I Remember, Daddy: The harrowing true story of a daughter haunted by memories too terrible to forget

I felt the small knot of panic that had been lying like a lump of lead in my stomach start to unravel, sending expanding threads of fear up through my chest until I could taste its sourness in my mouth. I pressed my face into the pillow and, for a moment, thought about giving in to the miserable weariness that was threatening to overwhelm me, and sleep. Instead, though, I turned to look at the doctor again, reached out to touch his white-coated sleeve and said, ‘Please try to save my baby.’

When I woke up from the anaesthetic, Tom was sitting beside the bed, his hand covering mine, and as I looked up into his eyes, I knew immediately that there had been a baby and that they hadn’t managed to save it. I felt an almost physical sense of sadness and loss, which seemed out of all proportion for something I’d never really known I’d had. And as Tom leaned forward to touch my cheek with his fingers, I burst into tears and cried as though my heart had broken.

Chapter Two

Tom worked in the despatch department of the company where I’d been working for the last few months. We’d fallen for each other almost as soon as we met, and within a few weeks I’d moved in to live with him at his mum and dad’s house. That was the way I did everything in those days; I was impetuous and made quick decisions, determined to live my life to the full and to throw all my energy into doing the things I wanted to do. It was always all or nothing with me then, and I knew I’d been really lucky to find Tom. He was a shy, lovely guy, with a large, loving family that soon became the family I’d never really had.

Tom and I had been together just less than three months when I collapsed that day at work. We hadn’t been using contraception, because I’d told him that I’d been raped when I was 18 and that, because of the damage that had been done to me, the doctor had said it was very unlikely I’d ever be able to have children. It was a sadness I thought I’d come to terms with, and Tom had seemed to accept it too. But, when I had the miscarriage and we lost the baby that day, I could tell he hadn’t been as resigned to the prospect of not having children as he’d pretended.

On the day when I was taken to hospital after fainting at work, the doctor told me, ‘You were about eight weeks’ pregnant. Unfortunately, though, it was ectopic – the baby was growing outside your uterus. I’m afraid it never really stood a chance.’

It was a shock to discover that I could conceive after all, although there was still the possibility that I’d never be able to carry a baby to full term. And I was surprised, too, by the profound sense of grief I felt when I was told that I’d lost the baby I’d only known about for a matter of minutes. My reaction seemed to border on the self-pitying, and feeling sorry for yourself wasn’t something that had been allowed by my father. No one likes a whinger, he’d told me more times than I could count. So, when things went wrong, I’d learned to pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again. Now, though, I felt as though I’d suffered a heart-breakingly important loss. And what also seemed particularly daunting and unnerving was the thought that I was going to have to reconsider all the assumptions I’d made about who I was and who I might be in the future.

Of more immediate and pressing concern, though, was the fact that I’d have to start using some sort of contraceptive. So, six weeks after I’d lost the baby that had been growing silently inside me, Tom drove me to the family-planning clinic.

I hated talking about sex at the best of times, and the knowledge that I was going to be asked personal questions by a total stranger made me feel quite sick. I didn’t want Tom to come into the clinic with me, and I think he was vastly relieved when I asked him to wait outside in the van.

The nurse asked me all the questions I’d expected – about my health and my sex life – and then one I hadn’t anticipated: ‘Is there any possibility you might be pregnant?’

‘Well, no,’ I told her, shrugging slightly and wondering if she’d been listening to any of my answers to her previous questions. ‘I told you, I’ve just lost a baby.’

She looked up at me, her pen paused above the folder on her desk and her head inclined at a slight angle, one eyebrow raised. Then she said slowly, ‘The time when you’re most likely to fall pregnant is when you’ve just lost a baby.’

‘No one told me that!’ I answered huffily.

‘How old are you?’ She looked down at the desk and shuffled her papers.

‘Twenty-three,’ I said, feeling suddenly unworldly and embarrassingly naïve.

‘Well, let’s do a quick pregnancy test, shall we?’ She cleared her throat and then looked up at me again with an encouraging smile.

