Victoria Summerley: City Life

'We all learnt a valuable lesson – you can fit, on average, six baby buggies in the hallway of a Victorian terrace'

For the past 18 years, I've been having an extra-marital relationship. It's a very intimate association and it involves a group and, sometimes, other people's husbands. But before you get too excited, I ought to point out that it's not at all improper. The relationship is with my NCT group.

We all first met almost exactly 18 years ago to the day, complete with maternity leggings and misgivings about childbirth, at the house of our ante-natal teacher, Nina, just off Clapham Common in south London. It wasn't so much car keys in the ashtray as heartburn medicine in the handbag.

NCT stands for National Childbirth Trust, which provides not only ante-natal classes but also a supportive social network for new mothers and mothers-to-be. This month, the charity underwent a rebranding – changing its logo, etc – in a bid to reach out to a wider and younger audience (as typical middle-class Nappy Valley residents, we were all in our mid-thirties when we had our first babies).

However, I'm sure the rebranded NCT will forgive me for saying that its core aims don't seem to have changed very much. There is still an emphasis on giving parents the information that will allow them to have the best possible experience of pregnancy, birth and parenthood.

As someone who went into NCT classes with a kind of Victorian horror of childbirth and came out with enough confidence to tell the registrar where to stick his foetal scalp monitor after seven unsuccessful attempts to attach it to my unborn son's head (the poor little thing eventually emerged looking like a pincushion), I can testify to the success of NCT educational techniques.

But the most valuable thing the NCT gave me was my group. I don't know quite what sort of social meteorological phenomenon bound us all together for all these years. Perhaps it was because we all gave birth in 1990, just as the economy was going belly-up and the world suddenly seemed a much bleaker place after the got-it, flaunt-it Eighties. Perhaps it was because we've supported each other through a series of the sort of seismic emotional upheavals – illness, divorce, redundancy, relocation, loft extensions – that make one cling to one's friends.

Or perhaps it is just that when you've discussed cracked nipples, haemorrhoids and your episiotomy stitches with someone, there isn't much you feel shy about telling them. You learn from them, too. First thing you find out is how many baby buggies you can accommodate in the hall of the average Victorian terraced house. (Six was the record, I seem to recall). Second, that it's a really bad idea to buy a cream sofa until your children have left home. And third, that it's useful to have a member of the group who's Polish, like my friend Dorothy, or an architect, like my friend Frances, who can advise or translate for all of you through the next 10 years of side returns, new bathrooms and builders who come from Bydgoszcz.

This is what is so invaluable about the NCT networking idea (OK, OK, so we lucked out on the Polish and architect bit). It's not just that so many of us live far from our families these days. For lots of us – indeed for women throughout the past 30 or 40 years– the whole experience of parenting is so different from that of our mothers, we might as well have given birth on different planets.

Even today, the plot seems to change every five minutes. You can drink, you can't drink, you must put the baby on its front, you must put the baby on its back. Ask your mother for advice, and she'll probably tell you that in her day, babies were (bottle) fed every four hours and potty-trained by nine months.

A peer group can help you navigate (or ignore) all this bewildering information and if that group is capable of having a bit of a giggle and a couple of bottles of wine or three amid the desperately serious business of becoming a parent for the first time, then so much the better.

In the early days, we met every couple of weeks or so, accoutred with prams, nappy bags and, it goes without saying, the children themselves. Over coffee, in kitchens that ranged from Battersea Bohemian to Clapham Contemporary, these meetings provided an opportunity to compare notes (in an uncompetitive way), receive reassurance and relax in the knowledge that everyone else had leaking breast pads or sick on their shoulders, too.

From weaning and potty training, we have progressed to choosing nursery schools, scrambling into primary schools and praying for a place at secondary schools. Two of the group even Moved To The Country. The meetings have grown less frequent but no less eagerly anticipated. When I meet up with them all next week, we'll be discussing university choices, A-level predictions and loans vs parental handouts. We still hold each other's hands through every London mother's nightmares.

Now that our kids are about to depart for Newcastle, Edinburgh and University College London, will that mean an end to our friendship? I doubt it. We'll probably still be meeting up in Café Rouge every six months when our lot have started going to NCT classes of their own.

Find out more about the NCT at www.nct.org.uk