The Midwife’s Here!: The Enchanting True Story of One of Britain’s Longest Serving Midwives. Linda Fairley

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СКАЧАТЬ midwife to think she knew more than he did himself about his personal life.

      ‘A couple of cards all right,’ I chuckled to myself when the pieces of the puzzle fell into place in my mind. ‘Good luck to them.’

      Preface

      To this day, the story of Geraldine Drew and the birth of her triplets remains one of my all-time favourites. It encapsulates the role of a midwife as a professional assistant and confidante, whose ultimate aim is to help women deliver babies safely into the world, whatever the circumstances.

      The Oxford English Dictionary defines a midwife as ‘a nurse (typically a woman) who is trained to assist women in childbirth’. Over the decades, I have learned that there are many, many different ways a midwife can assist a woman in childbirth and, believe you me, plenty of them are not listed in midwifery textbooks!

      When I started my nursing training in 1966 at the Manchester Royal Infirmary (MRI) I had no idea what I was letting myself in for, or even that I would become a midwife. I have since delivered more than 2,200 babies and I still tingle with excitement at every birth. Just feeling the warmth of a newborn’s head in your hands, that new life, there’s honestly nothing like it.

      In 2010 I celebrated forty years as a qualified midwife, becoming Britain’s longest-serving midwife at the same hospital. Today, I marvel at how much, yet also how very little, has altered over the years. I’ve witnessed countless changes in the NHS and in midwifery practices, from the demise of the old Nightingale wards to incredible breakthroughs in pregnancy drugs and IVF. I’ve seen fashions for routine enemas, bottle-feeding and home births come and go, and I’ve watched the reluctant shuffle of dads into antenatal classes and delivery suites turn into a stampede.

      There have been nine changes of government during my career, so I’m told, but I have never let politics get in the way of delivering babies. I have been very happy sailing along in the great old liner that is the NHS, quietly navigating sea changes in bureaucracy, funding, practices and guidelines. I’ve never aspired to rise up the ranks and become a manager. Delivering babies and striving to make every pregnant woman feel like the most important pregnant woman in the world is what I do best.

      Last year I had the honour of being my daughter’s midwife during her pregnancy, and I am now a very proud grandmother. Baby Joel was born prematurely in July 2011 as I was working on this book and also mourning the death of my third husband, Peter.

      So much has happened over the years that I could not fit my memoirs into one volume, and this book concentrates on the early years of my career in the late Sixties and early Seventies. That means the story of Joel’s nerve-racking birth, along with so many others, will have to wait.

      As you read this first instalment, I will keep laughing and crying, remembering and writing.

      Chapter One

      ‘It feels like we’re in the Army!’

      ‘My job is to make nice young ladies of you all,’ Sister Mary Francis proclaimed. She was the headmistress at the strict Harrytown High School I attended in Romiley, Cheshire, and this was a phrase I heard countless times from the age of seven.

      The private, all-girls convent school was very highly regarded and, like many of my peers, I came from a comfortable, middle-class family. It was expected that we ‘young ladies’ would enter suitably respectable employment at the age of eighteen, which I gathered meant choosing between working in a bank, going into teaching or becoming a nurse.

      I was seventeen years old when I was summoned to Sister Mary Francis’s imposing dark-wood office and asked the question: ‘Well, Linda, what do you propose to do next?’ Before I could answer, she tilted her head forward to peer at me over her small, round reading glasses and said gravely: ‘You are indeed a fine young lady, despite the one minor indiscretion we have thankfully overcome. I trust you have chosen wisely.’

      ‘I’m thinking of going into nursing,’ I replied meekly, blushing at her reference to my ‘indiscretion’. She meant the time I was caught breaking a cardinal rule and talking to boys on the bus. This had been seen as such a scandalous breach of conduct that a letter was sent home to my parents, warning of severe consequences should I ever compromise my reputation in such a way again.

      ‘Nursing is a good choice for you,’ Sister Mary Francis deemed. ‘But only the best will do for my girls. I want you to apply to the Manchester Royal Infirmary. It is a teaching hospital, and the most prestigious in the region. Please promise me, Linda, that you will always work hard for your living.’

      I nodded obediently, grateful that Sister Mary Francis had not probed any deeper, as I had just three rather fragile reasons behind this big decision.

      Number one: my best friend Sue Smith from school had an older sister called Wendy who was a nurse. She was always smiling when she told us tales about her job, and I thought she looked wonderful in her smart uniform. I admired her, and I wanted a uniform like hers.

      Number two: my mum always said I was a caring person, telling me that I’d insisted on looking after my teddy bear right up to the age of eleven. I thought I’d be good at tucking patients into bed and giving them tea and sympathy.

      Number three: I didn’t want to work in a bank and I didn’t want to teach. My parents never wanted me to work for the family business, even though their bakery shop near our home in Stalybridge was very successful. It was hard graft being self-employed, Mum always said. She wanted better for me.

      Nursing it was to be, and that is how I found myself standing before Miss Morgan, Matron of the Manchester Royal Infirmary, in September 1966.

      ‘You must see me as your other mother!’ she boomed. I was eighteen years old and I had just started my three-year training course at the MRI, which was situated on Oxford Road, a mile and a half outside the city centre.

      Though I knew next to nothing about nursing I had quickly cottoned on to one very important fact: Matron was like God, and her word was Gospel.

      ‘I want you to be able to talk to me at all times,’ Miss Morgan instructed forcefully, her extremely large bust somehow expanding further still as she snorted in her next breath. ‘You are my girls!’

      I looked at her in horror. She seemed completely unapproachable and absolutely nothing like my own mother. My mum was so gentle-natured she practically had kindness dripping from her pores. Miss Morgan was a bulldozer in a bra by comparison. Her voice penetrated my eardrums with considerable force, and her facial expressions were as stiff as the large, starched white frill cap that was clamped on her head.

      I nervously glanced from left to right to see how the other new girls in my group were reacting. There were thirty-six teenage girls in my intake, and we were divided into groups of six. As my name then was Linda Lawton, I’d been placed with two other student nurses whose surnames began with the letter L, as well as with three whose surnames began with M and P.

      I took some small comfort from the fact Nessa Lawrence, Anne Lindsey, Jo Maudsley, Linda Mochri and Janice Price all looked as startled as I felt.

      ‘You will be taken down shortly to be measured for your new uniforms,’ Matron went on, forcing a rather frosty smile to her lips. I imagined her heart was probably in the right place, but she seemed oblivious to the fact she’d turned us into a group of baby rabbits caught in the glaring headlights that were her wide, all-seeing eyes.

      ‘Be warned, girls, that if СКАЧАТЬ