‘Her father is coming down to get her. So good of him to look after his daughter like that,’ Matron had said to Christine.
‘Yes, I bet,’ Jessie snorted when Christine relayed this.
Lizzie didn’t say anything; she knew exactly what Jessie meant, had eventually worked it out for herself. She was doing her best to block it from her mind.
Matron’s kindness had evaporated by Christmas morning: she insisted they get up at dawn as usual and herded them off to chapel. It was cold and bleak.
At home, there had always been a little tableau near the altar of the baby Jesus in his crib with Mary and Joseph behind him and fluffy white sheep nearby in the straw. She’d always taken it for granted, thought it was a bit babyish even. Now she missed it.
When her mother rang later on Christmas Day, she didn’t say a word about Pearl’s miscarriage: her parents wouldn’t want to know.
And she certainly hadn’t told her mother in her weekly phone call that she’d tried to persuade Matron to let her keep the baby.
Lizzie picked up the pillow on Pearl’s empty bed. ‘I probably would have been a lousy mother anyway,’ she said resignedly.
‘One day, you’ll make a wonderful mother,’ Meg said.
‘One day, maybe,’ she agreed. ‘I don’t want to go through this again for a long time.’
‘I’m going to find a husband and have another baby as soon as I can,’ Christine said. ‘I’ve loved being pregnant and I know I’d be a good mother. I feel as if I’m cut out for it.’
‘You wait ‘til you have it. You might not be so keen after you’ve been through the birth.’
‘You always say that, Jessie. I don’t think it will be nearly as bad as you make out.’
‘You wait and see.’
‘What are you going to do, Lizzie? You’ve never said.’
Lizzie thought for a moment. She pictured going back home, the awful boat journey, her mother meeting her off the ferry. Would her father be there? Would Penny? Perhaps it would be a joyous reunion. She could live at home, help around the house for a bit, but then what? She couldn’t go back to school – all the girls would have left and gone onto Teachers’ College and Secretarial College, some even to the university. She would be too late for this year’s intake.
What could she do? Not much. She’d wanted to be an architect, but without finishing her final year at school that would be out of the question. Her mother had suggested working in an architect’s office, learning the ropes, perhaps being a draughtswoman one day. A bit of a come-down from her hopes and dreams of creating the most beautiful homes the town had ever seen, homes on stilts, homes that blended into their natural surroundings like the ones she’d seen in a library book about Frank Lloyd Wright, or designing offices and government buildings that people would be proud to work in.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Work in an office I suppose.’
‘You should go back to school and finish your exams.’ Jessie came round her side of the bed and stood facing her squarely, her arms folded. ‘You could get a degree if you were prepared to start over.’
‘I don’t think I’ve the courage to go back to school. I’d be a year older than everyone else. They’d all know why, for sure.’
‘Go to a different school then. You don’t have to go to a posh school, you know, to get a good education.’ Anahira grinned at her. She’d teased her many times about going to a private school, having been sent to board at one herself for a year. At the end of that year, she’d refused to return.
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ She managed a weak smile.
She couldn’t wait to get out of this place and start her life again, she would rather be anywhere else than here, but she’d never had such close friends. Julia didn’t know half as much about her as these girls. Yet after she’d had her baby, she’d never see them again.
‘You’ve been so good to me. I’m going to miss you when this is over.’
‘We can keep in touch.’ Jessie sat on the end of the bed.
‘We can write,’ Meg said. ‘I’m good at letters. There’s not much else to do in the backblocks of Geraldine.’
‘There’s not much to do here in the evenings either,’ Jessie said.
‘It’s like our lives have been put on hold for five months, like time has stood still while back home, our families have been carrying on as usual without us.’ Lizzie picked up her photo frame and studied her family. Penny would be seven by the time she got home, Jerry would be in the upper sixth, his last year at school, and her mother would be the same as ever, busy with her meetings, busy in the kitchen. Life had gone on without her. What if they’d stopped noticing she wasn’t around? Would they care if she never came home again?
‘We must write. I will if you will.’
They promised. They swapped addresses.
As Lizzie wrote down hers, it occurred to her that her father might not want her staying at home, at least not for long. Where would she go then?
Christine was the first of the five of them to be due, but she was not the first to be delivered. Anahira was, her waters breaking just as she was getting out of the communal shower.
Her squeals were soon echoed by the others.
‘You lucky thing.’ Lizzie was standing in the next shower and paid close attention to the water as it flowed towards the drain, expecting it to be different. But the puddles of water all looked the same – clear, with a slight soap scum. ‘How can you tell your waters have broken? Where have they gone?’
‘You’ll know when it happens.’ Anahira pulled a face. ‘It’s like going to the toilet standing up.’
