There are indeed some evil old bags - and young ones for that matter - who really delight in telling the horror stories to innocent young Mums.  And the really hard core 'Spreaders Of Gloom' will start on the Dads if there's no cringing first time Mum to torture.

I was in the Dads room at Treliske Hospital, Cornwall, along with three other soon-to-be-Dads.  One of them was a hardened old veteran of four births, we other three were first-timers.

Enter one evil old hag who would have been at home sat knitting at the base of the Guillotine, "Knit one, Purl one..." and screaming out ecstatically "Drop one!" every time a head thudded into the basket.  I will spare you the horror stories, because they truly were but I'll swear it was a well-rehearsed routine.

Her grand-daughter was in to have a child and the prognosis wasn't good.  The hardened old father of four tried to divert her as the tales grew darker by pointing out that things weren't necessarily as dark as she painted them, that his missus had produced four children as easily as 'shelling peas'.

"Life's like that..." she pounced, "just when everything's going well, suddenly it all goes horribly wrong."

With one emergency caesarean (my missus), and another younger lad quietly cacking enough bricks to build a wall because his offspring was coming early at about 7 months and wouldn't be stopped, the last thing we needed was the Evil One.

She'd got to the "Course, it's all right for you men.  All you have to do is pop another one in there, it's us women who feel the loss when things go wrong." 

A nurse came in and bustled her away, looking apologetically back over her shoulder.  Ten minutes later the same nurse returned with a tray of much appreciated coffees and a few biscuits.  One of us asked how the old ladies grand-daughter was doing, and had that been why they whisked her away so quickly?

It turned out she was a crazy old woman with no children or grandchildren, who had gone a bit loopy years before, and was visiting a friend with a hernia.  But she had a habit of creeping up to the maternity wing just to share the gloom of her own long-ago disaster.  More to be pitied than reviled, but it was far easier to see that in retrospect.

In our little cluster the premature baby was fine, (unbelievably tiny, but fine), my Missus presented me with a huge baby girl, the Dad-of-five took Missus and latest home within a few short hours of the birth (She walked into the Dad's room to show him off, telling it was as easy as shelling peas.)  And the other one was pretty non-eventful too.

One of these days I might write an item about the Dad's room.  It's a funny place...

Gyppo

Still, I'd be careful where I repeated that "shelling peas" line, if I were you...

I did have a pregnancy horror story that I shared. AFTER making sure the person in front of me was not having twins, I told about the mother who delivered her first baby the old fashioned way, but the other twin was not as eager to find a way out and so she then had to have a Caesarian section.

If someone was, in fact, having twins, I just wished them the best of luck and kept my damn mouth shut.