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

by Linda Fairley

  The concert was really great. A kindly usher noticed that Graham and I didn’t have a very good view from up in the gods and offered to move us nearer the front. Our new seats were practically on the stage, and when Cliff began to sing I felt as if he was singing just for me. It was very hot and quite stuffy, with dry ice and cigarette smoke filling the air, and by the end of the evening my mustard and black smock dress was thick with perspiration, not to mention the pungent smell of Capstan and Park Drive cigarettes. Graham was so hot he had to remove his tweed jacket and skinny-striped tanktop, but Cliff somehow remained cool and impeccably presented in his sharp-cut suit throughout the show. I adored him!

  ‘We’re All Going on a Summer Holiday,’ the students on Oxford Road continued to sing badly, jolting me sharply back to this Manchester night in the summer of 1967. I envied the students’ freedom, their joie de vivre. Just a year or so earlier I had left the Palladium singing that song without a care in the world, just like them. Now life had become much more serious, even though I was still only nineteen years old.

  ‘I guess we all have to grow up some time,’ I remarked to Linda wistfully, ‘but I feel so old compared to those students!’

  ‘Hey, we’re still “Young Ones”,’ she joshed, recalling another Cliff song, but I think she knew exactly what I meant. We were young, of course, but as student nurses we were no longer carefree.

  Chapter Four

  ‘People are dying … This is harder than I thought’

  One morning about twenty student nurses in my intake assembled in the hospital car park and clambered onto a coach with Mr Tate. Our destination was Booth Hall Children’s Hospital in Blackley, north Manchester.

  I knew it had a reputation for being one of the finest children’s hospitals in the country, and I hung on Mr Tate’s every word during the journey as he explained how Humphrey Booth first opened the infirmary in 1908, caring for the sick and destitute from the workhouse after the devastation caused by the plague. In 1914 it took in wounded soldiers from the First World War, and when war was declared a second time the hospital relocated its existing patients and installed a decontamination unit to treat victims of gas attacks.

  ‘Fortunately for the region, the anticipated casualties never materialised and within six months Booth Hall reverted back to caring for sick children,’ Mr Tate said. ‘The inscription on Humphrey Booth’s headstone reads “Love his memory, imitate his devotion”, and I think you will all agree that is an excellent standard to aspire to.’

  I felt quite emotional as the coach pulled into Booth Hall. It was a privilege to be a part of the NHS, continuing the good work of the likes of Humphrey Booth, and I was eager to learn about caring for children. I imagined it would be a worthwhile and rewarding branch of nursing, looking after little ones and then returning them, fit and well, back to the bosom of their family. Maybe I might think about being a children’s nurse in the future?

  It was windy as we walked across the car park to the hospital entrance, where a smiling but straight-backed Matron stood resplendent in a thick cape, arms held wide and welcoming like a priest on a pulpit addressing the congregation.

  ‘Welcome to Booth Hall,’ she enunciated with immense pride. ‘My staff and I are very pleased to have the opportunity to show off our fine hospital. I hope the visit will serve as an inspiration for you all, girls.’

  I caught a glimpse of Linda, who was trying hard to suppress a giggle. ‘What?’ I whispered.

  ‘Mr Tate,’ she said, flicking her eyes over my shoulder.

  I turned and saw our tutor grappling unceremoniously with his comb-over, which had become unstuck and was flapping wildly in the breeze, revealing his bald, shiny scalp in all its glory. The escaped hair must have been at least a foot long in full flight.

  ‘Linda, you are awful,’ I said. ‘Poor Mr Tate!’

  We were taken on a whistle-stop tour of several wards and day rooms, which I was heartened to note had colourful bedclothes and curtains and bright pictures on the walls. Children wrapped in dressing gowns and slippers sat quietly with nurses, playing with wooden farmyard animals and train sets. I’d like to do that, I thought.

  Our final stop was the burns unit. The smell and stiflingly high temperature hit me as soon as we stepped through the door, and my head immediately started to spin. In here, children were undressed save for their underwear and bandages wrapped around legs, arms, torsos and heads. There was a sickly-sweet smell of flesh mixed together with a petrol-like odour.

