Mine were the same. They’d bring up the way I was born at the drop of a hat. Especially when I was cross. And they’d always say the same thing: ‘Well, that’s what happens when you’re born in a storm.’
This, of course, would only make things worse. I mean, it’s very difficult to discuss the injustice of the recycling rota when your parents just keep bringing up the weather.
From eleven years ago.
It didn’t end there either. Once they started, there was no stopping them. My birth story was so well rehearsed in our house it was like a duet. My parents had their lines and they knew them well.
That’s how Dad would start. ‘Salty from the get-go, you were.’ (Frances Frida Ripley is me by the way. Hi. Except I’d rather you didn’t call me Frances, if that’s okay. Frankie’s fine.)
Then Mum would interrupt. ‘Well, love, that’s not completely true. Frankie was a very peaceful baby girl. A little wet, a bit cold, perhaps, but so calm. So still. You looked as if you didn’t have a care in the world.’
That would have been the hypothermia kicking in, Mum.
‘Yeah, you were peaceful, for all of a second,’ Dad would add. ‘Right up until the moment you took your first breath.’ Tiny smiles would fly between them, like birds swooping home. ‘That was when you started raging. And you haven’t really stopped since.’ Then, at a look from Mum, he’d mutter, ‘But we wouldn’t have you any other way, of course’ and lope off towards his painting shed.
But here’s my take on it: what did they expect? Of course I lost my temper when I was born. I mean, they were the ones who decided to have a baby on a freezing beach! On top of some pebbles! In the middle of winter! In a storm! No wonder I got a bit eggy. Any sensible baby would.
ANYWAY, IT WASN’T my fault. It was their idea to head down to the beach that day, even though Mum was heavily pregnant with me. Even after they saw the thick black storm clouds circling our small village.
They could have done something sensible instead, like driving to the nearest hospital on a test run, making a careful note of how much the parking cost and whether that was reasonable. Perhaps then I would have turned into a very different child and this would be a very different story.
But they weren’t practical people.
‘I wanted to paint the storm,’ Dad said. ‘Stand inside it. See its colours.’
Dad said stuff like this regularly. He was an artist. He was nuts about colours. For his day job, he painted pet portraits. Didn’t matter if they were scaly, hairy, sweet or scary, if you had £275 to splash out on a nine-inch by twelve-inch painting of your pet (unframed) then Dad, also known as Dougie Ripley, also known as –
– was your man.
In his spare time though, he painted the sea.
‘I’ll never get close to showing the sea the way she looks in my head,’ he’d say to us – us being me and Birdie (my six-year-old sister).
‘Why paint it then?’ we’d ask.
In reply he’d tap the side of his nose and smile his wonky smile. ‘It’s the pull of it,’ he’d say then. ‘You can’t deny the pull of it.’
Whatever that meant.
And don’t even get me started on Mum. She was practically nine months pregnant on the day of the storm. She could have sat about on the sofa complaining about her swollen ankles, like any normal pregnant woman. She could have said, ‘No, Douglas Ripley, we are not going to the beach in the middle of a hurricane, not on your nelly. Now drive me to the nearest hospital so I can have this baby, and put the radio on because apparently that’s important.’
But she didn’t.
‘I was sick of staring at our four walls, Frankie, and I thought the sea air would make me feel better. You weren’t due for another week anyway, so you can take that look off your face for starters.’
Here’s what they didn’t take:
1. A phone.
2. A car.
3. Anything practical in case one of them gave birth.
Here’s what they took:
a. A moth-eaten picnic blanket.
b. Mum’s favourite coral lipstick.
c. Dad’s easel and paints.
Anyway, unsurprisingly, Mum went into labour just after they got to the shingle beach down by the harbour. No one else was around, what with it being January. And the storm. And having normal brains.
And without 1, 2 and 3, it finally dawned on Mum and Dad that I was going to be born right on top of a. The moth-eaten picnic blanket. So they threw it on top of some lumpy pebbles and hoped for the best. Which was completely against NHS guidelines at the time, especially under the bit called ‘Good Places to Have a Baby’.
I was not swaddled in a comfy hospital blanket and cooed over by nurses. Instead I was bundled into a damp hoodie and seagulls squawked over my head. To cap it all off, I opened my mouth for some milk but got a mouthful of salt spray instead. And that was my first taste of the world:
According to Mum, it moulded me for ever. ‘You changed, right then and there,’ she’d say. ‘I watched the storm come over you, as sudden as a fever. You clenched your tiny fist and you raged up at the sky, like you were having a competition about who could be louder.’
A coral smile would flash on her lips, quick as a fish. ‘And sometimes I think a bit of that storm’s been stuck inside you ever since.’
Then she’d wander off in the direction of her study, stopping on the way to make her one billionth coffee of the day. Then, just as I’d begin to think I’d got away with it, she’d say, ‘Oh, and don’t forget to put the
