Mothers flee from hospital blaze.
Twelve mothers evacuated from the South Ward when the fire broke out in an adjoining room at Fant Lane Maternity Home, Maidstone, late on Wednesday night. Two fire appliances from Maidstone attended and the fireman had to use their apparatus to tackle the blaze which was under control in fifteen minutes.
I was hours old. My mother was one of them.
I don’t remember the heat or the sirens or her arms tightening around me in the dark. I don’t remember the evacuation, the rush down corridors, the other mothers and their newborns scattering into the Maidstone night. Memory doesn’t reach that far back, or if it does, it lives somewhere deeper than words can find. But I have the clipping. I’ve held it for sixty years. The newsprint is thin now, fragile as skin. The words haven’t changed.
Mothers flee.
That’s how I entered the world. Not into safety or stillness or the quiet room where a newborn is supposed to arrive. I came into fire, into displacement, into a moment when the only thing that mattered was moving, surviving, getting out. My mother carried me. And we got out.
Follow along. This is the opening to a memoir about breaking a multi-generational cycle of addiction and mental health trauma. If you want to follow this journey, new passages, chapters, and reflections as they’re written, follow this blog. You’ll be the first to know.