241 Pizza

“We started off comparing nappies,” says Gina. “Probably in 20 years we’ll be comparing Zimmer frames.” (Another pipes up, “I thought you were going to say nappies for old people, not babies.”)

Jill looks wistful. “Talking about it now makes me realise how quickly it has all gone.”

But why have they stayed together, when others fall by the wayside? In groping for an explanation, one word keeps coming back: “intimacy”. Not the kind of intimacy one of the men, James Clifton, is talking about when he jokes about other babygroups he’s heard of, who’ve swapped partners as well as purée recipes, “all mix and match, husbands and wives”. (“Well, I feel offended now,” ripostes Gina.)

But it’s the “shared intimacy” of seeing each other at their most exposed, scared and vulnerable, almost like babies themselves. Yes, they only had “one thing in common”, as James says, but that one thing was one of the most important.

In 1960, an article in The Guardian, entitled “Squeezed in like sardines in suburbia”, bemoaned the isolation of stay-at-home wives. This led to the establishment of the National Housewives’ Register, whose membership peaked in the early Eighties, then fell away. The organisation had been eclipsed by an explosion of babygroups, with their online equivalent in the form of websites like Mumsnet and thousands of local parenting bulletin boards. But this new phenomenon says as much about our society as the desperate housewife of the Sixties turning to the Housewives’ Register.

A few miles away from the Italiaanders’ living room, a new babygroup has begun, their children now two-and-a-half-years old. As one of them, Sallyanne Greenwood, says, her own mother marvels at the opportunities she has to get out of the house with a small child. “My mother didn’t have babygroups. She says she met people at the doctors’ weigh-in clinic, if she was lucky.”

But in the course of a generation, the pressures on women have changed. Sallyanne, 33, wasn’t isolated because she didn’t have a job, but because she did. Like so many women, she worked long hours far from home, in her case as a beauty therapist in the City, while living on the other side of London. Her family were hundreds of miles away. She woke up a few days after having the baby, and realised that, despite having lived in her neighbourhood for six years, she was not only a virtual stranger, but, due to the electronic tagging effect of a newborn, virtually housebound, too. Couldn’t she turn to her existing friends? No – they were scattered across the country, working, and mostly did not have children.

Philippa Hopcroft, 33, an Oxford academic turned IT consultant, felt the same. She grew up in the Belgian countryside, “in a farming village, where you just wouldn’t have thought of joining a babygroup as you had that community feeling already. In London, there’s nothing.”

For a few months after her baby was born, Philippa “felt totally isolated”, until she got back in touch with Sallyanne and her antenatal group and they “sat in Starbucks and moaned about how uncomfortable we felt”. The group has met at least once a week since: I joined them in a local playground, where children toddle between adults to be doled out wipes and raisins as naturally as if they were siblings.

Are they just together because of their children? “No,” says Philippa, “it’s not enough.”

But they also wonder if there was something a little less than random in the make-up of the group. They were, after all, drawn from the same leafy suburb, and clued-up enough to pay to join the same ante-natal class. The National Childbirth Trust often, and unsuccessfully, tries to shake off its image as a way for middle-class women to find each other.

“I thought it was just a coincidence that we all got on so well, but then we are mostly a certain type of person…” says Sallyanne.

Times recommends

• How I lost the gift of joy for a while
• How to get Coleen Rooney's post-baby body
• The A-Z of winter style rules