A Child's Voice Calling

by Maggie Bennett

  The two-o’clock feeds were finished and the babies back in the nursery when Sister Lilley, the midwife, put her head round the door to ask if Miss Court could come and sit with Kathy Bagshaw again for half an hour.

  ‘Not just at this minute, Sister Lilley,’ Mabel apologised. ‘There are a couple o’ girls bein’ discharged this afternoon and they . . . they’re coming to see their babies for the last time.’

  ‘Well, ask them to come to the Agnes Nuttall room now and get it over with. It’s not a good idea to linger over the goodbyes, it only upsets them,’ replied the midwife. ‘I’ll ask Sister Barratt to send them out directly.’

  The two young women stood waiting with Mrs James when Mabel carried their babies, first one and then the other, to the room where they had been fed and loved. As nursery maid it was Mabel’s duty to assist Mrs James in supervising this moment of farewell and she found it almost unbearable. One of the girls wept uncontrollably, her sobs echoing down the cream and brown painted walls of the first-floor corridor connecting the nursery with the Agnes Nuttall room and lying-in ward. Mabel put her arm around the girl’s shaking shoulders, but felt that she had no words of comfort to offer. She could only think of the story in St Matthew’s gospel, where the women of Israel wept for their lost children, and thought it the most heart-rending sound she had ever heard.

  Mrs James nodded to Mabel to return the baby to the nursery and led the girl away, leaving Mabel with the other one who neither spoke nor wept, but just gazed upon her little son, the child she had borne and breastfed and come to love more than anything else in the world. She turned wide, despairing eyes to Mabel. ‘Will there be somebody to love him, Miss Court?’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes, dear, he’s such a beautiful baby, somebody’s sure to want to give him a good home,’ Mabel managed to say, though her voice faltered. ‘Yer must go now, dear. Give him a kiss and then go without lookin’ back.’

  After that last kiss the girl had silently walked away, a blurred figure like an old woman with bent shoulders and a hand out to grasp the banister when she reached the stairs. As Mabel stood watching her go, her heart breaking with pity, Sister Lilley called out urgently from the birthing room. ‘I need you in here at once, Miss Court! Hurry up, she’s nearly ready to deliver.’

  Kathy Bagshaw had been getting pains for more than two days; the last ten hours had been a terrible ordeal for her. Sister Lilley had asked Mabel to sit with Kathy when the nursery was quiet, to hold her hand, rub her back and generally encourage her while the midwife was otherwise engaged, and Mabel found it a harrowing experience, unable as she was to lessen Kathy’s pain.

  But now the birth was imminent and the exhausted girl had to make the final effort that pushed her baby’s head out through the narrow passage. Sister Lilley turned her over on to her left side for the actual delivery, and Mabel had to hold up the right leg as the child’s head emerged and the midwife received the limp body into her hands. Several vital moments passed before the child took a first gasping breath; its bluish-white face made Mabel think of her lost brother Walter, and she stared with a silent prayer on her lips as Sister Lilley held it up by the heels, blew upon the body and slapped its bottom and soles.

  ‘Oh, the poor little thing—’ Mabel almost groaned aloud at what seemed very rough treatment of the tender newborn baby after such a long and difficult journey.

  But within a minute it gasped, breathed and cried weakly. Sister Lilley cleaned its nose and mouth, and said, ‘It’s a girl.’ She handed it to Mabel while she attended to the mother, expelling the afterbirth and removing the blood-soaked mat of cotton wool and brown paper beneath her.

  Mabel knew how to tie clean white string round the umbilical cord two inches from the child’s body, and to powder the cut stump and apply a cotton bandage round the belly. After wiping the baby dry she dressed it in a plain tie-up gown and napkin secured with a safety pin; then she wrapped it in a small square blanket. Kathy Bagshaw’s delivery was the fourth that she had seen, and the hardest and longest to date.

  ‘Can I see ’er, Sister? Can I ’old ’er?’ asked the mother.

  The midwife handed the baby into her arms. ‘The sooner you give the first feed, the better, Katherine,’ she said. ‘Undo your nightgown and make a start. All right, Miss Court, you can go now.’

