by Anne Bennett
‘Yes,’ Hannah said. ‘And call round to Mrs Byrne and ask her if she’ll keep Josie tonight. I’ve already asked if she could look after her when I’m in the nursing home and she won’t mind.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Arthur, looking flustered. ‘Thank God we have the car. But, we should have a phone installed. I must see about it.’
Hannah wished they had a phone, too, when a sudden intense pain gripped her stomach so that she doubled over with it. ‘Hurry, Arthur,’ she gasped when she had breath to do so. ‘I think this one is in a rush to be born.’
In the car, Arthur was full of consideration for her comfort. Hannah wondered if the baby could possibly cement the large cracks in their marriage. She could exist without sex and had been happier since Arthur had moved into the spare room and she shared the large bedroom with Josie. She was sure if they tried, they could live amicably together.
She knew he was nervous for he talked nonstop. ‘You’ll be fine, you’ll see. We’ll be there in no time. You just hold tight.’ On and on he went as Hannah rode the waves of pain.
At the nursing home, they chided her gently for leaving it so long, but Hannah remembered the hour upon agonising hour she’d lain in labour in the other home. There had been no one to comfort her and no information and she’d been terribly frightened. She’d been alone most of the time, except for the young girl in the far bed who’d screamed and cried for her mother constantly. She depressed Hannah greatly, but much as she wished the girl would shut up, she’d been shocked to the core by the vicious slap one of the nuns gave her. It stopped her screams but the gasping sobs she reverted to instead were just as bad.
This experience was so different. There was no time for a bath; a brief examination showed that the actual birth wasn’t too far away and so Hannah was helped into bed in a small room on her own and a pretty young Irish nurse called Nurse McIntosh attended her. Her accent was soothing and her hands were gentle, yet she seemed efficient and Hannah felt she could relax. She knew Arthur would be pacing the day room, probably smoking cigarette after cigarette in his anxiety, and she hoped for both their sakes that the predictions were right and the baby would soon be born.
‘How much longer?’ Arthur demanded of Sister Prescott. ‘She came in over three hours ago. It’s now past midnight. You said the birth was close.’
‘Calm yourself, Mr Bradley,’ the nurse said, and added with a smile, ‘Babies can be remarkably contrary creatures and yours is no different. The point is, the baby is anxious to be born, but just can’t seem to give that final push and your wife is tiring fast.’
‘So what’s to be done?’
‘I’ve sent for the doctor. He’ll probably advise forceps.’
But he didn’t advise forceps. He could scarcely believe that Hannah had given birth without help before for her hips were very narrow, but then of course she’d told him her first baby had been a month premature and she had torn badly. He’d known that of course. He’d seen the evidence of it the first time he’d examined her and had thought then, that whoever had stitched her needed shooting. But this full-term baby would need more help than a forceps’ delivery and a proper episiotomy, for it was showing signs of distress and so was the mother. She’ll have to go for a Caesarean, he thought, but first he’d have to talk to that husband of hers. By, the man was anxious. He’d seen some agitated fathers in his day, but this one seemed beside himself. If he didn’t calm down, he’d give himself a heart attack.
Arthur was very concerned about the operation planned and asked many questions, but Hannah just nodded when the doctor explained it to her. She was past caring about anything by then and just wanted the pain to end.
Hannah opened her eyes, blinking because of the brightness, and saw Nurse McIntosh’s face above her. ‘Hello, Mrs Bradley,’ she said cheerfully. ‘You have a beautiful daughter. But no wonder you had trouble bringing her. She was nine pounds!’
‘Nine pounds!’ Hannah remembered her tiny first baby. She didn’t know how much he’d weighed, or how long he was – that wasn’t information they would share with the mothers – but nine pounds sounded big.
She opened her mouth to speak and was immediately assailed by a feeling of nausea. Nurse McIntosh had been expecting that and held the bowl expertly and when it was over, she brought Hannah a drink of water and wiped her face. ‘It’s the effects of the anaesthetic,’ she said. ‘It’s to be expected.’
‘Can I … can I see my baby?’
‘Not yet, in a wee while. She’s in the nursery,’ the nurse said. ‘Now, she’s fine and you’re not to worry. She was just a little distressed over the birth.’
