“The woman’s stomach stuck up so high I couldn’t see her face or the upper part of her body at all. She seemed to have nothing but an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly legs propped in the high stirrups and all the time the baby was being born she never stopped making this unhuman whooping noise.”
“Life outside school, though, was a different story. The reaction of the Italian mothers to my mother being unmarried drove my crazy at times. There is nothing terrible romantic about my mother’s supposed fall from grace. She slept with the boy next door when they were sixteen and before anything could be decided his family moved to Adelaide. Although he new she was pregnant he never bothered to contact her again.”
“A fine lady went to Stowe Fair. She was pregnant for the first time and, keen to know what the future held for her, she consulted an old gypsy woman. ‘Why my dear, I do believe you will have seven babies.’ said the gypsy woman studying her hand. The fine lady went away and thought no more about it. When the time came for her child to be born, a midwife was summoned to attend the labour. ‘What have we here?’ she exclaimed as she delivered fir one baby, then another and another.”
Her sister Willa is pregnant and Annie is overjoyed when she comes home to have her baby. Annie tells Willa the names of local plants and Willa tells Annie about the ghost, murdered by highwaymen, who is said to haunt the old forge nearby.