The baby box - Jane Hayward

It is December 1964. Jane's mother is preparing for Christmas while Jane is refusing to take a do-it-yourself abortion pill from her school chumRita. Persuading the father of the child, Nick, to be with her on Christmas Eve, Jane announces to her parents she is pregnant. Her motherwishes she'd dug the baby out with knitting needles. Jane's father threatens Nick, throwing him out of the house. Nick leaves without saying'Good-bye'.

Jane's summer of love has presented her with an appalling dilemma: to marry a man she now knows is a coward or to face the future as anoutcast with a child to care for. It is vital for her respectable mother to keep her daughter's shame secret. Any love is smothered as she beratesJane for bringing disgrace into the family. Imprisoned in the house, Jane waits in vain for Nick to give her some kind of support, but he cannoteven keep a job. While her mother turns to an old friend from the war, Fiona, for comfort, Jane is consigned to the care of a moral welfareofficer. Fiona has the answer to Jane's mother's predicament. The following spring, Jane is banished to a mother-and-baby home.

Perhaps the first of its kind,The Baby Boxis a frank memoir, set in the 1960s, of a pregnant schoolgirl, written in a compelling first personaccount. The book highlights the prejudices of the day with some distressing, sometimes disturbing, truths. But this is not a misery memoir.Moving into the mother-and-baby home brings tales of the other girls, maintaining an upbeat story. Those who enjoy memoirs, especially thosereminiscent of an era, as well as readers who are looking for a true story with depth, will be engrossed in this tale of lies, deceptions and hiddenshame, but ending in redemption.