The Folded Blanket

Sandra Elizabeth Harris was born at 9:07 am at Calvary Hospital on Augusta Road in Lenah Valley, the second child of Margaret Harris née Whitfield and Robert Harris. Margaret was a painter who also taught art part-time at a Hobart secondary school. Robert was a violinist and composer with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. The baby came two weeks before she was due. She was delivered by the obstetrician Dr Lionel Carstairs, with Sister Agnes Mulvany attending, and the birth was straightforward.

Labour began the previous evening at the kitchen table of the house at 47 Fitzroy Place in Sandy Bay, where Margaret was marking a pile of Year 11 art essays. The contractions were irregular for several hours, and she kept marking. Their son, Daniel James Harris, was two and asleep upstairs. In the early hours Robert telephoned Margaret's parents, who drove across from their own house to sit with the boy, and then took his wife to the hospital. He remembered a packet of mints and the Polaroid camera. He forgot her dressing gown and slippers. Margaret laboured in a thin hospital-issue gown stamped Property of Matron.

Sister Agnes allowed Robert to stay in the labour ward through the morning, at a time when many fathers at Calvary were still sent to wait at the end of the corridor. He sat on a vinyl chair by the bed and did very little. The baby cried at once and loudly. Margaret wept, more from release than from joy. Robert stood without moving for some moments, then leaned down and kissed his wife's temple, and said nothing.

Margaret slept for most of the late morning. When she woke in the afternoon she asked for paper. Sister Agnes found her a pad of fluid-balance charts, and Margaret turned them over and drew, in biro, the hospital blanket folded at the foot of the bed. She did not draw the baby. She filled four sheets with the blanket's creases before the light from the window moved off it.

The Harrises had not settled on a name before the birth and did not agree on one during the day. In the evening, with the baby asleep in the nursery, Robert proposed Sandra. Margaret accepted it and added Elizabeth. The name was entered on the hospital card before Robert drove home to Sandy Bay to relieve his in-laws.