Authors: Linda Fairley
The Midwife's Here!: The Enchanting True Story of One of Britain's Longest Serving Midwives (28 page)
Love’s young dream. I was 19 and Graham 18.
Four years later on holiday in Greece in 1971, our first time abroad together.
Our wedding day, 22 November 1969. I felt a million dollars in my dress from Marshall & Snelgrove. I was so excited about what the future would hold, and the icing on the cake was when I was certified a qualified MRI nurse a few weeks later (
inset
).
© Photoshot
©
The Times
/NI Syndication
I soon learned that life wasn’t all rosy. Some parts of Manchester were terribly poor, and these streets are typical of the ones I’d race down on my Honda to the aid of women like Moira Petty, whose story still haunts me today.
©
The Times
/NI Syndication
©
The Times
/NI Syndication
A copy of the brochure with my photo used to advertise the new maternity unit at Ashton General Hospital, later renamed Tameside Hospital, where I still work today.
I was so proud to have been chosen to represent the hospital; it was a real stamp of approval after all the hard years of training. It’s such a privilege to be a midwife, which is why – forty years later – I continue to do the job I love.
The new maternity unit opened to patients on 4 December 1971. I wasn’t on duty that day, but I remember feeling incredibly excited to be on the cusp of a new stage of my career. As I always do at times of change, I felt a little apprehensive too, thinking about stepping into this brand new environment. The unit had cost £2 million, and expectations were running high. As the poster girl I would have to set a particularly good example, and putting a foot wrong was simply not an option. I said a few prayers and unloaded some thoughts into a notebook to help prepare myself for my first shift there the following day.
This is what was going through my mind on the evening of 4 December 1971, while Mrs Kathleen Randle was making local history by giving birth to her nine-pound son Jarrod Matthew Rohan Randle, the first baby born at the new unit, at 6.25 p.m. that day.
Life is very good, but that makes me a bit nervous. I think Sister Mary Francis has a lot to answer for! ‘You have to take the rough with the smooth, girls,’ she used to say. I can hear her saying it, and so when things go well I always worry, just a little bit. Please God, help me be strong, come what may.
I have to pinch myself sometimes to believe I am actually delivering babies for a living!!! Graham and I are going to start ‘trying’ for a baby of our own next year. Fingers crossed for that. I don’t think we’ll have any problems. I can’t believe I am going to be a sister very soon. Help me be the best I can. I know it will be really tough sometimes, but I can cope. I don’t think anything can surprise me now! I want to always be a midwife, until I retire that is – not that I’m thinking of that just yet!
It makes me laugh out loud when I recall my words, because even today I still can’t imagine retiring. I tried to leave Tameside Hospital, as Ashton General was later renamed, when I turned sixty in 2008, but I hated not working as a midwife and I lasted just three weeks before I asked for my job back and became a part-time community midwife.
So, the midwife is still here, more than four decades on and counting. I’m honoured to have become Tameside Hospital’s longest-serving midwife, and to have been celebrated as one of the UK’s longest-serving midwives as well. It’s an achievement that makes me feel as proud as I did when I saw my twenty-three-year-old self smiling out of those posters back in 1971, but of course that’s not my motivation for still doing the job.
I continue to serve the women of Tameside, some of whom I actually delivered many moons ago, because each and every birth still thrills me to the core. Feeling the warmth of a newborn baby in my hands is honestly as joyful and exhilarating today as when I nervously delivered my first baby, little Lorinda Louise Willis, back in September 1970.
It tickles me no end when I remember thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think anything can surprise me now!’ You never
stop
being surprised when you are a midwife. The job takes you into the hearts and homes of so many wonderful and interesting women, at such a significant time in their life, that you never know what is in store.
Little did I know back then that I had over four decades of surprises ahead of me, some more heart-breaking than I could ever have imagined, others so touching, so funny or so uplifting they would take my breath way. There wasn’t enough room for them in one book so I’m currently working on another.
My job has helped keep me going through heartbreaks of my own, and when I remember my youthful hope and expectation that Graham and I would not encounter any problems, I gasp at my naïvety. We did have the baby we longed for and our son Jonathan was born in 1974, but sadly Graham and I grew apart and separated when Jonathan was just a toddler.
I am sixty-four years old now and I know that only one thing in life is certain: babies keep coming, same as they always have, same as they always will. No mother on earth escapes without problems of one sort or another, whether they start at conception, birth or in the years of mothering that lie ahead. Why, then, do women keep having babies? It’s a question I’ve been asked many, many times, typically between ear-splitting screams, in the throes of a painful labour! The answer, of course, is achingly simple. Babies are our lifeblood. They make this world of ours go round and round. Babies enthral and inspire us, giving meaning and purpose to our lives, whoever we are and whatever we believe. That is why I feel so very privileged to be a midwife, and why I continue to do the job I love.
No matter how many babies I deliver, each and every one is a miracle, connecting me to the world like nothing else,
reminding me that we are all equal in the beginning, and in the end. It’s a great leveller, childbirth.