The Midwife

by Jennifer Worth

  When he was young Ted had prudently taken out an insurance policy that matured when he was sixty. He now did not have to go out to work ever again. Winnie, on the other hand, did not want to give up the paper shop. She was so used to hard work that idleness would have bored her to tears but, as Ted wanted her at home more, she agreed to cut down her hours. Their life was very happy.

  Winnie was forty-four when her periods stopped. She thought it was the menopause. She felt a bit odd, but her mother told her that all women feel a bit funny during the change, and not to worry. She continued in the paper shop, and brushed aside any feelings of queasiness. It wasn’t until six months later that she noticed she was putting on weight. Another month passed, and Ted noticed a hard lump in her tummy. Having experienced his first wife dying of cancer, hard lumps were a source of deep anxiety for him. He insisted that she should see the doctor, and went with her to the surgery.

  Examination showed her to be in an advanced stage of pregnancy. The couple were shattered. Why this obvious explanation had not occurred to either of them before is impossible to conjecture, but it hadn’t, and they were both knocked sideways by the news.

  There wasn’t much time to prepare for a new baby. Winnie left the paper shop that day, and booked with the Sisters for her confinement. Hastily, the bedroom was prepared, and baby equipment bought. Perhaps it was buying the pram and little white sheets that affected Ted so profoundly. Overnight he changed from a bemused and bewildered elderly man to an intensely excited and fiercely proud father-to-be. Suddenly he looked ten years younger.

  A fortnight later Winnie went into labour. We had arranged for a doctor to be present at the delivery, because there had been so little time for antenatal preparation, and because Winnie, now forty-five, was decidedly old for having a baby.

  Ted had taken note of our requirements and advice about preparation. He couldn’t have planned it more carefully or thoroughly. He had told Win’s mother not to come but that Ted would inform her when the baby was born. He had obtained books on childbirth and babycare, which he read all the time. When she went into labour he called us, full of joy and anticipation, tinged only with a little anxiety.

  The doctor and I arrived at almost the same time. It was early first stage, and it had been agreed that I should stay with her throughout labour, from the time of arrival to the third stage completion. The doctor examined her and said he would leave and call back just before evening surgery to assess progress.

  I sat down to watch and wait. I advised that she should not lie down, but walk about a bit. Ted took Win’s arm and gently and carefully led her up and down the garden path. She could quite easily have walked it by herself, but he wanted and needed to be protective, quite forgetful of the fact that only two weeks earlier she had been dashing off to the paper shop. I suggested she should have a bath. The house boasted a bathroom, and so he heated up the water, and gently helped her in. He washed her, carefully helped her out and then dried her. I advised a light meal, so he poached an egg. He couldn’t have done more.

  I looked at his library books: Grantley Dick Read’s Natural Childbirth; Margaret Myles’s Midwifery; The New Baby; Positive Parents; The Growing Child; From Birth to Teens. He had been doing his homework.

  The doctor returned just before 6 p.m., and there was no real change in the early labour pattern. We agreed that, in view of her age, if the first stage continued for longer than twelve hours, Winnie should be transferred to the hospital. Both Ted and Winnie agreed to this, but hoped it would not be necessary.

  Between 9 and 10 p.m. I observed a change in the labour pattern. Contractions were more frequent and stronger. I started her on the gas and air machine, and asked Ted to go out and phone for the doctor.

  When he arrived the doctor gave her a mild analgesic, and we both sat down and waited. Ted courteously offered us a meal, or tea, or drinks, whatever we wanted.

  We did not have long to wait. Just after midnight the second stage of labour commenced, and within twenty minutes the baby was born.

  It was a little boy, with unmistakably ethnic features.

  The doctor and I looked at each other, and the mother, in stunned silence. No one said a word. I have never known such an unnerving silence at a delivery. What each of us was thinking the others never knew, but our thoughts must all have been about the same question: “What on earth is Ted going to say when he sees the baby?”

