My very favourite cine-film clip from my childhood is of my mum chasing my sister, Kate, and me around on a place called Pepperbox Hill, in Wiltshire, in the early 1970s. We’re all in minidresses, and she probably sewed the ones Kate and I are wearing. Though the film is silent, you can see we’re laughing and screaming with delight. When my mum catches me, she sweeps me into her arms and kisses my neck. I love that film because it captures pure, simple happiness and defines, in maybe 45 seconds, her love for us.

Nobody else was there when she gave birth to me in December 1968 in my parents’ bedroom. Snow kept the midwife away, and the police and fire brigade arrived 10 minutes after me. She says she laid me on top of her while she waited and stroked my back and said: “It’s all right, baby.” I didn’t cry.

Fast-forward a quarter century — and I’m a mother now. My mum was my birth partner for both my deliveries. It seemed exactly right to me that she should be there. My lovely, distracted, anxious husband, David, was present, of course, and made about 100 cups of tea. But it was my mother who actually helped me. I don’t think she missed a contraction. David called her when my waters broke, and when she arrived, 90 minutes later, I was walking manically from room to room, in pain and panic. She took my hand, smiled and told me I needed to relax. And because she was there, I could. We laboured at home together for 18 hours, united by effort, excitement and growing irritation with the independent midwives my husband and I had chosen.

When it all went horribly, dangerously wrong and I was transferred to hospital, standing up in an ambulance, she came with me, and I remember laughing although I was terrified. When they needed to deliver the baby in an operating theatre, she was shut out in the corridor, relegated by a system that expected a husband in scrubs. She stayed for two weeks, through my uncomfortable recovery, a persistent infection, a humiliating failure to breastfeed. I wanted her to stay for ever.

When I was six months pregnant with my second daughter, my first, Tallulah, then just over a year old, developed septicaemia as a result of a severe strep infection. Her eyes rolled back in her head and the non-blanching rash crept slowly up her legs and arms as she lay limp on the bed at 3am in the on-call doctor’s office. We spent six days in an isolation ward in a London hospital, but the first day — when we didn’t know she would live — was the worst.

Mum came as fast as she could. I was taking deep breaths of fresh air by the hospital doors when the lift from the underground car park opened and she rushed out, white-faced. I remember falling into her arms with relief. She slept at the hospital every night so I could go home and sleep, and held Tallulah on the dreadful night when she pulled out three cannulas and screamed for hours. She made me believe it would be all right. And it was.

Four months later, Mum was helping me bath my new baby, Ottilie. This birth had been wonderful: all over in less than two hours, and I could have gone out dancing afterwards. Tallulah was splashing her hands in the water. Then my newborn stopped breathing. Inhaled, but didn’t exhale. I said so, more in surprise than anything else. “Don’t be silly,” said my mum, in the singsong CBeebies voice she reserved for the babies. “Of course she hasn’t.” I handed over the daughter I had delivered just six days earlier with a child’s confidence — though I was 30 years old — that my mum could fix her. Her “oh my God!” was probably the scariest sound of my whole, charmed life. But she fixed her. She held her in her hands, face down along her arm and slapped her back, and fished around in her mouth, breathed into her, and, eventually, before a doctor could arrive, Ottilie breathed.

I try to never forget that this seeming catalogue of disasters was not, in fact, disastrous. They’re just stories, once a few years have passed. Today I still have two daughters: happy, healthy, infuriating, wonderful girls. Tallulah is 10 and Ottilie 8. And I still have my mum, whose role in both their lives has been so pivotal. She drives me crazy sometimes. I think it is one of the most complicated relationships of my life. It isn’t all like the cine-film on Pepperbox Hill. Real life is not a Hallmark card, any more than it is a Kodak moment. But when I stand at the end of my girls’ beds at night, as I sometimes do after a day of too much crossness and beige food and not enough games and giggles and green vegetables, and silently promise them a better mum tomorrow — one who shouts less and has more time — I know she’s the mum I wish to be.

Things I Want My Daughters to Know (Michael Joseph, £12.99) is out now

By Elizabeth Noble. Photographs: Brian Berman

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