Philip and Maggie with their brood

Philip and Maggie Masson had been married for ten years before their daughter Ellen arrived. Maggie remembers that at the time "I didn't feel I had a maternal bone in my body". Six children later things look quite different...

Philip, who is vicar of the parish of Porthcawl, explains "Nobody expects two sets of twins. There are no twins on my side, and none on my wife's side...having the second set was an unexpected bonus". Maggie recalls that at one time they had four children under two years of age, and all in nappies (and terry nappies at that!).

Philip and Maggie are very much a team, and Philip is able to be very hands-on as a dad because his role as a vicar means that he can arrange his timetable so that he has time for the children. "The work still gets done, it just gets done at odder hours that's all". Inevitably mornings are hectic, and the girls might go out the door every now and then minus underwear, or with their dresses on backwards.

The girls - Angharad, Bethan, Ellen, Ffion and Catrin - agree vociferously that their family is unusual. Ellen, the eldest, does her best to look after her younger sisters, hampered by the fact that they "never listen to her". "I don't like tidying up after them". She is definitely not going to have lots of children when she grows up, she says.

Ellen is now ten, which means she's four years older than the older set of twins. Both Philip and Maggie feel that she is fairly mature for her age. She was two years older than their son Rhys when he died, so she had to cope with his death. Rhys had a condition called Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a degenerative genetic disease, which he eventually died from, aged ten months.

Though their lives are obviously hectic and very full, the death of their son is always with them. Maggie recalls "I didn't want to replace him, because he's obviously irreplaceable, but I desperately wanted another child, though there was a terrible dread that it would happen again". Philip and Maggie underwent genetic counselling, because there was a one in four chance of them having a baby with the same condition. "We'd made decisions about what we'd do if it proved that the baby had the same problem as our son. We'd have just seen the pregnancy through anyway, and perhaps had a child for a short time like we did Rhys".

When they discovered that Maggie was pregnant she had to undergo various tests, which is when they found out they were "blessed with twins". The second time Maggie was pregnant with twins, they were pretty shocked. Maggie cried alot, but when they sat and thought about it all rationally they just gone on with it. Maggie was worried because she couldn't believe "they'd be lucky enough to get away with it again". To have another two babies unaffected by Rhys's condition just seemed to be asking too much, but that's what happened.

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