  The third stage had to be dealt with, and this was conducted in dead silence. While the doctor was busy with the mother, I bathed, checked, and weighed the baby. He certainly was a beautiful little thing, of average weight, clear dusky skin, soft curly brown hair. A picture perfect baby - if you are expecting to see a baby of mixed racial origins. But Ted wasn’t. He was expecting to see his own child. I shut my eyes in a futile attempt to obliterate the scene to come.

  Everything was finished and tidied up. The mother looked fresh in a white nightgown; the baby looked beautiful in a white shawl.

  The doctor said, “I think we had better ask your husband to come up now.”

  They were the first words to be spoken since the delivery.

  Winnie said, “I reckons as ’ow we’d best get it over wiv”.

  I went downstairs and told Ted that a baby boy had been safely born, and would he like to come up.

  He shouted, “A boy!” and leaped to his feet like a youngster of twenty-two, not a man of over sixty. He bounded up the stairs two at a time, entered the bedroom and took both his wife and the baby in his arms. He kissed them both and said, “This is the proudest and happiest day of my life.”

  The doctor and I exchanged glances. He hadn’t noticed yet. He said to his wife, “You don’t know what vis means to me, Win. Can I ’old ve baby?”

  She silently handed him over.

  Ted sat on the edge of the bed, and cradled the baby awkwardly in his arms (all new fathers look awkward with a baby!) He looked long at his little face, and stroked his hair and ears. He undid the shawl, and looked at the tiny body. He touched his legs, and moved his arms, and took his hand. The baby’s face puckered up and he gave a little mewing cry.

  Ted gazed at him silently for a long time. Then he looked up with a beatific smile, “Well, I don’t reckon to know much about babies, but I can see as how this is the most beautiful in the world. What’s we going to call him, luv?”

  The doctor and I looked at each other in silent amazement. Was it really possible he hadn’t noticed? Winnie, who had seemed unable to breathe, took a large shuddering breath, and said, “You choose, Ted, luv. He’s yourn.”

  “We’ll call ’im Edward, then. It’s a good ol’ family name. Me dad’s an’ gran’dad’s. He’s my son Ted.”

  The doctor and I left the three of them sitting happily together. Outside, the doctor said, “It is possible that he just hasn’t noticed yet. Black skin is pale at birth, and this child is obviously only half-black, or even less than that, because his father may have been of mixed racial descent. However, pigmentation usually becomes more marked as the child ages, and at some stage Ted is certainly going to notice and start asking questions.”

  Time went by, and Ted didn’t notice or, in any event, didn’t appear to notice. Win must have had a word with her mother and other female relatives to say nothing to Ted about the baby’s appearance, and indeed nothing was said.

  Win went back to work part-time at the paper shop after about six weeks. Ted had longer each day with the baby and assumed most of the parenting. He bathed and fed him, and proudly took him out in the pram, greeting passersby and inviting them all to look at “my son Ted”. As the baby grew older, he played with him all the time, inventing learning games and toys. In consequence, by the age of eighteen months, little Ted was very bright and advanced for his age. The relationship between father and son was lovely to see.

  By the time the child reached school age, his features were noticeably black. Yet still Ted did not appear to notice. He had made a wider circle of friends than he h
ad ever had in his life before, largely due to the fact that he took the child everywhere, and people responded to this bright, handsome little boy, whom Ted introduced proudly as “my son Ted”. The child was just as proud, in his own way, of his father and as he clung to his big protective hand, gazed up adoringly with his huge black eyes. At school he always spoke of “my dad” as though he were the king himself.

  Ted, approaching seventy, had no inhibitions about waiting outside the school gates along with young mothers nearly half a century his junior. Only two or three little black or mixed race children would come running out of school, to black mothers, but one of them would fling himself into Ted’s arms with the cry, “Daddy.”

  “Lets go down the docks today, son,” he would say, kissing him. “There’s a big German vessel jes’ come in vis mornin’ wiv three funnels. Yer don’ see ’em very often. An’ yer mum will ’ave tea ready when we gits back.”

  Yet still he didn’t seem to notice.