‘But I’m only here to get the pill,’ I protested.

‘I know. That’s fine. But we just need to make sure, to be on the safe side.’ She stood up, collected together her papers and opened the door, and I followed her meekly into the corridor.

Half an hour later, I walked out of the clinic and into the car park, opened the door of Tom’s van and climbed into the passenger seat beside him.

‘Are you sitting down?’ I asked Tom, stupidly.

‘Well, of course I’m sitting down!’ He turned to look at me with a quizzical expression. ‘What is it, Katie? What’s going on?’

‘I’m pregnant,’ I told him, staring out through the windscreen, but seeing nothing.

‘What? You mean the baby’s still there?’ The distress in his voice made me turn to look at him at last, and I could see tears in his eyes as he reached for my hand and said, ‘But you lost the baby. I don’t understand.’

‘This is another baby,’ I told him. ‘I’m pregnant again.’

We sat together in silence for a moment, both of us trying to absorb information that our minds didn’t seem able to process.

‘That’s great,’ Tom said at last, wiping the back of his hand quickly across his cheeks. ‘It’s great news. My mum and dad will be thrilled.’

‘It isn’t great news!’ I almost shouted at him. ‘I can’t do this. I can’t be pregnant. I’m all messed up inside. What if I lose this one too? I won’t do this, Tom. I’m not prepared to take the risk.’

Tom was right about one thing, though: his parents were over the moon when they heard the news, and they were devastated when I told them I was going to have an abortion.

‘Please,’ his mother begged me. ‘I know it’s your life, Katie, and I understand that you haven’t got over your recent loss. But …’ She hesitated, then took a deep breath and said, ‘What if this is the only other chance to have a child you ever get? Don’t throw it away. Please. It would be our first grandchild. You can’t imagine how we’ve longed for this. We’ll help you. I promise.’

I already felt a tremendous sense of guilt towards the child that was never going to be born, and now I also felt guilty about disappointing Tom’s parents, who’d always been so kind and so good to me. But I knew I simply couldn’t face going through with the pregnancy. I was obsessed with the thought of being able to feel the baby growing and developing inside me and then my body rejecting it, killing it instead of nurturing and protecting it. And there was something else that was worrying me, too. I often had fleeting impressions of my own childhood that I could never capture for long enough to be able to make sense of them, and although I didn’t know what those unremembered images were, I knew that somehow they were linked to my fear of being responsible for a child of my own.

I went for the obligatory counselling session and then booked an appointment to have an abortion. But when I woke up on the appointed morning, I phoned the clinic and said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’m not coming. I can’t do it.’

When I told Tom’s parents that I’d cancelled my appointment, his dad mumbled something gruffly kind and patted my shoulder, and his mother enveloped me in a warm, breath-expelling hug and, with tears in her eyes, repeated her promise that they’d help us in any way they could. And although none of us could have known it at the time, it was a promise for which I was one day going to be immeasurably grateful.

I had a horrendous pregnancy, and at about four months I fainted again. Tom was with me this time and he rushed me into hospital, weaving through the traffic and sounding the horn of his van in a way I’d never seen him do before. Despite his efforts, though, I was bleeding by the time we reached the hospital, and the doctor told me I was going into early labour. It seemed that all my worst nightmares were coming true. I’d been so afraid of being pregnant and of becoming a parent that I’d almost had an abortion. But I’d changed my mind, because, in the end, my own fears hadn’t seemed to constitute an adequate reason for snuffing out a life that was only just beginning. And it was only then, when I’d made the decision to go ahead with the pregnancy, that I’d realised how desperately I wanted the child that was growing inside me. I knew Tom wanted it too, and that he’d tried to convince himself that he’d come to terms with the possibility of never having a son or daughter of his own simply because he loved me.

What made what was happening even more difficult to bear was the fact that I thought I was almost through the most dangerous period of my pregnancy, and I’d only just dared to allow myself to start believing that I might actually be going to carry my baby to full term. For the last few weeks, I’d felt sick most of the time, and although the constant nausea and occasional bouts of vomiting were really hard to live with every day, I’d comforted myself with the thought that perhaps they were good signs, because at least they probably meant that my hormones were doing what they ought to be doing.

