Farewell to the East End (16 page)
Read Farewell to the East End Online
Authors: Jennifer Worth
The doctor prepared for suturing. There was now no hurry, so he gave Mavis a local anaesthetic around the perineum and the vaginal wall, and sat back, waiting for it to take effect. Once the local anaesthetic had numbed the perineum, the doctor was able to repair the episiotomy. He was relieved to find that the cervix was not torn.
Meanwhile Trixie was down the road ringing the Flying Squad. She had taken off her gown and cap but had forgotten to take off her mask. There was blood on her hands and arms, and smeared down her uniform and legs. As she ran down the road she did not notice that people were looking at her rather strangely. It was not until she was inside the telephone box that she realised she did not have the three pennies on her with which to make a telephone call, so she stopped a passer-by. ‘Can you let me have threepence for an urgent telephone call?’ Only then did she notice the mask, so she pulled it off. Her hand was trembling, and she noticed the blood on it for the first time.
‘I must have threepence. I forgot to bring it. I must ring the hospital.’ Trixie’s voice was shrill. Dubiously the man dug into his pocket and produced three pennies. ‘Thanks.’ She dived into the box, but her hand was shaking so much that she could not dial the number or put the pennies in the slot, so she called the man back.
‘You’re in a bad way, nurse,’ he said.
Trixie felt too weak to answer, so she merely handed him a bit of paper.
‘Ring that number for me, please.’
The phone rang, and a voice answered immediately. Briefly Trixie explained the situation and gave the address. ‘We will send the Flying Squad immediately,’ the voice said.
‘Do you need any help getting back to the house?’ asked the man kindly.
‘I’ll be all right. Thanks for your help.’
When Trixie returned to the house, Meg was shouting at the doctor and Sister.
‘You murderers! Look wha’ you done. You’ve hurt ’er. I’ll report you to ve authorities, I will. Look at ve blood. You nearly killed ’er, you did.’
The doctor tried to defend himself
‘The placenta separated prematurely. That was the cause of the blood loss. I did not cause it.’
‘Liar! Tell vat to the judge. Medical blunderers.’
She turned on Sister. ‘An’ you, yer no better. You’ll kill vat baby afore you’re finished. An’ it’ll be your fault if she dies. I’ll not forget vis, I’ll not.’
Bewildered, the doctor looked at Sister.
‘Can you explain?’ he asked plaintively.
‘I doubt it,’ said Sister wearily. Her eye was swelling up, from the blow she had received from Meg. ‘We’ve been trying for six months with no success. I doubt if any explanation will get through.’
‘I’ll not forget vis. You jest wait. You’ll pay fer vis an’ all, the pair of you.’ Meg rolled her eyes and spat on the floor.
The Obstetric Flying Squad arrived. This was an emergency service held in readiness by all big hospitals for the support of domiciliary midwives. It was their proud boast that they could get to any emergency in twenty minutes, and they seldom failed to do so. An obstetrician, a paediatrician, and a nurse came, armed with an incubator, oxygen, drip, drugs, anaesthetics and all the other equipment used for obstetric surgery and infant resuscitation. They entered a small, hot and stuffy room that looked like a battle scene. Blood was literally everywhere. The doctor, covered in blood, was suturing the patient. The placenta still lay on the floor. Sister Bernadette, who was tending the baby, looked as though she had been in the front line. The skin around her eye was now blue, her face red and swollen, and her veil streaked with blood. A weird-looking woman in green glared at the hospital team with accusing eyes. ‘More murderers. I’ll see you don’t get ’er,’ she hissed venomously.
The doctor and the obstetrician consulted. Mavis was sleeping peacefully because of the morphine given half an hour earlier by the doctor. But she had lost a lot of blood, and the shock was severe. An intravenous infusion of blood plasma by drip was installed.
