I was breastfeeding my 5-month-old baby on a plane when the woman sitting next to me yelled, "You should be ashamed of yourself! Go lock yourself in the bathroom!" — then my older daughter taught her a lesson she never expected.
I was breastfeeding my 5-month-old baby on a plane when the woman sitting next to me yelled, "You should be ashamed of yourself! Go lock yourself in the bathroom!" — then my older daughter taught her a lesson she never expected.
I buried my husband on the twenty-fourth of April.
Nial was thirty-five. He got a headache on the Friday night that he described to me as "a strange one," and by Monday afternoon he was gone, and the words on the paperwork are aortic dissection, and there is nothing anybody could have done and I have been told that by four separate doctors and it has never once helped.
Our son Frey was four months old. Our daughter Hattie was eight.
For five weeks after the funeral I did not function. I want to be accurate rather than dramatic: I fed a baby and I got a child to school and I did not do one other thing. There were plates.
So when my mother rang at the end of May and said come and stay, come to Kesterling for three weeks, let me do it for a bit — I said yes.
The flight was the twenty-ninth of May. Nine fifty-five in the morning, Harrow Point to Kesterling, six hours.
I booked it eleven days out on my phone at two in the morning because that is when I do things now, and the plane was full, and I could not get three seats together.
I got 22B and 23B. One behind the other.
So my eight-year-old sat one row behind me on her own, which I felt terrible about, and which she was thrilled by.
I had Frey on my lap in the middle seat of 22, and next to me, in the aisle seat, was a woman of about fifty-five in a good jacket.
She was annoyed before we pushed back.
She looked at the baby, then at me, then back at the baby, and she said — before we had left the gate, before he had made one single sound —
"If that starts screaming, I'm not sitting here listening to it. I'm warning you now. You'll have to do something."
I said something apologetic. I don't remember what.
Frey slept for the first two and a half hours, which is the longest stretch that child has ever slept in his life and which I will be bitter about forever.
Then, somewhere over the middle of the country, he woke up and started crying.
I did the whole routine. Standing in the aisle with him, walking to the galley and back, the pacifier, the rocking, the shushing.
He was hungry. He is five months old. That is what it was.
So I sat down, got the cover out of the bag, put it on, and started feeding him.
And the woman in the aisle seat said, loudly enough that I watched three rows of heads turn:
"Oh my God. I paid for this seat. I've already had to listen to it screaming and now I have to sit here and watch this? Have some shame."
I did the thing I have done my whole life and which I have thought about a great deal since.
I smiled at her. Apologetically. And I said, "I'm sorry. He's hungry, I just need to feed him."
She rolled her eyes and said:
"People with babies like that should stay at home. What sort of mother can't even keep her own child quiet?"
What sort of mother.
I felt my whole face go hot. I could feel people looking. A man in 21C had turned right round in his seat.
And I apologised again.
That's the part I want to sit in for a second, because it is the part that is actually about me and not about her.
I apologised twice, in the space of about ninety seconds, to a woman who was shouting at me for feeding a baby.
Five weeks after burying my husband, on a plane, holding a child who had never met his father, I said sorry twice to a stranger for existing in a seat I had paid for.
I have been apologising since the twenty-fourth of April. To the funeral director. To Nial's mother. To Hattie's teacher. To people who cross the road to avoid me because they don't know what to say.
I said, "I'm sorry, but he can't go six hours without eating."
And she gasped. Actually gasped, theatrically, and said:
"Then go and lock yourself in the toilet and do it in there. Why should I have to sit here and watch that? Have some shame."
And a girl's voice from behind my shoulder said:
"Mum. Do you want my seat?"
Hattie was standing in the aisle by row 23.
She'd unbuckled and come round the side. She had her tablet under her arm.
And she said, in a completely level voice, to the woman and not to me:
"You can have my seat, Mum. I'll sit here so this lady doesn't have to feel uncomfortable."
I want to be honest that I did not read that correctly.
I thought she was being sweet. I thought my eight-year-old was offering me an escape, and I was so grateful and so wrung out that I took it.
We swapped. I got Frey and the bag and the cover into 23B with about the dignity of a bin bag, and Hattie climbed into 22B next to that woman and did her belt up.
And I sat down behind them and finished feeding my son with my hands shaking.
From 23B I could see the back of my daughter's head and about a third of the woman's face.
I saw Hattie open the tablet on her tray table.
I saw her turn it slightly so the woman could see the screen.
I heard about six words, not clearly.
