ABSTRACT

But who decided to have the baby anyway? If I asked any couple that question directly, he or she or both in unison would almost certainly say It was mutual. We just decided together that the time was ripe.’ What, I wonder, does mutual’ mean, and what precisely makes the time ripe’? If I then approach the question indirectly, a different vista opens up. Some had stumbled unawares into childbirth. They didn’t quite know how they had made love, or when she had conceived. It could have been chance, might have been carelessness – after a picnic by the river, waking at dawn as the sun slit through the bedroom curtains, groping their way into bed after the late night horror movie on television. They were the accidentals. And they were usually younger mothers (though not always – serendipity is not altogether banished by maturity): stardust blown from the hand of God’, as the Lord Mayor of London said of an early royal pregnancy.