Second Opinion

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The first baby died on the morning of 14 July, or rather, as Sister Lichfield who was a stickler for accuracy wrote in her report, he was found dead in his crib then. It was hard to tell how long he’d been dead; the small body was cold but not stiff, and the eyes were half open. They would have to leave it to the pathologist to decide that, Sister Lichfield said, and busied herself getting the body down to the morgue and doing what she could to comfort the mother.

‘Not that I can swear to it that she’ll be exactly heartbroken,’ she confided to her senior staff midwife, Audrey Burke, before she went to the four-bedded bay where the mother had been left to sleep in peace, while her baby had been taken to the nursery for the night because he’d been restless and noisy. ‘She wasn’t what you’d call over the moon about him, was she?’

Audrey, who had delivered Barbara Lennon, had to agree. ‘Not that you’d expect her to be really, poor thing. Been living on the streets since March, as I understand it, and couldn’t be sure who the father was. I dare say she’d have put him up for adoption anyway. All the same, I’m sure she’ll be as upset as any other mum would be.’ Audrey was a sentimental woman who always thought the best of everyone. ‘Though I have to say she wouldn’t hold him
when we showed him to her. Didn’t even look at him much.’

Sister Lichfield proved to be right. Barbara Lennon looked blankly at Sister when she told her of the tragedy, shook her head in some wonderment and just said, ‘Oh. After all that, an’ everythin’. Just goes to show, don’t it?’ And nothing more.

Sister Lichfield made no response to that, merely smiling kindly. She sent the Chaplain to see her and arranged for some bereavement counselling too. Always efficient, there was nothing she would forget for her patients’ welfare; having done it she gave the matter no more thought and turned her attention to other more absorbing considerations.

And that was all there was to it, until the end of October when another cot death happened. This time Sister Lichfield was far more rattled, and the whole ward was upset. The news went round like wildfire. Half the mothers burst into immediate tears of fellow-feeling and needed a great deal of comforting and reassuring before they settled again; and of course all the fuss upset the babies who cried noisily all morning while Sister Lichfield, looking crisper than even she usually did, which was very crisp indeed, tried to calm matters down and deal with the parents, who this time were hysterical with grief.

It was understandable. Viv and Angela Chowdary had waited a long time for their first child. It had taken them and half a dozen doctors to achieve the pregnancy, Angela had confided to Sister Lichfield the evening she was admitted with her contractions coming at twenty-minute intervals, so this was a very precious baby.

‘Not that they’re not all precious, of course,’ she added hastily as Sister set the foetal scalp monitor in place, making Angela wince slightly but able to smile bravely as well, ‘but I’m nearly past my sell-by date, let’s face it, and there won’t be many chances to have another go, will there?
Even if Dr Arundel in the Fertility Clinic’ll take me again. So this baby means the moon and stars to us. It’s a girl, you know. We had the tests and the amnio and all that — Viv was a bit disappointed at first seeing she’s going to be an only one the way things are — I mean, I’m thirty-nine, after all, and — oh!’ She caught her breath and looked a little surprised. ‘That was a big one.’

‘A very good contraction,’ Sister said approvingly. ‘Don’t forget your breathing now, dear, the way you learned it. I’ll send your husband in, shall I? He’s staying, of course?’

‘Oh, yes!’ Angela said and beamed at her, relaxed again now the contraction had settled, but clearly very excited and happy. ‘He wouldn’t miss a moment of this.’

