D O W N   I N   T H E   V A L L E Y    (Part 1) 

      One summer afternoon I stood in a bathroom in Wales and learned that I was pregnant. My husband was downstairs at the time, trying to fix our kitchen sink, and he had forgotten what I was doing.  So when I screamed ‘It’s blue!’ his response was ‘What?’  It was not exactly the magic moment I had envisioned, but I was thrilled, nevertheless. So was my husband when he realized what ‘blue’ meant.

      Everything was new to us: Wales, our cottage, and pregnancy.  We had only been in the U.K. for a month, Wales for three weeks, and our ostensibly renovated miner’s cottage for two weeks. 

      It wasn’t an easy beginning for a lot of reasons. Our first night in the cottage, the hot water heater bit the dust after churning out a few indifferent gallons of warm water. The pipes were brand new, and coated with some kind of wax that ended up in the bath – and when I got in, all over me. My husband made desperate trips back and forth to the kitchen, up and down the rickety stairs with kettle after kettle of boiling water, to try and help me scrub the stuff off, but in the end we had to give up and wait for it to wear off.

      That first night with the waxy pipes and the dud water heater was just the beginning of the beginning. During our first week of residence, we found out that the gas fires we had been promised would be installed were not to be forthcoming and we must make do with large, ugly heaters that used propane gas cylinders which had to be replaced every week. The cylinders, which were amazingly heavy and thus hard to lug up our narrow, fragile staircase, were only available at a limited number of stores, and we had to drive miles to find them.

     We also learned that none of the doors in the house would close. In fact, they all stood wide open and you couldn’t even budge them more than an inch or two. The landlady said it was the contractor’s fault, so we called the contractor.  The contractor claimed that the joiner had cut the doors the wrong length; when we contacted him, the joiner blamed whoever had installed the door jambs and laid the flooring and carpets, the latter which in fact were not real carpets but the stuff you lay under real carpets, and virtually hoover-resistant.  But the person who had installed the not-really-carpet carpets said that if the doors wouldn’t close, too bad, but it wasn’t his problem, it was the landlady’s responsibility. The landlady said they were all a bunch of lousy workmen, and see if she hired any of them again. But nobody did anything about it. Having doors that would not close made using the toilet a tricky matter. Whoever wanted a little privacy was obliged to call out 'I’m in the toilet!’ and hope for the best. On the occasions when we had guests over, it added a real frisson to their visit, I am sure. No one could just sneak upstairs for a quick trip to the toilet – you were obliged to announce your intentions to every single person in the house – unless  you didn’t mind  the possibility of being surprised.

     The people who lived next door were an elderly couple, and endlessly kind and sympathetic. The only problem was, I could only understand about sixty percent of what they were saying. Both of them were disgusted with our landlady, whom they knew much better than we did. They were convinced that she had no intention of doing anything about our cottage’s many structural problems and out-and-out deficits, which seemed to multiply with every passing day. From the very beginning, Ron and Irene were on our side. So whenever they would see one of us huffing and puffing as we lugged a propane gas cylinder up the hill to our cottage, or out in the backyard trying to bundle up bag after bag of miscellaneous debris and three years’ worth of empty cans, bottles, and crisp packets that the landlady had given us her word would be dealt with before we moved in, they would shake their heads and begin to commiserate. Or at least that’s what I think they were doing, but the trouble was, I never really knew for sure. Ron was from London, with a Cockney accent you could have stuck a spoon in;. Irene was Welsh, from the Valleys, with a lovely, musical lilt. But both of them were often virtually incomprehensible, and whenever I saw them coming, my heart would sink a little. I knew that we were all three in for a struggle.

     It is not easy talking to people you know you ought to be able to understand but do not. I had worked with a lot of British people in Japan, where Peter and I met, and I had thought that I would be able to cope very well when we got to the U.K. But I hadn’t reckoned with people like Ron and Irene. At first I felt so  inadequate whenever I ran into them that I would just answer ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to whatever questions they were asking and pray that my answers were consistent with the truth. If Peter was with me, I felt greatly reassured. He was British, after all, and understood all kinds of odd things I could only guess at. Whenever we both ran into Ron and Irene, I always got the feeling that we all understood each other a lot better, as Peter would often repeat things they had said sotto voce so that I could understand them, and rephrase things I had said so that Ron and Irene were more clear about what I meant. (Doing the latter was not as important as doing the former was. Most of the time, they seemed to understand me just fine.)

     It was after one of these meetings that I discovered something worrying: even Peter didn’t really understand Ron and Irene. We had run into them on our way home from shopping. In no time at all, Peter, Ron and Irene were laughing themselves silly about something to do with a pub. Or so I thought. I tried desperately to catch the gist of it – I was sure it had to do with drinking – but then I became convinced that I had gotten this wrong, that they were not talking about drinking at all, but something entirely different. Their shared laughter grew all the merrier; the three of them laughed so hard they had to wipe the corners of their eyes and take great shivering breaths. I gave up trying to understand and bided my time until I could find out the joke from Peter. This meant that I had to stand there trying to look as though I got the joke.  I affected a look of fixed pleasantness and amusement, until the laughter finally died down. Then the usual pleasantries were exchanged, after which Ron asked us about the hole in our wall that had suddenly appeared one day after someone had shut a door with more energy than necessary. He wanted to know whether it had been repaired (it hadn’t, of course), and after we’d talked about that for a while, we all said goodnight, and went into our respective cottages.

