14th February

February 14th is not Valentine’s Day for us. It is Tom and Alice’s birthday.

Have I told you the story of how I came to have boy/girl twins on the 14th February 1993? It’s a good one. I generally avoid personal stuff here, but as this has now entered Brocket lore, it’s got a life of its own.

Just before Easter when I was ten, I became very ill. It got worse and worse, but I was still sent to school. I knew it wasn’t good when on the Friday I looked in a mirror in the school toilets and saw that I’d turned a strange shade of green. By the Sunday, I had to ask my Mum to get a doctor. (You have to understand that she was a widow with four children, no family nearby to help, a teacher herself, and somewhat in denial about illness.) She was reluctant, saying, “You know, Jane, there could be someone dying”, someone who needed a doctor on a Sunday more than me. It turned out I was that someone. The doctor arrived, called an ambulance, there as great excitement in the road on a boring Sunday afternoon in Stockport with children crowding round as I was wheeled in and taken off to an isolation hospital in Manchester. It was thought I had gastroenteritis, so I was put in a room on my own, and only masked and gowned nurses and doctors were allowed in. It was strange and frightening; goodness knows how awful it was for people with Covid in the early parts of the pandemic.

Then appendicitis was diagnosed. But in fact it had already passed that stage, and I had peritonitis. So I was moved to a children’s ward in another Manchester hospital, and put on antibiotics, but it was too dangerous to operate. That had to be done in the summer holidays (lovely) to avoid absence from school in the 11+ year. But I did have a wonderful few days in a convalescent home afterwards - the youngest patient by about forty years, and was given a huge bunch of home-grown gladioli by an old uncle. To this day, I am very keen on the idea of a half-way stage between hospital and home, and I still love gladioli in August.

I came home with my very manky appendix in a jar (I also kept all my teeth in a jewellery box), but with absolutely no idea that this sort of illness could cause infertility. Even though it was known that appendicitis and peritonitis in girls and young women could/can cause huge problems, no-one ever thought to say something to me or my Mum.

So I went through my teens and twenties in total ignorance, all the while knowing I wanted children. It wasn’t just a vague, oh yes I’d like to have children, it was a full-on, instinctive, no-doubt-at-all, physical want. I met Simon, we got married, we started trying. Nothing. Twelve months later, nothing. After charts, thermometers, and all the other useless stuff (I didn’t know why, but I knew it was useless) I went to see a gynaecologist who took one look at my records, asked if I was worried about the peritonitis. I said no, and he said, well I am. There was surgery - a laparoscopy followed by a laparotomy to try to free my mangled, adhesion-filled, glued-up pelvis where various parts which shouldn’t have been stuck to each other, and where one fallopian tube was totally blocked, never to reopen, and the other was open but kinked. He gave me a 5% chance of conceiving naturally.

I’m not great at statistics, but I did the calculations and worked out that there was a great likelihood of it never happening before I got too old. The only option was accepting childlessness or trying IVF. My lovely gynaecologist - he really was brilliantly empathetic and never lost his delight in every single successful IVF birth he oversaw - said I was a good candidate for IVF, so IVF it had to be.

Now this was early days of IVF, but still in the hands of major hospital clinics, not private places which make often false promises of the world and babies. Also, you could still have a maximum of three embryos put back. But that was a long way off. I was so terrified of it failing that we couldn’t make the decision to go ahead, so instead signed up to the waiting list at the John Radcliffe in Oxford. After a year, we were invited to an introductory session in a lecture-hall full of couples seeking IVF. That was sobering but also very reassuring. A while later, our names eventually reached the top of the list, and so it all began.

There were early morning 100-mile round-trips to Oxford on the M40 with Take Me by Everything But The Girl (“Baby, baby, baby”) on cassette, tests, more tests, drugs, more drugs, Simon learning to inject my buttocks by practicing on an egg-box, the egg-retrieval which I will not dwell on (I was awake, choose not to remember the details apart from the excellent Frank Sinatra music I’d picked to go with it), then the terrible wait to find out if any had fertilised. And the incredible moment the clinic phoned to say six, SIX, had fertilised, and I had this mad moment of pride that we’d created life in a petri dish. During the run-up to this point, I’d said I only wanted a maximum of two embryos put back - I had brother and sister twins and two of Simon’s brothers were twins, so two seemed like a good number - but when I was told that three would increase my chances of a single live birth, I changed my mind. Three it was.