  Sister Pattinson, who was in charge of the burns unit, patiently started explaining how burns were dressed with open-weave gauze impregnated with Vaseline, which was designed to stop it sticking. I thought how cool and composed she appeared – or was that just in comparison to me? By the time Sister Pattinson got up to the bit about placing the gauze very delicately over the wound so as not to cause more damage to the raw flesh, I was feeling hot and flustered. I was fainting, in fact, and I couldn’t stop myself.

  I remember hearing the scraping of chair legs and the words: ‘Put your head between your legs, Nurse Lawton,’ as the ward began to swirl around me. Then I blacked out.

  ‘Never mind, Linda. Happens to the best of us,’ Lesley Bennyon told me back at the MRI the following evening, when we signed in for a night shift together.

  ‘I just felt so stupid,’ I said. ‘What must the children have thought? They are such brave little souls, and there’s me, with nothing wrong, collapsing like that in front of them.’

  ‘Put it behind you,’ Lesley advised. ‘Onwards and upwards! Come on, let’s see what’s in store tonight.’

  Glancing down the ward, I noticed that Mrs Pearlman was fast asleep, which was unusual at the start of a night shift. The night sister had not yet given me my orders, so I walked over to Mrs Pearlman to check on her. She was very still and very quiet, and her black hair had fallen messily across her face. Strands of it were lying across her nose and mouth, and as I got closer I held my breath. Her hair was as still as she was. There was no breath coming from either her nose or her mouth.

  I reached for her wrist. There was no pulse, and my own heartbeat quickened, as if to compensate. I smoothed her hair neatly off her face, and pulled the curtain slowly around her bed.

  ‘Lesley,’ I said, tears starting to well in my eyes. ‘Mrs Pearlman is dead.’

  Half an hour later, Lesley and I were tasked with the job of laying out Mrs Pearlman’s body. Lesley was an old hand at this by now, but it was my first time and I didn’t mind admitting I was a little frightened.

  ‘I don’t know what to expect at all,’ I told Lesley. ‘I’ve never seen a dead body before, let alone touched one.’

  ‘We’ll work together,’ Lesley said. ‘It’s not half as bad as you might think.’

  I nodded, silently asking God to help me in my job, and to take good care of Mrs Pearlman.

  ‘She was a very good lady,’ I said, telling myself she had lived to a ripe old age and appeared to have died in her sleep, which was a blessing. I guessed that Mrs Pearlman might have anticipated her death, and that is why she’d wanted to give me her gold watch. She was preparing to leave. ‘She deserves the best possible care. Please, God, help me to work well, and please may she rest in peace,’ I said silently.

  Lesley had fetched a trolley upon which she had placed a basin of water, some cloths, cotton wool, bandages and fresh white sheets. There was also a label attached to a piece of string.

  ‘First we have to wash her,’ Lesley said quietly, dipping the cotton wool in the water and setting to work, delicately wiping Mrs Pearlman’s face. There were some faint smudges of mascara below the old lady’s eyes and some spittle around her mouth, which Lesley tenderly removed.

  ‘There we are,’ Lesley said brightly. It was almost as if Mrs Pearlman were still alive and Lesley was chatting to her as she gave her a bed bath.

  For a moment I had to remind myself that Mrs Pearlman was very much dead. I stared at her face and could scarcely bel
ieve she could no longer talk or smile, because she looked for all the world as if she were in a deep sleep and might wake up at any moment.

  Lesley caught my eye. ‘Let’s pop her teeth back in, shall we?’ she said, reaching for Mrs Pearlman’s dentures.

  I’d been taught the theory of laying out a patient in school, but putting it into practice was another thing entirely.

  Lesley opened Mrs Pearlman’s mouth gently and inserted the false teeth effortlessly, before flashing me a sympathetic smile. ‘There now, she looks better already,’ she said. ‘Once, I had to lay out a man whose body was cold and rigor mortis had started to set in. It took the strength of two of us to prise open his jaw and squeeze his dentures back in place!’

  I smiled gamely, and Lesley kept talking. ‘How about we pop a little label on her toe?’

