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

Sue and I both felt so grown-up. We booked ourselves on a three-day excursion to Jerusalem, where I bought a beautiful leather-bound bible, and then we spent two weeks holidaying in Turkey with John’s Turkish wife Nevim, who looked after us really well. I was an independent woman of the world – or so I thought.

There was a rap on my door that made me jump. ‘Can I come in?’ a lovely Scottish voice sang, and I shot up gratefully and unlatched the door.

I knew it was Linda Mochri, and her voice instantly made my tears evaporate.

‘Of course you can!’ I said, and when I opened the door I was delighted to see she had Nessa, Anne, Jo and Janice in tow.

‘Your room’s the biggest, you lucky thing!’ Linda said as she lit a Marlboro cigarette and sat cross-legged on the end of my bed. The other girls filed in and found themselves a place to sit. Nessa was last through the door and she settled on the scratched wooden floor, folding her enviably long legs beneath her.

Janice also lit a cigarette, which she pulled from a fashionable lacquered case that covered her pack of twenty. She looked confident to the point of cockiness as she took a long drag.

‘How are you all settling in, then?’ she asked, after blowing out a plume of smoke. She looked at each of us in turn.

‘Feels like we’re in the Army!’ Linda snorted. ‘Curfew at 11 p.m., girls!’ she said, mimicking the home sister’s briefing from earlier in the day. ‘Any nurses not home by 11 p.m. will have Matron to deal with and will lose the right to request a late pass! Late passes allow you to be home by midnight – but be warned, you have to earn them, girls!’

We fell about laughing and, with the ice broken, we began to gently pick over the long day we’d had.

‘What do you think of our tutor?’ Anne asked with a mischievous glint in her eye. Anne was quite plump, with one of those smiley, rosy faces larger girls often have.

We all chipped in with our views on Mr Tate, who for the first two months would teach us anatomy, physiology and basic nursing techniques in the schoolroom. After that he would continue to teach us between our practical training and placements on the wards.

‘He’s the strangest-looking man I’ve ever seen,’ I volunteered with a shy giggle.

This was no exaggeration. Everyone admitted they had been taken aback at his appearance, particularly his precarious-looking comb-over.

‘I dread to think what he looks like when the wind blows,’ chuckled Jo.

She and Janice were two of a kind, I thought. Both exuded self-confidence, while Linda and Anne were definitely the jokers in the pack. Nessa seemed more like me. She was softly spoken and came from Cheadle, not too far from where I grew up. We were the only two who didn’t smoke, and when Nessa contributed something to the conversation it usually struck a chord with me.

‘Is it just me or does anyone else think the blocks on the windows are a bit alarming?’ she ventured.

‘I hate them!’ I admitted. ‘It makes me think a mad man is going to break in at any moment.’

‘Will you listen to yerself!’ Linda mocked gently. ‘We’re holed up here like prison inmates. I reckon the blocks are there to stop us escaping rather than to stop men breaking in!’

We all laughed again.

‘What shall we dissect next?’ Anne asked.

‘Bathrooms!’ Jo and Janice chimed in unison, and we all bemoaned the fact we had one bath and toilet to share between twelve of us.

The nurses’ quarters were shaped like a letter ‘H’ and my new-found friends and I were grouped together down one leg of the ‘H’. It was pot-luck that I got the biggest room. We were all allocated a number and I happened to be student nurse number six, which meant I was allocated the sixth room on the corridor.

‘It’s certainly not what I’m used to,’ Anne said wistfully, and we shared snippets of our lives back home.

With the exception of Linda Mochri we had all grown up in the region. Linda’s family had relocated from Scotland because her mother was ill with cancer, and the best treatment was available to her in the North West of England. Apart from that, we seemed to have a fair amount in common, all having come from good schools and supportive families. I learned that Linda, Jo and Janice had long-term boyfriends like me, but Nessa and Anne did not.

‘This is certainly a far cry from what any of us are used to,’ Janice declared, wrinkling up her nose.

I couldn’t have agreed more. As a child I moved house frequently, always to somewhere bigger and better as Lawton’s Confectioners went from strength to strength. My parents sold teacakes, puff pastries, parkin, pies, bread and apple tarts from their double-fronted shop on the High Street in Stalybridge, all hand-made in the bake-house by my father, John.

He was a gentleman who ‘never wanted to be on the front row’, as my mother Lillian often said. That was absolutely true. You couldn’t have met a kinder or more unassuming man, and he never once so much as raised his voice to me. My mother wore the trousers in their relationship and was also the one who controlled the business, but that didn’t stop her being a very kind and caring mum.

My brother John and I wanted for absolutely nothing. The fine career in journalism he’d carved out for himself made both my parents very proud and the two of us were the apples of our parents’ eyes, in our own distinct ways.

I shared a little bit about my family background with the other girls, and also told them about Graham, who I’d been going out with for about a year.

‘I love dancing and we met at the Palais in Ashton last year when I went to a dance with my old school friend Sue,’ I told them. ‘He works as a car salesman and drives a little blue bubble car.’

‘Lucky you! Is he good-looking?’ Janice asked cheekily.

‘Well, I think so,’ I blushed. ‘He’s got blond hair and blue eyes and wears very nice clothes.’

‘Ooooh!’ Anne chucked. ‘I’m jealous!’

‘Come on!’ Jo said, sparing me any further interrogation as she stood up and stubbed out her cigarette in my sink, having failed to locate an ashtray. ‘We’ve got an early start tomorrow.’ All the other girls took the cue and shuffled to the door.

As I bid them goodnight and got myself ready for bed I couldn’t help thinking about my bedroom at home with its soft cotton sheets, plush wool carpet and pretty pictures hung against the stylish floral wallpaper I’d been allowed to pick out from the chic Arighi Bianchi store in Macclesfield. I longed to be back in my bed at home, and for my father to knock gently on my door to wake me up in the morning, as he always did. But then, I thought to myself, what would I do all day?

Here I felt terribly homesick despite the girls’ comforting chitchat, but I realised I also felt very much alive and stimulated. My head was filled with hundreds of questions about what tomorrow would bring, and my emotions were on red alert. This experience was unsettling, but it was undeniably exciting too.

It had been an exhausting day, and if my tiredness hadn’t knocked me out I’m pretty sure the thick clouds of smoke the girls left behind in my room would have done. I had one of Graham’s handkerchiefs, which smelled of his Brut aftershave, and I placed it on my scratchy pillowcase for comfort, and to block out the smell of smoke. I didn’t stir until my alarm clock rang at 7.15 a.m., heralding my first full day as a student nurse.

‘A patient will not die if you forget to take their blood pressure,’ Sister Craddock pealed in her rich Welsh accent as she escorted us from the schoolroom, ‘but dirty floors breed bacteria, and bacteria kill.’