The baby I have been writing about, my first child, was born safe and well on January 7th 1965 – Andrew Walter Tudway.

Early on the morning of the 5th I seemed to start in labour and was admitted to the maternity unit. There, I was prepared, known in those days as being given an OBE – Oil, Bath and Enema! At that point, the labour process promptly stopped and I was sent home again. This is apparently quite common, but I was devastated and cried all afternoon. So did Roger.

Two days later, on the 7th of January 1966, we did the whole thing again, OBE and all. Andrew Walter Tudway was born that afternoon after a long but normal labour, with a thatch of strawberry blond hair and big purple feet. Nothing else seemed to matter at all. Clean wiped. A new start.

I remember Aunty Joyce and my father creeping in to see me; later on, my brother John, then Bob and Winifred Tudway, my in-laws.

The very next morning, the nurse encouraged me to wrap the baby up warmly and take him to see my mother, which involved wheeling him outside for a short way through the hospital grounds. Mummy was lucid and took great pleasure in seeing us.

I also have a lovely memory of my elderly father sitting the baby on his knee and showing me how to burp him, his hands very gentle and his pride in this, his second grandchild, very evident.

I was kept in hospital for nearly two weeks; the normal practice for those times, now long discontinued. I had visitors but it was all curiously muted. Most of our young colleagues didn’t really know what to say – should they be happy for us with a new baby in the circumstances? Was my husband a nutcase? What could they say about my mother, who none of them knew as a person but knew to be dying on another ward? Much easier not to come, or to call in and out very quickly.

I didn’t understand this at the time. A baby trumps everything else and the hormones ensure that the mother’s attention is totally focused on the joy of having the baby at last. I was quite hurt and upset at the time. I had kind of expected lots of flowers and presents and there was hardly anything tangible. Still, I had Andrew and was in a happy bubble for a while, only marred by having difficulty breastfeeding and having to give bottle supplements.

Going home was another matter. I found the weeks after that very difficult. I hadn’t a clue about baby care, stayed glued to Dr Spock and found the hormonal variations totally impossible to cope with. New parents are also very, very tired all the time; living in a twilight state even worse than that of the average house officer. I tried to visit my mother, knowing her time might not be long, but almost unable to let it affect me. That time is all very blurred. I can’t even remember how long she stayed in the hospital, or whether she went back to the nursing home.

Her death was expected. We were phoned up at the flat and told in the early morning that she had gone. After a while, I slept fitfully again.

I dreamt that I was in my parent’s bedroom in Gardole, the house in Croydon and room in which I had been born, my childhood home. I could see the worn carpet with its plum and ochre pattern very clearly, and my father’s writing desk and battered typewriter. My mother came to me looking well, in her old blue dressing gown. She held me in her arms and we were the same height, so we rested our cheeks against each other. I remembered what it had been like when she held me as a little child, how warm and protective she had been, the safest place in the universe. I remembered how in her long illness she had been reduced; shrunken, fragile, fearful and shaking, and how I would hold her gingerly, overwhelmed with grief and panic myself; no use to her. Now she was healed and strong, I had no more fear or revulsion of her or of myself and we were equals.

My mother said to me, in that dream, “You know I can never come out of this room anymore, but I will always be in here. If you ever need me, you can come to me.”

When I woke I knew I had been given a very good dream, predicting a relationship of maturity within my true self, though not to be realised fully for many decades.

Indeed, we were to need all the comfort we could get. Two days before my mother’s funeral my father had a heart attack and died. My brother had been with him and taken him to hospital, but there had been no time for anything else. At our mother’s funeral, therefore, it was John’s sad task to announce our father’s sudden and unexpected death and the tentative date of the funeral.

For me, that day is a blur, as I held my six-week-old baby firmly cradled in my arms the whole time, letting it all wash over me, helped by Aunty Joyce, my mother’s younger sister. She came early to the flat to take me to the church. I had no suitable dark mourning clothes, all mine were brightly coloured. Anyway, I remember crying afresh at the very idea of surrounding my lovely, magical little boy with anything dark and threatening, I wanted to wear my everyday bright yellow duster coat. My wonderful aunt said simply, “You and John are the chief mourners. It is up to you what you wear, for there’s no-one else who can be offended.”

Years later, when I talked to older relatives who remembered the funeral they told me that the sight of the child held within a circle of bright yellow, shining in the front row of the dark, gloomy church, was the most moving thing about the day, and of their memories of my mother’s funeral. Dorothy Mary Kapp, nee Wilkins, Rest in Peace.