The Midwives of Raglan Road

by Jenny Holmes

  The kettle had boiled itself almost dry before Hazel gave up on her father and turned off the gas.

  ‘Where’s Dad got to?’ she asked her mother without preliminaries when Jinny returned home from a long afternoon spent behind Ken Bishop’s fruit and veg stall at Clifton Market.

  Jinny sighed as she deposited a big bag of potatoes, onions and carrots at the cellar head. ‘Hello, Hazel. Lovely to see you too,’ she mocked.

  Hazel grinned sheepishly. ‘Sorry, Mum. Here, let me take them down for you.’ No sooner said than done – the heavy bag was safely stored in the keeping cellar and Hazel was back in the kitchen refilling the kettle before Jinny had removed her coat.

  ‘Where is your dad, anyway? Why isn’t he back?’ Jinny looked in the mirror over the mantelpiece to pat her hair back into place. She caught sight of Hazel’s reflection behind her own – so like her but minus twenty years of wear and tear. Both had small, delicate features, blue eyes and finely arched eyebrows, and both were fair skinned. What’s more, they were alike in making the most of their slender figures and wearing clothes and make-up that were up-to-the-minute. ‘Two peas in a pod,’ people would often say. ‘More like sisters than mother and daughter.’

  ‘Maybe he stopped behind for a bit of overtime,’ Hazel suggested, holding back the news about Betty’s baby until her mother’s mood improved.

  Jinny tutted. ‘There’s been no overtime at Oldroyd’s mill since January. Nor at Kingsley’s or Calvert’s, for that matter.’

  So much for Leonard Hollings’ promise. Hazel was struck by the thought that she might not get her money as soon as expected.

  ‘As a matter of fact, your dad mentioned earlier this week that they’re thinking of cutting back hours in the spinning shed.’

  Hazel had the good grace to blush and apologize once more. ‘I didn’t realize. But you know Dad – he doesn’t talk to me about his work.’

  ‘Yes, though he’d have come clean if you’d bothered to ask.’ Since Hazel’s return from college, Jinny had made it her business to bring her daughter back down to earth. ‘I don’t want her flouncing around all over the place,’ she’d told her own mother Ada and her sister Rose on her last visit to them in Nelson Yard. ‘What use is a certificate in midwifery if you stick your nose so high in the air that you don’t notice what’s going on around you?’

  Ada had nodded but kind-hearted Rose had disagreed.

  ‘Don’t be too hard on the girl,’ she’d advised her sister. ‘Hazel’s thin skinned. She’ll take your criticism to heart and so will Robert. It’ll lead to arguments if you’re not careful.’

  At home on Raglan Road, Hazel now took the latest rebuke from Jinny in subdued silence and retreated to the corner of the kitchen to pour the tea. ‘Dad’s been overseer at Oldroyd’s longer than anyone,’ she reasoned. ‘His job’s safe, surely.’

  Jinny’s reply came in the form of pursed lips and a sour look, interrupted by the opening of the door and Robert’s belated entrance. He was all smiles and he carried a slim, neatly wrapped parcel under his arm.

  ‘I know – before you say it, I’m late and I’m sorry!’ He laughed, spilling good humour into the frosty silence. Ten years older than his wife, he was a tall, strong-looking man whose dark hair was streaked with grey and whose clear brown eyes could be read like an open book.

  ‘What are you looking so pleased about?’ Jinny challenged, but she softened when Robert slipped his free arm around her waist and kissed her cheek.

  ‘This!’ he announced, holding up the parcel before offering it to Hazel. ‘I had to drop in at Redman’s to collect it after work. That’s why I’m late.’

  ‘What is it?’ Hazel asked.

  ‘Open it and see.’

  Quickly she untied the string and folded back the stiff brown paper. She lifted out her recently awarded midwifery certificate, complete with college coat of arms and her name written out in beautiful copperplate, all encased in a frame that had been specially made at the picture-framer’s on Westgate Road. ‘Oh!’ she said, her face flushed with unspoken gratitude.

  ‘Stand aside, you two – this gets pride of place, here on the mantelpiece.’ Robert took the frame and got Jinny to move a heavy marble clock out of the way.

  ‘This clock was a wedding present from my mother,’ Jinny grumbled as she looked in vain for a different place to put it.

