Our first child, Rhiannwen Cari, was born dead.

Her names meant "beautiful princess" and "darling" in Welsh, the language of my ancestors. And she truly was beautiful, too. A cute little button nose, and a full head of dark hair. Delicate features, like her mother.

She got tangled up coming out, they said. Apparently, it happens. About one in a thousand babies either strangle themselves with the umbilical cord, or crush it somehow, either way fatally cutting off their oxygen supply.

After 21 minutes, she was revived. The longest 21 minutes of my life, and far too long, of course, for her, especially when added to the minutes or perhaps hours she had been distressed during the birth.

She struggled on for five days, battling fits that caused her little body to contort and turn painfully, until the kindly, grey-haired doctor with his spectacles permanently askew gently told us that if she lived she would be terribly incapacitated, as her brain had suffered great trauma.

She was so beautiful. Externally, when her body was peaceful, she looked entirely healthy and normal, if you could discount the tubes and wires everywhere. But she had difficulty breathing, would probably have to be fed artificially her whole life, and she was almost certainly blind and deaf. As her consciousness grew, her quality of life would have been appalling. In the end, it was a very easy decision to remove her from the devices keeping her alive, and to hold her while she gently slipped into another world.

Nearly twenty years later, the searing pain of the event has subsided to an ache and a dull sense of opportunity lost, as we watch our second girl proudly and bravely approaching adulthood. But the passage of time has not dimmed my admiration for the staff in the neo-natal unit, and their heroic efforts to save the lives of dozens of tiny babies, and to return them in due course as healthy youngsters to their desperately worried and frequently disbelieving parents. Nothing prepares one for the emotional agonies of a seriously premature birth, or a birth that goes wrong, and the expert nurses working in this area have to handle, with extraordinary tact and care, the terrified parents as well as their tiny charges sleeping fitfully in the humidi-cribs.

It can be very difficult to understand what is happening to one's child, their likely prognosis, and what is being done to help them, especially with the strain of recently having given birth and the shock of everything

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