Charlie Brooker

Charlie Brooker

I was born in an NHS hospital. At least, that’s what they tell me. Call me forgetful but I have no memory of any of it. I could’ve been born in the log flume queue at Chessington World of Adventures for all I know. Or in a lowly cattle shed, like Jesus. Which would explain why I take after him in so many ways.

Both my kids were born in NHS hospitals too. The first one tried to show up early. Several weeks before the due date, my wife Konnie shook me awake at 6 a.m. to say she was a bit worried her waters might have broken. She couldn’t be sure. She’d just gone a bit … leaky.

My brain ran around screaming, but my face remained calm. The very picture of denial, you might say. We decided to wait until 8 a.m., when our local surgery opened. It was just around the corner. We were halfway there when the trickle became a flood. The GP sent us straight to St Thomas’s Hospital in a cab. We expected the baby to pop out at any time. Instead, Konnie was kept in for about a week, for observation, before being sent home with several sheets of disposable strip thermometers and instructions to return immediately if her temperature rose or the baby decided to appear. If neither of those things happened, they’d induce the birth at thirty-seven weeks.

The temperature stayed put and so did he. Who knew a baby could remain indoors so long after the waters had broken? No wonder he coped with the Great 2020 Lockdown so effortlessly (at least at the time of writing – if the Nintendo Switch breaks, it’s going to be like sharing a cell with a miniature werewolf).

Come the thirty-seventh week, we were back at St Thomas’s for the season finale. We got there bright and early at 8 a.m., but it turned out they were having a rush on and we’d have to wait. After spending almost the entire day in a room full of women clutching their swollen bellies and groaning, like the aftermath of some insane Christmas feast, they led us to a room and gave my wife some drugs to induce the baby. We were to stay in the room overnight. Like a dumbo, I hadn’t envisaged staying this long and was ill-prepared. They found me a sort of yoga mat and I slept on the floor, like a divorcee camping out in the garage.

By the next morning there was still no sign of the baby. Hours stretched by. They prepared Konnie for an epidural and I played Angry Birds Space on my phone. It’s amazing how many details of this kind of life-changing incident you forget; I don’t know the names of any of the medical staff who helped us, yet I can clearly remember that Angry Birds Space – which is like Angry Birds, but in SPACE – had literally just been released that morning, because it took forever to download from the App Store using the public Wi-Fi.

Suddenly, the machine that was monitoring our unborn baby’s heart rate made a noise I didn’t like and moments later the bed was surrounded by the entire cast of Holby City. I was handed a set of scrubs and told to go and change into them because they were going to perform an emergency Caesarean any moment.

I nodded calmly, kissed Konnie on the forehead, strode into a disabled toilet to get changed, shut the door and instantly found myself clinging to the handrail like I was in a rocking carriage – because my legs had become noodles. I slowed my breathing, tried to calm my internal organs, wept efficiently for five cathartic seconds, then began wrestling with the scrubs, which turned out to be about five sizes too big. Also, I had no idea how I was supposed to put them on.

Moments later, I emerged, looking like a schoolboy in an ill-fitting Halloween surgeon costume. My heart rate was through the roof but, in the moments I’d been absent, the baby’s heart rate had thankfully stabilised. Another doctor had arrived and the new consensus was that the emergency was averted – or at least postponed. They wanted to wait a few more hours in the hope that he’d eventually come out on his own. They were just like the FBI surrounding David Koresh’s compound at Waco, except none of them chewed gum or said, ‘Shit’s about to get real.’ Not within earshot, anyway.

Konnie tried to snooze. I tried to take my mind off things by using my phone as an intermittent escape hatch – but let me tell you, the difficulty of Angry Birds Space really intensifies when your fingers feel like electrified bananas because your adrenalin is still at wartime levels.

And then, forever later, but also somehow instantly, Konnie was being wheeled into the operating theatre while I tagged along. I was jittery; she was out of it on whatever new drugs they’d pumped her full of. She’s teetotal, so part of me enjoyed watching her slur her words and loll her face around like a soap-opera matriarch with a drink problem for once. In fact, I wish I’d filmed it.

I stood beside her and held her hand while they raised a sheet at around tit level so we couldn’t see them cutting her open behind it. I remember trying to stroke her hair in a manner that struck me even at the time as possibly a little patronising. Sure enough, even through her narcotic haze she told me to stop because it was doing her head in.

What happened next was like a magic trick. They rummaged around behind the sheet, delving into her insides while somebody somewhere recited medical jargon, like some occult incantation. There was a surprising amount of pulling, pushing and wrenching – and then suddenly someone was holding up a baby, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. A skinned, screaming rabbit. Which we had to take care of for the rest of our lives. It should have been nightmarish. But it wasn’t. It was great.

For months, I’d been secretly worried I might feel nothing when the baby was born. After all, I’d previously never really ‘got’ children. They’d always struck me as an inherently unknowable species – like cows or parrots. Cute, I suppose, but who really gives a fuck, right? And then, when it came to it, when it happened … the moment they put this warm, vulnerable infant in my hands, I felt my brain rewire itself with a new sense of purpose. Love. Love and protection.

I was instant pudding.

‘He’s beautiful,’ I said to Konnie.

She nodded, woozily, her eyelids half shut.

‘Do you want to hold him?’ I said.

Instead, she asked for something to be sick in.

A few hours later, we were on a different floor of the hospital, our son wrapped in a towel with the word ‘SUNLIGHT’ printed on it, lying in a sort of Perspex crib-trolley beside Konnie’s bed. She slept off whatever they’d given her, while I took 500 photographs of the baby.

St Thomas’s Hospital stands beside Westminster Bridge. Our son’s crib was positioned directly beneath a window facing the Thames. Night had fallen. Big Ben glowed across the river. The House of Commons stood illuminated, golden. The building where, sixty-four years earlier, the National Health Service Act had been passed.

I took a few steps back and snapped a picture of our firstborn sleeping there, with Parliament visible behind him through the window.

I’m no good with cameras. The picture I took is poorly framed and quite blurry, and by far my favourite photograph of all time.

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