Claims

I didn't know what I was going to write about this week until Tuesday, when I started to read Clare Chambers' latest novel 'Small Pleasures ' (very good, by the way), a fiction built around a true life news story from 1956.

The news article in the Sunday Pictorial was the result of a call put out by the paper for women who believed they were 'virgin mothers', (that is had become pregnant without any prior male involvement), to come forward with their stories. This interest in 'virgin births', or spontaneous parthenogenesis to give it it's formal name, had been sparked by research published in 1955 by Dr. Helen Spurway of the University of London citing proven cases of parthenogenesis in species of fish and reptiles. Spurway's findings instigated quite a widespread popular debate at the time as to whether such a phenomenon might be possible in higher life forms, including human beings.

Nineteen women replied to the call put out by the Sunday Pictorial, all of them claiming to have experienced 'virgin births'. Given there was no financial inducement in any of this, the respondents had nothing to gain from the process except being proved truthful or mistaken (perhaps fraudulent). The journalists on the paper went to work on the facts of each case, in conjunction with a team of doctors. Not surprisingly, most of the claims were debunked quickly and easily but there was one case, that of Mrs Emmimarie Jones and her daughter, that warranted closer investigation.

Emmimarie, a German woman resident in Hereford, wrote: "For ten years I have been wandering (sic) and worried about the birth of my daughter. I honestly believe that she has no father." Emmimarie claimed she had been a virgin, bedridden with rheumatism in a German hospital staffed only by women. After leaving the hospital in 1944 she had gone to a doctor, feeling lethargic, only to be told she was three months pregnant. "There has been no opportunity. It cannot possibly be true", was her response.

Between November 1955 and June 1956, Emmimarie (who'd since moved to England and married a Welshman) went with her ten year old daughter Monica on several occasions to Guy's Hospital in London where they voluntarily underwent a series of tests devised by a team of specialists. Apart from what was obvious at first sight, that mother and daughter bore a remarkable physical likeness (hair, eyes, teeth et cetera), the tests revealed that the two had identical blood, saliva and sense of taste - this was cutting-edge science in the days before DNA analysis - all consistent with a case of parthenogenesis. Even when a skin-graft test between mother and daughter failed to take, doctors were equivocal about the reasons for this. They concluded with an open verdict: they had failed to disprove Emmimarie's claim. That was a good enough basis for the Sunday Pictorial to run its feature story over several issues (boosting its circulation by millions in the process). Emmimarie subsequently returned with her daughter to Germany and all trace of them was lost.

The informed medical opinion on parthenogenesis in human beings remains that it should not be possible, and yet recently such virgin births have been observed in lower-order mammals such as rabbits and rats.

My latest poem started life months go as a short comic piece about a woman undergoing a phantom pregnancy and giving birth to a ghost. My reading of 'Small Pleasures ' and the published information about the Emmimarie Jones case has taken it in another, more substantial direction. 

Of course I don't know the anguish of those unfortunates (women and men) who have longed to be a parent but for whom it never quite happened, so this is all about taking an imaginative leap. And building on the relative success of last week's Ode, I thought I'd try and wrestle my latest narrative into another formal structure, this time abba quatrains..."and that's what you've done, too" - but I've not been entirely successful; form stumps content. Anyway, here it is (for now, as it might be missing a verse). Thoughts?

Miss Fortune's Phantom Pregnancy

Scrawled on the fifth years' dormitory wall

Fortune favours the Brave, cryptic allusion

by girls supposedly in the know to a liaison

forged at their upper school Christmas ball

between the maths mistress and Headmaster.

Equations of the heart had not resolved well

for one so ambiguously named; now she fell

less than the sum of her parts as fate cast her

to be the object of her pupils' salacious talk.

Spring swelled her form coincidentally with

Mrs Brave going to tend for some aged kith.

If he was the cheese, she was certainly chalk

and yet it proved no obstacle to speculation,

provoked tears in a stock-cupboard, broken

nights for a woman in two minds; no token

of support being offered from that direction.

Wracked for lack of love and want of a child

at half-term she delivered a premature ghost.

Her pain was real but an emptiness hurt most,

more intense than any sense of being reviled;

so she resisted suggestions she might resign,

met each cycling year of fresh, young faces,

content to put those girls through their paces.

She might even sell the cot and pram in time.

Here, if you can decipher it, is the main spread of that Sunday Pictorial write-up on the fascinating case of Emmimarie Jones and daughter; and her claim, which doctors were unable to disprove, that her baby was indeed "born without a man".

Thanks, as ever, for reading, S ;-)