‘Distressed! What do you mean distressed?’
‘It’s quite common, believe me,’ the nurse said. ‘She’ll be fine in a day or two.’
‘A day or two?’
‘Maybe sooner.’
‘Maybe sooner,’ Hannah repeated and wondered what was the matter with her that she seemed only able to repeat the nurse’s words. She felt suddenly incredibly weary, but she must demand to see her baby. If the child couldn’t be taken out of the nursery, then she would go to see her. She struggled up in the bed and felt pains shooting through her stomach.
‘Come, Mrs Bradley,’ the nurse chided. ‘You’ll do yourself an injury and pull your stitches into the bargain. Settle yourself for a little sleep. Don’t worry about your baby. Your husband has seen her and held her. In fact, he’s been very helpful. He’s given her her first bottle.’
‘Her first bottle.’ There she went again. ‘I … I was going to feed her.’
‘You were in no fit state then. Perhaps we’ll see later, but don’t you worry about it for now.’
But Hannah remembered Arthur’s words. ‘This is my baby. You’ll have little to do with it once he or she is born.’ It was coming true, she thought in panic, and tears trickled down her cheeks. ‘There there,’ Nurse McIntosh said gently. ‘Don’t upset yourself. You’re tired, that’s what it is. You settle down now.’
‘I’m not sleepy,’ Hannah tried to say, but her eyes closed in spite of herself and she slept again.
As the day wore on, she opened her eyes only to be sick, and in her dreams she was back in the home, begging to be allowed to see, hold and keep her baby, while the nuns laughed at her as they receded further and further away. The nightmares she’d had for years were happening again.
Eventually, she woke in the dusk of evening and Arthur was sitting beside her, a huge satisfied smile on his face. ‘The baby?’ she said.
‘She’s fine, beautiful. I’ve just seen her,’ Arthur said. ‘And I’ve given her another bottle.’
‘No!’ Hannah cried. ‘I want to feed her.’
‘Your wants don’t come into this,’ said Arthur. ‘I’ve talked it over with the doctor and he agreed that you would find it difficult to feed. National Dried Milk is just as good, I’ve heard, and tomorrow you will be given tablets to dry up your milk.’
Hannah said nothing. She sat stunned, looking at her husband. She’d longed to feel her baby, tugging at her breast. She felt that it would help banish the terrible feeling of desolation she still felt at times when she remembered the baby boy snatched from her.
All right then, she thought, she couldn’t breast-feed, but she could give her a bottle. She could still have the closeness with her. ‘Why can’t I have her beside me?’ she demanded. ‘I can give her a bottle. She’s my baby.’
‘She has to stay in the nursery a little longer,’ Arthur said, ‘and you’re not well enough to be taken down there yet.’ He leaned towards Hannah and said, ‘Get used to it, my dear, I told you how it would be.’
Later, Sister Prescott found Hannah in such a distressed state, she sent for the doctor who was extremely worried. By the time he came, she’d stopped thrashing around the bed, screaming and crying, and lay comatose and silent, though her eyes were open. He was unable to get any reaction from her. He sedated her and could only put her condition down to the trauma of the b
irth and he told Arthur this the following evening.
Arthur knew why Hannah had become so agitated, but she’d played directly into his hands. ‘She’s never been that strong emotionally,’ he said. ‘That’s why I was so concerned with the birth taking so long and her eventually needing an operation and everything,’ he said, mock concern on his face. ‘I’m thinking of engaging a nurse to help for a while when Hannah is well enough to come home.’
The doctor remembered how anxious Hannah had been the first time she’d visited him and how her own Doctor Humphries had said how agitated she’d become at times. Then he remembered the silent figure on the bed who’d seemed locked into something in her mind and thought a nurse to help her over the first traumatic weeks when she’d have total care of the child a very good idea. ‘Excellent plan,’ he said to Arthur. ‘That would certainly have my recommendation. I only wish half of my fathers were as considerate to their wives as you.’
The next day, the baby was wheeled into Hannah’s room in her crib. Hannah struggled to sit up and looked at her baby daughter.