It hadn’t been an easy birth. Angela had soon forgotten all she had learned in her prenatal classes, not breathing at all as she should despite Viv’s exhortations, and she had bawled a great deal, somewhat to Sister Lichfield’s disapproval. She was as modern a midwife as the next, she liked to tell herself, but really she did think privately sometimes that in all this fuss about birthplans and natural childbirth and did-they-or-didn’t-they-want-to-be-in-a-birthing-chair-or-under-water, the mothers forgot the virtue of a bit of old-fashioned dignity. Sister Lichfield had trained in the days when a labouring woman was expected to bite her lips and not fuss too much, and certainly not to argue when offered plenty of painkillers to knock her out and shut her up. Sister Lichfield wouldn’t have admitted it to her colleagues for the world, but she still preferred the old days when midwives were properly in charge and mothers didn’t make such a drama out of it all. A pregnancy, she was fond of saying to her pupils, was after all only a pregnancy. No need to make a career out of it.

But she never let her patients know she felt this way, and was a good caring woman who often remained late on duty to finish a case. In Angela’s case, in fact, Sister knew she wouldn’t deliver for some time, and went off only to return
next morning an hour before her shift was due to see her. And was just in time to deliver the baby who emerged looking bruised and bewildered but seeming well, and when checked over by the paediatric people was charted as indeed being in excellent shape.

The baby, Sister Lichfield thought, showed clearly her grandfather’s race — she had soon discovered that Viv Chowdary was the son of an Indian father and Scottish mother — being dark of eyes and with a mass of black hair, and she was very pleased to be told by a now ecstatic Angela that the baby’s third name would be Celia, after Sister Lichfield. She smiled and accepted graciously, enjoying the compliment even though it was one she had been paid many times before. This part of East London had a considerable number of Celias aged fifteen and under.

The baby was taken to the nursery to rest, because the birth had been so stormy, though Angela had protested at first, wanting her daughter to be at her side all the time. But she had agreed when Viv had added his own insistence that she should rest and had settled to sleep most of the day away, which wasn’t difficult as she was in a single room, while Viv went off to celebrate with his own ecstatic parents and an assortment of brothers and sisters and inlaws of all kinds. Sister Lichfield called Fertility to let them know that another of their successes had duly arrived. Dr Arundel wasn’t there, and wouldn’t be back today, she was told, but would come to see her grateful patient first thing tomorrow morning. And the Maternity Ward swung into the daily round of deliveries — a particularly busy one today, in the event — and no one paid much attention to either Angela Chowdary or her baby.

Or not until the late afternoon. Sister Lichfield was about to go off duty, now thoroughly tired after her too early start, when the pupil midwife responsible for Angela’s care, a rather anxious girl called Nuala Kennedy, was sent to fetch the baby to her for its first attempt at the breast. It
was she who found the baby dead. She ran out into the corridor from the small separate nursery, her eyes almost as wide open as her mouth and shrieking like a steam engine. The noise brought Sister Lichfield into the corridor from her office in her mufti — she’d been changing to go home — together with several of the other nurses and midwives.

‘There’s something wrong!’ the pupil midwife shouted, her face showing real terror.

Sister Lichfield’s hand had itched to provide the time-honoured remedy for hysteria, but she settled for grasping the girl by the shoulder, hurrying her back into the nursery and closing the door firmly behind her. ‘Good God, woman, do you want to set the entire ward off? When will you girls learn how to be quiet around the mothers? They burst into tears at the least excuse and then set the rest of them off. Now what is it?’

‘The Chowdary baby, Sister,’ Nuala gibbered. She gulped as sudden tears appeared in her eyes. ‘I think it’s dead — I tried to pick it up and it’s sort of floppy and …’ She shuddered suddenly, quite uncontrollably. ‘It’s not what I’d expected. Not here in Maternity. I’m sorry to be so —’

But Sister wasn’t listening to her. She bent over the cot and looked at the baby. The dark hair looked the same, a thick shock that seemed to grow part way down the side of the face too, but the skin that had been a pleasant sallow pink was now blue and the eyes that had been so bright and wide this morning at the moment of birth stared blankly from beneath unevenly open lids. There was no question that the child was dead. Sister Lichfield felt a stab of regret so deep and so painful she could have joined the young pupil beside her in her tears. But she just stood up straight and snapped, ‘Who else has been in here today?’