42 Years since...

Alice on my mind. *Distressing content about babyloss*

In memory of Alice Hannah Wilson Jones. 30/06/84. #babylossawareness #stillbirth #alwaysremember

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Forty-two years since I climbed onto a bus with red-raw eyes, trying to hold off the sobs threatening to wrack my body in two.

The body that still cradled my baby daughter inside.

“Cheer up, it might never happen,” said the bus driver.

“It already has,” I said with a clenched jaw.

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Forty-two years since I ‘knew’ before the ultrasound the doctor had ordered when I attended the clinic the day before. He hadn’t been able to hear the heartbeat, but pretended he had to stop my panic, numbness creeping up my arms and pooling in a cold spot in my chest. I ‘knew’ the evening I watched Pamela Stephenson on television talking about breastfeeding her baby, Daisy. I had a sudden, deep knowledge. I was never going to be doing that.

I realized I hadn’t felt my baby move for a couple of days, but the people around me kept saying reassuring things like it’s common around the six-month mark as the baby adjusts to its more cramped space. It’s not. Get checked out immediately if this happens!

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Forty-two years since I went to my parentcraft class the next day, before the appointment the GP had made for me. Another mother expressed concern at her baby’s reduced movements, and everyone reassured her. I said my baby had stopped moving, too. Two women gave me a lift to the hospital. At the scan the radiographer said, “I’ll just be a moment,” and left the room. I tried to unfurl my clenched fists. She returned with a senior doctor who took up the probe and rolled it over my stomach.

“I’m sorry, Mrs Wilson. There’s no sign of life down there.”

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Forty-two years since a nurse took me into a small room containing a table and two chairs. Someone brought me a cup of tea. Sweet, they said, for the shock. I sipped it between sobs. Alone, twenty-one years old.

“Is there anyone I can ring for you?” I gave the nurse the telephone number of my communal house on the banks of the River Humber. She called it and handed me the phone. I spoke to my boyfriend.

“How are you getting home?” the nurse asked.

“On the bus.” Two buses, in fact, the first from the stop outside the hospital and the second a coach from a stand in the centre of town.

“Smile,” said the bus driver as I climbed the steps and handed over my bus fare. “It might never happen.”

“It already has.”

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Forty-two years since there was a welcoming committee at the end of the hour-long bus journey back to the house on the bank of an estuary. My boyfriend stood in the doorway as the bus juddered to a halt and I climbed down. Taking my hand, he led me through the living room into my bedroom that I’d recently decorated, two walls lilac and two yellow. Half a ‘me room’ and half a ‘baby room’, as I’d told my mum in a letter which she didn’t answer. My boyfriend sat on the edge of the bed with me while I talked and talked about our baby, how it would have been to be her parents. Not so long ago, he’d pushed the carrycot pram I’d saved to buy through the house when it was delivered: for the first time appearing to come around to the idea of becoming a father. “You’ll use it against me,” he’d said at the beginning of the pregnancy. The burgundy corduroy pram stood in the corner of the bedroom now, empty, as it would forever be.

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Forty-two years since I woke repeatedly in the night to the glow of the dim blue lamps on the walls of my room. Remembering afresh every time.

I had to go back to the GP the following day with the sealed brown envelope from the ultrasound department. One of my housemates helped me steam it open and read the contents. Medical jargon, but — the baby was dead.

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Forty-two years since my last walk along the clifftop as a pregnant mother, the sky tumbled with clouds and a raucous orchestra of seagull music to accompany the soft tread of our footsteps on a clay path: mine, my boyfriend’s and my sister’s. Only a week previously, my boyfriend’s parents had visited, acknowledging the existence of the baby for the first time. His mother brought me a hand-knitted shawl. “I would have liked a little girl,” she said a month later.

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Forty-two years since I laboured alone through the night, the last bus having carried my boyfriend home. A cleaner entered the room. “Is it your first baby?”

“Yes, but the baby’s dead,” I felt guilty for whatever feelings I’d caused her.

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Forty-two years since the thirtieth of June, nineteen-eighty-four, when Alice was born sleeping. Wrapped tightly in green hospital fabric – one miniature hand peeping out next to her face – and placed in my shaking arms for the merest of minutes before they took her away. The flash on the Polaroid camera they used to take a photograph of her – dwarfed by the transparent baby crib – didn’t work, causing the image to be dim and her features indistinguishable.

Years later, by then the mother of three boys and soon to give birth to my younger daughter, I contacted the hospital to ask if there was anything they could do to enhance the photo of my first baby. There wasn’t, but they sent me a bereavement kit and invited me to a service for parents of baby loss. I still haven’t attended one. I’ve still not explored the cemetery next to the former maternity hospital grounds to find the communal grave where her remains must have been placed, but I plan to, one day.

The Pink Cardigan. A painting I made in memory of Alice Hannah Wilson-Jones.

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Forty-two years later, while her younger siblings have become adults and are having children themselves, Alice Hannah will forever be ‘My Baby’

I went on to become a mother of four more children.

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AI overview from Google:

Hospitals began to systematically offer keepsakes like hand and footprints and give parents a choice in funerals in the mid-1980s. Before this shift, medical professionals often removed stillborn babies without consulting families, and mothers were discouraged from holding their babies or arranging funerals. [1, 2, 3, 4]

The cultural and medical approach to early stillbirths and baby loss has undergone a major shift over the decades: [1, 2]

• Before the 1980s: Babies were often buried in communal graves or with unrelated adults by the hospital. Parents were routinely denied the opportunity to see or hold their babies, and keepsakes were not provided. [1, 2, 3]

• The mid-1980s: Advocacy groups (such as Sands) successfully campaigned for parents to be consulted about funerals and allowed to spend time with their babies. This is when collecting handprints, footprints, and locks of hair became standard practice. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• 1992 (Legal Change): The legal definition of a stillbirth in the UK was changed from 28 weeks of gestation to 24 weeks. This meant babies born after 24 weeks received legal recognition and official registration. [1, 2]

• 2024 (Early Loss Recognition): In February 2024, the government in England launched official Baby Loss Certificates for parents who experience a loss before 24 weeks. This allows families to formally acknowledge their baby regardless of how early the pregnancy ended. [1]