baby Daniella
baby Daniella

Attempting to get back to normal but a crisis for Diana is only averted after some intervention as the bank rate leaps to 12% and share prices follow Sterling and go the other way

Another morning preparing the drinks and breakfast with Deborah a bit fretful over having to eat and drink at the same time as everybody else. Daniel off to school and then Debbie taken to school with packed lunch and eager to go on her trip today to the Waterways Museum at Stoke Bruerne. Home to finish the clearing up, wash up the crockery, collect and store the duck eggs. Then morning coffee and an outing with Diana to Huntingdon to do our shopping at Mothercare and Tescos before a fine salad lunch for both of us at the riverside snack restaurant whilst Daniella slept soundly in the car carrycot outside. Home and I started my first effective work on the boat whilst Di looked after Daniella. Afterwards I came back to the house to find Diana in tears with a sudden, painful and engorged left breast.

I prepared a bath for her to soak and recover, but she deteriorated further into shivering and then spasmodic shaking. I called the Doctor and arranged for the loan of a breast pump from The National Childbirth Trust agent in Cambridge.

I got Norma to collect it and bring it over and in the meantime the Doctor arrived and inspected the breast and prescribed dehydrating tablets if the breast could not be loosened and expressed; for fear of mastitis turning into an abscess. I spend the early evening touring St Neots for a chemist and eventually the Police helped me by calling out the Boots dispensing chemist. Back home Diana had used the breast pump to relieve herself and was recovering her composure, but still weepy and very tired.

Local papers today featured our birth and company sale with major front page articles in The Trader and The Hunts Post. The Cambridge Evening News also reported further on my future micro industry plans. National news today of a two per cent rise to 12% in the Bank Rate and also of further falls of share prices on the stock exchange. Behind this was the decision of the National Union of Miners to pass disciplinary measures against working colleagues in spite of a High Court Injunction; the widening of the docks strike to include non-dock labour scheme ports; and the National Union of Seamen deciding to embargo lorries on the ferries in resistance to the privatisation of Sea Link. A poor day indeed for the Thatcher Government.