  ‘Fanks for all yer done, Mabel,’ added Kathy weakly. A shaft of golden autumnal sunlight fell across the pea-green walls of the room, illuminating her drawn features as she hugged her baby close, and Mabel forced a smile at the sight of another girl becoming a mother, learning to breastfeed her child for six weeks and then . . .

  Removing her white cap and rolling up her soiled apron, Mabel put on her hat and coat and went downstairs to the staff door at the side of the solid brick Victorian building. Out in the fading light of a late October evening she made her way down Lavender Hill, realising how tired she felt. It was not that the work itself was hard, on the contrary, the mothers themselves did most of the domestic work at the Rescue, both before and after delivery. They assisted in the kitchen, sewing room and laundry, and were responsible for cleaning their dormitories and living quarters. The only cleaning Mabel had to do was in the nursery and delivery room, so compared with the endless sweeping, dusting, brushing and sluicing at the Anti-Viv it was money for old rope, as Albert would say.

  No, it was not the work that was hard. It was the situation of the relinquished babies that put an almost intolerable strain on Mabel. She yearned over the new lives in her care, each in his or her tie-up cotton gown and napkin, lying quietly asleep or awake and crying in the cots, peeping out at a world that was to take away a mother’s love even before it could be comprehended. And there was nothing that Mabel could do: she felt emotionally drained dry, as if the last ounce of pity had been wrung from her heart – and what use was pity? She anguished for the baby who would never again be held in a mother’s loving arms, or suck warm milk from her breast; from now on it would be held by a stranger and given a glass bottle with a hard rubber teat and a different kind of milk, sometimes too hot or too cold, not so satisfying, maybe causing the tender little stomach to reject it, to suffer pain and discomfort, diarrhoea, soreness – and to be all alone in the world. Hurrying down towards the maze of side streets between Queenstown and the Wandsworth Road, Mabel knew she would never get used to the sorrows of the Rescue.

  And there was no comfort to be had at home. Annie would not allow her to talk in front of Alice and Daisy about what happened behind the high red-brick walls of the Agnes Nuttall Institute and discreetly lowered her own voice when referring to Mabel’s place of work.

  So where could she turn for counsel? Who would listen to the sad stories that haunted her? Who else but her best and dearest friend, her young man and future husband, Harry Drover. For him no subject was unmentionable, not if it concerned his dearest Mabel and he would listen endlessly on their walks while she poured out her thoughts and feelings about life at the Rescue. Looking down on her eager, upturned face, he realised how deeply she felt about the plight of the babies left motherless.

  ‘There’s this poor young girl we’ve got in at present, Harry, only fifteen, hardly older than Alice and so dazed by what’s happened to her. Her father’s a farmer in Surrey, honest country people – they must’ve been so shocked when they found she was . . . y’know, carryin’ a child.’

  ‘Who’d taken advantage of her, Mabel? Was she forced?’ he asked, frowning.

  ‘No, it seems she used to cross the fields to go to school with a boy o’ the same age from a family livin’ near. She told Mrs James they thought they were only playin’—’ She broke off abruptly, lowering her eyes, conscious that her mother would have a fit, as the saying was, if she knew half of what Mabel confided in Harry Drover, things Annie Court would not have mentioned, let alone discussed.

  But Harry’s association with the Salvation Army had taught him a great deal about the darker side of life and he was not hampered by any such false delicac
y. On the contrary, he was quick to reassure her that he understood. ‘Ruby comes across cases like that, Mabel, and it’s wrong to label that poor girl as a fallen woman,’ he said in his thoughtful way. ‘Though it’s all too often the first step down the path to . . . to prostitution. There’s nothin’ sadder ’n a good girl ruined.’

  ‘It’s just as sad for the baby,’ rejoined Mabel quickly. ‘Yer never saw such a poor little wizened-looking mite, scarce five pounds. She just sits an’ stares at him when I put him in her arms. He’ll go to the babies’ home at Merton and she’ll go back to her parents as if nothing had ever happened. But Harry, that poor little boy, I’m sure he’ll die with nobody to love him.’