The placenta was scooped up off the floor, and the two doctors examined it. It was large, but appeared to be complete. The consultant palpated the woman’s abdomen. The uterus was firm and hard, about the size of a grapefruit, as it should be. He looked around the small, stuffy room that contained not a vestige of clinical apparatus; at the woman in a state of primary obstetric shock; at the volume of blood loss; at the first baby sleeping peacefully in the crib; at Sister Bernadette tending the asphyxiated twin.
‘In circumstances like these, undiagnosed twins, a transverse lie, premature separation of the placenta and haemorrhage could spell certain death. You have done really well, old chap.’
‘Thanks,’ said the doctor wearily. He seemed to be in a state of exhaustion. ‘We do our best.’
‘You done yer best!’ shouted Meg. ‘You wants lockin’ up, I say. If you’d done like what I said an’ put ’er on a birfin’ stool in ve first place, vis would never ’ave ’appened.’
The consultant looked at Meg in astonishment.
‘Take no notice, we’ve had this the whole time,’ whispered the doctor. ‘Nothing will convince her.’
The nurse took the baby from Sister Bernadette and placed the child in the incubator, warmed to 95 degrees F, and humidified to avoid drying of the respiratory mucous membranes. The baby was breathing, but her breaths were shallow. Her muscle tone was flaccid, and her skin tone bluish. Her heartbeat was regular, but faint. The paediatrician, after examining the baby, injected 1 cc of Lobeline into the umbilical vein in the cord and milked it towards the abdomen. Oxygen was attached to the incubator, and the oxygen input adjusted to 30 per cent.
The paediatrician advised immediate transfer to Great Ormond Street Hospital. Paradoxically, Meg, who had so violently opposed hospital for Mavis, did not object. The baby was kept in Great Ormond Street for six weeks until her weight was over five pounds, and then she returned home. Both babies thrived. They grew up to be strong, healthy girls, brought up entirely by their mother and aunt. They were a regular sight in Chrisp Street market, helping on the fruit and veg stall, and they became great favourites with the locals.
Thirty years later I was visiting Trixie, who had recently moved to Basildon in Essex. We went shopping, and she insisted we call at the market. It was a large and lively market, with open stalls and old-fashioned costers crying out their wares. I heard the strident voice of a woman calling out, ‘Best apples, only thirty pence a pound. You won’t find cheaper anywhere. Best bananas. Melons. Grapefruits.’
We approached the stall.
‘Well? Wha’choo want?’ demanded the female.
I gasped, staring at two identical women in drab brown dresses, leather belts at the waist, men’s boots, and tight headscarves pulled down low over the forehead. I could not speak.
‘If you don’t know wha’choo want, I can’t hang about. Next.’
The years rolled back. ‘Megan’mave,’ I exclaimed.
‘What?’ The two women drew together. Black eyes flashed a challenge.
‘Megan’mave! But you can’t be – it’s not possible!’
‘Mave’s our mum, an’ Meg’s our aunt. D’you wanna make somefink of it?’
No, I didn’t. Trixie grinned at me, and we slipped quietly away, chuckling.
MADONNA OF THE PAVEMENT
I saw them in High Holborn. They stood out from the tense, jostling crowd because they seemed to have no object in life, nowhere to go, nothing to do; they were aimless, lost. They stood out also because they were so poor. Poverty is such a relative thing; but no man is really poor till life becomes a desert island that gives him neither food nor shelter nor hope. They were such obvious failures at this game of getting and keeping called success. If they had suddenly shouted in pain above the thunder of the passing wheels they could hardly have been more spectacular in their misery, this man, this woman, this child.
He slouched along a few yards in advance of the woman. He looked as though Life had been knocking him down for a long time, then waiting for him to get up so that it might knock him down again. His bent body was clothed in greenish rags and his naked feet were exposed in gashed boots. He was not entirely pathetic. He was the kind of man to whom you would gladly give half a crown to salve your conscience; but you would never allow him out of sight with your suit-case!
She carried her baby against her breast in a ragged old brown cloth knotted round her shoulders. Perhaps she was twenty-five, but she looked fifty because no one had ever taken care of her, or had given her that pride in herself which is necessary to a woman’s existence. She had not even the happiness of being wanted or necessary – a condition in which the altruistic soul of woman thrives. This man of hers would obviously be better off without her. She had once been pretty.
