It had all been perfectly planned. She would leave for England six weeks before the baby was due. But tribal wars to the south and flooding to the north changed their plans and the coastal steamer she was to take to Port Said had engine trouble and had to go into port at some small harbor town without so much as a clinic or a consulate.
And in this difficult place she had gone into labor. It should all have happened at the London clinic where her daughter Opal had been born three years before. The quiet competence, the skilled midwife. The blessing of twilight sleep to give her some respite from the sixteen hour labor. She had not cried out when the pain was intense. One did not cry out in pain. She knew this as all women knew. It upset the children if you gave birth at home. It upset everyone. Then three weeks recuperating in bed with the baby mercifully spirited away to the nursery at night and most of the day so that by the time she went home little Opal slept from ten until six and was nearly attuned to the four hour feeding schedule laid down by Nurse Dilys who was really quite firm about it. ``You must think of yourself,'' she had said. ``Baby must stay on schedule. You must get your rest. If you are not well and strong baby won't thrive.''
They took her to a house where only women went. No boiling water, no sterile linen. Not even a comfortable bed. No white capped Nurse Dilys giving crisp commands and keeping things in order. Just two women, one young, one old, who seemed to find her very funny. They laughed with great white teeth exposed and their skin was latticed with blue dye. One was wrapped in faded red, one in apple green. As the pains increased she fought back her panic. Surely she could not endure sixteen hours of labor on a hard straw mat with no reassuring words, no twilight sleep. Surely she would die.
She felt as though her body was bent on self destruction. The pains were huge and intense and the two women looked at her and nodded their heads and said something and she gritted her teeth because she would not cry out her pain because she knew these hard strong women would scorn her as a weakling but still they looked at her still they nodded and said one word over and over which she did not understand.
At last she could no longer control herself and a shriek tore out of her that she thought would raise the dead and the two women nodded their heads and shouted something and out on the verandah other woman started their ululating cry and with each scream she felt the birth progressing and somehow her pain was made more bearable by the strength of her cries and those of the other women.
Little Harold entered the world without complication. The women tied threads of red and gold around his wrists and ankles and they gave her mysterious teas to drink. She was supposed to stay in the womens' house until she had been purified, or so the captain of the steamship had said, but she left them in six days when the ship was repaired.
The captain was a Dutchman, and at the table with the other few passengers she became the toast of the voyage.
``You screamed `like a sixteen year old' the old woman told me. And she says that was a good thing.'' The captain laughed.
``Yes,'' she answered, ``I screamed like a sixteen year old. Yes. it was a very good thing.''