‘Keep on holding your hand there and you should feel it relax and fade away.’ And even as he said it the softening came, and Robin stared down, a little overawed. It was as though the girl’s body was acting of its own volition and with no reference to the mind and spirit that inhabited it; and then she thought – it isn’t the girl who matters to this body now; it’s the other body, the baby’s.
It was a confused thought and it vanished as Sam turned back to the table, pulling gloves on as he came. She watched
him, still holding on to the woman’s hand, as he began to examine her, and winced a little at the inevitable invasion of her body that was required and then her original thought came back; it’s not her body now. It’s the baby’s, at least until it gets out, and wondered how it would feel to be the girl on the table and to her amazement found herself wishing it was her. She would have expected to be appalled, revolted even, but she wasn’t. What was happening right now to this girl seemed more important than anything in the world, even the huge fires overhead which was swallowing up the City of London and for all they knew might swallow them up too eventually. And it would have been a wonderful thing if it was happening to her.
Under her fingers she felt the belly tighten and harden again and she let out an involuntary exclamation, and Sam, withdrawing his hand said, ‘Another one starting? Good girl – well spotted. She’ll start to show – yes, there she goes –’ And again the girl on the table tightened herself into a grimace of pain, an even tighter twisting this time.
‘We’ve got to try to stop her doing that,’ Sam said. ‘It’ll make delivery devilish difficult. We’ve a bit to go. The cervix is almost dilated and I can’t feel any placenta in the way. As far as I can tell. Just pray it isn’t a praevia.’
‘Praevia?’ Robin asked.
‘If the afterbirth is across the birth canal, she could bleed to death before the baby’s delivered and it could be dead too,’ he said. ‘She bled earlier in the pregnancy, apparently, but maybe it isn’t a true praevia. Sometimes these smallish haemorrhages can be due to a stretched and torn vein – nothing too dangerous. We just have to wait and watch –’ And he nodded encouragingly at the little man who was still hovering outside the group of patient, doctor and nurse.
‘She all right?’ he said then and Sam stared at him.
‘You speak English then?’
‘Small. Small,’ the man said and nodded anxiously at the girl on the table. ‘All right? Wife baby all right?’
‘I hope so,’ Sam said. ‘Why isn’t she in hospital?’
‘No go.’ He shook his head. ‘Wife not go. Me here, you see? Me here. Boss say, me in charge. No go. So wife no go –’ His face creased in anxiety. ‘Wife strong lady – ’
Sam laughed then. ‘She’s a very strong lady,’ he said cheerfully. ‘So far she seems well – ’
There was a rattling sound from the depths of the cellar and the little man brightened. ‘Hot water. Tea,’ he said and disappeared into the darkness. And Sam laughed.
‘So it’s not just the English. Everyone makes tea at the drop of a hat, all over the world – ’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Robin said. ‘It helps. What happens now?’
‘We wait for the ambulance that policeman promised and pray it gets here before the baby does. But at the rate she’s going’ – for another wave of pain had moved over the woman’s body – ‘the baby’ll beat it. She’s almost ready to push – ’
‘How do you know when she’s ready?’ Robin was fascinated. ‘I mean, how do you know to tell her?’
Sam laughed. ‘I need tell her nothing. Her own body does it without any prompting. As soon as the cervix is really dilated and the head gets down far enough to sit on the perineum, she’ll start to push. She won’t be able to help it. All we’ll have to do is guide the little beggar on his way – ’
‘Why do you need to? I mean, women haven’t always had doctors to do babies for them, have they?’
He looked at her sharply. ‘Good for you, Robin! The London hasn’t managed to stamp out your questioning yet! I’m one of those who think that women themselves know best how to have their babies, and how to look after them. Too many damned experts get involved these days. It confuses women – I suspect sometimes it makes birth harder – but there it is. That’s the way it’s been done, so that’s it. If I, as a doctor, don’t handle pregnant women according to the rules, then it’s my fault if it all goes wrong. If it all goes well, it’s luck. If I do obey the rules and it all goes wrong, then it’s an act of God. No one ever blames the doctor or gives credit to the mother. That’s the way medicine is – Ah! There we go again. It’ll only take a few more contractions – ’
The girl on the table had closed her eyes and was pushing downwards, clearly trying to expel the baby from her body, and Robin stared fascinated as the face reddened and began to sweat. And then after a long moment relaxed, breathlessly, and the girl opened her eyes wide and stared fearfully at Robin and then at Sam.