  Tears welled up in her soft grey-blue eyes and Harry put his arm around her, ignoring the disapproving looks from a family group walking along the same path on the Common. ‘Dearest Mabel, yer do wonderful work among them poor women and girls. Ye’re an angel o’ light at that Rescue and I’m that proud o’ yer – and I believe the Lord’ll show yer a way to help that girl an’ her baby if that’s what He wants.’

  ‘Ye’re a tower o’ strength to me, Harry,’ she murmured, nestling close to his shoulder. For it was true: his positive, understanding attitude never failed to raise her spirits and in a way he took the place of Albert, for in spite of the outward differences between the two they shared the same goodness of heart.

  She told him that she was not really looking forward to Christmas at the Rescue. She could only see it as a difficult time for the young mothers waiting to give birth or contemplating the approaching separation from the new lives they had borne in pain. The Christmas story could hardly bring them comfort, she thought, for the Child born in a lowly stable had a loving young mother who kept Him and cared for Him throughout His childhood and young manhood; and she had the protection of a good husband to watch over her and the Child.

  And what a pity that the arrival of a new baby should ever be cause of shame and disgrace. When she thought of her own mother’s views about the girls at the Rescue, she found herself quite shocked by it, far more than by the fact of their unmarried state. Her discussions with Harry on the subject were a much-needed outlet for her feelings and brought the pair into a closer intimacy. On his part he was touched that she felt able to share these confidences with him and privately regarded them as being like talks between a married couple, which of course they would one day be – though he did sometimes wonder if he should gently warn her against expressing such charitable sentiments to anybody else but himself. She was so innocent in many ways, he thought tenderly.

  The case of the fifteen-year-old mother was to have a happy ending, thanks to Mabel’s intervention. She had quietly asked the girl where she lived and had written a letter to the parents at a place called Martyr’s Green, begging the mother to visit her daughter and the tiny baby son who, Mabel wrote, was not likely to survive if sent to the babies’ home. The result had been beyond her best hopes, for not only the girl’s mother but her father and two older sisters had all arrived at the Rescue and after one look at the baby had decided to acknowledge him as their own, whatever was said in the village. And home they all went, a triumph of love over social convention. Mabel was jubilant: it seemed that Harry’s words had come true and she joyfully shared the happy news with him. He tried to advise her to be careful, but she could not resist quietly encouraging other girls with families to write their own letters home and tell their parents about their babies. ‘Tell yer mother how beautiful he is and how much yer love him,’ she would advise, or, ‘Say she’s the image o’ her grandmother, an’ got the family nose.’ She helped them with the spelling, bought stamps and posted the letters off. Her satisfaction with the successes was only lessened by the failures, when the pleading letters had not brought about a change of heart.

  ‘Hey, Mabel, yer grandmother’s askin’ to see yer, so ye’d better get over to Tooting before Christmas – don’t keep her waitin’ if she’s feelin’ generous!’

  Mabel looked up at her father with a question in her eyes. ‘I don’t get that much free time, Dad, and when I do—’

  She hesitated and Court correctly interpreted her shy little smile. ‘Yeah, there’s yer young man, I know. Well, get him to take yer over there – Mimi could give yer a helping hand if yer play yer cards right, girl.’ He gave her a knowing wink. ‘She wants to hear about this job o’ yours at the Institute – it’s in her line o’ business, i’n’t it?’ He laughed good-humouredly. ‘She’ll probably tease yer about young Drover, but she could be a big help to both o’ yer, Mabel.’

  As always, Mabel consulted Harry who felt that she should go, especially as he was to accompany her, and they walked over to Tooting on the Sunday afternoon preceding Christmas. Mimi Court received them graciously and a smartly dressed maid brought in the silver tea service on a trolley. Mabel and Harry sat together on a settee opposite her and she eyed them with a general air of approval. Yet Mabel felt the familiar sense of unease that always came over her in this house, even with Harry at her side.

  ‘So, Mabel, I hear ye’re learnin’ to be a midwife in a home for fallen women. Whoever would’ve thought it?’

  ‘I only assist the midwife sometimes, Grandmother, it’s not a proper trainin’,’ said Mabel hastily, accepting tea and cake. ‘I’m a nursery maid, but I get called to help in the delivery room an’ lying-in ward.’