Lizzie winced at the thought. ‘Eew.’
‘I’d give anything for it to happen to me,’ Christine said. ‘I was supposed to be first.’
‘Good timing, Anahira,’ Meg joked. ‘It’s a lot easier to clean up in the shower– and a lot more private.’
‘I’m glad it didn’t happen in the dining hall. It would be so embarrassing.’
‘Or in chapel. Imagine what Miss Mayhew would say!’ Lizzie added.
‘I suppose I’d better go and tell her,’ Anahira said.
‘Yes, you’d better. But you haven’t had any contractions yet, so I wouldn’t hurry,’ Jessie said.
‘Do they start soon?’
‘They should. But there’s no guarantee,’ Christine said. ‘The books were a bit vague about that.’
‘She’s right,’ Jessie said. ‘That’s the thing about babies - you never can be sure when they’re coming.’
Anahira’s contractions started at breakfast, but with the rush to clear up the kitchen and prepare the midday meal, they didn’t notice she wasn’t there any more. She just slipped away to have her baby without telling them.
Lizzie didn’t see Anahira again until she came up to the dormitory to collect her things. For five days, the girls had spoken of little else and they besieged her with questions as soon as she came through the door. But Anahira didn’t want to talk about it.
‘It’s awful,’ was all she’d say.
Lizzie felt a flutter in her stomach, like she imagined a contraction might be – a gripping, sickening feeling. But it wasn’t a contraction. She recognised it as fear.
‘Did they let you see the baby?’
‘Yes. I saw him.’ There was no life behind her eyes; her expression was unreadable. She turned away and started to pack.
Lizzie started to say something; she wanted to ask what it was like, seeing your own baby after all this time waiting. Was he beautiful? What colour was his hair? And what was it like giving birth? Was it as painful as Jessie made out? But the constriction in the pit of her stomach warned her not to speak. Anahira was struggling not to show any emotion but Lizzie could see she was close to tears; she couldn’t bear looking at her any longer and turned away towards the others. They were pretending to be occupied with something else: Jessie started to pull hairs out of her brush; Christine returned to the book she’d been reading
; Jessie fiddled with her nightgown; Meg crossed to the window and pulled at the blind tassel. Defeated, Lizzie sat on her bed and picked up the photograph of her family, staring unseeingly at the figures inside the frame.
The girls had been warned long ago by the others in the home that it would be like this. They’d never quite believed it; now they knew.
Anahira threw her few belongings in an old leather bag. There was a sharp click as she closed the catch at the top.
‘It’s goodbye, then,’ she said, standing at the end of her bed.
They all said their farewells.
Lizzie hugged her tightly; the thin frame was limp and unresponding. She wanted to say something comforting.
‘Don’t forget to write,’ was all she could think of. It sounded hollow.
Anahira didn’t answer.
‘I wonder who’ll be next?’ Jessie said as the door closed behind her.
It was Christine. The girls knew nothing about it until they awoke one morning to find her bed empty. Lizzie immediately thought the worst, imagining a repeat of what had happened to Pearl, but Miss Mayhew told her Christine was over in the hospital having her baby.
They started to worry again that evening when she still hadn’t returned, but Miss Mayhew assured them Christine was all right, it was a long labour, that was all. She deflected their questions with the same response until the following morning when one of the girls on laundry duty told Jessie at morning tea that Christine had disappeared.
‘She’s run off with the baby,’ Jessie reported back.
‘What!’ None of them could believe it.
‘Jenny said she and Freda had to go over to collect the laundry trolley this morning and they overheard one of the nurses talking about it. Apparently Christine crept into the nursery last night and stole back her baby when the nurse was out of sight. She hasn’t been seen since.’
There was a chorus of cries: ‘But where would she go?’ ‘Good on her!’ ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘She always said she was going to keep her baby.’ Jessie said. ‘And she did.’
‘There’s hope for me yet,’ Lizzie said.
‘I wouldn’t count on it.’ Jessie put down her cup with a clatter. ‘They’ll put a double watch on the nursery now in case any of us get the same idea.’
‘There’ll be all hell to pay,’ Meg said. ‘Matron will be furious.’
‘Serve her right, the old bag,’ Jessie said.
‘Christine deserves a medal.’ Lizzie stood and collected the others’ cups to take to the servery.
Elation for their friend was short-lived. Two days later, Sally reported that Christine had been brought back and the baby returned to the nursery – without her. Sally didn’t know what had become of Christine and Miss Mayhew and Matron and anyone else in authority they asked refused to say.
Christine’s belongings disappeared when they were at work; they never saw her again.
