The Charles Street Telephone

Elizabeth Anne Chen was born at 4:52 am at the Royal Hobart Hospital in Liverpool Street, the first child of Jonathan Chen and Margaret Rose Chen née Thompson. Jonathan, thirty, was a marine biologist on the staff of the University of Tasmania. Margaret, twenty-eight, was a painter. The baby was a healthy girl, and the delivery was uncomplicated. She was delivered by the obstetrician Dr Graham Pruett, with Sister Moira Kenny attending.

Margaret's labour had begun the previous evening at the couple's house in Taroona, a little after seven, while she was cleaning brushes in the sleep-out she used as a studio. The contractions were slow to settle into a pattern, and she waited at home for some hours before telephoning the hospital. Jonathan drove her into the city along the Channel Highway late in the evening, in steady rain, with the windscreen wipers failing on the passenger side for most of the journey.

It was a long first labour, close to fourteen hours from the first contractions to the birth. Jonathan stayed with Margaret through the night. He had brought a book on the population ecology of reef fish, and he did not open it. Sister Kenny sent him twice to the end of the corridor for tea he did not drink. The child arrived without intervention a little before five in the morning, and cried at once.

Her parents had agreed on the name some weeks earlier. She was called Elizabeth for no reason either of them could afterwards remember, and Anne for Margaret's mother, Anne Thompson, a retired primary school teacher in New Town. Margaret's parents came to the hospital at nine with flowers from their own garden.

At a quarter to seven, Jonathan used the public telephone in the hospital foyer to ring his parents in Launceston, who lived above the family greengrocery in Charles Street. His father answered. Elizabeth was the first grandchild of her generation on the Chen side, and the first of the family to be born in Hobart rather than in Launceston. The shop, which had opened at seven o'clock six days a week for as long as anyone in the street could remember, did not open until after nine. By the afternoon Jonathan's parents were on the road south.