On my due date and with no sign of contractions I went for a walk in the park with my mother. I was forty weeks pregnant. We arrived home from the park at about 12.30 (midday) and my Brazilian cleaner opened the door. Shortly afterwards my four year old daughter and Nicaraguan Nanny arrived home. My mother speaks no Spanish or Brazilian, the Nicaraguan Nanny speaks no Brazilian or English and the Brazilian cleaner, speaks no English or Spanish. So there were three women in the house who were unable to communicate with each other. All of a sudden I started to experience strong contractions. My mother called my husband (ironically a Doctor) to tell him that he should start to come home from work and take me to the hospital. At about 12:50am I felt a massive force and knew the baby was coming and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I screamed to my mother ''the baby is coming!" and just had time to pull down my trousers before the baby came out with the waters in my sitting room, like a bullet from a gun. It fell onto my trousers and from the trousers onto the lounge floor. My mother was dumb struck with shock. The Brazilian cleaner ran nextdoor to where our landlady lives and screamed "BABY!". The landlady came running around with her son. He took my daughter into the kitchen. The landlady and my mum were both positioned behind my bare bum (fully exposed throughout the birth to all in my lounge) and my mum asked the landlady: "Who are you?", "I'm the landlady," said the landlady: "Who are you?" "I'm her mum" said my mum. She then asked the landlady to get some scissors and ordered her to cut the umbilical cord which she did!. (My landlady cut my umbilical cord!!!) My mum then ran upstairs for some clothes pegs and came down to peg the cut cord. Meanwhile my mother had taken all the cleaning products from under the sink in the kitchen to get the tub to place my placenta. When my husband finally arrived (and as we had been expecting the plumber that day) and he saw the landlady's son (who he had never met) in the kitchen with all the cleaning products removed from under the sink he presumed he was the plumber!
Two ambulances arrived shortly afterwards one full of women and the second full of men. However they were too late!

When my husband had received the phone call from my mother he had left work casually and went to collect his car parked outside the flat he rents. As he got into the car his tenant called him to say she had locked herself out of the flat and had an hour to get to the airport to fly home to Hungary. Her passport and luggage were locked in the flat. My husband had no spare keys on him so took the tenant back to his work where a colleague had spare keys. I had been trying to call him to tell him what had happend during this time and he finally returned my call to find out his son had already been born.