What would happen to her? One day, they were all best friends, sharing everything, studying each other’s bodies, knowing more and sharing more about each other than they had with anybody. The next day, one of them would be gone, never to be seen again. And all she had was an address, somewhere in Nelson. She would write, but would she ever hear back? Somehow, it seemed unlikely. It was so sudden, this loss of friendship. Who would be the next to go?
‘That’s two deliveries now. I bags be next,’ Meg said. ‘I’m due before you two anyway.’
Lizzie wasn’t due for nearly another week when the first contraction came. They were in the kitchen cleaning up after lunch.
‘I’ll see how far they’re apart,’ Jessie said, putting down the tea towel and looking at her watch. She sent Lizzie over to the chair beside the servery. But she couldn’t sit still. She started clearing away cups. It seemed like an eternity before the next sharp pain shot through her.
‘Twenty minutes,’ Jessie called out, looking at her watch. ‘You’ve got ages yet.’
‘But shouldn’t I go see the nurse?’ Lizzie was terrified. This was the moment she’d been dreading – and also the moment she’d been looking forward to, because soon she would be free of this tremendous burden she’d been carrying around for so long through the hot summer days, restless in her bed, impossible to sleep at night. But before she could be free, she somehow had to get the baby out.
‘If you like. But she’ll just put you in that claustrophobic windowless room and make you lie on that uncomfortable high bed while she sticks cold stainless steel instruments up your fanny.’
‘Jessie!’
‘Well it’s true. And that’s just the beginning of the nightmare.’
‘I suppose if we got to have an adorable little baby at the end of the nightmare it would be bearable.’
Jessie folded her arms and looked at Lizzie as if she were mad. ‘But we don’t, do we? Not even Christine managed to pull it off.’
‘We should have seen it coming. She was absolutely nuts about babies, right from the start.’
‘And she never changed her mind.’ Meg came up behind Lizzie waving a spare tea towel at her.
‘Maybe she thought she deserved a reward at the end of all that pain,’ Lizzie said, ignoring the waiting dishes.
‘The only reward we’ll have is an end to the pain,’ Meg said.
‘Don’t count on it. If you get stitches, you’ll be in pain for some time to come.’ Jessie grinned mischievously.
‘Stitches? Nobody said anything about stitches before.’ Lizzie nearly dropped the cups she was stacking.
‘You can’t have been listening,’ Meg said. ‘One of the girls two groups ahead of us went into all the gory details when we were in the garden one Sunday afternoon.’
‘I never heard that. Where do you have them?’
‘Where do you think?’ Jessie pointed to the area at the top of her legs. ‘Where the baby comes out, silly.’
Lizzie swallowed hard and bit back a cry.
‘She said it happens to a lot of girls at the hospital,’ Meg continued.
‘That’s because they don’t care about us,’ Jessie said. ‘They only care about keeping the doctor’s bill down, so they try to avoid calling him. And the result? A lot of us get torn apart and have to get stitched up afterwards.’
‘Oh God, I hope it doesn’t happen to me.’ Lizzie’s voice started to quiver.
‘Oh, Lizzie, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘No, it’s all right, I’ve got to know. Christine used to tell us everything she knew from those books, but she never told us about stitches.’
‘The nice books she reads wouldn’t go into that sort of unpleasant detail.’
Lizzie felt another stabbing pain in her abdomen and yelled in pain.
‘You’ve still got a long way to go,’ Jessie said, looking at her watch.
‘You make it sound so matter-of-fact, so clinical.’
‘That’s what doctors are supposed to do.’
‘Well I hope you’re not like any of the doctors I’ve met so far. They’ve all been awful.’
‘I’m going to be brilliant.’ Jessie grinned. ‘Though I’ve a long way to go.’
‘Anyway, I hope I don’t need a doctor. I want a nice easy birth . . . like I was.’
But lying on the high narrow bed with its stiff, plastic-covered mattress, Lizzie soon realised she wasn’t in for an easy birth. She was stripped down, her clothes taken away – she never thought she’d be sorry to have the ghastly grey smock disappear – and made to wash in front of the nurse, ‘even down there’. Then the added humiliation of having her pubic hair shaved. Now that it was gone, she felt totally and utterly exposed.
All that covered her was a worn old hospital gown the nurse had to tie at the back. Her bare bottom was visible; her underpants were nowhere to be seen.
The nurse approached with a long rubber tube, a stainless steel dish, and a grim smile. ‘You have to have an enema,’ she said.
‘An enema – what’s that
?’ It sounded like a banana. Would she have to eat it? And what were the rubber tubes for?
She soon found out. And she hoped she would never in her life have to go through that again.
Once in the delivery room, the nurse kept telling her off, that she should be more dilated by now, while the contractions kept coming so far apart she found herself almost dozing off in her quiet isolation – until the sharp stab in her abdomen brought her back to reality.
In Her Mothers' Shoes Page 9