‘I think we can give her some help,’ Sam murmured. ‘No need for her to go through hell if she can have something to
take the edge off. Give me that small nitrous oxide kit – that’s it. With the oxygen. It was damned bulky to carry but well worth it – ’
Quickly his hands moved in the equipment, setting it up, as the little man returned with mugs of tea on an old lid from a biscuit tin for a tray and he stood and hovered as once more his wife gasped and began her pushing efforts.
Sam had the equipment ready now and held the mask over her face and at first she fought it, trying to push him away, and then as the deeper breaths she was taking because of her efforts filled her with the nitrous oxide, relaxed and stared a little glassily at them both.
‘That’s the way to do it,’ Sam said with great satisfaction. ‘As Mr Punch would say – Here we go again – ’
It seemed to Robin that the next half hour took a week to pass, and yet at the same time was over in a flash. It was as though time had been poured into a crazy kaleidoscope and shaken up so that it presented first once face and then another. She was bewildered and exhilarated and more fascinated by what she was seeing than she had ever been in all her life.
The pushing and the breathing of the nitrous oxide went on and on, and the tea cooled, ignored on its biscuit-tin lid, and the little man hovered on the fringe and Robin listened with one ear for the sound that might mean the ambulance had arrived. But they could have been alone in the world, just the four people and fifth as yet unseen, in their half-lit cellar.
When it happened it was sudden and shocking.
‘Come on,’ Sam said with abrupt urgency, holding the girl’s knee hard against his chest, as Robin, working by imitation, did the same on the other side. ‘Like that – push. Keep on pushing – keep on and on and on –’ And the girl tried to pull away from their controlling hands on her legs, and Robin, feeling wrong somehow, fought to keep the knee she was holding well back against her apron.
‘That’s it – hang on –’ Sam said breathlessly. ‘I have to see what’s happening here – good girl! No bleeding yet – push! That’s it – push – harder – harder!’
And there at the edge of her body it appeared – a crumpled furious face that emerged as far as the chin and then remained there as the woman gasped and seemed to lose all awareness of what was happening, as again she breathed in great gasps of
nitrous oxide which smelled sweetish in the warm dull air of the cellar. And then there was another push and this time the rest of the head and neck appeared and one hunched shoulder as Sam reached down and hooked one finger beneath the emerging armpit. The head turned, the baby turned, and with a sudden swirl of pinkly stained water it was there, the whole streaked wet body, bright pink in the poor light, and with a great twisting snake of pulsing blood vessels emerging from its own domed belly.
Robin stared and blinked, startled to find that she was weeping and Sam picked up the child by his heels and held him high and with a long tube taken from the piled-up boxes behind him began to suck the baby’s mouth clear, and there was a moment and then a gasp and at last a mewing sound as the baby opened its mouth and began to wail, and this time Robin’s tears clouded her vision and she had to sniff hard and rub her face.
‘No need to slap the baby to make it breathe?’ she managed to say and Sam shook his head.
‘None at all. Why hurt the child as soon as he leaves his safe warm home? To prove this is another world? He’ll find out soon enough! I reckon that first wallop can have effects that last a lifetime – ’
‘More psychiatry,’ Robin murmured and he laughed and agreed.
‘Lots more,’ he said. ‘I promise that. Stick around till say – what – 1950? You’ll see where I’ll be by then!’
The girl on the bed lifted her head now and was calling something loudly and Robin looked at her and laughed aloud. It was the first time the girl had uttered a sound, but it was a sound that had been worth waiting for. Her face that had been twisted in pain was as smooth as a schoolgirl’s and she looked as though someone had lit a lamp inside her, she was so excited, and she reached her hands out for the baby, and Sam said a little abstractedly, ‘Hold on, my love, just hold on there – you shall have him –’ And he set the baby down on his mother’s belly and with one of his Spencer Wells’ forceps grasped the bulging cord and then used another to clip it again a couple of inches away. He sliced between the forceps with a pair of scissors, making Robin wince, though it seemed not to bother the baby or the mother at all, and then wrapped the child in a dressing towel and gave it to the girl, who at once pulled down
her nightdress and set it to her breast, and the baby, feeling it on his cheek, twisted his mouth and then his head and found her nipple and clamped himself on like a leech.
