Do you know where the cervix is, chaps&;#063;

27 weeks

I am sitting on a sofa in the double aspect lounge of a Bohemian
Streatham flat whose walls are bright orange and adorned with a couple
of huge abstract oils and a poster from a Woody Allen film called
America. H-J is next to me. She is holding my hand, and her thumb is
stroking mine.

My eyes want to devour all the paraphernalia around me, the clip-frame
photos on the walls, the titles on the spines looking across at me from
numerous self-assembled book cases leaning precariously against the
walls, and the artists on the CDs in the bay, which are piled floor to
ceiling between the hi-fi and a wide-screen TV the size of a chest
freezer. But they mustn't. My eyes must not pinch images from this
stranger's room. I am not a guest in this house. I am a paying member
of a National Childbirth Trust ante-natal session. So I must pay
attention to Roxanna, our Romanian teacher, who is kneeling on the
floor at the head of the circle of six couples, and I must listen to
what she has to say. She has interested eyes and a warm smile, and
looks healthy, despite the pallor of her cheeks, highlighted by the
blackness of her hair. It is incredible to believe that she gave birth
to her third child three months ago. She has positioned a laminated
poster of a woman's insides on her thighs and she peeks over the top of
it moving her biro from vital organ to vital organ. 'There's the
vagina,' she says with a pronounced eastern European accent, 'here's
the cervix, uterus, bladder, rectum.' She calls the anus the a-noos,
which I find quite cute.

When she shows us a second poster with the same body and a baby of 30
weeks inside it, we gasp with disbelief at the sheer enormity of the
creature now occupying the uterus. I exchange a horrified look with Ray
who is sitting the other side of me on the sofa.

The twelve of us have stuck sticky labels to our chests so we can all
get to know each other properly. That's how I know Ray's Ray. At the
start of the session, Roxanna asked us all to introduce ourselves and
to tell the class something about our name. That was the first
exercise. It didn't involve physical contact or role-play or revealing
the deepest anxieties of our inner souls. It was ok actually. As we
tried to recall our parents' reasons for their choice, we rather
self-consciously looked down at the word on our chest. It was as if we
needed to remind ourselves of our name.

Apart from Ray, Nigerian, unshaven, goatee, pearl-white smile, named
after the bloke his mum fancied when she was pregnant with him, there
are two Daves, one's a strong silent South African, about 30, the
other's in fact Adrian David and a lot of people call him John. He
works for Lambeth in health and safety but wants to be a writer. He's
about my age, with cigar-shaped sideburns, a goatee and a high-fashion
nylon shirt with browns and greys that clings to his swollen belly when
he stands up. Then there's: Jack, early 40s, bald on top, named after
both grandfathers and an Irish revolutionary; Yusaf, early 30s,
front-combed greying dark hair, glasses. And me.

During the second split-group exercise, as I sat cross-legged in our
boys circle and we chipped in with our thoughts on why it would be nice
for us to be pregnant rather than the women, I realised I liked these
guys. Frankly, I told them, the main reason for me coming to NCT
classes is to make new friends, you know, like-minded guys. Yusaf's
eyes dropped to the floor as I tried to engage them, and I realised I
must have sounded a bit of a loser.

Roxanna's pen is now pointing at the laminated anoos. 'There is a lot
of pressure on the rectum during the birth,' she reveals. 'So if your
partner tells you she needs to have a poo, it may not be a poo that's
coming, it may be the baby!'

Then she gets a doll out of a bag, like a magician reaching for her
next trick. 'This is the size of baby at 30 weeks,' she informs
us.

We all gasp again; it's so big. Next she shows us the final poster. Can
you see the difference, she asks. I can't, until someone says that the
baby's head has moved downwards, then it's obvious.

'We say that the baby has engaged,' Roxanna explains. H-J tells Susan
her shape seems to be the same as the laminated woman with the engaged
baby.

'Maybe I'm due,' Susan laughs.

'Do you need a poo?' I ask. And everyone laughs - except Roxanna.

And I hope I haven't broken one of the ground rules we have agreed as a
group, which is to respect cultural differences within the class, and
seek to identify and engage with each other's core personal values.