‘Don’t you bloody well touch me!’ she shrieked, presumably to the poor midwife. ‘And ya can tell that fella of mine the same, wherever he is! I don’t want him near me EVER again! I NEVER want to have another kid! Aaaargghhhhh! Arrrghhhhh! Bleedin’ hell. Make it stop NOW! Why don’t the men have to do owt? Why is it all left to US? Aaaaarghhhh!’
‘I’m sorry you’ve had to hear that,’ I said apologetically. ‘But I’m afraid we do hear quite a lot of effing and jeffing in here.’
To my surprise and relief, Mr and Mrs Sully both started to laugh.
‘Effing and jeffing!’ Mr Sully said. ‘I’ve not heard that expression before. It’s really funny!’
‘Have you not? I say it all the time. I think it sums up the nonsense we have to hear sometimes quite well!’
With the ice broken, I felt comfortable enough to ask Mrs Sully to go to the bathroom and produce a urine sample. This, we all knew, was the point where things had started to go so dreadfully wrong last time, but Mrs Sully did not make a drama. Her husband helped her into the adjoining toilet and stood guarding the door, and a couple of minutes later the process was completed.
All was well with the sample, and I helped Mrs Sully up onto the bed for an internal examination. This was all going to plan, I was sure. I must admit, though, it was still a relief when I saw with my own eyes that nothing untoward was happening down below. I felt my shoulders relax ever so slightly inside my dress as I noted that Mrs Sully was doing very nicely indeed, and was already four centimetres dilated.
‘Thank you, Nurse,’ she said to me kindly when I told her she was progressing well. ‘I wasn’t looking forward to that bit at all, but I’m fine. Can I just ask one thing? Would it be all right if I didn’t have a shave and all that? It’s just that with Malcolm here …’
‘Of course!’ I replied. ‘Honestly, not long ago the Senior Sister would have asked questions if we didn’t stick to those routines, but things are starting to change, I’m glad to say. It’s not so strict any more.’
Mrs Sully looked visibly relieved, and I thought how ridiculous it was that any woman should have to worry about such things as a shave and enema at a time like this. I’d always been a bit dubious about the benefits of shaving a woman in labour anyhow. As for enemas, well, let’s just say if nature required the bowels to be emptied, in my opinion usually the woman could manage this without the aid of soapy water being administered up her rectum in the ‘high, hot and a hell of a lot’ fashion I had been taught in the Sixties.
It was another three hours before Mrs Sully was fully dilated and ready to push. Because of her previous obstetric history, Dr Bedford had stepped into the delivery room and the theatre staff were alerted and kept informed of her progress throughout. Mr Sully held his wife’s hand tightly as her contractions made her groan and shake her head from side to side on the pillow.
‘You are doing absolutely brilliantly,’ I said. ‘Do you think you can give me one big push, when I tell you?’
‘Ye–yeeessssss,’ she moaned, biting her lips and wrinkling her brow.
I could see the head now, and I knew this baby was tantalisingly close to being delivered. Mrs Sully gripped her husband’s hand so hard she made him yelp like a puppy as she gave an almighty push, exactly when I wanted her to. To my surprise the baby, complete with a thick mop of black hair, practically shot out in one fell swoop. Mrs Sully had delivered him with such force and determination that if I hadn’t been ready to catch him, he might have shot clean off the end of the bed.
‘It’s a little boy,’ I declared breathlessly as the red-faced baby let out an ear-splitting cry. His head appeared slightly squashed, which was very normal, but apart from that he appeared to be perfectly healthy.
‘Congratulations!’ I said, tears leaking down my cheeks. ‘Well done to you both!’
I looked at Mrs Sully and saw that she was sobbing and laughing all at once.
‘I’ve done it!’ she said, sounding triumphant and ecstatic despite being completely exhausted. ‘Can I hold him?’
‘Any minute now,’ I said as I swiftly cut and clamped the cord with trembling hands.
It had been such a high-speed delivery I was throbbing with adrenaline. As I cleaned and weighed the baby as quickly as possible, I suddenly realised Mr Sully had been very quiet. I glanced to where I expected him to be, standing at the side of the bed, and was puzzled to see him sitting in a chair by the window, his head between his legs. Dr Bedford, whose intervention had thankfully not been required during the delivery, was standing over him, which was a very unexpected turn of events indeed.
‘There, there, my good man,’ Dr Bedford was saying. ‘Stay seated, I will get a nurse to attend to you.’
To my amusement I learned that, despite working with blood samples in the university laboratories, Mr Sully had passed out momentarily when he witnessed his son’s dramatic arrival into the world. Dr Bedford’s medical skills may not have been necessary during the birth, but the consultant’s swift reactions meant that he spotted that Mr Sully was about to faint, and had steered him expertly into a chair, no doubt preventing him from cracking his head on the floor.
‘Malcolm!’ Mrs Sully exclaimed when she realised what had happened. ‘You daft ’apeth! We’ve got a little boy! We’ve got a little boy! And he’s all right!’
Mrs Sully was holding her son in a blanket by now. By this time there was another doctor, a paediatrician and another midwife as well as myself and Dr Bedford in the room, and Mrs Sully’s joyful words set everyone off with wobbling lips and tear-filled eyes. We all took it in turns to congratulate the beaming new mum and take in the wonderful scene. My legs felt like jelly, and I imagined us all standing like dominoes, about to tumble around the bed because our bodies were quivering with so much emotion. It was a day I will never forget.
‘I have some news, I think,’ I told Graham one morning.
He raised an eyebrow and looked up from his cornflakes to see me standing there in my uniform with both hands laid gently on my belly.
‘I think this is it. I think I’m pregnant!’
Graham’s face shone instantly. He could not have looked happier if he tried, and he asked me a string of questions about when we would know for sure, how many weeks I might be and when the baby would arrive.
It was June 1973 and Graham and I had been trying for our own baby for several months. I had been a sister for more than twelve months, which was an achievement I had wanted to get under my belt before having a baby of my own. Everything was just as I’d planned.
‘Has your job ever put you off having your own children?’ my old friend Sue Smith had asked me one night when we were catching up on the telephone.
She worked as a schoolteacher in South Wales now and had a baby daughter called Miranda, and I think my reply was something along the lines of, ‘I suppose I could ask you the same thing!’
It was a fair question from Sue, I suppose, and one that I’d been asked several times before in recent years. Never once did I take it very seriously, though. The fact that I’d seen some very sad outcomes, not to mention having witnessed women suffering terribly in labour, never put me off wanting to have children of my own.
It was very unusual for things to go badly wrong, and when Graham and I had made the decision to start a family I was filled with nothing but optimism and hope about becoming a mum. In fact, I thought nothing could go wrong for me at all,