The pram in the hallway, the baby seats in the car, speak to the presence of little ones. JG Ballard considered it an advantage to his writing, after his wife had died and he was left to care for their three small children. He refused to pass them onto relatives and chose instead to raise them as best he could, single parent by day, writer by night with much drinking and cigarette smoking to shore up his energy until he too was dead.
Others see the pram in the hallway as a deterrent to the lives of writers. Either to the person who does not take up writing till after the children are grown and gone, or the children themselves who suffer neglect.
I never used a pram with my babies, nor a highchair. When they were tiny I ferried them places by car, in a capsule for the later babies, a bassinette on the back seat for my first born.
By the time my children could sit, I invested in a lightweight Maclaren pusher to wheel them around. A pram seemed an unnecessary luxury, until my youngest came along and I borrowed the pram of another to experience the joy of walking along a street pushing my little one as she slept.
My mother had a pram in Holland. She used it to walk the thirty long miles from her home in Haarlem to the countryside where one of her cousins lived. This cousin was married to a man who ran a farm with crops and cows enough to feed the sickly baby watered down milk so that she might regain her strength during the Honger winter of 1945.
The pram was in wicker with high wheels and sturdy frame, and it held the baby snug over the rickety cobblestones of Haarlem streets, over the kinderhoofjes, babies heads, so named because of the round bluestones that covered the ground, and then onto the gravel laneways of the countryside.
By the time they reached Heilo, the baby sickened. She lasted only one night and died in the morning. In May towards the end of that cruel winter when ice was beginning to thaw, an icicle entered my mother’s heart. It stayed there as she pushed her pram, now empty. They buried the baby in Heilo, far from her home. Dead at five months of age but forever in my mother’s heart.
I asked her to tell me this story again and again when I was a child. I wanted to know what happened. I wanted to understand how my mother could go on living in a world in which her baby no longer lived.
I could not understand the way she held back tears. Her ability to tell this story with seeming detachment.
In one of my earliest writing classes I befriended a woman who described the death of two babies, boys. They each died in turn of a genetic abnormality before they were the age of one. My friend told the story with more grief than my mother showed for her lost baby.
‘I could not bear to go through what you went through,’ I said to her in a break during our class. ‘To lose two babies.’
‘I could not bear to live with an incestuous father,’ she said and turned to face me, her eyes grim. ‘I can’t think of anything worse.’
And so it was we shared our grief. Compared notes, pondered on the unimaginable, each a different story. We survived the unthinkable, each in our own ways. My friend wrote fiction, insisting her story was too raw, too close to home, but her fiction spoke of a young woman who had lost a baby and could not believe the baby was gone, while I stuck to memoir even as at the time I wrote my story as fiction. Always in the third person a thin disguise.
Even as I write now in the first person, a thin disguise, an effort to process something I could not make sense of when I was young. The unimaginable, the stuff that makes no sense, life lived under cover of darkness.
At the age of 34, JG Ballard drove his family from his home in England to Spain for a holiday and there his wife contracted pneumonia and died. He drove back home, the front seat empty, his three children in his care alone.
My mother pushed her empty pram across the fields of Holland, an empty space in her heart.
The pram in the hallway suggests the presence of a small life in your care, the empty pram its absence.
In 1964 when JG Ballard was 34 years old and drove his car with his wife and three children on a holiday to Spain, he did not know that his wife’s lungs would become so congested with pneumonia she could no longer breathe. Nor that he would later drive home alone with his three children to a life so different from the one he had imagined.
Ballard had also been interned by the Japanese during the Second World War and although he was only a child, looking back on it, he did not imagine internment was so bad for him. A child who simply played with other children, the way children do.
He saw cruel things beatings and torture, but it was only later through his writing he came to recognise the extent of the trauma. His family had been prosperous and successful in Shanghai. Then one day out of nowhere it was all taken. They were dropped into a bucket of despair.
This is the stuff that, like the pram in the hallway, offers a writerly dimension, the stuff we must explore. For how can our expectations be so turned on their heads, the way it is in war times, when we are helpless to forces beyond our control, when we might lose all we once had or find ourselves as hungry as our dog this morning who vomited because he had been fed too early the day before and his hunger, his empty stomach turned into an acid bath so great he had to expel it.
‘A hungry vomit,’ my daughter called it. This breed of dogs have bodies not designed to be so empty; they shrivel. Our minds too need nourishment. A pram needs a baby, and a life needs to be populated by live company to keep it going.
My daughter had a pram. My parents bought it, a proper old-fashioned baby carriage, probably a Silver Cross knowing them, the Rolls Royce of perambulators. We never used it much. It really wasn’t practical. But once I did take my daughter for a walk in it on my own one evening; she’d’ve been about one at the time. That’s the only time I remember being behind the wheel as it were. Don’t recall ever seeing anyone with a pram after that and even as a child’s toy prams fell out of favour replaced by pushchairs, buggies and strollers. There is a tradition here in Scotland called “hanselling” where complete strangers—invariably little old ladies—will sidle up to the pram and deposit a few coins inside. I don’t recall it ever happening when I was out and about but it happened a number of times to my wife. If you give a purse as a gift, it’s the done thing to hansel that too.