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shan’t be going to the Lutheran church, German or Danish or any other kind. And I won’t be churched after the birth, as if there was something dirty about having a baby.
    I won’t have the doctor unless I must. Hansine can see to things. If there are complications she can run and fetch him. If only there were women doctors! I wouldn’t think twice if it was a woman coming into my bedroom in a trim black dress with a stethoscope hanging round her like a smart necklace. But I shake with disgust at having a man there, seeing me so exposed, so vulnerable, my body open and indecent. And I believe men think it funny, doctors or not. You can see that little half-smile on their faces, the way they cover it with a discreet hand. Women are so absurd, they seem to be saying, so weak and foolish, letting this happen to them! How ugly they look and how stupid!
    I went downstairs at last. Hansine was calling the boys in for their supper. My appetite had gone and I couldn’t eat a mouthful. It was the same with all my babies. A few days beforehand I just stop eating. The boys were on the subject of names again. A friend Mogens has made at school told Knud his name is really Canute like a king who sat on the seashore and commanded the waves to stop or the tide to turn or something. He said he would call Knud Canute and all the others at school would and then the boys in the street would start singing ‘Canute, Canute, like an old boot’. So now, as if it weren’t enough Mogens wanting to be Jack, Knud wants to be Kenneth. Apparently, there are four boys in Mogens’ class called Kenneth. I said they must ask their father, which is a sure way of postponing things for months.

2
    1988. IN OUR SOCIETY , the extended family fast disappearing, one sees one’s cousins only at funerals and then very likely fails to recognize them. The man who came and sat beside me in the church I knew only because he came into the front pew. Only a nephew of the dead woman would do that, so this must be John Westerby. Or his brother Charles?
    I’d seen neither of them since my own mother’s funeral over twenty years before and then only briefly. Business affairs called and both had had to rush away. This man looked smaller than I remembered. He also looked a great deal like Rasmus Westerby whom I had called Morfar. He enlightened me by whispering, ‘Here’s John coming now.’ It must be Charles.
    My other cousin—I only have two—had come with the full panoply of family. The pew was just big enough to hold us all, Charles, John, John’s wife, son, daughter, son-in-law and could it be a grandchild? I was temporarily distracted by trying to remember the names of that son and daughter but had reached no conclusion by the time a voluntary began and six men came in slowly, carrying Swanny’s coffin.
    There must have been a hundred people in the church. They sang up, they all knew the hymn. I hadn’t been able to decide what to have, as far as I knew Swanny had no favourite hymn, but Mrs Elkins had been able to name one. She said that in those last terrible months when she ‘wasn’t herself’, when she was ‘that other one’, Swanny had gone about humming ‘Abide with Me’. So that was what we sang, at full throttle, to the backing of a tape, because organists are hard to find these days.
    I left first. There is a recognized protocol about these things, and John’s son, who seemed to know all about it, deserted his family to walk with me. I murmured that he was very kind and he dipped his head in a formal kind of way. It was no use, I had no memory of his name, still less of what he did or where he lived.
    The tears I hadn’t quite cried seemed to dry up in my eyes. I felt choked. If I remembered her shuffling about that house, humming and mumbling, I was afraid of crying aloud. Instead, as we crowded round the graveside and the coffin was lowered, I made myself think how different it would have been if she had died ten years before. She