During 1984, when I had continued to discuss mounting a randomized controlled study of social support and pregnancy, one prominent member of the NPEU's advisory board, a paediatrician, had expressed the view that I would never get funding for it: ‘This is nothing to do with whether the study itself is good or bad. The truth is that because of the hybrid nature you will never find a grant-giving body fully capable of understanding the thrust of the proposal.’ When the ESRC's period of funding for the Social Factors and Pregnancy Outcome pilot project came to an end in December 1984, the last baby in the study sample had only just been born, two of the postnatal interviews remained to be done, and the study as a whole still had to be analysed and written up in the form of a final report. In January 1985 I moved from Oxford to a permanent university-funded research post at the Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU) in London. This provided a welcome relief from the uncertainties and repetitive deadlines of a contract researcher's ‘career’, but did not solve the problem of securing funding for the main SSPO study.

The ‘hybrid’ nature of the study was a main cause of the difficulty. But the social support study had followed me to my new place of work, whether I liked it or not. Aside from the unfinished business of the interviewing, data analysis and writing up, the women continued to ring me up. One, Andrea Field, telephoned in January reporting a series of bizarre occurrences mixed with reports of harmful feelings towards her new baby. It eventually transpired that she had just been diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, in the aftermath of a highly stressful pregnancy in which her baby's father had maintained a dramatic and ambivalent double life as husband and father in one family and visiting father-to-be in Andrea's own.