And then the woman in 22C made a sound — a proper sound, from the chest — and stood up so fast she hit her head on the overhead locker, and she got out into the aisle and half ran up toward the galley.
Every head in the back half of that cabin turned.
I want to tell you what I thought had happened, because I was wrong about every part of it.
I thought my eight-year-old had done something horrible and clever. I thought she'd found a photograph of a spider, or made a face, or written something, and that some sort of poetic justice had just occurred at thirty-five thousand feet.
Some part of me — I'm not proud of it — was pleased.
I leaned forward and said, "Hattie. What did you show her?"
And my daughter turned round in her seat with her face completely white and said:
"I don't know why she did that. I only showed her Dad."
Hattie made a slideshow in April.
Her aunt Sabine helped her with it, on that tablet, between the eighteenth and the twenty-second, for the funeral. It played on a screen at the crematorium.
Sixty-one photographs, in order, from 2016 to March of this year.
Nial at twenty-six. Nial and me on a beach in 2017 with Hattie about the size of a loaf. Nial asleep on a sofa with a two-year-old on his chest. Nial holding Frey in a hospital chair in December, eleven days old.
And photo number eleven, which Hattie chose herself and would not let anybody take out, is from the tenth of April.
It's him in the hospital bed with the mask on. Hattie is on the chair beside him. It's a bad photograph, badly lit, taken by a nurse on my phone.
She kept it in because — and she said this to Sabine, at eight years old, and Sabine had to leave the room —
"It's the last one where he's awake."
That's what she showed her.
She sat down next to a woman who had been shouting at her mother for feeding a baby, and she opened the slideshow, and — this is Hattie's account, given to me at about the fifth hour of that flight, and confirmed almost word for word by the woman two hours later —
she said:
"This is my dad. He died five weeks ago. My mum hasn't been sleeping and my brother won't take a bottle from anyone except her. So please can you stop shouting at her."
And then she started scrolling.
She was not being cruel. I need that understood. She was eight years old and she had one thing on her that she believed was important, and she used it.
She got to about the eighth photograph.
And the woman in 22C got up and went to the galley and stayed there for twenty-two minutes.
Her name is Danica Poole.
She is fifty-four and she came back to that seat at about the four-hour mark and she sat down and did not say anything for a while.
Then she said, to Hattie: "I'm sorry."
And then she turned round in her seat and said it to me, over the headrest, in front of about eleven people who were all still very interested.
And then she told us why she'd run, and she did it in about four sentences, and she did not dress any of it up.
She had been drinking since twenty to nine that morning. In the bar at Harrow Point, before the gate. She had had three, and then two more on board in the first ninety minutes, which is why I hadn't clocked it — she'd been ordering them one at a time and I was busy.
That's the first part. The shouting was a woman five drinks in at eleven in the morning.
The second part is why.
Danica has a daughter called Rowena. Rowena is twenty-nine and she lives in Kesterling and she has a son called Bo who is fourteen months old.
Danica and Rowena had not spoken since 2019.
She did not tell us what the falling out was and she does not owe anybody that.
What she told us is that in March, Rowena had written to her. And that after ten weeks of back and forth she had been invited to come and stay for four days and meet a grandson she had never met, and that the flight she was on was that flight.
She said, "I've been trying to get on that plane for six years and I got to the airport two hours early and went straight to the bar."
She was terrified.
And she sat down next to a woman with two children and a baby who wouldn't settle, and she was five drinks into being terrified, and she was as unkind as she has ever been in her life to a stranger.
Then an eight-year-old sat down beside her and showed her sixty-one photographs of a family with a father in them, in order, ending in a hospital bed.
She got to photo eight and had to get up.
She said — and this is the sentence, and I have thought about it every week since —
"I've spent six years telling myself she's fine. That she's got a family and she doesn't need me. And then that child showed me what actually happens to a family."
She was in the galley for twenty-two minutes and she was sick and then she stood in there with a cup of water.
The purser is called Neve and she is about sixty and she had already been down to us twice during the shouting and offered to move Ms Poole, and Ms Poole had refused both times because — she said this herself — moving would have meant admitting.
Neve stood with her in that galley for the whole twenty-two minutes and did not say anything at all, which Neve later told me is about ninety percent of that job.
Here's what the rest of that flight was like.
Danica Poole held my son for forty minutes.
I want to be careful about how I write that, because it sounds like a redemption scene and it wasn't. It was much more awkward than that.
She asked. She said, "Would it help if I held him while you eat something," and I said no automatically, and she said, "Right, of course," and then about ten minutes later I said, "Actually, yes."
