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away, as Moscow hospitals do unless you arrive by prior written arrangement, ambulance or with Vladimir Putin in your passenger seat. A local politician had had a heart attack outside one a few months earlier and staggered to the main gate, but rules are rules, security said. You couldn’t just wander in off the street. He turned around, collapsed over the barrier, and headed for the Great Politburo in the Sky.
    I wasn’t about to take no for an answer and they didn’t need a grasp of English to understand my thousand-yard stare and all the cash I had on me. The barrier lifted and I raced past signs that showed a baby and red writing.
    The hospital wasn’t one big building. It was more like a campus, a maze of rectangular dark-brown brick buildings for different disciplines, set in what had probably been intended to look like parkland. But the rural idyll had well and truly gone out of the window. The ground was dry-packed mud, strewn with dog-ends and takeaway wrappers. It was badly tarmacked in places, with tree roots and weeds pushing through the cracked and buckled surface.
    The birth-house block was midway in. I pulled up outside the main doors and ran round to help Anna out. We were greeted by sounds of bedlam. New mothers pleaded and cried from the upper windows; the men below shouted back. Rain started to pepper the mounds of dog-ends, empty beer cans and discarded newspapers that surrounded them.
    I half cradled, half carried Anna to the front of the reception queue. Three women in white coats and badly knitted cardigans sat behind the desk. Their eyes were like prison guards’. One look was enough to tell me that the only way for us to avoid extreme bodily injury was to wait in line while they bollocked the people in front of us.
    Their fellow staff members buzzed back and forth at warp speed, clipboards at the ready. It reminded me of the British Army: walk around with a purposeful look and a clipboard, and everybody thinks you’re doing something important. I knew plenty of lads who criss-crossed camp all day, doing absolutely nothing.
    A couple of guys in doctor’s uniforms – and what looked like half-sized chef’s hats – pushed through a door to our right, and then reappeared some time later in biker’s kit.
    We finally reached the front. Receptionist Number One clearly felt the whole thing was a massive inconvenience, but she filled in the admission forms. An orderly appeared with a wheelchair and began whisking Anna away. I made to follow, but the Gorgons at the desk had other ideas. The scariest of the three pressed a buzzer under the desk and two grey-shirted security guards materialized behind them. I got the drift. No partners allowed. No exceptions. What did I think this was? A private clinic?

5
    15.50 hrs
    I’d been waiting in the main reception for an hour, maybe two. I still knew nothing about what was happening to Anna and was expecting big things from the change of shift. I let the new cardigans and grey shirts settle in for a moment, then went up to the desk and asked if there was any news. Like the last lot, none of them spoke a word of English, and the look they gave me said they wouldn’t have helped me even if they could.
    Anna had warned me about this shit a while back, when I told her there was no point in going private. She said the Russian maternity system was a throwback to Communist days, and in no hurry to join the twenty-first century.
    These ‘birth-houses’ were badly run and badly equipped. Up to eight women at a time gave birth in the same room while one doctor zigzagged between them. The Soviet empire had needed to repopulate after Hitler and his mates had wiped out twenty million of them. Now Russia’s population had dropped another two million in the last ten years. The baby conveyor-belt needed to keep running, without people like me getting in the way.
    Women in labour were treated like prisoners. Pain relief was a luxury. Mobile phones were forbidden. There