The Midwife's Here!: The Enchanting True Story of One of Britain's Longest Serving Midwives (10 page)

‘Poor Cynthia,’ said Linda, who had blanched. ‘Why do people have to get ill?’

Nobody had an answer, and I knew Linda well enough to realise her question was as much about her mum’s cancer as it was about Cynthia. I knew her mum’s condition was deteriorating, and that Linda was very worried about her.

I went to bed that night with Linda’s words pressing on my mind: why do people have to get ill? It was a question without an answer, and one that made me feel all the more grateful for my placement at St Mary’s, where the days were filled with new life rather than sickness and death. Perhaps Jo was right. Perhaps I had found my vocation, working at the maternity hospital. I wasn’t quite sure about being an obstetric nurse as I didn’t know much about the job at that stage, but I certainly
wanted to find out more. I fell asleep looking forward to climbing into the taxi the next day, travelling into the beating heart of the city and taking care of all those tiny little babies and their mums.

‘I’m happy to see you’re working so well here at St Mary’s,’ Sister Rose said one morning as I reported for duty. She had a small transistor radio on her desk, and I could just make out the DJ announcing the Rolling Stones’ new single, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’. As the record crackled onto the airways I couldn’t help tuning in, and I inadvertently tapped my foot in time to the music.

Sister Rose switched off the radio instantly and gave me a stern look, as if to say, ‘Let’s not be having any of that here.’

‘As I was saying,’ she went on firmly, ‘I want you to know that if you continue in the same vein I shall be giving you an excellent report to take back to the MRI. I believe you have the makings of a very good obstetric nurse.’

I felt myself blush. I hadn’t expected such a compliment. I still had more than a year to go before I even qualified as a nurse, let alone made any decisions about my future career. I had been telling myself to take things steadily, take my time and weigh up my options carefully, but my reaction to Sister Rose’s compliment made me realise how much this placement meant to me. I was invigorated by her words. I wanted to excel here, because I was starting to believe it was the gateway to my future.

‘If you would like to broaden your horizons, I can arrange for you to observe a delivery,’ Sister Rose proposed.

‘Oh, yes please!’ I said enthusiastically. ‘I should like that very much.’

‘Excellent! Please attend to the milk kitchen this morning, and I will see what I can do.’

I loved the milk kitchen. Making up the feeds made me feel very useful, and even though this seemingly mundane task was assigned to me every day I always took the utmost care in sterilising the bottles and measuring out the powdered milk.

The very first time I held a baby, one of the other midwives showed me how to tilt the bottle at just the right angle so as not to allow the newborn to gulp air. The tiny boy, who was no more than a few hours old, attached his rosebud lips greedily to the teat and sucked contentedly. I was captivated. It was an honour to be feeding a brand new baby, feeling his warmth against me and smelling the sweetness of his delicate head. I had a perfect little life in my hands.

‘Makes your heart melt, doesn’t it?’ the midwife said, seeing the enthralled expression on my face.

‘Yes, it does!’ I replied. ‘That’s exactly the right phrase. I could get used to this!’

The milk kitchen was housed in a side room just off the ward, and each day I would boil water in a giant-sized metal kettle while I washed the glass bottles and rinsed out the brown rubber teats that needed to be stretched over the top of them. All the equipment then had to be placed in a cage and lowered into a large metal steriliser unit, which hissed and boiled and spat. Meanwhile, I measured out the boiled water and carefully counted each spoonful of dried milk powder into
a large stainless steel jug and mixed it up with a sterilised spoon. Retrieving the bottles was always slightly unnerving, as they had to be hooked out of the steriliser cage with small forceps, taking care to tip out any drops of water, lest they would splatter your uniform or burn your hands.

Pouring the yellow-tinted liquid into the bottles was an exact science. I would typically make up two dozen batches of two-ounce and four-ounce feeds, as that was about as much as the tiny mites could manage in one sitting. I’d been shown how to squeeze a few drips of milk onto the inside of my wrist to check it was not too hot, and once the correct temperature was reached I was able to distribute the bottles around the ward, leaving one at the end of each bed ready for the babies to be woken and fed, always at exactly the same time.

Occasionally, if there were some milk left over, I would hide away in the kitchen and discreetly have a little drink of it myself. I liked the sweet taste, and it helped keep my energy levels up.

‘Have you saved enough for my Tommy?’ one friendly patient, Rosemary, asked me one day.