  Of course there were whisperings and gossip amongst neighbours and acquaintances, but none of them actually said anything to Ted. The more unkind would snigger and say, “There’s no fool like an old fool.” And the rest would laugh and agree, “Yer can say tha’ again”.

  I have a different theory.

  In the Russian Orthodox Church there is the concept of the Holy Fool. It means someone who is a fool to the ways of the world, but wise to the ways of God.

  I think that Ted, from the moment he saw the baby, knew that he could not possibly be the father. It must have been a shock, but he had controlled himself, and sat thinking for a long time as he held the baby. Perhaps he saw ahead.

  Perhaps he understood in that moment that if he so much as questioned the baby’s fatherhood, it would mean humiliation for the child, and might jeopardise his entire future. Perhaps, as he held the baby, he realised that any such suggestion could shatter his whole happiness. Perhaps he understood that he could not reasonably expect an independent and energetic spirit like Winnie to find him sexually exciting and fulfilling. Perhaps an angel’s voice told him that any questions were best left unasked and unanswered.

  And so he decided upon the most unexpected, and yet the simplest course of all. He chose to be such a Fool that he couldn’t see the obvious.

  THE LUNCHEON PARTY

  “No Jimmy, not this time. You and Mike are not camping out in the boiler room at Nonnatus House. I may have deceived the Home Sister at the Hospital, but I am not going to deceive Sister Julienne. Besides, I don’t trust you. I don’t believe for a moment that there is another emergency. I think you just want to be able to boast to the boys that you have slept in a convent!”

  Jimmy and Mike looked a trifle crestfallen. They had been plying me with beer and soft talk, in the confident expectation that I would swallow a load of rubbish about them being down on their luck and out of their digs, and would I smuggle them in the back door of Nonnatus House? The male of the species is sweetly naive.

  The evening had been fun - a change and relaxation from the rigours of daily work. The beer had been pleasant, and the conversation exuberant, but it was time to go. It was a long way back to the East End, buses were not plentiful after 11 p.m., and I would have to be up at 6.30 a.m. the next morning for a full day’s work. I stood up. An idea had come to mind. It seemed a pity to disappoint them altogether.

  “But how would you like to come to lunch one Sunday?”

  Their enthusiastic agreement was immediate.

  “OK. I will ask Sister Julienne, and will ring you to fix a date. I must be off now.”

  I spoke to Sister Julienne next day. She had heard about Jimmy before, on the occasion when I had taken a 3 a.m. swim in the sea at Brighton and arrived for work at ten in the morning. She agreed at once to a luncheon party for the boys.

  “It would be delightful. We usually entertain retired missionaries, or visiting preachers. A couple of lively young men would be a pleasure for us all.”

  She fixed a date for three weeks ahead, when there were no other guests for Sunday lunch, and I telephoned Jimmy to firm up the arrangements.

  “Do you think the nuns could run to three of us for lunch? Alan wants to come. He thinks he might get a story.”

  Alan was a reporter, scraping a modest living on his first job in Fleet Street. I thought it highly likely that Sister Julienne could find one more chair at the refectory table, but was not at all sure that Alan would get much of a story out of the lunch. However, hope always runs high in a young reporter’s heart - until the iron enters his soul, that is.

  The girls were in a flutter of excitement about three young men coming to Sunday lunch. We were all single nurses with a seemingly endless working week and were often hard put to meet eligible young men. Expectations ran high.

  I wondered, with a good deal of amusement, how the meal would go. What would the boys make of us? How would they react to the nuns, particularly to Sister Monica Joan? And it would be interesting to see Alan’s “story”.

  The day arrived, warm and bright, and none of our patients was expected to go into labour, which would have disrupted the luncheon party. Everyone was in a flurry of excitement. Had the boys known the flutter they were causing in so many female hearts, they would have been deeply flattered. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they would have regarded it as no more than their devastating charms were due.

  They arrived at about 12.30 p.m., just after the Sisters had entered chapel for Tierce, the midday Office.