  Lesley picked up the brown label upon which she wrote ‘Moran Pearlman’ and her dates of birth and death. I calculated she had been seventy-six years of age, and was glad she had lived a long life. ‘Here, Linda, this needs tying around her big toe,’ Lesley said, placing the label in my hand and giving me a nudge of encouragement as I got to work.

  Then I watched as Lesley set about packing Mrs Pearlman’s body. ‘It’s not a pleasant job, but honestly, it gets easier each time,’ Lesley soothed. ‘I was exactly the same as you this time last year – worse, probably!’

  I admired Lesley. She somehow managed to keep the atmosphere light yet respectful as she demonstrated first how to bandage around the jaw to keep the mouth closed, and then how to insert cotton wool into the nose and ears to stop any bodily fluids leaking out.

  As we gently turned Mrs Pearlman over to wash her back, the old lady let out a slow sigh as her lungs expelled her last breath. Even though I’d been told about this in school, it still took me by surprise, and my hands shot to my mouth.

  ‘Eerie, isn’t it?’ Lesley said as she continued her work.

  All that remained was to wrap Mrs Pearlman’s body in a paper shroud and sheets and place a large white label around her legs, which Lesley also wrote her name on. We had just finished the job and were about to call the mortuary porters when a sister stuck her head around the curtain and groaned.

  ‘The Rabbi is on his way!’ she said crossly. ‘Honestly, Lesley, you ought to know better.’

  Lesley’s face fell, and she immediately set about unwinding the sheets from Mrs Pearlman’s body. I looked at her in confusion.

  ‘It’s because she’s Jewish,’ Lesley hissed, shaking her head and furrowing her brow. ‘And Sister is right. I really ought to know better. The Rabbi always visits and says prayers before the body is wrapped up and taken to the morgue. Step outside, Linda. Please detain the Rabbi a moment if he turns up before I’m done unwrapping her.’

  Later, after two porters wheeled Mrs Pearlman’s body away in what looked like a metal coffin upon a trolley, I felt a sob in my throat. Tears sprang to my eyes, which I couldn’t stop from dripping down my cheeks.

  ‘Have a good cry,’ Lesley said. ‘You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. I used to cry every time.’

  ‘H-h-how did you stop?’ I asked, accepting a hankie and blowing my nose quietly into it.

  ‘There’s no special trick, but thinking about how terrible you look with puffy eyes helps – especially if you think of the handsome house doctors I’ve spotted recently! Come on, let’s sneak ourselves a cup of tea before we go back on the ward.’

  A few days later I relayed the story of my first ‘laying out’ to Graham in intricate detail, complete with fresh tears, which flooded rather than dripped this time.

  ‘People are dying,’ I bawled. ‘This is harder than I thought.’ Sharing the experience diluted the awfulness a little, and as always Graham was a willing shoulder to cry on.

  ‘It’s all good experience for you,’ he said kindly. ‘Your friend is right, I’m sure. It can only get easier.’

  He had taken me to one of our favourite little snack bars on Oxford Road. As I sipped a Coca-Cola and ate a Wagon Wheel, I dried my tears and looked at Graham lovingly. I couldn’t imagine life without him. I didn’t want to go back to the nurses’ home on my own, and I laid my head on his shoulder and sobbed.

  The following evening, after my shift, I telephoned Graham from the payphone along the corridor of the nurses’ home. Feeding four penny coins into the slot, pressing ‘A’ when I got the connection and hearing his voice saying ‘Ashton 4319’ had become something of a ritual.

  ‘I’m sorry about last night,’ I said. I was so tired I had fallen asleep on his shoulder in the snack bar. He had gently roused me and driven me back to the nurses’ home in time for the 11 p.m. curfew. I couldn’t thank him enough. Getting a telling off from the home sister on top of everything else would have been too much to bear.

  Alone in my room, I studied myself in the mirror properly for the first time in weeks and was shocked by what I saw. There were thick black rings under my eyes and my uniform was sagging around my bust and hips. I’d been a size eight when I started at the MRI and I could see I’d lost weight. Even my hair looked thinner as it hung limply around my ears.

