My breasts are becoming a more common sight on the train than ticket inspectors. To date I have breastfed in the library, in the window seat of at least three cafes, on a sofa outside the men’s toilet (comfiest place to sit available), in front of the postman, on the bus, in a pub, on a park bench in the frost, during therapy, standing up at an exhibition, on the tube, at a private members’ club and sitting on a log in the middle of Epping Forest.
I’m not an exhibitionist and my breasts have never been much to write home about. But after years of stripping off in the cold light of day to swim outdoors, combined with a somewhat lackadaisical attitude to sterilising, not to mention, oh I don’t know, the fairly essential need to keep my child alive, I have precisely zero qualms about getting my pink and lightly-chewed nipples out wherever I need to these days. And here’s the bit you’re probably not expecting – people are great about it.
When my baby was just four weeks old, a man on the bus with very few teeth and a somewhat deflated padded jacket smiled, helped put my baby’s hat on straight as I fed and then gave me a Korean red ginseng sweet that tasted like old soil, saying it would be good for my health. I mean, the sweet tasted of pure soil and I waited for him to eat one first just to check it wasn’t soil, but it was so kind and he was so easygoing that I nigh-on welled up.
As I breastfed by the entrance to my local library a lovely woman with spectacles dancing on the end of a gold neck chain and frost-coloured highlights in her hair came over, gave me a conspiratorial wink and said: “I got told off for doing that in John Lewis once. Thank God things have changed.” When I walked into a cafe at the top of my road, a beetroot-faced and screaming baby on my shoulder, the woman behind the counter rushed over, put me in a seat, brought me over a pint of tap water and ordered me to feed my baby before worrying about the menu.
I am lucky, I know, to live in London – a city of immigrants, blow-ins, the young and busy. These people bring to my breasts their own cultural associations, usually far more positive than the sort of pink-faced, leaf-blower-shouting you often hear from older British white men about how the sight of 4cm of naked maternal breast ruined a perfectly good pint of Speckled Dick down at The Dog and Todger. More often than not, people just ignore me. Carry on frantically WhatsApping their lover, talking to their mates, swiping cartoon sweets on tiny glowing screens or applying their makeup.
It is 36 years since Harriet Harman breastfed her daughter in the House of Commons – an event that got passed down to me by my own mother like antibodies against the patriarchy. And yet there lingers, a very real fear among women, even new mothers, of taking up room. Of “imposing” the breathing, moving, eating, shitting reality of human life upon innocent bystanders; on “real” people.
The feeling that we should leave any social space the moment our baby makes a noise is hard to shift, even for such a hardened nipple-airer as me. Unless you’re in one of the brilliant breastfeeding cafes run by a local council – that are now, of course, being destroyed by the government’s funding cuts and Jeremy Hunt’s mismanagement of health and social care – the pressure to go and stand out in the cold, on a hard pavement, trying to dodge the smokers and dogs, to bounce, rock or sing your baby back to silent passivity can be enormous.
Don’t give in. Whether you’re breastfeeding, bottle-feeding or both; feed your baby. Feed them anywhere and everywhere. Do it for your baby, do it for yourself but also, if you don’t mind, do it for women like me, because the more of us there are, the easier it becomes.
And if you’re not a mother, be supportive anyway. A friend in Liverpool told me that the other day, as she fed her baby in a cafe, another woman – a perfect stranger – walked over and gave her a card that said well done for breastfeeding in public. She told my friend to pass it on to the next breastfeeding woman she saw. If you see a woman feeding a baby in public make her feel welcome; give her a nod of encouragement, get her a glass of water, ask her if she needs anything and for God’s sake give her a seat. It doesn’t take much but it means a lot.
Now I’ve got that off my chest, I’m off to get my chest out on the train again.
• Nell Frizzell is a freelance journalist