  ‘I was telling Sidney Redman all about our Hazel,’ Robert went on as he stood back to admire the effect. ‘What a clever girl she is and how hard she’s worked to qualify. Sidney promised to pass the word around, since he and his missis don’t have any more call for the services of a midwife, if you know what I mean.’

  A prim glance from Jinny did nothing to dent his garrulous high spirits.

  ‘What?’ he said with a grin. ‘I’m only stating the obvious. Anyway, I expect there’ll be plenty of young couples from Westgate Road knocking on our door before too long, and all up and down Raglan Road and in Nelson Yard …’

  ‘I delivered Betty Hollings’ baby this morning.’ Hazel was unable to contain her excitement any longer. Her eyes shone and a dimple appeared in her left cheek – a characteristic that somehow made her seem younger than her twenty-one years. ‘Mother and baby are both doing well!’

  With a whoop Robert gathered her in his arms and gave her one of his strong hugs that squashed the breath out of her. ‘You hear that, Jinny? Hazel doesn’t let the grass grow. No, not her. She’s only gone and started as she means to go on.’

  ‘I know – I’m not deaf,’ Jinny replied stiffly. ‘Anyway, Hazel, I hope you made the Hollingses stump up the money before you left …? No, I can see from your face that you didn’t.’

  ‘Next week,’ Hazel explained. ‘That’s when they’ve promised to pay me.’

  Jinny didn’t need to go on – her expression said it all.

  ‘They will!’ Hazel insisted. She felt her cheeks burn. Why did her mother always have to put a dampener on things? Why couldn’t she be pleased with her for once? ‘Leonard swore to me that he’d put in the overtime.’

  ‘My, my – Thomas Kingsley’s filled his empty order book, has he? He must have if he’s handing out overtime to his loom tuners left, right and centre.’ Taking her apron from the hook and tying it around her waist, Jinny turned her back on Hazel and Robert and took a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese from the food safe above the sink. ‘Ask anyone around here, the first rule of working for yourself is to make sure you get paid on the dot. Didn’t they teach you that at college?’

  Robert stepped in to ease the bad feeling in the room. ‘Leonard will stump up the money, don’t you worry,’ he told Hazel. ‘If not, his name will be mud.’

  But Jinny wasn’t so easily deflected as she sliced through the bread with a deft sawing motion. ‘I ran into Mabel Jackson yesterday. She was asking after you, Hazel, then telling me how hard it is to get cash out of folk these days, even for someone like her who’s been at it for years. She’s lost count of the women she’s helped, me included. Back then, when you put in your appearance, we were properly grateful for what Mabel did and she could rely on us to pay up. Not now, though, not when everyone is so hard pressed.’

  ‘All right, Mum. There’s no need to go on about it.’ Hazel felt like one of those hot air balloons whose steering went awry so that it got snagged on a tree branch and punctured. Whoosh, the air had gone out of her, leaving her deflated.

  Of course the money side of being self-employed was a worry, but Hazel had thought through the practical angles and reached the optimistic conclusion that setting up as a midwife was a bit like being a hairdresser – there would always be women having babies and needing her help, just as there were always women who needed a haircut.

  ‘Set the table for us, there’s a good girl.’ Jinny ignored the fact that Hazel was upset. The cheese was sliced and laid on the bread. The gas was lit. ‘Cheese on toast with a nice slice of cream cake to follow,’ she announced. ‘I called in at Sykes’ bakery
for the bread and Marjorie knows how partial you are to a Victoria sponge, Robert. This one came out of the oven lopsided so she let me have it cheap.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  One of the problems Hazel had come up against after her year away in London and her return to Raglan Road was the unshakeable feeling that she was fourteen years old again, a school leaver about to embark on the rocky road to adulthood.

  For that was how her mother treated her – as a naive girl with ideas above her station and a tendency to answer back.

  ‘I don’t know where you get it from,’ had been Jinny’s incantation throughout Hazel’s teenage years, up to the elbows in sudsy water as she scrubbed away at Robert’s stiff shirt collars. It didn’t matter what the argument was about – a request for privacy from Hazel as she heated her Friday-night bath water in the kitchen copper or a refusal to run an errand because she was getting ready to go out – the charge was always the same. ‘You don’t get it from me, for a start. You never caught me cheeking my elders when I was your age.’

