When Wintering author Katherine May and I caught up a few days before the baby arrived (you can watch our conversation back here), the first thing I spoke to her about was The Watch. I encountered the concept while reading Wintering in that strange, long first winter of lockdown in 2020. At the time, my sleep was unsettled and I’d frequently wake in the velvet depths of the night, my brain active from having been inside all day, my body tired from the relentless nervous toll brought on by the pandemic.

The Watch, May explained, was a barely documented phenomenon that defined the nights of people in a pre-industrial era. When sleeping patterns were defined by the rising and the setting of the sun, people would break their rest into two chunks: one from early evening until the small hours, another from the early morning until dawn. What happened in-between was The Watch: a few hours spent awake and quietly, when people would clean their houses or visit friends, have sex or read books.

When I read about this, I realised that my waking wasn’t a battle with sleep so much as a moment of inky night that people had been familiar with for centuries. Time to think about matters beyond how little sleep one is getting. I began to use this time, variously, for thinking about what I would be writing at the time, or listening to podcasts. I made a rule not to look at my phone, and I still don’t turn the light on and read. If The Watch took place after 4.30am and I was particularly awake, I’d get up, make a pot of tea, and go into the room next door to write. Still, now, more than two years later, we will wake up and talk about whether we had a watch or not.

Over the past two weeks, The Watch has taken on new significance. The baby has fed, variously, between one and five am, often twice. When he stirs, I take him next door - to the room I used to write in - and sit in the chair that my sister fed her sons in. We painted half of the walls red, and a lamp we found for £15 stays on in the corner through the night. I switch it off at the end of the last feed, which arrives with the dawn, and it feels like a new way of marking the morning. For these twilight hours, the room is both timeless and also fully of the night. I take C in there and we go through our little rituals: the changing and the cleaning, the sitting and the feeding, the gentle rocking to try and bring up an ever-elusive pocket of air from his gut. He drifts in and out of sleep, and once he is down we return to the bedroom.

I’d not thought much about these night feeds before the baby came, aside from the fact they would come and steal my sleep. What’s surprised me is how much I enjoy them. The world feels so small and so quiet. We are neither fully awake nor fully asleep, but in some transitional space in-between - not unlike those hours that comprise The Watch. I have been reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall while feeding, and in that drifting half-light the hushed, candlelit dealings of Cardinal Wolseley and Thomas Cromwell seem more vivid than by day.

I can’t shake the sense that this most simplistic and vital of tasks - of feeding and settling a baby in the depths of the night - has punctuated the lives of millions of women for millennia. As the babies stir, we wake when the non-birthing partners beside us don’t, and we undertake The Watch. The hours pass and then the days until it is just us again, in the middle of the night, thinking.