These islands

My eldest daughter is about to have a baby
June 19, 2002

The alarm went off at seven. The Christmas holidays were over and it was the first day of the new term. The children had been sleeping late for weeks. I anticipated complaints: "Oh Dad, five more minutes. I'm tired." It couldn't have been more different. One after another the four younger ones, at the touch of my finger on their shoulder, sat up, rubbed their eyes and swung their feet onto the floor. But the fifth and oldest I left sleeping. She was 20. She had no school. She was about to have a baby and today was the day.

"You know why the children woke so easily?" my wife asked at breakfast.

I didn't.

"They know India's going into hospital today. The children have picked up on our anxiety."

I went to my desk and tried to write. The words came but they had no lustre. In the afternoon I drove my daughter and her partner to hospital. After I dropped them off, I found myself, for the first time in years, hankering for a drink while it was still daylight.

It was later that evening, when we were home and the younger children were in bed, that India rang. The doctor, for whom she'd been waiting since I had dropped her off, had finally visited. (It was only hours, not days, so I suppose we should be grateful.) The baby was breech. A Caesarian section would be performed the following day. My wife's face was drawn. And I could just hear, faintly, drifting from the receiver, that my daughter's words were mixed with sobs.

The next morning I failed to hear the alarm and overslept by over an hour.

"I know why," said my wife at breakfast. "You don't want this day to come."

After the school run, I went to the hospital. My daughter was in an antiseptic cube filled with humming machines-the recovery room. My wife was already with her. Surgery phobia had set in. My daughter was weeping.

"It'll be all right," said my wife, mopping her face, "the doctors are experts."

We set off for the operating theatre along dark corridors with huge windows that overlooked other dark corridors. At the operating theatre doors we said goodbye and my daughter, still crying, was whisked through. Only her partner was allowed inside with her.

While we waited by the double doors, a friend appeared. Mary was in the hospital on another errand. Her eyes were green and wet. Her sister, explained Mary, had just got some news. She had incurable cancer: death was imminent.

The greater suffering of others is supposed to put one's anxieties into perspective. But the truth is that no matter how others fare, your own preoccupations persist. I nodded, I sympathised, but all my thoughts were for my child and her child-my grandchild-and the life they were likely to have, together.

The doors swung open and a nurse barked, "Boy, healthy," then vanished.

Baby himself appeared in a blood-spotted blanket. He was small and sleepy. In the recovery room there was weighing and measuring. Then his mother was wheeled in, sutured, ready to feed.

My wife went to bed early that night. She was mangled, she said, by the day's events. I watched Rumble in the Jungle, the documentary about the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire. As I watched, I wondered how nobody noticed that President Mobutu Sese Seko was a monster. Everybody was stupid, I decided grumpily. Obviously, I was in the wrong mood.

When I got into bed, my wife was already asleep. As my breathing fell in with hers I began to drift. Before my mind's eye, the familiar, pre-sleep scenario unrolled. I was walking in a suburban London street, holding my mother's hand. Everything was going well until, reaching the kerb of Cherrywood Lane, my foot went out to reach the uprising tarmac and I jolted awake.

I got up, made a hot whiskey, then picked Roald Dahl's Going Solo off the shelves. I had never read this account of his service with the RAF in the middle east during the second world war, but I assumed it would be like everything else of Dahl's. It would be astringent, economical and flawless, the only type of prose to which, at this moment, I could pay attention.

And it was. It worked for a while, until, pausing between chapters, I flicked to the front in search of the potted biography with, I hoped, Dahl's date of birth. To my horror, my oldest daughter, the new mother, had scrawled on the page-I had forgotten this was once her book. In the big looping writing of a ten year old she had written, "This book belongs to India G?bler. I don't think Going Solo is as good as Boy but it is still very enjoyable and exciting." Well, that was that. The dam gates opened and the memories and anxieties that filled the inner reservoir gushed out in an unceasing torrent.

The first light of dawn, when it finally showed, was the colour of wood smoke.