Text 1: Two of everything, including tears, by Lauren Achebe

An original contemporary magazine article.

At our twelve-week scan, the sonographer went quiet, turned the screen towards us and said, ‘Right. Well. There are two.’ My husband laughed so loudly that a nurse put her head round the door. I did not laugh. I asked whether she was sure, and then, absurdly, whether she could check again.

Iris and Ezra were born in March, seven minutes apart, and the first six weeks are a blur in which I remember only fragments. A chart on the fridge, in three colours of felt pen, recording who had fed, when, from which side, and for how long. Waking at four in the morning with no idea which baby I had just put down. Discovering that it is entirely possible to cry and eat toast and change a nappy at the same time.

People are kind to parents of twins, but they are also very curious. In the supermarket, strangers stop the double buggy to look in. ‘Double trouble!’ they say, every single one of them, as if they had just thought of it. ‘Are they identical?’ (One is a boy and one is a girl.) ‘Were they natural?’ (I have learned to smile and walk on.) An elderly man once told me, with great sympathy, that he was glad it was me and not him.

What nobody warned me about was the guilt. With one baby, you can give all of yourself. With two, someone is always waiting. I would feed Iris and listen to Ezra crying in his cot, and feel as if I were failing both of them.

And then, at about ten weeks, something changed. I came in one morning and found them lying side by side, awake, turning their heads to look at each other with total astonishment, as if each had only just noticed that the other existed. Ezra reached out a fist and laid it on his sister’s cheek.

I still do not sleep. But I no longer ask anyone to check again.

Text 2: A letter on the birth of twins, by Martha Linley

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1852, a grandmother writes to her sister about the birth of twins to her daughter Jane.

My dear Harriet, I write in great haste and greater happiness to tell you that Jane was safely delivered on Friday night, and that we have not one grandchild, but two.

Nobody had the least suspicion of it. Dr Morley himself was so astonished that he called for a second basin and stood looking from one infant to the other as though he expected a third. There was but one cradle prepared, and for the first night the two little girls lay in it together, head to foot, while their father walked about the house in his stockings, too happy and too frightened to sit down. At four in the morning I found him standing at the window, saying to himself, ‘Two. Two of them,’ as though he were counting money he had not expected to receive.

I must tell you, however, that we are anxious about the younger. The elder is a fine strong child, who cries lustily and feeds well, but the little one is very small, smaller than any infant I have seen, and so weak that she can scarcely take nourishment. Dr Morley has advised a wet nurse, and a respectable young woman from the village came to us yesterday. We keep the child wrapped in flannel by the fire, and Jane will not let her out of her sight. I have sat up with her these two nights, and every time her breathing changes my own heart stops.

The neighbours have been very kind, and very curious, and we have had more callers in three days than in the whole of last year. Old Mrs Jessop declared that twins were a great blessing and a great burden, and that she did not know which.

They are to be christened on Sunday, privately, for fear of the little one’s health. Jane has chosen Anne and Mary. Pray for the little one, my dear, as I do. Your loving sister, Martha.

Both of these texts are about the arrival of twins in a family.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the arrival of the twins
• how the writers present their thoughts and feelings about this event

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