A bullock-cart, bearing a desperately thin but heavily pregnant woman, her anxious husband and an enormous tin trunk, wound its way laboriously up the steep hillside. The wooden wheels creaked in the great mountain silence as they juddered close to the precipitous edge, sending showers of loose shale into the chasm below. Hours later they reached the cantonment of Landour, over 8,000 feet high up in the Himalayas, and their destination: the American Mission Hospital. The relief was short-lived. The baby had disappeared. A kindly doctor could find no heartbeat. The woman, exhausted, ravaged by TB and having lost two previous babies, could feel that the child inside her no longer stirred. There was nothing the distraught parents could do but pray, the wordless prayer of surrendered anguish. The baby, when she was born, weighed over eight pounds and but for a congenital problem in one eye “She-little-all-cry” was apparently perfectly healthy. Only some thirty years later was it discovered that she too had had TB whilst in the womb. When for the first time I recounted this story of my birth to a friend, the response was: “It must make you feel rather special”.  It did not but, looking back through the prism of the years, it does give me cause to wonder…