The initial excitement was followed an agonising period of not knowing what was going on inside me, and taking anything and everything as a bad sign, until we went back for the four-week scan. The terror of finding nothing turned to elation as a tiny heartbeat was detected. Tears all round. Then a second heartbeat. More tears and laughter and delight. “I’ll just have another look round”, and there was a third, even tinier heartbeat. This time the room erupted, and the whole clinic heard. “But don’t fall in love with the little one just yet, it might not be there when you come back in a fortnight”. I admit that for two those weeks when I was expecting triplets, I felt overwhelmed, like I’d been invaded by bodysnatchers. So when, at six weeks, there were just the two, Tom and Alice, I knew me and my body would cope much better.

The pregnancy was never for one moment anxiety-free. It had taken several years to achieve it, and who knew how it would progress. It wasn’t easy; I was terribly, horribly sick all the way through (I emerged two stone lighter) and, to complicate things, we’d moved to Kronberg-im-Taunus with Simon’s job at the twelve-week point (the move had been planned before the treatment). I couldn’t work, so I read Elizabeth Gaskell novels in the mornings, had little walks round the pretty town, knitted in the afternoons, and monitored my bump, fascinated by the many feet, hands, elbows, knees all jostling for position when I played music or had a bath.

Tom and Alice were due on 9.3.93, a date I liked the look of. But in the small hours of Sunday February 14th, my waters broke, and I went into shock. This sounds daft, but it really was a surprise and I didn’t feel ready to see the babies. Cue another ambulance to Frankfurt Höchst, fantastic doctors and nurses, an epidural, a gynaecologist in dazzlingly white scrubs to set off his deep sun tan (it did cross my mind to ask where he got it in February, but I got distracted), and the two most beautiful, gorgeous, healthy babies. One fair, one dark, one larger, one smaller, one boy and one girl (no surprise, we’d known early on). Thomas and Alice.

And the tulips? Well, I’d always loved tulips, and Simon had bought me the most enormous bouquet for Valentine’s Day. As I was bundled into the ambulance, I pleaded with Simon to bring the tulips with him the car. Sensibly, he ignored me. But now, every single birthday/Valentine’s Day, he buys me tulips to make up for the ones we left behind.

The story doesn’t end there, though. Around the time of Tom and Alice’s second birthday, we went to Burgundy for a week (I was working in the wine trade). We’d done quite a bit of wine-tasting while my Mum and sister looked after Tom and Alice. I woke up on the last day wondering how I felt so rough with what felt like a stonking hangover, because I’d spat out all through the tastings and hardly drunk a thing. Then Simon asked if I wanted a cup of tea, and I had a wave of nausea, and the odd thought that the only time I’d ever not been able to drink tea was when I was pregnant.

It just couldn’t be possible. Or could it? The weeks in my diary didn’t add up, but still I thought I was imagining things, until the constant nausea convinced me to get my English-German dictionary, look up Schwangerschaftstest, and buy one. The blue line appeared and there was one of those classic phone calls to Simon at work prefaced by “are you sitting down?”. He then had to get a flight to Moscow on which I think he drank the plane dry of celebratory cognac.

I had another sicky pregnancy, and this time we moved to Brussels half-way through. Even though this was a natural conception, the doctors at the John Radcliffe were again incredibly supportive, and I went back and found out for sure that it would be a Phoebe. It felt easier in some ways, harder in others - looking after toddler twins while throwing up all over the place, in bins and at markets, wasn’t great, plus Simon was away 100 nights a year with work. Belgium, though, is another marvellous place to have a baby, and if there were an obstetrics version of TripAdvisor, having a baby in Leuven would rate five stars, would highly recommend. The midwife breezed in asking, “which language are we doing this in?”, swiftly followed by, “when would you like your epidural?”, to which the obvious answer was, “now, please”. Phoebe, our third miracle baby, was born, full-term and healthy, at the end of October, and our family was complete.

There we are. The story of how we came to have three amazing, wonderful children, how the words “baby, baby, baby” which I sang over and over again in the car became a reality, and why I have these beautiful tulips.

Happy Sunday!