The Midwife's Here!: The Enchanting True Story of One of Britain's Longest Serving Midwives (21 page)

All that remained was for me to record the delivery time and birth details in my notes. While I did so, Mr Willis fetched his two young sons from upstairs and they scampered with great excitement into the sitting room to meet their little sister.

‘Meet Lorinda Louise,’ Mr Willis beamed.

Stepping back, I felt incredibly satisfied as I took my pen from my apron pocket and proudly recorded the time of the textbook delivery as 7.45 a.m. precisely.

I looked at the Willis family. They were all quiet now, gazing at Lorinda Louise in awe.

‘Aren’t we lucky to have a little girl?’ Mrs Willis beamed as she admired her sleeping daughter, who was snugly wrapped in a hand-crocheted yellow blanket. ‘If we’d known I’d have got Nana to knit that in pink!’

She turned to me and said, ‘Thank you, Nurse. You were marvellous! I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you so much!’

The big brothers, dressed in matching Thunderbirds pyjamas, began to jostle for prime position at the side of the crib, elbowing each other but never once taking their eyes off their new little sister. The entire family could not have looked happier if they tried.

The magnitude of the occasion hit me with even greater force. I hadn’t just delivered a baby; I’d performed a miracle! Lorinda Louise was the very first baby I had delivered all by myself! There was no qualified midwife guiding my hands, as I was used to. I was out in the community on my own, and I’d done it without so much as a whisper from my mentor. I didn’t have Sister Houghton’s hands to guide me and I didn’t have Mrs Tattersall by my side. All my training and hard work had paid dividends. This was the very best feeling in the world,
ever. Midwifery was my vocation, and I could actually do it! I
had
done it! I’d delivered a baby – me, Linda Buckley!

A knock at the door interrupted my triumphant thoughts.

‘Eee, it’s brass monkeys out there,’ I heard Mrs Tattersall exclaim loudly as Mr Willis let her in. I noticed it was 8.30 a.m., and it was only then that it dawned on me she had been gone a full hour.

Mr Willis was grinning like a Cheshire cat, and Mrs Tattersall knew the look of a proud new father when she saw one.

‘So you’ve had the baby?’ Mrs Tattersall said in a kindly tone as she crossed the sitting room and peered in the cot. ‘Oh, that’s good. Let’s have a cup of tea and a cigarette then.’

Mr Willis obliged yet again with the tea and Mr and Mrs Willis and Mrs Tattersall each lit up a cigarette from a packet of John Player’s No. 6. All three proceeded to smoke contentedly around the sleeping baby.

I sipped my tea quietly, taking in the scene before me. I was surrounded by clouds of smoke and I was floating on cloud nine. I felt like shouting out: ‘How can you all act so normal? I’ve just performed an absolute miracle and look at you puffing on your cigarettes!’

I didn’t, of course. I dutifully helped pack the equipment away, said my goodbyes and rode my moped back to the hospital, where I was expected to carry on with clinic duties. Normally I’d have been dead on my legs after working all through the night, but I was buzzing with the thrill of my first solo delivery.

‘So you’ve got your “confidence case” nicely under your belt,’ Mrs Tattersall smiled later, when I was called to her office to receive my report.

I’d heard the term many times before, but only now did I fully appreciate its meaning. I was brimming with confidence, that’s for sure, and I couldn’t wait for my next delivery.

‘I think you’ll find I’ve given you a very good report,’ Mrs Tattersall said, passing me a brown folder. This was a record that had to be written up by the mentor whenever a pupil midwife delivered a baby. ‘You thoroughly deserve it, Linda. Well done, love.’

I never did find out what took her so long when she went to the telephone box, and I never asked.

‘Maybe the clever fox knew quite well what would happen,’ I said to Graham later that day. ‘I wouldn’t put it past her.’

‘She wouldn’t have taken any chances if she didn’t have complete faith in you,’ he replied, pulling me in for a cuddle. ‘I’ve always said you’re a natural. I’m so proud of you, my little nurse.’

Graham always drew out the letters of the word ‘n-u-r-s-e’ when he called me that, as if softly savouring the sound.

‘I’m a midwife now … well, very nearly. You’ll soon have to call me “my little m-i-d-w-i-f-e” instead.’

