Not sure if this will amuse or horrify you ... giving birth in an NHS hospital in the mid 1960s.
First, the ante natal clinic. Held in a bleak prefab, with a shed attached as a waiting room. We sat on long wooden benches, clutching our bottles of urine. No magazines, no heating, no anything - we all sat there cowering and worried. A nurse came in and barked at us to take off all our underwear beneath the waist! So we sheepishly removed our knickers and tights (it was the sixties - tights were just wonderful, we thought.) The two girls (first timers, so didn't know the routine, poor things) who were wearing trousers, were mortified. They struggled out of their knickers and put their trousers back on - only later to be bawled out when they entered the inner sanctum and the doctor harangued them for wasting his valuable time for the few seconds it took to get the trousers off.
Ah yes - the doctor. A heavy handed guy, the first 'internal' I'd had. Didn't even look at me, just a case of rough examination and that was it, I was ordered to attend a couple of natal classes at the hospital where I'd be delivered. No suggestion that future baby's father would be welcome at the classes (he wasn't). Classes were frightening. The Sister in charge of the maternity unit was a very fierce lady, who assured us all we would ALL be given an episiotomy as a matter of course, even showed us the scalpels that'd do the deed, and that we'd probably in induced if we didn't look like delivering between nine and five during the day.
a FATHER present during delivery? Never been heard of those days. Fathers were off and out of it. My son's father was playing golf (we since divorced).
When I went into labour, I was given what we all got - a shave and an enema, then a hot bath. I knew my baby was coming fast but the midwives insisted at as a first child, couldn't be. But it was. My little son was born very soon after I was admitted, after I'd wailed that he WAS COMING and finally someone took me seriously. The delivery? I was given gas and air, that didn't do a thing - just before my son appeared, someone said 'oh, the gas and air cannister was empty, fancy that ...' I got a shot of pethidine and apparently threw a bed pan across the delivery room as I didn't like them constantly shoving it under me when I didn't want it.
I was stitched up after birth, by a doctor who looked like a child, and told I was 'numb' so wouldn't feel the embroidery - NOT TRUE!
Everyone spent a week (and occasionally ten days) in hospital after the birth. We had lessons in bathing babies but not, strangely, about getting to grips with breast feeding. You were pretty well left on your own with that. A girl in a bed near me was crying with pain and said she didn't want to breast feed. So the fearsome sister eventually told her that it'd be made sure that her baby would be kept waiting for a feed, crying with hunger, because of her 'selfishness'.
We were also treated like naughty schoolgirls in the ward - IF you were good, you were allowed one night out, back by 9 p.m., during that time with your husband (no-one would admit to not being married).
We were interrogated about bowel movements and also had to abide by a ritual where we had daily to place the sanitary towels that we used after birth on a shelf, each bit marked with our names, so that sister could check that blood loss was within limits. Seemed humiliating but obviously it was in our best interests.
When, after a week, I returned home with my baby son, I, like I'm sure everyone here, thought to myself 'HELP! What do I DO?' Thankfully, he survived and is now a lawyer in his mid forties.