been a lot of work done by companies about customer services since 1990, but this has mostly come to mean bland reassurance and attempts to sell things rather than the actual ability to fix problems. I had no such trouble back then. I was told by this man who was king of his station that I had been very silly and there was nothing he could do, the Penzance train was on the way to Wakefield. He then sighed in dismissal and went back to his papers. ‘But’, I said. ‘Nothing I can do’, he gruffed again. Nina started wailing and I stood telling him about the keys to the communal entrance door that would mean that we would have to replace the specialist lock that we couldn’t afford. Then I lifted my shirt and silenced the baby, starting to cry myself. ‘There’ll be no need for that’, said the station master ‘you sit here’. He went away, returning some minutes later with a cough and a cup of tea. The bag had been located and was en route from Wakefield arriving ….

In the end, I was reunited with my patient Mother-in-Law and my bag, purse intact. ‘Never mind’, she said, ‘at least it wasn’t the baby that got left behind’.

No comments: