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NEW BABIES
AH, NEWBORNS, in all their softskinned, surprised-looking, downyhaired, dozy loveliness. The heft of them, the smell of their sweet heads . . . then, frankly, the relief of handing them back before they fill their nappies, posset, or cry, piercingly, to be fed.
My days in the milk-scented exhaustion of early motherhood are behind me now. My last child was born a decade ago, into an April heatwave that preceded the royal wedding of Kate and William. Harry and Meghan’s daughter is a June bug, a proper child of summer. Lilibet seems the perfect cutesy name for a kid with Hollywood and Highnesses in her heritage.
Many literary plots revolve around a child’s destiny, identity or the impact of their arrival. But which infants would win a Best Books’ Beautiful Baby competition? A personal favourite would be Eppie in George Eliot’s Silas Marner, the golden child abandoned on the weaver’s doorstep, who gives the old curmudgeon’s life meaning.
Like Eppie, many of fiction’s cutest babies are born out of wedlock. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, the Bensons offer refuge to Ruth, a woman seduced then abandoned pregnant. When baby Leonard arrives, the pious Miss Benson is reluctant to become attached. Just one touch, however, and ‘the doors of her heart were thrown open wide for the little infant to go in and take possession’.
Stacey Halls’s recent bestseller The Foundling is set in the 18th century. Bess takes her day-old daughter Clara to the Foundling Hospital, but vows to return as soon as she can afford to. When she does, she is astounded to learn that Clara has already been claimed.
Someone else’s lost baby becomes the focal point of M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans. Tom and Isabel Sherbourne live in a remote Australian lighthouse. One day, a dinghy washes ashore, with a dead man and a healthy baby girl on board. The couple, whose hopes of becoming parents have been disappointed, adopt the child, naming her Lucy, instead of alerting the authorities.
All newborns, and their strung-out parents, deserve to be cared for.