She lay swaddled in her blankets, so that just her down of auburn hair and her face were visible. Hannah had no desire to pick her up. As she looked at her, she felt nothing, nothing at all. This was her daughter, her own flesh and blood. What was the matter with her? Where was the rush of maternal feeling she’d felt for Michael? Whatever Arthur said, once she was home, she’d have to care for this child. Surely she could love her own child? It shouldn’t be hard.
‘Don’t you want to pick her up?’ the nurse asked, puzzled. ‘She’ll be awake screaming for a feed anytime soon. I’ll bring you the bottle and you can wake her gently.’ Her hands were in the crib as she spoke and suddenly Hannah was filled with panic. ‘No,’ she almost screamed, and then seeing the nurse’s startled face tried to explain. ‘I don’t want to … I’m too tired. Can you take her away?’
The nurse said nothing to Hannah, after all these were private patients, but she said plenty to her fellow nurses. ‘Barely looked at the poor wee thing and refused to hold her. Told me to take her back here and feed her. Like Lady Muck, she is.’
‘I hear the husband’s engaging a nurse,’ another put in.
‘Good job!’ the first nurse said. ‘If you ask me, that Mrs Bradley would be too idle to get off her bum and see to the poor mite anyway.’
‘At least her father seems to care. Proper dotes on her, he does.’
‘Oh, he’s a thoroughly nice man,’ said the first nurse. ‘A proper gentleman and yet he’s not above cuddling the baby and feeding her. We have few fathers like him. Comes in here even before he pops in to see his wife. Mind you, I can understand that. She’s probably a right madam.’
‘Yes,’ said another. ‘The baby’s probably a lot more interesting and far less carping than that piece.’
Hannah was aware the nurses thought her an odd and unnatural mother when she refused to feed her baby twice more that day. Sister Prescott had never had a case like it before and summoned the doctor again. ‘It sometimes happens with a difficult birth,’ the doctor said. ‘Especially if the mother and child are separated for a little time after the birth, unavoidable of course after a Caesarean operation.’
‘What is to be done, Doctor?’
‘I don’t know if much is to be achieved by forcing the child on her,’ the doctor said. ‘I’ll talk to the husband, he’s a sensible chap and concerned for his wife. Maybe now that she is better and the baby recovered enough to be with her, visitors might be encouraged. Maybe showing the baby off would rekindle her maternal feelings, for they are there, but hidden.’
Arthur was surprised at what the doctor had to tell him that night. He’d bought flowers again, the second bouquet to decorate Hannah’s room, and could see as soon as he went in that Hannah was so nervous of him she actually shrank back in the bed. But she had no need. That day, Arthur had engaged a nurse, Pauline Lawson, one of the old school, hot on order and discipline.
For the first few months she would sleep in the child’s bedroom, but she would have the sitting room as her own part of the house, which she could convert to a bed-sitting room later if she wished.
Pauline Lawson had never worked in such a small house. Before the war, she’d worked in a large ancestral home in the countryside in Sutton Coldfield after losing her husband at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and her two young daughters to the Spanish ‘flu in 1919.
She spent the war years in hospitals, tending wounded soldiers and afterwards, nursing the elderly. But her first love was children, for she’d not really got over the death of her daughters, and she readily agreed to care for Angela when Arthur explained his wife was not very strong. He went on to say that his wife was emotionally unstable, prone to attacks of nerves, and for some reason hadn’t taken to the baby. Pauline’s face didn’t change, but she couldn’t understand an attitude like that. Unnatural, she thought, that was.
Arthur said he didn’t want Hannah bothered about nursery matters. He would deal with anything when he came home. Did she think she could cope? Pauline was longing to cope. He needn’t worry, she told him, his small daughter would get all the mothering she would need from her.
It fell into place nicely. Pauline had to work out a week’s notice with the family she was with and she could move in the day before Arthur was due to fetch Hannah and baby home.
So Arthur, pleased with himself, could afford to be pleasant with his wife. The nurse exclaimed over the beautiful bouquet and noted the fact that Hannah said nothing. ‘I’ll leave you two alone,’ she said, ‘and put these in some water,’ and she went out to report on the ungratefulness of Hannah Bradley.
