Alive with an air of anticipation

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Dec 01, 2007 

Houses that are expecting babies have a whole different shape and texture.

When I was three-and-a-half and my sister was two and our mother was pregnant again, I don't remember understanding a thing of what was about to happen but I can still very sharply recall the ways in which our home felt different.

Strange new objects appeared in the bathroom. There was the translucent, scuffed baby bath, taken out of the cupboard again - a thing of fascination for my sister and me, mainly because we weren't allowed to get into it. And then all the magic of nappies. Was there a changing table or were nappies changed on the bed? And, anyway, wasn't my middle sister still wearing them? I don't know. But I remember the almost edible sweetness of Johnson's baby powder, which never really smelled of babies but entirely of mummies - my mummy, our mummy, who was about to be someone else's mummy too.

Could it be true? I didn't like to think about it too much. Instead, I remember twisting the baby powder cap to make the little holes appear and disappear - open and shut, open and shut - until I was told to stop.

The baby wasn't born yet but our house changed in other ways too. Downstairs it was almost Christmas and people in perfume-scented coats came and went, laughing and whispering and bringing presents for the baby. (What baby? Where?) We had a purple tinsel tree and shiny metallic baubles hung in the window and we wore our dressing gowns buttoned up to our chins after our bath and tried to be as quiet as possible - except it wasn't possible and we ran around giggling and shouting out silly words. "Sshhhh," everyone said to us, which just made us laugh louder.

And I don't remember Mummy's big tummy at all but I do know there was a special, cold and bright early morning when my sister and I were in our nighties bouncing on our beds - up and down, up and down, out of breath - and in came our father in his pyjamas, his shape suddenly huge in our doorway, telling us we had a new sister. Where, where?

That morning, after our baby sister was born, I know we crept into our parents' bedroom to see her. I remember doing it. I remember the long walk along the landing and that it was dark and warm in there and there was a lovely big clown toy that someone had brought - she couldn't possibly play with it, so could we have it? - and a Teasmade machine by our parents' bed with steam coming out of it. There was the grown-up smell of Typhoo tea and our lovely mum with her pink cheeks and long hair. I remember nothing at all about the baby but the room and its secretive, magical atmosphere is lodged for ever in my mind.

When I was expecting our first child, there were two houses. First, there was the little house where he was conceived, the early summer's evening when the air fizzed with this dangerously wild and wonderful idea. To make a baby! In the downstairs of that same house was the blond pine hall where I walked in after the pregnancy test and stood, exactly halfway between the uncarpeted stairs and the sofa, to tell my husband the result. But I couldn't get the words out fast enough before I fell into his arms. (Funny that I remember that embrace in so much greater detail than I remember the act of conception.)

And then there was the second house, the house we bought and moved into when I was barely four months pregnant, the house I never spent a second in without there being two of me, a double self, my child and me. I loved that house - the first house I'd ever owned - and I haunted it at night. I was its happy, restless ghost. All those nights I couldn't sleep for excitement and for the nameless, sexless child turning and stretching inside me, I'd get up and pull on something that would barely cover my shape and wander round and round those endless, lovely rooms, the house fitting itself more and more snugly around me.

Downstairs in the dark, cold kitchen I'd watch the kettle come to a slow boil for camomile tea. Upstairs I'd stand exhausted in the bathroom and paint my 10 shaky fingernails crimson. (I couldn't reach my toes.) And sometimes I'd take the 20 paces into the little room off the landing that we'd painted banana yellow and stand and stare awhile at the forlorn little folded piles of clothes, the white cellular blankets, the mysterious piles of muslin cloths that people had assured us we'd eventually need.

The house was waiting for the baby and so was I. It was empty and I was full to bursting. And so we were strangely comfortable companions in those long ago, dead-of-night hours, both of us waiting for that impossible-to-imagine moment when our boy's loud cries would fill those rooms and we'd both turn into something else - me into a mother and the house into our baby's first home.