Dover Goes to Pott

see the funny side of it but he was very nice about it. I had to offer to pay for his hat and everything but he said not to bother, accidents would happen. I don’t know about accidents. If you ask me, John-Paul did it deliberate. Anyhow, I’m always extra careful when anybody comes in with a bowler hat now. Well, as I was saying, Cynthia didn’t start worrying until they’d been married a year and there wasn’t a sign of anything. Well, at first I kept saying the usual things, like you do. Telling her to relax and forget about it, but every month she used to come in here with a face as long as a fiddle and I’d know we were back to square one again. And, of course, it got to be more than just wanting a baby. There was her father, you see. It seems he’d said some pretty rotten things about John Perking when there was all the trouble before she married him, sort of casting reflections on his manhood, if you know what I mean. Well, I know John Perking does look a bit of a weed but there was no call for Mr Wibbley to cast aspersions like that. I mean, who’s he to talk when he’s at home? They only ever had Cynthia and one kid hardly constitutes a world record, does it? Well, of course, Cynthia was just longing for the day when she could go waltzing along to her father and spit in his eye and tell him she was pregnant. It got to be the only thing she cared about. It’d prove her husband was just as good as anybody else and I think she’d a pretty good idea her father would be only too pleased to forgive and forget if he had a grandson. And she didn’t like living here, you know, not really. She put up with it, of course, and I don’t mean she didn’t love her husband but—well — this wasn’t her kind of life and it’s no good pretending it was. But she could only get out of it by having a baby. Of course, I suppose if she’d left her husband her father would have taken her back all right, but I’m sure the idea never crossed her mind. After all, she’d got her pride, hadn’t she? They were absolutely devoted to each other — a bit too sloppy, if you ask me, but then it wouldn’t do for us all to be the same, would it? Well, sloppy or not, it didn’t produce any results. She used to come in here, Cynthia did, and sit just where you’re sitting at this very table and ask me what to do. As if I was an expert! I mean, I have ’em like shelling peas, once a year regular as clockwork and no damned pill on the market makes the slightest bit of difference. I tell you, round here they call this house The Warren! All these kids aren’t mine, by the way. I’m just baby-sitting one or two for the lady on the other side. After all, eight are no more trouble than four, are they, really? Well, some of the conversations Cynthia and me had round this very table would make your hair curl, really they would! My husband used to say it was downright disgusting and an invasion of a man’s privacy but, like I said, how can I help if I don’t know what they’re doing? Well, it went on and on and in the end Cynthia goes, on the q.t., mind you — to the doctor. Well, to cut a long story short, he said there was nothing wrong with her. So you can see where that left us, can’t you? Only, of course, Cynthia didn’t feel as though she could ask him. She thought if it turned out to be his fault really he’d be completely shattered and she just couldn’t bring herself to do that to him. I kept telling her it might just be something that the doctor could put right and she kept saying, but supposing it isn’t, and bursting into tears. Oh, we had some real old how-do-you-do’s, I don’t mind telling you, but she wouldn’t budge. She just preferred to let him go on thinking that it was all her fault that they couldn’t start a baby. I suppose it was all very noble and touching and what have you, but at times I really did feel like giving her a good shake. It was just like one of those daft plays on the telly where if somebody would only use a bit of common sense they wouldn’t get in to all these messes. Oh, that clock’s five minutes fast, by the way. I checked it by the pips this morning. Well, you can imagine my surprise when a couple of months ago Cynthia comes bursting in here looking like she’d come up on the Pools. I’ve never seen her so excited. Mind you, as soon as I realized that was all she was going on, I tried to calm her down a bit. Like I told her, just missing a month doesn’t mean a thing. There might be a hundred reasons for it. But she just laughed and called me a wet blanket. She was certain she was pregnant and nothing me or anybody else might say would make a blooming bit of difference. Well, I asked her what Mr Perking had had to say about it and she said she hadn’t told him, just in case. She was going to wait till she was absolutely, one hundred per cent certain and then break the good news. So, she had got some common sense, hadn’t she? Well, a month went by and I was nearly having kittens myself, half expecting her to come in here one morning and say that the worst had happened and it was all a false alarm.