‘How are you, my dear?’ Arthur said, giving Hannah a peck on the cheek.
‘Stop this, Arthur.’
‘Stop what?’
‘This … this play-acting. You don’t care for me.’
‘I married you,’ Arthur said.
‘Married people sleep together,’ Hannah snapped. ‘Married people make love.’
‘We made love,’ Arthur said. ‘And the evidence of that is lying in the nursery down the corridor. Then I found out I’d married a whore.’
‘Arthur, I’m not. It wasn’t like that.’
‘I don’t care what it was like,’ Arthur snapped. ‘This child is the only child I will ever have and I will claim her. It hardly matters to you. I’m told you can hardly bear to look at her. The nurses can’t understand you at all. They think you’re unnatural.’
Hannah had a sneaky feeling they were right. She’d felt that herself and she lowered her head in shame.
‘So, my dear, I’m hardly displacing your maternal feelings,’ Arthur said. ‘Now I’ve decided on a name for her. Angela Maria. Angela, because she looks like an angel, and Maria after my mother. Do you like my choice?’
‘I seem to have no say in it. Call her what you like,’ Hannah said, her voice weary and sad.
‘You’re learning, my dear,’ Arthur said, smiling at her as if she’d performed some amazing feat. ‘Now,’ he went on, ‘the doctor thinks visitors might help you in your relationship with your daughter. I doubt it myself, but Mrs Emmerson and her friend are desperate to come. So is Josie, but children under twelve aren’t allowed. Even Mrs Banks asked if she could see you.’
Hannah wanted visitors. She wanted to see people other than the disapproving nurses who thought Arthur such a grand fellow and Arthur himself, who frightened her and never failed to make her feel a failure. Gloria and Amy and Elizabeth Banks would be a welcome change.
So they came, Gloria and Amy bringing more flowers and even sweets and chocolates for Hannah, and for the baby, they’d bought warm dresses and little jackets and pram sets. They were both enchanted by Angela, who Hannah asked the nurse to bring in from the nursery, but both were surprised she wasn’t by Hannah’s bed. ‘She disturbs me,’ Hannah said. ‘And I’ve needed rest at first. It seemed easier.’
‘Can I … Can I pick her up?’ Gloria aske
d tentatively, knowing some mothers were possessive about newborn babies.
‘Of course.’
Gloria lifted the baby tenderly and peeling back the layers of blanket, exclaimed about her tiny hands and chubby little feet and minute nails but Hannah, who had not really examined her daughter at all, watched and felt nothing. The baby was handed from Gloria to Amy and she too was full of praise. ‘You must be very proud of yourself,’ Gloria said and her words had a wealth of meaning in them, known only to her and Hannah.
‘Oh, yes,’ Hannah said and Gloria was surprised at the tone of her voice.
‘Do you want her?’ Amy said, holding the child out to her.
‘No, put her back in the cot,’ Hannah said. ‘The nurse will be along to take her back to the nursery and give her a bottle.’
Gloria and Amy exchanged glances. They knew Hannah couldn’t feed the baby herself. Arthur had explained about the operation, but Gloria would have thought she’d have still taken the opportunity to cuddle the baby and give her a bottle.
‘It was too tiring for me,’ Hannah told them tersely. ‘Arthur agreed with me that as I can’t actually feed her myself, it might as well be left to the nurses.’
On the way home, Gloria said to Amy, ‘There’s something the matter with Hannah.’
‘It’s from the difficult birth, I’ve heard it before. Like a sort of depression.’
‘Well, she’ll have to snap out of it,’ Gloria said. ‘For she’s got to see to that babby when she goes home.’
That very thing was playing on Hannah’s mind. She didn’t know how she’d cope when she went home with Angela. Oh, she could feed her and change her, she supposed, but she couldn’t seem to love her, feel anything for her at all and then she was so tired all the time.
It was Elizabeth Banks who put her mind at rest. She came with the largest basket of every fruit imaginable. In that world of shortages, Hannah couldn’t imagine where she’d got it from. ‘I’m so glad that Arthur has engaged a nurse to give you a hand for the first few weeks at least,’ she said. ‘You look quite washed out.’