Facts about the Cuckoo

Facts about the Cuckoo

By all reasonable bets, the baby should have put in an appearance on Sunday 16th June. The girl was already overdue by nearly a week and while knitting a pair of green and white bootees, she set her kitchen alight. It wasn’t exactly her fault (so she told herself afterwards), although it was her job to cook Sunday dinner. Her father had bought them an electric cooker, but it was from bankrupt stock, part of a dumped load of American ovens used previously by the U.S. army in wartime (surely not the second world war? the oven looked like a 50s design. Korea? Maybe, but how did it end up in Swansea?) Anyway, her dad had bought it for £2 and it looked good: clean, with a lot of impressive knobs and a grill, but with only three oven settings, high, low and in between; worse still, it lacked a thermostat. That meant that on the occasions when they could afford to buy a couple of lamb chops or some sausages, she needed to be in the kitchen watching the food cook, and turning the oven off and on, off and on, in order to stop it getting too hot. On that sunny summer’s day, she neglected to stay put. Instead, with an aching back and the need to put her feet up, she sat too long in her living room, concentrating on making her baby’s tiny boots. She hadn’t had a lot of knitting experience but was determined to get it right. Just because she was a pregnant teenager didn’t mean she was a hopeless case and she wanted to prove that. But when she went to check on the lamb chops and saw the smoke, she felt as useless as you could ever feel – and frightened too.

Her husband was in the bedroom revising. He was right in the middle of his final zoology exams and had said he didn’t want to be disturbed until the meal was ready. She had crept around during the morning and had once or twice pressed her ear against the bedroom door, to catch him reciting his zoological facts out loud.

The common cuckoo - Cuculus canorus - is a member of the cuckoo order of birds, Cuculiformes. Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Chordata, Class: Aves, Order: Cuculiformes, Family: Cuculidae, Genus: Cuculus, Species: C. Canorus.

She thought it was funny that he needed to know all this in order to have an understanding of the cuckoo. To her, the cuckoo was just a small summer visitor, known for its familiar call, and for the fact that it laid its eggs in other birds’ nests. At this moment, she thought how if she were a cuckoo, she wouldn’t want to do that.

Their rented flat was a typical Victorian terrace and they had the upstairs part, sharing the front door and hallway with the couple downstairs. Their neighbours were an odd pair, a middle-aged Welsh brother and sister, somewhat reclusive and very quiet so that if you happened to go in or out when they were about, they would dart back in again. They never spoke at all after the first hello on moving day. If the front door bell rang, it always had to be the upstairs inhabitants that answered: downstairs never would.

So, when the pregnant girl opened the living room door and saw thick smoke billowing up the hallway from the kitchen at the back, her first move was to call anxiously to her husband, and then to worry about the downstairs neighbours. The husband, though he swore loud and long when he realised the situation, acted quickly, turning off the electricity supply, and telling his wife to ring for the fire brigade. This was 1968, long before mobile phones, and they didn’t have a phone line at home either. The girl had been going to ante-natal classes and had it drummed into her that she must have a sixpence ready for the phone box when her pregnancy drew to a close, as she would need to ring the maternity ward. Of course, in an emergency, you could ring 999 for free, but in this moment of panic, she didn’t remember that and went scuttling around looking for her stash of sixpences.

By this time, her husband had opened the oven door and thrown water over the flames – not actually what you are supposed to do, as it turned out, because it just created a flash and a bang and more smoke - but it did in fact put out the fire, so in reality, the danger was over. But the girl was unaware of this, as she hurried down the road to the phone box on the corner, as fast as her advanced state of pregnancy would allow, puffing and panting and wobbling all the way. When she had made the call, and was back home, she started banging on the downstairs door to alert the neighbours. No reply, nothing. They were definitely in: they rarely went out and she could see movement under the door, but they weren’t budging. She shouted ‘there’s a fire, you need to get out’, but they stayed put. If they ever knew anything about the events taking place above them, they never said and the young couple never found out.

