I have struggled with hundreds of questions about it ever since. He remembers someone rushing out and shouting, 'We need blood!'. The doctors were too busy to tell him what was going on. He put it under his jumper to keep it warm and waited for three long hours. After five minutes, a nurse emerged with a baby. I remember a blur of green gowns, a drip in my arm, the hospital corridor rushing past, my husband's terrified face, the bright coldness of the operating theatre, the mask going over my nose and mouth.

The clear fluid was not amniotic fluid but serum from still, separating blood. The blood had merely collected inside me. I had been haemorrhaging internally since the sweep. As I stepped from the bed, I suffered a huge loss of blood. She asked me to stand up and move around the room. When she returned four hours later, I had started to have mild contractions. She went back to her surgery to see more patients. It was amniotic fluid, my consultant reassured me – a good sign. A slow flow of clear fluid ran between my legs. I was put in a birthing room and strapped up to various monitors. We ran red lights all the way to the hospital. I couldn't understand where it had all come from. My skirt was drenched in bright red blood.

'Ah,' she said, smiling, 'I've broken your waters!' My consultant cheerfully inserted a finger. My husband and I arrived at her surgery for a cervical sweep, whereby a doctor or midwife uses a finger to stretch the cervix to stimulate labour. We had chosen a female obstetrician with a good reputation and discussed Vbac (vaginal birth after caesarean), which she was confident I could have. The birth of my first had been by emergency caesarean, and I was keen to try for a natural birth. I felt I had failed because both of them went 'wrong'. There are a multitude of responses, but mine, like my mother's, has been silence: not because of how dreadful the births were, but because at some level I couldn't acknowledge my feelings about them. Plenty of my friends recount them openly, especially if they went well, and I've noticed that even among those who had difficult births, talking about it can be a way of coping with the trauma. I don't believe women forget their birth experiences. She said the reason was obvious (my mother's second pregnancy ended with a stillbirth, and the unspoken grief still lives inside her after 50 years): birth was so dreadful that it had to be forgotten, or no one would go through it more than once. I asked my mother about her births and she said she never talked about them to anyone. I wondered whether the article should have a subtitle: not to be read by expectant mothers. Above all, it would mean describing the actual births. I would have to face raw memories and all the old unanswerable questions. I knew that writing this article would be hard. If birth came up in conversation, I would stay mute hoping the subject would move on. But my experience remained locked inside me, refractory and unexamined. It seemed churlish to brood, especially when so many women were unable to conceive. Why linger on them? People went through far worse. Each had produced a beautiful, healthy boy. At least it's what I tried to tell myself.

Crowning actual childbirth