  I collapsed into bed and closed my eyes as tightly as possible, telling myself a good night’s sleep was what I needed. Through the darkness, two images of Mrs Pearlman’s face appeared and began to completely occupy the blackness in my head. First I saw her sitting up in bed, smiling at me, and then I saw her lying cold and still on the morgue trolley. I snapped my eyes open and tried to get her face out of my mind, but each time I closed my eyes, there she was again.

  What was I doing to myself in this place? I’m sure I looked worse than some of the patients, and once again I found myself questioning my choice of career, searching for reasons to stay but finding reasons to leave.

  Seeing Lesley’s smiling face the next morning helped to bring back my smile. She’d been on night duty and was about to clock off.

  ‘You missed a right kerfuffle last night,’ she told me. ‘We had a tramp brought in, poor old devil. Police called an ambulance after finding him in an alleyway behind Piccadilly Station. We couldn’t make out if he was drunk or just delirious. He’s in that side room on the end.’

  Lesley was holding a tray containing several sputum jars – little pots given to the patients to spit mucus into, so the contents could be taken to the laboratory for testing. She looked perfectly at ease with her revolting wares, and she laughed when she saw me shudder.

  ‘Come on, Linda,’ she said. ‘Chin up. Now you’ve laid out a body you’ve seen it all. There’s no going back. If you can do that, nothing else can rattle you!’

  I nodded reluctantly. ‘Come with me while I check on our poor old tramp before I go,’ she said, linking her arm through mine. ‘I’m afraid he still doesn’t smell too good, despite having had a bed bath and some fresh clothes. No doubt he’ll be glad of a cup of tea when the trolley comes round in a bit …’

  We entered the side room and both shrieked in unison. Tiny black dots were crawling all over the tramp’s pillow and counterpane, but the old man was completely motionless.

  ‘Stay there,’ Lesley said, leaving me rooted in the doorway as she stepped up to the bed and lifted his limp arm to test his pulse. I could tell he’d passed away, which didn’t appear to surprise Lesley.

  ‘I’ve seen this before,’ she told me solemnly, staring at the pillow. ‘It’s lice, hundreds of them by the looks of it, leaving his body as it starts to go cold.’

  I was speechless.

  ‘There’s two beds need making on the ward,’ Lesley said swiftly. ‘Go quickly and busy yourself while I talk to Sister.’

  I thanked Lesley profusely for letting me go.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ she said. ‘It just goes to show: I guess you can never presume you’ve seen it all in nursing. Sorry you had to see this, so soon after Mrs Pearlman.’

  Miss Morgan retired at the end of my first year as a student nurse, and a new matron called Miss Bell arrived. She
too had an ample bosom, which seemed to be a prerequisite for the job, but I was pleased to see that she also had a refreshingly sunny smile. Her dark chestnut hair was as glossy as fresh conkers, and I was quietly impressed by her each time I saw her patrolling the wards. I thought how glamorous she looked compared to me, even though I was still a teenager and she must have been a middle-aged woman.

  ‘Matron’s coming!’ someone would caution with unnerving regularity. With Miss Morgan I’d been inclined to hide my head in a locker or dart into the linen cupboard and wish her far away, but when Miss Bell appeared I always wanted to catch a glimpse of her, and I didn’t feel the need to hide. She was immaculately presented and exuded confidence and charm. Like Sister Barnes, she made me aspire to be like her. ‘You can do it,’ I told myself time and time again. I could be like them if I kept working hard, looking after myself and trying my best. I didn’t have ambitions to be a matron or even a sister, as those jobs seemed a million miles away from me, but I wanted to be the best nurse possible.

  ‘I’d like to ask your father for your hand in marriage,’ Graham announced one evening. We were sitting in an unglamorous café on Deansgate, warming our hands on mugs of hot chocolate.

  I giggled, embarrassed. Graham had said many times ‘When we get married …’ and in my heart I had known for a long time that he was ‘the one’ and we would no doubt settle down together eventually. I hadn’t been expecting this formal proposal right now, though, not while I had two more years as a student ahead of me. Nevertheless, I was thrilled.

  ‘OK!’ I grinned, adding without hesitation: ‘I’d like that very much.’

  A few weeks later Graham took me to a jewellery shop called Wilds in Ashton. We looked at engagement rings in the window, feeling terribly excited and grown up, before going round to my parents’ for our tea.