Baby wrangling

Last week my friend Helen asked an interesting question – how did Sarah carry Ovid? Okay, so initially it didn’t seem much of a question. At the time, we were sitting together on the train, and Helen had her 15-week-old Isabel slung across her lap, and I had teeny little Izzy-feet pummelling my thigh, and it seemed kind of obvious how any mother would carry a baby. But what she meant was, how did Sarah carry Ovid when she needed her hands free? Helen pointed out how women in most cultures had some kind of sling arrangement for carrying small babies. Maori women carried them in a kind of kete, or sometimes a sling made out of beaten lacebark. Izzy herself had arrived on board the train in a nifty stretchy sling, tied and knotted around Helen’s body so that the baby was pressed firmly face-first into her mum’s chest.

I have no kind of mental picture of women of Sarah’s time and class carrying or wearing babies in this way. You don’t see it in art; you don’t see it in photographs – although with the long exposure times of early photography, there aren’t many candid snaps – everything is carefully posed, adults and older children frozen straight-faced. Very young children are often blurs in these early photographs because they simply couldn’t keep still. It seemed to me that western women had moved away from baby-wearing before the nineteenth century, and didn’t rediscover it until the 1960s and 70s. Some quick internet research confirms this – baby-wearing seems to have remained normal practice for women from all over the world except western women.

Helen speculated that perhaps Sarah and other young settler mums might have taken up the baby-wearing idea from Maori women. Would they have done this, or would they have been more likely to follow the more western pattern of simply leaving babies lying in their cradles while doing household chores? I imagine that Sarah’s later babies might have spend time in a perambulator, popularised by Queen Victoria later in the century; but that Ovid and the older children would either have been carried in arms, or not carried at all. American pioneer experience shows that young children were left to their own devices far more often than in earlier or later times, simply because their parents were working too hard to spare much time for them. It seems likely that early New Zealand settlers were in much the same position, and this raises a more interesting question about how Sarah coped in the first few years.

Back in England, although William and Sarah lived in their own little house, both of their families were reasonably close at hand. In her early days of motherhood, Sarah would have had ample help and support from the extended families. It would have even been likely that one of her sisters or sisters-in-law might have lived with them for a time to help out, although on the night of the 1841 census, two weeks before they left for New Zealand, the household consisted only of William, Sarah and Ovid. Leaving the extended family behind was a huge step, but to some extent the loss of support would have been buffered by the five months spent on Gertrude with other young families. The women would have helped each other out with child-care and other domestic tasks; older children and other adults would have been around to watch the babies and toddlers. It wasn’t until they went ashore in Wellington that William, Sarah and Ovid were truly on their own – although perhaps not even then, as they shared their first house with a shipmate. [Sarah herself uses the word “shipmate”, which suggests a single man rather than a woman or family.]

Would the friendships and support systems developed on Gertrude have held up once the steerage passengers came ashore? Or would they have been so scattered, and so busy trying to survive, that they were isolated into their individual families? How did Sarah cope with an active toddler while doing everything she had to do to care for her family? I suppose Ovid wasn’t the first toddler to have ever been tied to the kitchen table by leading strings to prevent him falling in the fire while his mother cooked the dinner!

More children, paradoxically, might have made things slightly easier for Sarah. Older children (often even toddlers) were pressed into service to care for their siblings. Chances were that Ovid carried and held Oscar at least as much as either of their parents did, and that Gertrude was watched over and petted by both of them. Modern mums would probably have fifty fits if they saw their two year old lugging the newborn around the house, but the reality of large families in lower socio-economic households has meant that this has always happened, and probably still does.

The facts of how Sarah managed are lost in the past. In terms of my story, the bits that hold the known facts together, I now have Helen’s thoughts tucked into my sub-conscious to percolate. I can see, perhaps, that in desperation, Sarah might have fashioned a make-shift sling to cradle a fractious infant while leaving her hands free to peel the potatoes. I can see that William would have needed to whip up a rocking cradle for Oscar, that Sarah could have rocked with her foot while sewing or writing letters. I can’t see her wearing any of the babies in a sling while going out of the house. On the other hand, a carry-cot, Moses-basket style, would have been a distinct possibility… Anybody have any more ideas?