The shame of it! To parade her woman’s body draped in rags through streets full of other women in their neat clothes, to meet the pitying eyes of other wives and mothers, and to drag on, tied like a slave, behind this shambling, shifty man. Is there a crucifixion for a woman worse than this?
He walked ahead so that she had plenty of time to wonder why she married him. Now and then he would turn and jerk his head, trying to make her quicken her pace. She took no notice, just plodded on in who knows what merciful dullness?
Then the sleeping child in her old brown shawl awakened and moved with the curious boneless writhing of a young baby. The mother’s arms tightened on it and held its small body closer to hers. She stopped, went over to a shop window, and lent her knee on a ledge of stone. She placed one finger so gently in the fold of cloth and looked down into it ...
I tell you that for one second you ceased to pity and you reverenced. Over that tired face of chiselled alabaster, smoothed and softened in a smile, came the only spiritual thing left in these two lives: the beatitude of a Madonna. This same unchanging smile has melted men’s hearts for countless generations. The first time a man sees a woman look at his child in exactly that way something trembles inside him. Men have seen it from piled pillows in rooms smelling faintly of perfume, in night nurseries, in many a comfortable nest which they have fought to build to shield their own. No different! The same smile in all its rich, swift beauty was here in the mud and the bleakness of a London street.
They went on into the crowd and were forgotten. I went on with the knowledge that out of rags and misery had come, full and splendid, the spirit that, for good or ill, holds the world to its course.
Two beggars in a London crowd, but at the breast of one – the Future. Poor, beautiful Madonna of the Pavement ...
H. V. Morton, first published in the
Daily Express,
1923.
Daily Express,
1923.
Human memory is the strangest thing. Apparently we have millions, perhaps billions of interconnecting fibres in our brains, triggered by electrical impulses, which can record our experiences. But sometimes these stores lie dormant for years, and the memories seem to be completely lost. But they are still there, waiting for some spark to ignite them.
A book of essays by H. V. Morton was the spark for me. I took them with me on holiday and after a strenuous day of swimming and cycling I was sitting in the last long rays of the evening sun, reading. As I read this beautiful and tragic story of a bully of a man and a downtrodden woman, it all came back to me. I had completely forgotten the Laceys. I read the first page of the essay – the description of the shiftless couple in the streets of London – without much thought, but then came the heart-rending but uplifting paragraphs about the baby and the woman’s love. The spark of memory had been ignited and the memory of the Laceys was there, in a flash, as they say. It only remained to be written down.
John Lacey was the landlord of the Holly Bush, just off Poplar High Street. As I came to know him better, I found it incredible that Trueman’s (the brewers) had ever granted him a licence and continued to pay his wages, but stranger things have happened in the world of employment, and he enjoyed the role that fate had generously offered him.
John Lacey had been diagnosed as having late-onset diabetes. It was not very severe at the time of diagnosis, and the doctor had advised that it could be controlled by a diet of reduced sugar and carbohydrate. But John Lacey refused to cooperate, and his blood-sugar level rose higher. Insulin injections were prescribed, and the doctor – judging that if the patient would not control his diet, he would not inject himself regularly and accurately – asked the Sisters to give the injections twice daily. This was very time-consuming. Soluble insulin was used in those days, and each injection only lasted twelve hours in the body. We received a lot of requests to attend diabetics because back then it was very difficult to assess and maintain the correct dose of insulin and to inject it hypodermically.
Sister Evangelina and I went to assess Mr Lacey. The pub was in a side street and was in no way attractive. The street was narrow and dingy, several houses had been bombed, and many walls were held up with scaffolding. The pub itself was hardly noticeable, the frontage resembling any of the houses around it: dark brown paint flaking off, windows caked with dirt, a narrow front door, always shut. The only thing that might at one time have distinguished the pub from its neighbours was its sign; but it was so old that it hung from only one hinge, and most of the paint had worn off.
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