It thrilled me to think I would soon become a fully qualified midwife, and I kissed Graham and thanked him for all his support over the years.

‘I wouldn’t have got this far without you,’ I told him.

‘Course you would!’ he smiled. ‘It’s your calling!’

‘I mean it,’ I replied. ‘It’s been really tough, tougher than I ever imagined. Without your support I would have quit years ago.’

Later that same week Mrs Tattersall rushed purposefully along the hospital corridor towards me. It was Saturday night, she had a delivery bag in one hand and a packet of cigarettes
in the other, and I could see we had another birth to dash to. I immediately felt excited, but my heart sank like a stone when she said, ‘Meet me at Moira Petty’s on Hope Street.’

I’d been to the Petty house several times before, and of all the homes I’d visited this was the only one that pushed me right out of my comfort zone. Moira lived with her mum and two sisters. Each of the girls, all in their late teens or early twenties at most, had two children. This would be Moira’s third baby, making it the seventh infant in a house that was already bursting at the seams.

The house was filthy and damp. The first time I did a home visit I was horrified to see several dirty mattresses leaning up against the walls in the back dining room. Mrs Tattersall explained that there were so many people living under the one roof, and one of the rooms was so damp upstairs, that the sisters and their children had to sleep downstairs. This meant when they needed the space during the day they just propped up their mattresses.

The air was permanently thick with the pungent smell of sweaty, dirty bodies. Children with scraggy hair and grimy faces scampered about in vests and sagging nappies, and a scruffy black dog stuck its nose into everything and appeared to be the family’s only means of cleaning the tiled floor in the back room, where the girls slept. I say this because on my first visit a few weeks earlier, one of the sisters knocked a box containing two eggs off the dining table, which stood in the centre of the room. Both eggs smashed on the quarry tiles, making a huge mess, but nobody attempted to clean it up. I soon realised why not, when the hungry hound ran in and gobbled up not only the broken eggs but their shells too, licking the floor so clean the only evidence he left was the empty egg box.

Even on a bright day it was always dark and cold in the house, and the family had no hot water. ‘We won’t have a cup of tea,’ Mrs Tattersall had said as we pulled up outside on that very first visit, and I understood why as soon as we stepped inside. I had never encountered a family as poverty-stricken as the Pettys, and their lifestyle shocked and upset me. It wasn’t just the dirt and the fact they were obviously very poor that was so distressing; it was that none of the girls seemed to have any purpose to their life. They were just surviving, producing babies they had no means of supporting. Their world was as far away from my own as I could imagine.

‘How can they live like that?’ I asked Mrs Tattersall one day. ‘I know they have no money, but I don’t understand why they don’t even wash themselves. I mean, they must know they smell awful.’

‘Some people don’t know any different,’ she explained plainly. ‘If your mum’s never taught you how to wash properly, you don’t learn, do you? They will never have seen their mum brush her teeth or keep herself clean, so they don’t know any other way of being. They have no hot water, so God only knows it would be hard enough for them even if they knew what they were doing.’

The Petty family’s circumstances were by no means typical of the area. There was industrial unrest grumbling away in some parts of Britain, but here in Ashton, from what I saw, life generally seemed to trundle on regardless and most people got by and certainly didn’t live below the breadline. I had seen some worrying reports on the news about job losses and fears of wage cuts amongst postal workers and miners elsewhere in the country. Closer to home, the local Granada Television workers were planning strike action, complaining about pay
and refusing to work with colour television equipment. I remember that clearly as there was talk that some episodes of
Coronation Street
might have to be recorded in black and white again, instead of the new colour that everyone was raving about.

However, as far as I knew, none of these issues affected the Petty household. The Pettys were not victims of the economy or social change. Instead, it seemed they chose to live the way they did, scraping by with what little money they were given in state hand-outs because they didn’t appear to know any better.

The home visits prior to the birth were a huge eye-opener for me and I didn’t enjoy them one bit, but Mrs Tattersall always made sure I accompanied her. I didn’t fully realise until the night of the actual delivery that she had done it to prepare me and cushion me from the shock in advance.

When we met outside the house at 10 p.m. I was shivering.

‘Ready?’ Mrs Tattersall asked with a reassuring look after I had parked my moped and pulled off my helmet.