‘Clever girl,’ Sam said, though he was involved still at the other end of her body. ‘Knows just what to do better than I could tell her, you see – she pushed the child out a treat, and now she’s making sure the placenta’ll come as easily – here we go –’ And he delivered the afterbirth, a great reddish brown thing, into one of the basins and for the first time Robin was repelled by what she was seeing and looked away to the mother’s face again.
She was staring down at the baby still with that expression of vast excitement, and above her the little man stood and stared down too, his face quite smooth and apparently blank. But then he looked up at Robin and she saw the blaze of excitement in his eyes and said, ‘Well done,’ to him and he too lit up and laughed and stood up a little straighter and said, ‘My son, yes? Son?’
‘Very much so,’ Sam said then, as he swabbed the girl with some of the lotions that they had brought from the London, and set a pad of gamgee there, and pulled down her nightdress and rearranged Robin’s cape as a blanket. ‘As fine a set of male equipment as I’ve seen in a long time, eh, Nurse Bradman?’ And Robin, who had indeed noticed the child’s sizeable genitalia, blushed a little, and was furious with herself for doing so.
‘Your name, sir?’ the man said as he stood there very straight behind his wife and baby. ‘Your name, missee?’
‘I’m Sam,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to, you know – ’
‘I choose,’ the man said with great dignity. ‘And you, missee?’
She shook her head. ‘But I’m a girl,’ she said gently. ‘Not a name for a boy baby like yours.’
The Malaysian looked at her a little sadly. ‘Yes – next time – you come again?’
Sam roared with laughter at that. ‘Give the poor girl a chance!’ he said. ‘She’s barely had this one. Next time, for a girl, the name is Robin, though, when you get to it. Try and put that into good Malay.’
The little man looked thoughtful. ‘Is not easy. Sam is easy.’ And he bowed slightly. ‘My son,’ and he indicated the child, who had stopped sucking and was now sleeping with every appearance of content. ‘My son Wong Tu Sam.’ Sam bent his
own head in reply and said gravely, ‘How do you do, Mr Wong,’ and then smiled at the baby’s father. ‘And you too. How do you do.’ And the two men shook hands, after Sam had taken off his gloves, and seemed highly pleased with each other.
Tidying up took a little while and still the ambulance hadn’t arrived, and when the dispensary basket had been repacked and the instruments washed in the remains of the hot water and returned to the bag and the placenta wrapped in a great many sheets of newspaper ready to be disposed of, Sam and Robin stood there waiting. And then Sam said, ‘We can’t stay here like this! They’ll get here, and in the meanwhile these two are all right. We’ll get back and I’ll call Guy’s – ’
It was as though his decision had speeded things up, because they heard it then, the sound they’d been waiting for. Voices and footsteps along the corridor outside and then they were there, two men with a stretcher, both built on the large side and filling the cellar so full that it seemed to have shrunk.
‘Great timing,’ Sam said a little sardonically. ‘We’re done here. Baby’s in a good state, but should be checked when you get to your unit. Mother’s fine, no placenta praevia as feared, loss of blood minimal. Placenta delivered complete, and it’s here to be taken back for checking and disposal. Where’re you taking them?’
‘The London,’ one of the men said as the two of them began to get the woman and the baby wrapped in blankets and on to the stretcher. ‘Bart’s and Guy’s are full to the brim and goin’ potty. They’ve lost some buildings of their own, and staff and patients. It’s a right bugger out there and no error.’
Sam looked grim. ‘A lot of damage?’
‘There won’t be no city left tomorrer mornin’,’ the man grunted as they picked up the stretcher. ‘They’ll come in for business as usual and there won’t be none. Gawd, but I’d like to get up there and kill those bleedin’ German bombers. This is just stupid – docks is one thing – war effort stuff and so forth – but historical old buildings, there’s another.’
‘And people,’ Sam said quietly.
‘People?’ The ambulance man had the girl on the stretcher now and they were taking her towards the door, her anxious husband close behind. ‘Much they care about people, that lot! Listen, the copper outside said if that there car with the white crosses on it was yours, it ain’t no more. It’s bin burned like
everything else. You’d better come back to the hospital with us, eh? It’ll be a hot ride, but not much worse’n it would have been in your own car, I’ll tell you that. We got blankets you can use to shield yourself. Come on then. Into the jaws of hell we go. Welcome to the world, nipper. It’s all yours and ain’t it a beauty!’