‘Pardon?’ I replied, flustered.

She looked at my mouth and gestured for me to wipe around my lips.

‘Oh!’ I exclaimed, feeling extremely embarrassed.

‘It don’t bother me!’ she chuckled. ‘Don’t expect Sister would be best pleased, though!’

I enjoyed chatting to the women. There was something magical about being involved in their lives at such a momentous time. Despite being tired out after giving birth, they were nearly always in good spirits and their shared experience created an open and friendly atmosphere on the ward.

Funnily enough, conversations were hardly ever about babies. The new mothers cooed over them and admired each other’s newborns, of course, but the women didn’t obsess about potential ailments, pre-school provision and the pros and cons of certain foods as they tend to do today. Instead, they talked about the latest episode of
The Prisoner
or
Coronation Street
they’d seen on telly, swapped crochet patterns for matinée jackets and booties and bickered over whether Tom Jones was more of a dish than Elvis.

When their families visited, proud new dads and excited siblings would stick their noses excitedly into the hammock cot beside the bed, and then the kids would exhaust the mother with a million and one questions. ‘Have we got enough tokens off the marmalade to send off for a Golly badge?’ ‘Where’s the new lace for my football?’ ‘
Please
can we get the cornflakes with the toy in the bottom of the packet?’

The only time most married women stayed away from their husbands and children was when they were in hospital after giving birth, and it was touching to see their presence at home was clearly missed.

‘Will I be able to wear my roller skates when we take the baby out in the new pram?’ or ‘Can we make a go-cart out of the old pram?’ were questions I heard more than once, along with the old chestnut from the dads: ‘Is it OK if Mrs So-and-so takes in our washing, only I can’t figure out how the twin tub works …?’

I enjoyed the daily routine on the ward. Once the bottles were made, I might help another midwife with douching the patients, which I learned was simply washing between their legs. I admired the midwives for the way they managed this task so efficiently, never compromising a woman’s comfort or
dignity. Their skill seemed to strip away any embarrassment I’d imagined such a job might entail.

Next it would be time to change and bathe the babies. The square cloths used to make up the terry nappies arrived in stiff piles from the hospital laundry each morning. They smelled so strongly of Ajax laundry detergent they made my nostrils tingle, but at least there was never any doubt about their cleanliness. They were always pristine and spotless.

I was taught how to gently wash the baby down with warm water and cotton wool and apply a generous coating of zinc and castor oil cream to the bottom to ward off nappy rash, before folding the cloth into a neat nappy.

Little girls, I learned, were best placed in kite-shaped nappies, where you folded the top down and then the side in, while little boys stayed drier in triangle-shaped nappies with more padding at the front. I tried to use the metal safety pins with pink guard covers for girls and save the blue ones for boys, as it was the only way of distinguishing between the sexes once the babies were dressed in their NHS nighties. Nobody brought their own baby clothes into hospital in those days, so it was regulation white cotton nighties all round. Dirty nappies, mercifully, were dumped straight in the wash bin and sent off to be dealt with by the laundry.

It only took me a few weeks to become an expert at bathing babies, and to be able to show new mums how to do it.

‘Wish I could take ye home with me, Nurse,’ a new mum said to me one day as I gave her a demonstration in the nursery, where we had a special, low porcelain sink for bathing the babies.

Her compliment thrilled me. Inside, I felt like such an amateur, so young and inexperienced, yet somehow I must
have looked competent as I gently lowered her wriggling baby into the water, taking care to hold the little girl under her arms and keep her face out of the water.

‘You’ll be fine,’ I reassured the woman. She was probably only a year or two older than me, as most women started their families in their early to mid twenties back then, and I was flattered to see she was hanging on my every word.

‘Practice makes perfect. You just need to test the water temperature with your elbow to make sure it is not too hot or too cold, and make sure you have a steady grip on your baby. Here, come and try.’

It was an honour to witness special moments like that. Many of the mums came from the most poverty-stricken areas spread around the city. They wore poor-quality nightdresses, often had a sneaky drag on a cigarette when Sister wasn’t looking, and many cussed routinely in their strong Manchester accents. Whatever their background, I found that the vast majority had the manners of a princess. They would thank me kindly for everything I did, tell me I was an angel and beam at me with gratitude when I made my way round the ward checking temperatures and pulses, or delivering mugs of Horlicks before lights out.