‘I am,’ I nodded. Thanks to Mrs Tattersall I was shivering more from the cold wind that was blowing than through nerves this time.

‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I need you to be focused on mother and baby tonight, nothing else.’

Hauling her bag of instruments out of the boot of her car, Mrs Tattersall continued in a voice loud enough to be heard down the street, ‘I hope the lover’s not here. That bloody man gets right up my nose. We could do without him swaggering around drunk, getting in the way.’

I’d never met the man myself and had no idea what his name was, and I don’t think Mrs Tattersall did either as she only ever referred to him as ‘the lover’. All I knew was that he
was Moira’s mum’s boyfriend, and according to Mrs Tattersall he appeared to be the only man to have anything to do with the household. She had it on good authority he was in trouble with the police and only ever went out at night, under cover of darkness, when he snuck to the local pub and staggered home blind drunk at closing time. His police record meant he couldn’t work, or so the story went, and we could only presume he lived on the state benefits claimed by the women. Mrs Tattersall clearly didn’t see fit to delve any deeper into the family set-up, and I trusted her instincts.

I dearly hoped he wasn’t home and was relieved when one of Moira’s sisters answered the door and showed us into the front room, which the family referred to as the parlour. This was the best room in the house, and as such was usually reserved for the mother and her lover. Moira must have been given special permission to use it tonight. She was lying down on a saggy mattress in the middle of the floor, surrounded by an assortment of grubby, threadbare towels and blankets.

My heart went out to her. She was wearing an old skirt and had bare legs that looked grey with cold and dirt. Mrs Tattersall examined her and remarked it was lucky she’d brought the instruments already sterilised, as labour was very well established and the baby could arrive before midnight.

‘Let’s hope so,’ she whispered to me under her breath. ‘The lover’s at the pub. It would be good to get this baby out before he rolls in.’

I thought so too. I wasn’t used to seeing people drunk and I felt anxious in this house late at night and wanted to go home as quickly as possible.

It was an uneventful, routine labour. Moira was courageous in the face of her contractions, making relatively little noise
and following Mrs Tattersall’s instructions carefully with regards to breathing correctly and shifting her position on the mattress when it would make her more comfortable.

‘It will be time to push very soon, I think,’ Mrs Tattersall advised. ‘But don’t push until I tell you, Moira. You know that, don’t you?’

Moira nodded. ‘I’ve done it twice before,’ she said, ‘and it weren’t that long ago. I’ve not forgotten, Nurse.’

The dog barking manically in the hallway alerted us to the sound of the front door opening.

‘Will ya mind me bleeding coat,’ Mrs Petty slurred. ‘You’ll be yanking it right off me arm, ya big oaf!’

Moments later the parlour door swung open and the lover stood swaying dangerously before us. He was a dead ringer for Stan Ogden in
Coronation Street
, and Mrs Petty didn’t look too dissimilar to Hilda Ogden with her headscarf and red lipstick, which was painted on in a thin bow shape that didn’t match the size of her lips.

The pair of them stank of alcohol and appeared too drunk to register what was happening to Moira. I felt sick to my stomach and my legs started to twitch and jump involuntarily with nerves. It had never happened to me before, but I simply couldn’t stop my legs from jangling.

‘What’s she doin’ in here?’ the lover bawled, waving his finger towards poor Moira.

‘Baby’s on it’s way, ya daft fool,’ Moira’s mum chided, as the penny dropped.

‘Well, I’m having the parlour!’ he grunted.

Mrs Tattersall sprang towards him immediately and stood taller than I had ever seen her, hands on hips and chin jutted forward.

‘I’m afraid you can’t come in,’ she said firmly.

‘Who the ’ell are you to tell me what to do?’

‘The midwife, for your information. Moira here is in labour. Now if you don’t mind, sir …’

The lover took a step forward and pushed his jowly face towards Mrs Tattersall’s.

‘But I want to come in here,’ he implored, sounding more pathetic than menacing now. ‘I just want to come in t’parlour and sit down …’

He was rocking from side to side as he spoke and his speech was so slack it was as if he’d been punched in the face and his jaw was unhinged.

Moira’s mum just gaped and stood rooted to the spot, making no attempt to stop her boyfriend as he lunged haphazardly forward once more.