The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
‘I’M A MOTHER. THIS REALLY UPSETS ME’
Cole Moreton,
Giving birth to her third child during the pandemic was ‘a scary time’ for TV presenter ROCHELLE HUMES. But, as she tells it’s made her speak out about a subject that’s very close to her heart
ochelle Humes, the singer turned primetime TV presenter, is halfway through a sentence when her baby Blake breaks in with a gurgle. ‘That’s him, let me show you,’ she says, turning the Zoom camera to reveal her husband Marvin lying on his back on the same wide bed at their home in London, holding up five-month-old Blake in his impressively filled romper suit. ‘The size of him!
He’s so big!’
There’s delight and a splash of relief in her voice, which is understandable given how worrying it must have been a year ago to find herself pregnant at the beginning of a global pandemic. ‘I did find the start of it frightening because it was a very scary time,’ says Rochelle. ‘We didn’t have the understanding [of Covid] we have now, so it was like that for a lot of women.’
When Rochelle found out she was pregnant with a third child last spring she already had enough to handle, being on the cusp of launching her first business. ‘Great idea, starting in a pandemic, but it’s worked!’
My Little Coco is a range of skincare products for babies. ‘We were going to launch on the Monday and I found out I was pregnant on the Sunday,’ she says, able to laugh now at the memory of all that stress. ‘I walked into this lovely launch we had planned and I cried – a real, ugly cry. “I’m pregnant, by the way! This is why I’m crying! I just found out yesterday!” It was all very emotional.’
When the first lockdown was lifted last summer and Marvin was able to go back to work as a radio presenter for Capital FM, Rochelle was ordered to stay at home. ‘I was nervous. My doctors told me to isolate even as the world started going back to normal. That was right around the time I was due.’
Her daughter Valentina was only three back then but sister Alaia-mai had just turned seven so would go to classes when schools returned in September. ‘My brain couldn’t process it. “So, my daughter’s at school, Marv’s going to work… I’m isolating. Is there any point?”’
Blake was born in October, by which time Marvin was allowed to be in the operating theatre for the caesarean. Thankfully everything went well, although with doctors, nurses and husbands in PPE and no visitors
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twins by caesarean and afterwards was given liquid morphine, as is routine. ‘She was in and out of consciousness, saying, “My stomach! My pain!” Her husband expressed their concerns [to the hospital staff], but they were dismissed. Eventually Jade got sent for a scan, hours and hours later, and was rushed straight to theatre because it revealed an internal bleed and litres of blood inside her. They’d clipped a blood vessel during the caesarean and it was trickling like a tap,’ she says. ‘Jade’s not angry about the accident, but is angry that her pain wasn’t believed, which could have led to a fatality.’
Is Rochelle convinced that racism is part of the problem and that some doctors don’t listen properly to black women? ‘Oh, 100 per cent. That’s exactly the feeling,’ she says. ‘The women I’m talking to don’t want to believe that. No one wants to assume someone’s going to treat them differently because of their skin colour. [But] the underlying thing is that [non-white] women aren’t feeling their pain is taken seriously. They’re not feeling heard or listened to. That needs to change.’
There was some controversy around this documentary when the writer Candice Brathwaite complained she had lost out to a ‘lighter-skinned black woman’ as host. She turned out to have been in contention for a completely different programme, but the social-media row did highlight some people’s feelings about how life is easier for black people who are lighter-skinned. ‘Colourism wasn’t at play in this instance. However, unfortunately it does exist, which is unjust and shouldn’t happen. It’s important that it’s acknowledged and recognised so things can change.’
She has only begun to feel able to talk about race in the past year or so, starting with an appearance on another Channel 4 documentary in which Rochelle wept at the memory of trying to remove her own colour at the age of seven, after a friend’s father said she couldn’t come to a party because she was black. Her mum found her red raw in the bath: ‘I had tried to scrub my skin off.’
Years of everyday racism took their toll and even as a pop star with S Club Juniors, then The Saturdays, Rochelle was plagued by self-doubt. ‘I remember waiting backstage and thinking: “No one’s going to cheer for me.” Then they did and it was all right. But no matter if they screamed the house down the night before, every night I would think the same. It’s so deep-rooted, you just carry those things with you.’
The Saturdays sold more than eight million records before they took a break in 2014 that has never ended – so is there any chance of Rochelle reuniting with Frankie Bridge, Una Healy, Mollie King and Vanessa White?
‘We’ve never spoken about it. I can’t imagine it, to be honest. We’re friends, we talk on our Whatsapp group chat, but currently it’s only about how bloody hard homeschooling was and how we’re all ready for a vino on Friday!’ How have they managed to stay close when so many other bands have fallen out? ‘There was no clipping anybody’s wings. We split the publishing all ways. There were disagreements because we were five opinionated women, but we always said the majority rules. There was never any bad blood.’
I wonder how she plans to liberate her daughters from the kind of self-doubt she suffered at a young age? ‘I have as many open conversations as they need and I have celebrations of them and how wonderful they are.’ One way of doing that was to write the children’s books