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

I exhaled rather more loudly than I meant to, releasing my stress.

‘How are you getting on?’ Sister Barnes asked thoughtfully.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Just fine?’ She raised an eyebrow quizzically.

‘Yes, it’s just … it’s harder than I thought it would be.’

‘I remember thinking the very same thing when I was your age,’ she replied. ‘You need to believe in yourself more. I think you have what it takes, but do you?’

I felt very small and meek besides Sister Barnes. My shoulders were hunched, my chin was lowered and I felt washed out with tiredness. She, on the other hand, looked vibrant and full of life. Her eyes were twinkling, and she had an energy about her that made me want to straighten my spine and pull my shoulders back.

Sister Barnes eyed me thoughtfully and then stood up and clapped her hands together twice, as if struck by a bright idea.

‘Come with me,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Wash your hands and put your apron back on. I have a patient who needs an injection, and I think you are exactly the right nurse for the job.’

My heart leapt. I’d been desperate to give someone an injection ever since I arrived, but until now the opportunity hadn’t presented itself. Sister Barnes was young enough to remember how much it means to a young student nurse to be trusted with a syringe and a vial of drugs for the first time. I was thrilled.

As soon as I saw the patient in question I allowed myself a wry smile, remembering Linda’s description of the whale-like patient who was her first ‘victim’. Mrs Butcher was the female equivalent and I knew exactly why clever Sister Barnes had decided to let me loose on this particular patient.

‘Mrs Butcher, Nurse Lawton is here to give you your injection,’ Sister Barnes announced as she pulled the curtain around the bed and asked Mrs Butcher to lift her nightdress and present her right buttock.

‘Is it the first time she’s given an injection?’ Mrs Butcher asked, surveying me suspiciously, no doubt because I looked so young.

‘Not at all,’ Sister Barnes replied. ‘This is a demonstration to show how proficient Nurse Lawton is.’

Mrs Butcher sniffed and rolled over clumsily while I reminded myself to seek out the upper, outer quadrant of the buttock as I’d been taught during our practice on oranges in the classroom. Moments later, I pushed the needle through Mrs Butcher’s extremely well-padded rump and administered the drug steadily, with surprising ease.

‘All done!’ I said triumphantly. I tingled inside. I felt absolutely fantastic.

‘Didn’t feel a thing!’ beamed Mrs Butcher, her face cracking into a satisfied smile.

‘Thank you, Nurse Lawton,’ Sister Barnes said. ‘Now you can pop back in on Mrs Pearlman before you finish for the day.’

I wanted to skip down the corridor, I felt so exhilarated. I didn’t, of course. I walked on the left-hand side, as always, but there was a different rhythm in my step. It felt as though I was bouncing along on fluffy carpets instead of stepping purposefully on the hard stone floor, and I was pretty sure my eyes were twinkling just like Sister Barnes’s.

By now, we student nurses had been working flat out for about ten months. Nights out were rare, as we were usually either working, studying or sleeping, but that weekend Linda and I went to a dance at the university. We wore red and yellow mini skirts that Cynthia Weaver had helped us make, after we each bought a strip of fabric in Debenhams. We’d discovered that Cynthia was a very talented dressmaker, making every stitch of her clothing by hand, which is how she managed to always be in the latest fashions. On her advice we teamed the skirts with floral blouses, and I wore my hair in two long plaits, secured with velvet ribbons. As a final touch I doused myself in a generous splash of my favourite perfume, Estée Lauder’s Youth Dew, cramming the turquoise bottle into my tiny macramé handbag so I could refresh it later.

Strictly speaking, you had to be a university student to go to the dances, but we never had any trouble getting in. Some of the young male students wolf-whistled or messed about making saucy remarks about needing bed baths when we told them we were nurses from the MRI, but it was just light-hearted banter. The students were always happy to help get us in, and would leave us to our own devices once we were through the door.

Sipping orange squash between dances, Linda and I sang along to our favourite records, ‘I’m Into Something Good’ by Herman’s Hermits and ‘Bus Stop’ by The Hollies. During the evening we gently unloaded on one another too, swapping tales of forgotten bedpans, muddled-up meals and grumpy consultants who mostly seemed to be cast from the same mould and thought the rest of us should treat them like gods.

In contrast, the university students looked as though they didn’t have a care in the world. It was as if they had never left school, yet here were Linda and I, on a night out and letting our hair down, yet not quite able to forget about work: the business of life and death.

‘So you haven’t managed to kill anyone yet?’ Linda asked me jokingly, at which I flinched.

‘Not quite,’ I stuttered.

A month or so earlier I’d had a dreadful experience when I was thrown in at the deep end on one of my first night shifts. I’d pushed it out of my head, but Linda jogged it right back to the forefront of my mind.

‘You have to tell me now,’ she laughed. ‘It’s written all over your face!’

‘It was awful,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe what happened. I’ve tried to blot it out!’

‘Go on!’ she said. ‘Get it off your chest.’

‘OK,’ I said reluctantly. ‘Here goes. I was looking after a man called Stanley James, and Sister Craddock had given me strict orders to keep an eye on his fluid intake. He was only allowed an ounce of water hourly, as he was due an operation the next day, and you know what a stickler she is for the intake and output charts.’

Linda rolled her eyes and nodded.

‘He begged me for more water but I told him he had to do as Sister ordered, and eventually he settled down to sleep.

‘I didn’t hear him stir for a while, but when I went to check on him in the early hours I found his flowers on the floor and the empty flower vase in his hands. He looked at me apologetically and said, “I just needed a drink, Nurse.”’

Linda gasped. ‘He’d drunk the flower water? Oh my God! What happened to him? Did sister blow her stack?’

‘She did. I was as terrified of what she would say as I was of what would happen to Mr James. Anyhow, I managed to aspirate most of it back up, but I had to confess all in my report. When Sister Craddock read it, she yelled at me: “He’s a very poorly man and you’re supposed to be keeping an eye on him.” She was so angry her face went red and it made her freckles join up into one big freckle. She kept shouting, “You obviously weren’t keeping an eye on him properly!” I thought she was going to suspend me.’

‘What happened to Mr James?’ Linda asked, eyes bulging.

‘He died the next day, unfortunately,’ I said. ‘Apparently he was a dreadfully ill man and it was unlikely he would have survived for very long, even after the op. That’s what Sister Craddock said once she’d calmed down. She was surprisingly understanding, in fact. The flower water wasn’t what killed him and she wanted to make that very clear. So to answer your question, Linda, some of my training has been a baptism of fire, but I haven’t killed anyone yet! And I’m very glad that Mr James got his last drink before he died.’

We linked arms and walked home at 10.45 p.m. on the dot, to be sure to get in before the 11 p.m. curfew, as the Student Union where the dances were held was on the far side of the vast university campus, about half a mile from the nurses’ home. The roads were quiet as usual, save for the occasional Triumph Herald and Hillman Imp that drove by. One cocky young motorist with a head glistening with Brylcreem gave us an admiring wolf-whistle and the offer of a lift, but we politely declined. We broke into fits of giggles as we watched him pull away, leaning over the passenger seat to wind up the window manually, which was impossible to do with any style.