1 Earth bound

“When we are born, we cry that we are come

To this great stage of fools.”

William Shakespeare, King Lear, IV:6, 1606

"I can’t go through with it," my twin lamented as she evaporated in the warm liquid in which we floated, almost indistinguishable from the living creatures that still inhabit the watery element. We reflect the stage of human evolution millions of years older than ourselves. But she would not say why she could not proceed down the long road into the future. We had been destined to be born together, she and I, but something stronger than us both had pulled her back from the very edge of life and now I was destined to be a solitary soul in a solitary world and my fate would be to search for her.

The pain of the earth-bound journey is agonising and I cannot yet cry out, because I still draw oxygen through the tube attaching me to my survival kit. My skull feels as though it is cracking under the pressure. My very skin aches with the effort of propelling myself forwards, forwards, forwards towards the light. My birth is as inevitable as the heat of the sun and the chill of the October night air into which I am about to be ejected.

At the time I enter the world, Hitler’s bombs are devastating Liverpool. The sky over the Dee estuary is burning red, blood-stained from the monstrosities befalling the innocent victims of war, and I can feel the propulsion of the missiles and the shattering of glass and the crashing of buildings, and the pulling, pulling of life inside and outside those walls and these.

War and birth. Peace and death?

What a time to forsake my warm sanctuary!

But I am determined to survive. If my twin has succumbed prematurely to the temptation not to be born, then I will surely not. I will live for both of us. I will communicate with her unborn soul from within my born self and somehow prove to her that it was worth taking that primeval risk. I will live, live, live... Whatever the pain. I will live for both of us.

Swept along by defiance and a last terrific burst of energy, and clutched at by merciless, groping, unfeeling hands, I plunge headfirst into the makeshift light of that makeshift delivery room in that makeshift life we call human existence.

I pucker up my face in protest and scream loud and long, making room for the first earth-breath of millions. I scream out my pain of parting from my sanctuary. My lungs, emptied of their debris, draw in sweet fresh air and my skin turns rosy.

"Here I am world!" I cry. "I’m ready for you. Are you ready for me?"

I suffer the undignified administrations of the midwife and instantly forget the woman from whose body I have been ripped. Ministrations ended, I slumber the early hours away in a tiny prison with iron bars and cold bedding, aware only of the watchful and wondering gaze of my father, whose gentle, comforting voice assures me that all will be well. The earth part of me has re-joined my spirit and that of my father in that first earthly meditation, that first step in the direction of Lethe, that first dying day.

Outside, the whistle of bombs and the rumble of anti-aircraft guns finally ceases as dawn lightens up the sky with a different red.