The Lost Privacy Of The Parents of Quintuplets

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19373, 10 July 1937, Page 9

The Lost Privacy Of The Parents of Quintuplets

THF. announcement on the title-page * that “1 Would Be Private" is a novel will not lead Rose Macaulays readers to expect in if the usual ingredients of a novel. Having read her ‘‘Keeping up Appearances." “Staying With Relations,” and many others, they will look for the cynical truths and subtle humour that finds such effective utterance in the mouths of the least cynical or subtle people! The privacy of Robert Mcßrown, a young London policeman, was lost for over when he came off duty one evening and went home lo find that bis wife bad produced quintuplets. Not even his ultimate llight with his famil v to a distant island was to restore that privacy to him. “Well. Mr. Mcßrown, I hope you and your young woman arc proud of yourselves, adding five to the British Empire at one go," the doctor congratulated him. But Ronald Mcßrown. once more on duty, found little comfort in what he had done for his Empire. Pacing the streets, lie was thankful the people did not know he had become so singular a policeman. A Cautious Policeman To return home and find the way lo .Ms own door barred by reporters and women who had brought camp stools, determined to wait until their curiosity was satisfied, did nothing to lessen his regret. To such pleadings as: “Can you give me your own story of what it feels like to be the father of quins?”, lie merely replied, “Move along, please. You’re loitering so as to cause an obstruction."

Policemen need no caution. They know already that anything they say may be used against them. Yet, despite such caution, Constable McBrown read in the papers next morning, “Happy father says, ‘I am the proudest officer in the Force tonight. I can't think how we did it.’' Meanwhile the quins had been taken in what very much resembled eggboxes to a clinic, and at Paradise Buildings, Mnrylebonc, every conceivable kind of present for the babies began lo arrive—clothes, postal orders (two-thirds of them still negotiable), cheques (nearly half of them valid), countless letters, and many other testimonies to the esteem in which infants who contrive to be bom live at once are justly held by the British Empire. Eight hundred and fifty-seven adoption offers were received, hut the parents, if they had not been able to welcome Die quins' arrival, at least had no intention of parting with any one of their own flesh and blood Their one idea was to leave England.

And so the Mcßrown family and an extraordinarily assorted retinue set out for the island of Papagayo. Alas for their hopes. The first sight of the perambulator, “oddly and excessively fraught with infants,” brought the inhabitants of Papagayo in swarms. The news spread across the water. The quins were as famous as ever. Of the vain endeavours of the parents to secure the longed-for privacy, the midnight transportation of their family to an uninhabited adjacent island, and their eventual acceptance of the inevitable—that they must forever remain objects of public curiosity -—is entertaining reading.