In the hospital, they gave me drugs to try to prevent my going into labour prematurely. I knew that babies born at four months couldn’t survive, and it was clear that they didn’t really hold out much hope. But, by some miracle, the contractions gradually became less frequent and finally stopped, and the following day I was allowed to go home.

Everything seemed to settle down after that. The rest of my pregnancy was relatively uneventful and I went into labour two weeks after my due date.

The labour itself was horrible. Tom held my hand, wiped away the sweat that was streaming out of every pore in my body, and counted ‘In – two – three; out – two – three – four,’ as I tried to breathe away the pain and suppress the panic. But it soon became clear that no amount of controlled breathing was going to push the baby out of my body, and I was given a spinal block so that it could be literally dragged out of me with forceps. And, ironically, it was at that point that Tom forgot to follow the breathing technique he’d been counting out so carefully for me, and he fainted and had to be half-carried out of the room. Which meant that, sadly, he wasn’t there to see our child emerge into the world or to hear its first feeble cry.

Immediately the baby was born, it was whisked away to a corner of the delivery room, and I lay back, exhausted, on the bed, listening and waiting for the more vigorous wailing I knew would begin as soon its tiny lungs had filled with air.

The seconds and then the minutes ticked by, and still the only sounds I could hear were the hushed, urgent voices of the doctor and one of the nurses. Eventually, I lifted my head to try to see what they were doing, and – because, for some reason, no one had thought to tell me – asked, ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’

For a moment, no one answered. Then a nurse walked towards me, placed a tightly wrapped bundle on my chest and said, ‘It’s a boy,’ and I looked down for the first time into the huge blue eyes and wrinkled, blue-tinged face of my son.

The doctor came and stood beside the bed. ‘He’s having some problems breathing,’ he told me. ‘We need to get him into intensive care.’ He leaned towards me and reached out to lift the baby from my arms, and I just had time to touch the skin of my son’s cheek and whisper ‘Hello’ before he was rushed out of the room.

Because of the spinal anaesthetic I’d been given, I had to lie flat on my back for the next 24 hours, which meant that I couldn’t get out of bed to have a shower, and when my mother came in to see me, she took one look at my tangled, matted hair, said, ‘Look at the state of you!’ and burst into tears. It wasn’t the greeting I’d expected, but I think she’d been more worried about me and about the baby than I’d realised.

For the next few minutes, she concentrated on getting me tidied up and ‘presentable’, which was probably her way of dealing with the sudden rush of relief and emotion she was feeling.

As soon as I was able to get out of bed, I had a wash and waited for my son to be brought in to me so that I could feed him. When the nurse handed him to me, I felt nervous and excited. I pulled back the edge of the blanket the baby was wrapped in and looked down into a huge, moon-like face framed by a shock of bright red hair.

‘This isn’t my child!’ I told the nurse.

‘Of course he’s your child,’ she said. Her tone was briskly coaxing, as though she was speaking to a small child or a very stupid adult. Then she gave a quick, nervous laugh and patted my shoulder as she added, ‘Who else’s child would he be? Isn’t he just the spitting image of his father?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He may well look exactly like his father.’ I spoke slowly, trying to control the hysteria and panic that were rising up inside me. ‘But I’ve never seen his father, because this isn’t my child. My child doesn’t have red hair and he’s less than half the size of this baby.’

‘There, there.’ The nurse’s tone was so patronisingly patient that I had a strong, but mercifully fleeting, desire to throw the baby at her. She looked at me warily, patted my shoulder again and assured me, ‘He is your baby. There’s no question about that.’

Suddenly, all the pain, worry and exhaustion of the last few hours hit me with full force and I burst into tears. I didn’t have the strength to argue with her, but I knew that if I didn’t, I was going to go home with someone else’s baby – and, even more importantly, someone else was going to go home with mine.

At that moment, another nurse strode purposefully down the ward towards us, holding another, slightly smaller, white bundle in her arms.