Because I had not eaten anything since a piece of toast at six in the morning and I was so tired I was seeing edges.
So a woman who had told me to feed my baby in a toilet sat with him against her shoulder for forty minutes while I ate a plane meal with both hands, which I had not done since April.
She was extremely good with him. She's had a baby.
And she and Hattie talked. For about an hour and a half, all the way in, about absolutely nothing — school, a game on the tablet, a long thing about a dog Danica used to have.
I dozed for about twenty minutes, which is the only sleep I got that entire month, in a plane seat, with my daughter sitting next to a stranger who had been screaming at me four hours earlier.
At the gate she gave Hattie a piece of paper with her name and email on it and said, "If you ever want to tell me anything about your dad, I'd like to hear it."
Hattie wrote to her in July. About seven lines. She got four paragraphs back.
That has happened maybe six times since. It is, I think, the strangest and most useful thing to come out of any of this.
Now, the part I actually want to say, which is not about Danica Poole at all.
I apologised twice.
I have gone over that flight roughly four hundred times and that is what I keep landing on. Not what she said. What I said.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry, he's hungry. I'm sorry, but he can't go six hours.
I was thirty-two years old. My husband had been dead for thirty-five days. I was feeding a five-month-old on an aeroplane, under a cover, in a seat I had paid four hundred and ten dollars for.
And I apologised to a woman who was shouting at me for it. Twice.
And my eight-year-old, one row back, listened to her mother do that.
And she did not accept it.
That's the whole thing. That's the actual story and it took me about four months and a counsellor called Odele Trask to see it properly.
Hattie did not defend me because she is unusually brave. She's a normal eight-year-old; she is frightened of the dark and of one particular boy at her school.
She did it because at eight years old she has not yet learned the thing I learned somewhere around twenty-four, which is that when somebody is being awful to you in public, the correct move is to make yourself smaller and get through it.
She hasn't been taught that yet.
And watching my mother do it in front of her, on a plane, is one of the ways children get taught it.
Odele put it to me in September in a way I did not enjoy at all. She said: your daughter got out of her seat because she was watching the lesson being delivered and she rejected it.
I have thought about that every single day since.
Some other things.
We stayed at my mother's for three weeks and it turned into seven, and I have never been more glad of anything.
My mother did the nights. All of them. For seven weeks a sixty-six-year-old woman got up to a bottle at two and four in the morning so that her daughter could sleep, and I did not say thank you properly until August and then I said it badly.
Frey is fourteen months old now. He is enormous and cheerful and he does not know anything.
That is the thing about the youngest one that catches me sideways. He will never miss Nial. He will only ever have the absence, which is a different thing, and which I do not know how to prepare him for.
Hattie is nine. She sees a bereavement counsellor once a fortnight and has since June.
She talks about her dad constantly, out loud, at dinner, in shops, to strangers. The counsellor says this is exactly right and that the ones who worry her are the quiet ones.
The slideshow is still on that tablet. She has added four photographs since April — old ones she found in a box at my mother's, from before she was born.
Sixty-five now.
And she has shown it to a number of people who did not ask, including a dental receptionist, which I found out about afterward.
I have stopped stopping her.
Danica Poole met her grandson on the twenty-ninth of May, 2025, about ninety minutes after we landed.
She wrote to Hattie about it in July, and Hattie read it out to me at the kitchen table, and there is a line in it I asked her to read twice.
I nearly didn't get off that plane. I sat there after everyone else had gone and the crew were waiting. And then I thought about your dad in that photograph and I got up.
Two things happened on that flight and only one of them is a good story.
The good story is a woman who shouted at a widow being handed a slideshow by an eight-year-old and getting up and running to the galley.
The other one is that a thirty-two-year-old woman apologised twice for feeding her own baby, in front of her daughter, and would have apologised a third time if she'd been asked to.
I don't apologise anymore. Not for that.
It took eight months, it took Odele Trask, and honestly it mostly took the memory of the back of my daughter's head in seat 22B.
But somebody sighed at me in a queue in the supermarket in February, at the self-checkout, with Frey on my hip.
And I looked at him and I said, "Sorry?" — not the apology one. The other one.
And he found something else to look at.
Hattie was standing right there.
She didn't say anything. She just put her hand in my coat pocket, which is a thing she has done since she was three.
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But she'd heard it. I know she'd heard it, because in the car she said, out of nowhere, about four minutes later:
"You said it in the good way."
