Julia Romp - A Friend Like Ben - The true story of the little black and white cat that saved my son

‘Let’s have a cuppa, Ju,’ my dad said after Harry had left.

The vicar had got the message that maybe I wasn’t ready to be his wife when I’d started crying, and I wasn’t the only one who’d been surprised by his proposal. Dad had laughed out loud when Harry spoke to him and I think he was almost as shocked as I was that anyone would think I could make a wife, because I was still so young and dizzy. But as I sipped the hot sweet tea, I wondered for a moment if I’d made a terrible mistake, because Harry was such a good man.

I didn’t stop to think about it too much, though, because I didn’t stop to think about too much of anything back then. I just trusted that things would work out as I wanted them to; that another honourable man would come along and ask to marry me. I never questioned the fact that one day I would settle down with my Prince Charming. I was such a dreamer back then that my idea of a bad day was getting into work – after moving to a florist in London’s poshest district, Mayfair – to find out they’d delivered flowers to Michael Jackson at a nearby hotel. He was my idol and I was heartbroken that I’d missed him. As I say, I didn’t realise how good I had it.

Then came the afternoon when Mum and Dad had to make another pot of tea as I told them I’d unexpectedly fallen pregnant. I was 22 and had been seeing a local boy called Howard for a bit. Having been told I had polycystic ovaries and would find it hard to conceive, I was – you guessed it – young and dizzy when it came to contraception and now had to tell my parents that I was pregnant.

‘Let’s have a cuppa,’ Dad said and we sat down together as I cried.

My parents looked stern. They’d brought us up with rules and I knew they’d be disappointed.

‘What are you going to do, Julia?’ Mum asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I wailed into my tea.

But I did really. I knew I was going to have my baby, even though Howard was understandably a bit shocked by the whole thing. It might not be quite how I’d planned it, but this baby was mine and I would be a good mother. Howard tried to do right by me and I even moved in with him to see if we could make a proper go of it. But six weeks later I rang and asked Dad to come and get me because neither Howard nor I was comfortable. I felt as if I was letting everyone down as I sat in the cab and burst into tears.

When we got home, I ran upstairs to my bedroom and opened the door to find the room had been decorated for me. There was white tongue-and-groove boarding around the bottom of the walls and a wallpaper frieze covered in roses around the top. Once I’d slept in that room with my sister, Tor, and now there was a cot in it. I started to cry even louder.

‘Come on, Ju,’ Dad said, hugging me. ‘Dry your tears now and come downstairs. Mum’s put the kettle on.’

I think most first-time mums have a dreamy image of how it’s going to be but mine wasn’t just rose tinted. It was cerise. As I got fatter and fatter, I dreamed of the little girl I was going to have with huge blue eyes and blonde curly hair like that I’d had as a child. I couldn’t stop looking at babies in prams wherever I went and wondered what pretty clothes I was going to dress mine in. I loved their smell, their smiles, the dimples in their cheeks, everything about them.

But when he was born George wasn’t at all what I was expecting. Stiff and red, he screamed from the first moment he met the world, and his cries echoed around the room as the nurses took him away to look at him because he’d swallowed meconium; his head had also been misshapen as his tiny body squeezed down the birth canal. I couldn’t help but feel a little worried. I thought babies came out smiling and smelling of talcum powder.

When they brought George back a few minutes later, the nurses suggested giving him a bottle of water and Mum took the baby because I was still so shaky I didn’t trust myself to hold him. But as he was lowered into Mum’s arms George just carried on screaming, and as I looked at them together I could see she was struggling to feed him. I wondered how I was ever going to do it if Mum couldn’t. She was an expert after four children but even she was having trouble.

‘He’ll learn,’ Mum said with a smile as she looked at George wrapped up in his blanket, his face red and blotchy from wailing. ‘These things take time, but it will come naturally. Don’t worry, Ju.’

I didn’t know it then, of course, but this was something I would hear again and again over the weeks, months and years that followed. Mum was only being kind, but hers was the first of a thousand explanations about George.

‘His hips are a bit stiff, so he might be a bit uncomfortable,’ one nurse said as he screamed and screamed in the days after he was born.

‘It was quite a difficult delivery, so he needs time to settle,’ another told me.

I’d be a rich woman today if I had a pound for every time I heard the words ‘It will take time.’ Back then I believed what I was told and was sure George would be calmer when I took him home. I’d read all the books and knew that some babies take a while to adjust to life. He’d settle when he was surrounded by love and warmth instead of a clinical hospital ward. But even when we got home to Hounslow and I started giving George warm baths or putting him in his pram, walking him up and down the garden, draping him over my shoulder, lying him on his back or rocking him in a bouncy chair, nothing calmed him.

You see, I loved George from the moment I saw him and wanted to do my best for him. He was my baby, a tiny, defenceless creature I had created and would be responsible for forever; a part of me that I would do anything to love and protect. But as the days turned into weeks, I began to feel as if he didn’t want the love and care I had to give him. It might sound silly to say that about a tiny baby, but George would scream even louder whenever I went near him and I just didn’t understand it because I thought babies loved to be cuddled.

When the midwife visited, she said that I should take him to the doctor, who referred me to the local hospital, who said George might be suffering from constipation and gave him some medication. But still he didn’t stop crying. Then the midwife suggested that massage might help, but George went rigid the moment I touched him, as if the feel of my hands burned his skin. Later he’d lift his head when my skin made contact with his and jerk the moment I touched him. It was the same if I tried to calm him by rocking him or laying him against my chest. He just didn’t want to be close to me and screamed night and day.

Each day I told myself that things would get better, but they didn’t. I hung a mobile over George’s cot, thinking he’d like the bright colours, but he stared past it. I wiggled brightly coloured toys in front of his face, but he turned away and cried. The hardest thing was his sleeplessness, because he would only nap for half an hour at most; day and night, he was awake.

I could see my kindly midwife thought I might be being impatient when I told her he didn’t rest. ‘All babies sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s important that they do.’

But George didn’t.

‘He’ll have to drop off in the end,’ Mum would tell me. ‘He’s been fed, he’s warm and he’s got a clean nappy. He’ll go to sleep.’

But George’s screams would echo around the house all night as people tried to sleep. Our home had four bedrooms: Tor was in one, Nob in another, and both had to get up for work every morning. Then there were George and me in the third, and Mum and Dad had the last one with my nephew Lewis, who was three and a half. My brother Boy and his girlfriend, Sandra, had had Lewis when they were only teenagers and were too young to cope when he was born at just 22 weeks, weighing two and a half pounds. Lewis was christened during his first few hours in the hospital because the doctors didn’t think he’d survive, but he did. He came home nine months later to be looked after by Mum and Dad, because he still had such bad lung problems that he needed permanent oxygen, which is why he still slept in their room so that he could be checked every hour. George’s screams meant no one was getting any sleep though, and it’s one thing trying to calm an unhappy baby but another when you’re worrying about everyone else too. So I started staying in my room more during the day, because I thought that at least people would get a bit of a break then with a couple of walls between them and George’s cries.