  ‘I’m not cheeking my elders,’ Hazel would retort before her mother gave her the thin-lipped look that said, That proves my point exactly! Then Hazel would retreat to her attic room to sulk and dream of escape.

  Her father, too, sometimes behaved as if she was a child, though in a different way – spoiling her as he had from the moment he’d married Jinny and they’d all three moved into the house on Raglan Road. He was Jinny’s second husband – her first, Alec Sharpe, having been killed in the war.

  Alec and Jinny had married late in 1913, during the slow build-up of hostilities between Britain and Germany. Hazel had been born in the autumn of the following year, just a week before Alec had gone off to the Front. The eager young private didn’t see in the New Year, but met his bloody end alongside thousands of comrades slaughtered in a muddy Flanders field.

  Five years later, Robert Price had cautiously courted and married the beautiful, sad-eyed young widow, stepping into the role of husband and stepfather without a moment’s hesitation.

  Even-tempered and hard-working, Robert had lavished attention on Hazel and it was he and not her mother who had eventually backed her over leaving home and going to college. The frame for the certificate was a case in point. It showed Robert’s unswerving pride in his stepdaughter. He hadn’t stopped to consider if it was something she or, more to the point, Jinny would wish to have in prime position on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Hazel deserves a treat,’ he would tell his wife in the early days, when Hazel won an essay-writing competition at Lowton Junior School. Then he would take her into town for Saturday-afternoon tea at the Kardomah refreshment rooms and he would boast about her to all and sundry. Top of her class again – I don’t know where she gets it from.

  His words echoed Jinny’s refrain, though for different reasons, Hazel thought with a wry smile as she finished her tea then retreated to her attic bedroom. This, she reminded herself, was the day of her first delivery – signifying a new life for baby Daisy Hollings, joy soon followed by extra drudgery for Betty and a professional road opening up for Hazel. And yet here I am, she reminded herself, listening to Mum’s grumbles and stuck at home on a Friday night with nowhere to go.

  She hung her work skirt on a hanger and put it away in the wardrobe. Then she rolled up the pair of silk stockings that had been drying over the back of her chair and slid them into her top drawer. After that she went downstairs in jumper and slacks, took cleaning materials out of the shoe box and began to polish her brogues.

  ‘Not going out tonight, love?’ Her dad glanced up from the newspaper he was reading.

  ‘Not tonight,’ Hazel replied. She’d already heard the click of the front door as Jinny went out, presumably to drop in on her mother and Rose. ‘I thought I’d have a quiet night in.’

  ‘That’s a shame. You should be out enjoying yourself, getting back into the swing of things.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow.’ She sighed as she noticed her certificate on the mantelpiece, the glass gleaming in the gaslight. She heard the faint, insistent hiss of gas and the intermittent, soft pop-pop of the mantel in the alcove that housed Jinny’s treadle sewing machine. Everything was the same as in the old days, Hazel thought again – except for her mood, which was a mixture of mounting irritation and apprehension that she’d seldom felt before.

  She brushed polish from her shoes then buffed them until they shone. What’s wrong with me? she wondered, punishing the shoes with firm swipes of her yellow duster. I have plenty to keep me busy. For a start, I’ve promised to call in on Betty tomorrow morning to see how she’s getting on. On Monday I’ve arranged to go to the surgery on Westgate Road to see if there’s any work coming up there. The more people know about me and my new venture, the better.

  ‘I’d have done that for you,’ Robert said, folding his newspaper and noticing Hazel at work on her shoes.

  ‘I don’t mind. I got used to doing it myself while I was away.’ The response sounded sharper than she’d intended and she was relieved when the door opened and her cousin Gladys breezed in without knocking.

  ‘Put those away this minute and come with me!’ she cried, snatching the shoes from Hazel and pulling her to her feet – a whirlwind of blonde, bubbly energy that sucked in everything in its path. Tonight twenty-two-year-old Gladys was dressed in a red knitted bolero and high-waisted white slacks, with peep-toe sandals that showed her crimson-painted toenails. ‘Hello, Uncle Robert. A little bird tells me Hazel is down in the dumps for no reason so here I am to sort her out!’

  ‘Who says I’m down in the dumps?’ Hazel protested feebly.

