Home birth in London, 2011

I got a letter from King's Hospital the other day asking if I would mind sharing my birth story with them. It's something I've been meaning to write down for Eliza anyway and so I was quite grateful for the prompt. A birth story is a strange thing: go looking on the web and you will find scores and scores of women have taken the time to write down fairly hefty blow-by-blow accounts of how they brought their babies into the world. For me it is a subject of endless fascination. In fact, the first birth story I read was when I was about ten, written by the mother of one of my best friends, describing in gratifyingly strong detail the actual marvellous truth of how she, my friend, had been born. I think that planted the seed of my interest. Any children I had, I knew that writing it down would be part of the birth. I wanted to hold on to their birth story - and pass it down to them.

Now it is 2011. My friend's birth was in 1982 and when her mother, a brilliant thinker and doer, wrote it she was following the example of those fearless feminists of the seventies: nothing hidden by prudery or ashamed of being out and proud and womanly. I wonder when women first started writing down these birth stories of theirs, because although I think of it as a modern phenomenon, a refusal to be abashed by something so primal, any woman with a birth story to tell and the power of writing must have been tempted, if she could only find the time and privacy to write. It is still difficult, though, because what we are dealing with is the body, the very last thing to sit comfortably in words. I reckon that when people told stories and hadn't the choice of writing them down there was probably also this love of the birth story. I imagine it fell to the most garrulous and earthy of women to relate these tales. Perhaps they were also the midwives. 'Midwife to the tale', now where did I hear that phrase?