  ‘Hm. They must think ye’ve got a good head on yer shoulders, then. And all the women are first-timers, which makes for long labours and more trouble all round. So yer get yer share o’ hand-holdin’ and back-rubbin’ while the midwives are at their tea and gossip, eh?’

  Mabel could think of no reply to this, but Harry answered promptly. ‘They think the world o’ her at that Institute, Mrs Court.’

  Mimi nodded to him, a gleam of amusement in her dark eyes, and turned again to Mabel. ‘But how d’ye like the work? Would ye care to take it up as I’ve done and have yer own practice one day?’

  Mabel looked at Harry and answered firmly, ‘I told yer before, Grandmother, I’ve always wanted to look after children and I’m going to train as a nurse when I’m old enough, at a Poor Law infirmary.’

  ‘And what about Mr Drover here? Doesn’t he come into these plans somewhere?’

  Mabel blushed deeply and again Harry answered for her. ‘One day when we’re both older, Mrs Court, when I’ve trained as a Salvation Army officer and Mabel’s a qualified nurse, we hope to serve the Lord together as a married couple in the Army. Mabel will be a great asset at one of the children’s homes or refuges, and . . . and I shall be at her side,’ he added with a loving glance at the girl of his dreams.

  Mimi nodded again. ‘Yer got a long time to go before then. Tell me more about the Institute, Mabel. Yer still haven’t told me yet if yer like it. Do yer?’

  Mabel hesitated. ‘I feel I’m doing useful work there, but it’s very upsettin’, those long labours, so painful. But it’s the agony o’ parting with their babies that’s the worst and breaks my heart.’

  ‘What happens to them? The babies, I mean?’

  ‘They go to a babies’ home at Merton, an’ some o’ them get adopted from there.’

  ‘But not all?’

  ‘Some go to children’s homes if they’ve got somethin’ wrong with ’em – like we had one with a harelip that went to a hospital for an operation.’

  ‘And the mothers go back to their homes as if nothin’ had happened?’

  ‘If they got homes, yes – only some go back into service if that’s where they came from.’

  ‘And everybody pretends there’s never been a baby at all, eh?’ Mimi’s eyes darkened with a look of contempt. ‘Hah! They make me laugh, these families who think they can shrug orf their daughters’ little bastards, forget ’em, hide ’em away in homes – council homes, private homes, orphanages, Dr Barnardo’s, Waifs an’ Strays, homes for cripples, homes for imbeciles, Sunshine Homes for babies blinded by the clap – ugh, they make me sick!’
/>
  Her voice had become harsh, and Mabel looked at her in surprise, putting down her cup and glancing at Harry. ‘One or two o’ the girls do keep their babies, Grandmother, and get work as wet-nurses or find some woman who’ll look after the child while they go out to work.’

  This innocent remark seemed to infuriate Mimi all the more. ‘Oh, yes? An’ what sort o’ work do they get, other than sucklin’ another woman’s child while their own goes short? There’s no respectable work, no decent place for a girl lumbered with a baby, believe me! An’ childminders more often than not take her hard-earned money an’ let the child starve or die o’ neglect. Oh, no, don’t give me sentimental claptrap about keepin’ their dear little babies, only to end up sellin’ ’emselves on the street – ’cause that’s what ’appens in the end, Mabel, yer can take it from me. An’ what’ve you got to say, Mr Drover?’

  Harry stared down at his hands for a few minutes, then replied in a low tone, ‘Ye’re only too right, Mrs Court, in a large number o’ these sad cases. My sister Mrs Swayne, she’s a servin’ officer in the Salavation Army and, er, she sees—’ He left the rest of his remark unsaid, but the drift was clear enough.

  Mimi rose from her seat and went to the window, her plump shoulders tensed in unusual agitation. As always in times of emotion of any kind, her would-be genteel accent deserted her. ‘’Ave yer ever asked yerself ’ow your girls at the Rescue came to need rescuin’, Mabel? Babies don’t just turn up from nowhere, they ’ave to be planted. Do these girls ever tell yer ’oo the fathers were?’

  ‘Not as a rule. Matron knows but she doesn’t like it talked about,’ said Mabel, thinking of the morning and evening prayers led by Mrs James, the exhortation to the mothers to lead pure and blameless lives in the future, resisting all temptations to sin.