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HAVING A WARTIME BABY

Winifred Barber

If you had a baby during the war, and you lived in a vulnerable place where there was bombing, you had the option of going into the country to have it I could have gone to Evesham to have mine, but I was living at home with my parents, and my husband was there.

My neighbour was expecting a baby at the same time as me and she had already got 3 children and she said she thought she would go away to Evesham to have her baby. It was due about a week before mine and we had been going to the clinic together. The Doctor lived in Selly Oak and the Clinic was in Selly Oak, they were very good, but we had to walk and about a week before the baby was due my friend went off to Evesham.

I had arranged to have the midwife and the Doctor at home, and the midwives were very very good. They did everything, it was marvellous and the day the baby was due they kept coming in and examining me and they informed the Doctor. I had my baby about twenty minutes to twelve at night, she was born during a very heavy thunderstorm. Once you had the baby you had to stay in bed for a fortnight. You were not allowed to get out of bed and you weren’t allowed to even put your feet on the floor, you even had to have a bed pan. The nurse came in three or four times a day to tend to you, and I of course had my Mother there as well to get my meals. It was quite a shock the day I had to get up. My legs didn’t feel like mine at all. We now know it was really not a good idea to lie in bed for that length of time.
My neighbour had her baby in Evesham and in due course came home.

We had to feed the babies for nine months. They didn’t have any solid food at all until then. Another neighbour was expecting a baby and they discovered she was expecting twins and she was having them at home. Most women, so long as they had someone at home to help, had their babies at home. She was going to have these twins at home. News came that she had had them but that one of the twins had died at birth. The other twin was very fragile and the doctor sent the baby to the hospital because the Mother had lost all her milk. They tried to find a food that suited it but they couldn’t find one, they tried all sorts of baby milk and cows milk but sill couldn’t find one to suit. This baby didn’t improve at all.

My neighbour came to me one day and said that the nursing sister at the hospital said did I know anyone who was weaning a baby and would be willing to give her milk, so she came to ask if I would be willing. I did, but of course because my baby was eight months old by now, the milk was too rich for a newborn and had to be watered down. I fed this baby for about four months, so I think I did my war effort. I didn’t mind and was only too pleased to have helped.

They brought this baby home after about four months and it was a beautiful baby and after the war when we both left the area I didn’t see her again for a few years. When we did meet up again she said she often thought about me and how I had helped to save her baby, and she said he had grown into a strapping lad, and had done very well at school.

She said the only sad thing was that he was a ‘disbeliever’ and didn’t believe in God, even though he had been brought up in a Christian home and his Father was an organist. The family used to go to church three times on a Sunday. When the boy was about fourteen years old he decided he wasn’t going to go anymore and he became an atheist. She said that for 12 months they had tried to persuade him, and every Sunday there was a row that went on all day because he didn’t want to go. In the end they decided to let him go his own way. They felt they had done what they could for him, but she said he was a good lad.

I was terribly upset about that, because I felt that God had done so much to help that little boy and I did wish she hadn’t told me, but that was something else that happened during the war.

For anybody who had a new baby there were no prams about. I was lucky I had mine and my neighbour also had hers, but there were no prams about. We tried to get a push chair but there were no push chairs about either, unless you were lucky to be able to buy one second hand. It was a difficult to push one baby in the pram and my husband put a plank across the pram so that I could sit my other child on that. For people who had got several children it was very difficult. My neighbour’s husband was at the war and she was at home with four children and didn’t have any help. It wasn’t like today; we had to get on with it.

My second baby was born in 1943 and when she was almost 12 months old, we used to bath the children in the mornings and get them into their prams and we would wheel the pram next to the hedge and my neighbour used to do the same. My neighbour and I used to stand by the babies for a chat, and one particular morning in early September we suddenly heard a humming noise which we thought was wasps.

The noise still went on and we couldn’t think what it could be. We began looking up into the sky and suddenly we saw hundreds of planes really high in the sky and you could just detect the transport planes carrying we thought, many soldiers to their destiny. We got really upset, because we didn’t know how many would return. We listened for days to hear if there was anything about all these planes and then the news broke that the airborne army had landed in Holland. It was Arnhem and it had been a disaster, and when I saw my neighbour we just looked at each other and shook our heads. It was terrible, all those lives that were lost. That morning was the worst of the war for me knowing that so many of the soldiers going over in those planes were now dead. It was so sad, and difficult to imagine that such terrible things could happen.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by June Woodhouse (volunteer) of the CSV Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Hereford and Worcester on behalf of Winifred Barber (author) and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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