  ‘Aunty Jinny did. I bumped into her at Nana’s house. And look at you – it’s true. Anyone would think you’d come back home with your tail between your legs instead of getting top marks in your year. And don’t deny it – Uncle Robert’s been spouting off about it to the whole family.’

  ‘Dad!’ Hazel’s sigh of protest matched her glum expression.

  Gladys wrinkled her nose in a sign of impatience. ‘Come on, Hazel, shake a leg. You’ve got ten minutes to put your glad rags on. Don’t go mad, though: change into your best pair of slacks and a nice, fitted blouse – that kind of thing.’

  ‘Why? Where are we going?’

  ‘To town – where else? To the new jazz club next to Merton and Groves. Don’t worry, Uncle Robert, I’ll look after her!’

  Sitting beside Gladys on the tram into town, Hazel couldn’t help feeling like the ugly duckling. Where Gladys sparkled (fingernails painted to match her toenails, silver earrings and locket necklace), Hazel gave off a quieter glow. Her hands and nails were scrubbed clean, she wore hardly any make-up and her fair hair was less bold and brassy. True, she matched Gladys and perhaps outshone her in other details, such as the trimness of her figure and the violet depth of her heavily lashed eyes, but she lacked her cousin’s breezy confidence, coming across as more thoughtful and reserved.

  As the conductor took their coppers and gave them their tickets, it was Gladys he winked at and it was with her that he acted out the pretence that she had tendered the wrong fare.

  ‘That’s tuppence you owe me next time you take my tram,’ he kidded, his cap tilted back, a dark forelock curling down. ‘I’ve got a memory like an elephant so I won’t forget.’

  ‘Cheeky blighter!’ Gladys laughed, springing from her seat as they approached the stop. ‘I know your face – you work with my brother, Dan Drummond. I’ll be sure to tell him how you tried to trick me.’

  And at the entrance to the jazz club, Hazel was sure that it was Gladys who attracted the attention of the small gang of smokers hanging around on the pavement, puffing away at their cigarettes.

  ‘Aye-aye!’ they chanted with a rising intonation that showed their approval.

  ‘Watch out, lads – things are looking up.’

  ‘Fall in behind me – I’m first in line.’

  ‘Behave yourselves!’ Gladys tutted as she and Hazel avoided the scuffle at the doo
r and made their way down some stone steps into a dingy, smoke-filled cellar with a bar and a small stage where musicians were tuning their instruments. ‘Get a move on, Hazel. Dan and Eddie are here already – I asked them to save us a couple of seats.’

  So Hazel followed meekly, threading between tables in the crowded room until they found the corner where Gladys’s brothers sat. There was just time to say their hellos and take their seats before the band struck up the first tune – a smooth, fluid combination of clarinet and saxophone backed by the beat of drums and a tinkling waterfall of piano notes that launched the singer into a doleful, gravel-voiced plea for his unfaithful lover to return.

  Hazel’s eldest cousin, Dan, leaned in close and nudged her with his elbow. ‘Well, Hazel, what do you reckon to this place?’

  ‘It’s grand,’ she said with a nod. It was the type of music she’d heard in the cinema, watching suave men in white dinner jackets and dicky bows flirting with screen goddesses like Carole Lombard. The musicians onstage were not in the same league as that but they were good enough to make you tap your feet and pay attention.

  Dan nodded back. ‘By the way, congratulations on your college thingumajig. Though it’s rather you than me any day of the week with that job.’

  Hazel laughed. ‘Thanks, Dan. Lucky for you, no woman in her right mind would ask you to bring a baby into this world. Anyway, how’s life?’

  ‘The same, ta. Still driving a corporation tram. Still hoping to pick a winner at the dog track.’

  She started to tell him about the incident between Gladys and the cheeky conductor then thought better of it. The band had begun a new tune and a few people, Dan and Gladys among them, were standing up to trawl the room for partners to dance with. Soon couples held each other close and shuffled around the confined space as the lovelorn singer sang of fresh woes.

  ‘Dance?’ Eddie offered, diffidently holding out his hand to Hazel. Like his brother Dan, he had the handsome charm of the Drummonds – a clean-cut look with regular features and a side parting in his sandy hair. But his face retained an innocent air and lacked the brash sophistication of the others, allowing Hazel to see that he was only inviting her out of politeness.