    ‘So what did they say?’ I asked Peter eagerly. Peter looked at me blankly. ‘What did they say about what? The hole?’. ‘No, the joke!’ I cried. ‘The funny thing that you were all laughing about so hard.’ ‘Oh that,’ he said.  ‘Actually I haven’t a clue. I just knew it was funny  – but I really couldn’t understand myself. I think it was something about a pub they went to last night.’ That made me feel both a little better and a little worse. On one hand, I didn’t feel like such an idiot for not understanding them, but on the other, I knew I couldn’t really rely on Peter as an interpreter anymore.

     Then I got morning sickness. One day I was frying onions and boiling potatoes for dinner, and it suddenly hit me:  I don’t want to eat even one bite of this meal. At first, I did my best to ignore it, but the queasiness rapidly got worse until it was no longer queasiness but full-fledged nausea. Pretty soon it was not just things like onions and potatoes that bothered me, but absolutely everything.  The smell of freshly brewed coffee, of rice cooking or bread baking – it made no sense, but any smell at all was enough to send me on a mad dash to the toilet.  My long-suffering expatriate husband, who was delighted to be able to eat things like parsnips, basmati rice, and Brussels sprouts again after years away from Britain, was forced to cook them for himself only and consume them downstairs, as just the sight of him eating made me retch. Since we could not close the doors, the smell of whatever he was cooking in the kitchen would slowly but surely make its way to where I lay, deathly white and trembling, in my bed upstairs. Then I would stagger to my feet and slowly make my way to the bathroom, where I would remain for some time.

      For those lucky women who have not had it, the term ‘morning sickness,’ is a misnomer. I had it during all of my waking hours. Sometimes it would even rouse me from my dreams. Our little cottage was as cold as a tomb, and the cold seemed to make the nausea worse, but I imagine that if it had been very hot, the heat would have made me feel sick too. In fact, in retrospect I don’t think that anything would have made me feel any less sick. I was luckier than a lot of women who have had it in that my husband was happy to cook for himself. He even tried to cook for me, but this was not an easy chore. Morning sickness goes hand in hand with weird cravings – or at least it did in my case –  and I often had these too, but they were most undependable and changeable. One moment I would be certain that I wanted shrimp fried with coriander and sprinkled with lime juice and chopped peanuts, but if Peter actually managed to produce such a dish, I would suddenly know that in fact I did not want that or anything remotely like it, but peppermint ice cream instead.  This is an awful cliché, I know – the business of pregnant women wanting strange things at odd hours and then deciding they want something different – and until I myself had experienced this, I never believed it was a genuine phenomenon . But I still remember feeling that if I didn’t have peppermint ice cream, getting through the day was going to be an ordeal. And I can still remember how desperately unhappy I was when Peter managed to make me noodles with shrimp, but left out the coriander.

     One afternoon when I had been particularly ill and unable to keep anything down all day, my husband called the local clinic and they sent a midwife to see me.

     The midwife was from the Valleys and sounded very much like Irene. She was kindly and sensible, and although she was only a little slip of a woman she almost broke her leg on our stairs when her foot went through one of the rickety places and she sank ankle-deep in rotting timber. I couldn’t understand her very well either. She said she had had morning sickness too, ages ago, and she assured me that it would not last forever. That much I understood. But throughout her visit there were a number of things that puzzled me. Most of these did not seem to be really vital things, and I was able to ignore them and concentrate on the overall meaning of what she was saying, which for the most part was perfectly clear. But then she said something about checking for protein, and she asked me to spend a penny. I had no idea what that meant and she must have thought that I was very stupid. Until she spelled it out for me (‘I need you to do a wee into this cup for me, if you can, love’) I just lay there and stared at the paper receptacle she had handed me and wondered if I was expected to make a donation of some sort. My husband told me that she took the stairs very slowly on her way out, and cautioned him to make sure they were fixed by the time I was well enough to negotiate them again.

     As it turned out, the hole in the stairs would remain that way for some time to come. One morning I woke up so weak I could no longer walk to the toilet to throw up. Normally, I would attempt something for breakfast, and take it in very tiny bites. A soda cracker, for instance, might take me up to fifteen minutes to eat, and a small container of yogurt would occupy me for a good thirty minutes. The idea was to fool my stomach by introducing the food so slowly it wouldn’t really know it was being fed, and thus would not reject whatever it was straight off. But that morning, nothing stayed down. No sooner had I bitten off an edge of my morning cracker, than I knew for sure that it would be coming back up. My husband helped me to the toilet and stood with me while I gagged and retched and heaved, then he called the midwife. She sent me to the clinic, and the doctor there worked miracles to get me a bed in the local hospital. They fed me intravenously for four days, and by the time I was discharged, I was able to keep down crackers and yogurt for the next several weeks.

     This all sounds pretty bleak, but when I remember those first months in Wales, living in a cottage that was poorly heated, entirely without insulation and a dependable supply of hot water, and essentially falling down around our ears, the thing I remember most is how happy I was. Being pregnant was a real experience. Miserable though I was with constant nausea and vomiting, I was thrilled to be having a baby. I remember talking with another woman as we waited for our clinic appointments one morning. She too was very difficult to understand, and on top of that, she looked to be fresh out of high school. She had a spiky haircut and nose rings, and I’m sure I was old enough to be her mother. But we had something in common: she had the same feeling that I had, as she waited for her baby to be born. She too woke up every day feeling strangely excited, as though it was her birthday. That feeling sustained me through quite a lot.