  I opened the door. They certainly looked very spruce, in grey suits, newly washed shirts, and highly polished shoes. I had never before seen them look like that on a Sunday morning. Obviously lunch in a convent was a novel experience for such dedicated young men-about-town. They looked a little unsure of themselves, though.

  We kissed, but slightly more formally than usual - no hugs, no laughter, no badinage about nothing much - just a formal kiss, a polite “How are you?”, and “Did you have a good journey?”

  I felt a trifle uncomfortable, having never found conversation easy. We all know people in a certain context, and outside the familiar, often find them to be completely different. I had known Jimmy since childhood, but normally met up with the others in London pubs. I didn’t know what to say, and just stood around looking awkward, thinking the whole thing was not such a good idea after all. The boys could find nothing to say either.

  Cynthia saved the day. She always did, without knowing how or what she had done. She stepped forward, her soft smile dispelling the tension and filling the rather strained atmosphere with warmth. When she spoke, the slow sexy voice just knocked them over. All she said was: “You must be Jimmy and Mike and Alan. How lovely - we’ve been looking forward to this. Now which of you is which?”

  Was it the way she said it, or the wide smiling eyes, or the unaffected warmth of her welcome? The boys must have met scores of girls who were more beautiful, with more self-conscious allure, but they could seldom, if ever, have met a girl with a voice quite like that. They were absolutely bowled over and all three stepped forward at the same time, crashing into each other. She laughed. The ice was broken.

  “The Sisters will be here soon, but come into the kitchen and have a coffee, and we can have a chat.”

  Coffee, nectar, ambrosia? They followed eagerly; anything with this glorious girl would be heaven. I, thankfully, was forgotten and I breathed a sigh of relief. The luncheon would be a success.

  Mrs B. had neither sex appeal nor an alluring voice, “Now don’ you make a mess in ’ere. I’ve got lunch to serve.”

  Jimmy smiled confidently at her. “Don’t you worry, madam; we won’t mess up this beautiful kitchen, will we boys? What a magnificent kitchen, and what glorious smells! All your own home cooking, I take it, madam?”

  Mrs B. sniffed, and eyed him suspiciously. She had grown-up sons of her own, and was not susceptible to their particular charms. “You jes’ watch it, tha’s all I’m sayin’.”

  “Oh, watch it we certainly wil
l,” said Mike, whose eyes had not left Cynthia as she filled the kettle. The water pipes all around the kitchen rattled and shook as she opened the tap. She laughed and said, “That’s just our plumbing system. You’ll get used to it.”

  “Oh, I’d like to get used to it”, said Mike with enthusiasm.

  Cynthia laughed and blushed a little, brushing back the hair that had fallen over her face.

  “Allow me,” said Mike gallantly, taking the kettle from her and carrying it over to the gas stove.

  Chummy appeared in the doorway, her head buried in The Times.

  “I say, gels, did you know that Binkie Bingham-Binghouse is getting spliced at last? Jolly good show, what? Actually, her Mater will be frightfully chuffed, don’t you know. They thought she was on the shelf. Good old Binkie, haw haw!”

  She looked up and saw the boys. At once she went red, and jerked the arm holding the newspaper. It crashed into the dresser, setting the cups rattling and shaking. The paper caught behind a couple of plates and sent them crashing to the floor, smashing them into a dozen pieces.

  Mrs B. rushed forward, snarling:

  “You clumsy great ... you - you - jest get out o’ my kitchen, you clumsy ... you!”

  Poor Chummy! It always happened that way. Social situations were a nightmare for her, particularly when men were around. She just didn’t know what to say to a man, nor how to behave.

  Cynthia again saved the day. She grabbed a dustpan and brush, saying, “Never mind, Mrs B. Luckily it was the plate with the crack in it. It needed throwing out, anyway.”

  Deftly she swept up the bits, Mike appreciatively studying her neat little bottom as she bent down.

  Chummy stood in the doorway, abashed and tongue-tied. I tried to get her to come over and join us for a cup of coffee, but she flushed scarlet and muttered something about going upstairs to wash her hands before lunch.