I didn’t do many night shifts at St Mary’s, but I found myself looking forward to being on the ward after dark. Lights out was strictly at 10 p.m., and the night sister would discourage the new mothers from getting up unless they had a very good reason. Usually I was sent into the nursery, where all the babies were taken to give their mothers a chance to sleep soundly. Sometimes I had a baby in my arms and would be rocking one or two others in cribs, using my feet.

‘What a racket!’ the night sister often exclaimed when the babies were grizzling and fighting sleep. I didn’t like to hear them cry, but the noise didn’t offend me. I enjoyed cuddling the babies, however noisy they were. I found it very rewarding to soothe them with a gentle ‘sh-sh-sh’ as their fidgety little bodies and fragile, flailing limbs gradually turned to heavy, sleeping weights in my arms.

It was warm in the nursery, and there was always a pleasant, convivial atmosphere. In the end, I often couldn’t hear the crying, I got so used to it. I’d sit and look out the window and watch amorous couples walking arm and arm into the Ritz or the Palace, amusing myself with thoughts of what the future held for them. Would they have babies, and would they look out of the window of St Mary’s one day and say, ‘Oooh, I remember going to the Ritz back in the spring of 1968 …’?

‘Eee, will you look at this funny baby,’ the midwives would giggle to each other from time to time. ‘Only a mother could love it!’

It was gentle banter to pass the time and lighten the atmosphere, nothing more. The midwives all seemed to enjoy their work, and the chit-chat flowed easily amid the chorus of newborn cries and snuffles.

Once, I heard some older midwives whispering about a ‘termination’ case. I never joined in conversations like that, as I could tell when they wanted to keep something hush-hush and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. However, I picked up that a young girl without a baby was occupying bed eleven on the ward. She had been sent here to rest following her operation, I gathered, because there was nowhere else for her to go. The curtain was closed tightly around her bed, which
was understandable. I thought how terrible it must be for her to hear newborn babies all around, not to mention the proud new mothers chatting happily away to each other.

Abortion was something very new for the midwives to contend with, as it had only recently been legalised and was now offered free on the NHS. The Abortion Act of 1967 came into effect on 27 April 1968, after initially being introduced as a Private Member’s Bill by David Steel. I had followed the news with interest as the bill passed through Parliament, not realising how close I would come to the reality of it all. I learned that most women in this situation were cared for on a gynaecology ward at the MRI rather than at the maternity hospital, although a minority had started to trickle through to St Mary’s.

‘The cut-off points all seem a bit arbitrary,’ one midwife lamented. She was referring to the fact that unless there were extreme circumstances abortions were only carried out on the NHS up to fourteen weeks, and yet a foetus was not considered viable until it was twenty-eight weeks old. This meant that if a woman delivered prematurely prior to twenty-eight weeks, doctors and midwives were not encouraged to attempt resuscitation if there were no signs of life.

‘I know what you mean,’ another, much older, midwife replied. ‘I think twenty-eight weeks is about right, but then again we all know how well formed a foetus is just before twenty-eight weeks. It’s a tough call deciding when a baby is a baby and not a foetus.’

A low hum of agreement went round the little nursery. I could feel tension in the air and could tell the midwives were not entirely comfortable with this topic. Delivering babies was their role, not this.

‘But at least this Act is a step in the right direction,’ the older midwife ploughed on. ‘It’s better to make abortion legal than force these poor girls into back-street clinics. Believe me, I’ve known some terrible cases. The NHS is much better off picking up the bill for terminations than forking out to put these poor women back together again after they’ve been butchered.’

The word ‘butchered’ made me shudder, and I felt very glad that, thanks to the new law, the girl in bed eleven was being cared for by professionals in her time of need, rather than having to go to a back-street clinic.

Even when opinions ran high the midwives didn’t appear to judge any of the patients, though one or two seemed to enjoy a good gossip.

‘Did you know this poor mite’s mum is a prostitute?’ I heard one midwife, Veronica, hiss to her colleagues one night.

‘Never!’ the other midwives replied, looking in alarm at baby Paul, the bonny, mixed-race little boy who was sleeping contentedly in my arms.

When I heard the word prostitute I felt myself go red, and with all eyes pointing in my direction I stuttered, ‘Is she from the red-light district?’

In my shock and embarrassment, it was the only thing I could think of to say about prostitutes.