Upstairs, things were more or less under control by the time the fire engine arrived, but the firemen took one look at the girl’s pregnant belly and ordered her to lie down and rest, so her shaken-up husband had to deal with the firemen while they checked everything over. Incredibly, other than smoke damage to the kitchen, a mess to clean up and the ruination of the lamb chops, there was no real harm. Still, the girl felt sure she would go into labour that night.

But she didn’t. The baby stayed resolutely put. Over the next few days while the husband took his exams, the girl looked for signs of labour and waited. Given her age, she didn’t know many people who’d already had a baby. She’d read all the right books, had prepared well and tried not to let the old wives’ horror stories about labour affect her. She had two friends who had recently given birth. One, a friend from school called Julie, had had twin girls a couple of months previously and had written to say it was like ‘having the biggest shit ever’, which was probably fairly accurate given that her babies were only 3lbs each. Another friend lived just around the corner and had had a girl, Eiry, six weeks previously. Avis seemed to be coping OK, at least she was still wearing her trademark thick black eye make-up (‘I have to, my eyes are like piss-holes in the snow’) and she had told the girl how impressed her midwife had been to smell furniture polish when she came to check on mother and baby. This only made the girl more anxious – it seemed like a lot to live up to. Perhaps the cuckoo knew what it was doing after all.

On 19th June, the husband went to his penultimate exam. The girl pottered around and wrote a letter to her friend with twins and went out to post it. Later, her sister popped in to see how she was getting on, but only stayed long enough to admire the finished green bootees and deliver a Cadbury’s cream egg. Around lunch-time, the pregnant girl began to feel a bit queasy and soon after, she realised she was certainly in labour. This was a dilemma: her husband had his final exam that afternoon. Could she hang on until he returned around 5 or 6? No, as it turned out. Things began to speed up, so she wrote a note to say ‘In labour, gone to Avis’s’ and pinned it to the flat door. Her friend’s flat was only a couple of streets away but still, it took a while to get there between labour pains, one of which took excruciating hold as she walked over the zebra crossing.

At her friend’s house, it was soothing to be with someone else, and she managed to stay calm until her husband came rushing in around 6, whereupon they called the hospital. By then though, labour was so advanced that an ambulance had to be fetched and they drove with sirens ringing out and blue lights flashing, all the way out of Swansea (the place Dylan Thomas had described as ‘an ugly, lovely town’) towards the Gower Peninsula and to the cottage hospital at Fairwood Common, on the edge of the woods.

Things took the expected course; she laboured hard, but dutifully did her breathing exercises, and had some pain relief when it was needed. And she experienced all the indescribable emotions that come together at the end of nine months. At 10.50 in the evening, she delivered her first child, a baby girl with huge eyes, olive skin and a soft covering of downy black hair: Rachel Sian. The girl and husband laughed and cried, and by midnight the husband had left to phone the girl’s father and his own parents and was later able to report a rambunctious, exuberant night wetting the baby’s head and celebrating the end of final exams.

The girl found that she was wide awake after the birth, filled with energy and with wonder at the incomprehensible fact of producing a real baby, a living thing from her own young and unremarkable body. The hospital was peaceful and very small – just two interconnecting wards of six beds each – and mothers were allowed to keep their babies with them at night if they chose. So, all that first night, the girl lay with her baby alongside her in a little crib and all night the girl kept gently touching the sleeping child, holding her tiny fingers and toes within her own hand. The girl felt a most overwhelming love for this beautiful creature, a sensation she could not imagine ever feeling for any other living thing. She didn’t know then the nature of love: that it is elastic, without boundaries; at that moment, it was all-encompassing and completely focused.

As the night shed its dark and turned into a mid-summer’s day, she heard the familiar up and down song of the cuckoo, a sound rarely heard except in the early morning, and in places quiet enough for the song to carry. She thought it curious that although the bird spends nine months of the year in Africa, it never sings when it’s there, but it was singing here and now, for her and her baby. And she wondered if her baby would grow to fly away to warmer places in time. For now though, it was enough that the cuckoo sang out its greeting to the child who had made the girl into a mother.