A Child's Voice Calling (21 page)

‘Yer look so beautiful when ye’re happy like this, Mabel,’ he told her, marvelling all over again that this lovely girl was in love with him and had promised to marry him one day, however long they had to wait. And he believed it would happen, in spite of the doubts and fears that sometimes plagued him, a sense of foreboding that all was not well in Mabel’s home; he longed to protect her from the lurking shadows.

But for now she was jubilant at beginning her new job, and even her mother had to admit that Mabel was happier than she’d been for months.

At least she would still be living at home and not going to that woman at Tooting . . .

HAPPY AND EXCITED
as she was to take up her new appointment, Mabel did not take long to discover that the Rescue was a place of sorrow. And that she would have to share in it.

On her first day she was taken into the nursery by Mrs James herself and the strict routine was explained to her. The fifteen babies who lay in their canvas cots had to be taken every four hours to be fed by their mothers. ‘You have to change the ones whose mothers are still in the lying-in ward and carry them out in your arms,’ said Mrs James. ‘The other mothers have to come to the Agnes Nuttall room where they must change their own babies before and after feeding them. On no account are they to enter the nursery. That is the rule and must be kept.’

Mabel realised that Mrs James was a conscientious woman who did not intend to be unkind: her first thought was for the safety of the babies. They were fed at six, ten, two, six and ten o’clock on the dot, and whether Mabel was on the early or late shift this was her prime responsibility. All babies were breastfed; the boat-shaped glass bottles with their thick rubber teats were only used after the mothers had been discharged, when the infants were transferred to the babies’ home at Merton. Those who cried between feeds were sometimes offered sweetened water on a teaspoon and at night were taken to
their mothers at the discretion of the staff on duty. From her first day the sound of a crying baby touched Mabel’s tender heart and she could never ignore it; she would lift the child out of its cot and either cuddle it on her lap or walk the bare boards of the nursery with the helpless little creature held against her shoulder. ‘Sh, sh, little love, Mabel’s here, never fear,’ she would croon, stroking and kissing the downy head. ‘Sh-sh-sh.’

At feeding times the girls – for they were mostly young – would reach out eagerly to take their babies from her arms. Sister Barratt who was in charge of the lying-in ward gave advice and assistance with breastfeeding, and Mabel soon picked up the essential points to remember: a comfortable position with the baby’s head supported, its body firmly wrapped in a cot sheet, its mouth in contact with the nipple. She marvelled at this beautiful, natural bond between mother and child, the flowing out of love and nourishment in one mysterious stream. It was a new experience for each of these women and girls, and one they would always remember, thought Mabel pityingly, no matter what else happened to them later in life. For how could a mother forget her sucking child?

As time went by her thoughts often followed the babies to Merton, where arrangements were made for adoptions where possible; those with any kind of physical defect would go to children’s homes. Mabel’s distant dream sprang to life again, getting nearer, taking shape and substance: she saw herself, the future Mrs Drover, trained and experienced in nursing, pouring out love and care upon unwanted, unloved children in a Salvation Army refuge. This sad situation at the Rescue was another step on the
journey towards her goal – and there was such a lot for her to learn.

The two-o’clock feeds were finished and the babies back in the nursery when Sister Lilley, the midwife, put her head round the door to ask if Miss Court could come and sit with Kathy Bagshaw again for half an hour.

‘Not just at this minute, Sister Lilley,’ Mabel apologised. ‘There are a couple o’ girls bein’ discharged this afternoon and they . . . they’re coming to see their babies for the last time.’

‘Well, ask them to come to the Agnes Nuttall room
now
and get it over with. It’s not a good idea to linger over the goodbyes, it only upsets them,’ replied the midwife. ‘I’ll ask Sister Barratt to send them out directly.’

The two young women stood waiting with Mrs James when Mabel carried their babies, first one and then the other, to the room where they had been fed and loved. As nursery maid it was Mabel’s duty to assist Mrs James in supervising this moment of farewell and she found it almost unbearable. One of the girls wept uncontrollably, her sobs echoing down the cream and brown painted walls of the first-floor corridor connecting the nursery with the Agnes Nuttall room and lying-in ward. Mabel put her arm around the girl’s shaking shoulders, but felt that she had no words of comfort to offer. She could only think of the story in St Matthew’s gospel, where the women of Israel wept for their lost children, and thought it the most heart-rending sound she had ever heard.

Mrs James nodded to Mabel to return the baby to the nursery and led the girl away, leaving Mabel
with the other one who neither spoke nor wept, but just gazed upon her little son, the child she had borne and breastfed and come to love more than anything else in the world. She turned wide, despairing eyes to Mabel. ‘Will there be somebody to love him, Miss Court?’ she whispered.

‘Yes, dear, he’s such a beautiful baby, somebody’s sure to want to give him a good home,’ Mabel managed to say, though her voice faltered. ‘Yer must go now, dear. Give him a kiss and then go without lookin’ back.’

After that last kiss the girl had silently walked away, a blurred figure like an old woman with bent shoulders and a hand out to grasp the banister when she reached the stairs. As Mabel stood watching her go, her heart breaking with pity, Sister Lilley called out urgently from the birthing room. ‘I need you in here at once, Miss Court! Hurry up, she’s nearly ready to deliver.’

Kathy Bagshaw had been getting pains for more than two days; the last ten hours had been a terrible ordeal for her. Sister Lilley had asked Mabel to sit with Kathy when the nursery was quiet, to hold her hand, rub her back and generally encourage her while the midwife was otherwise engaged, and Mabel found it a harrowing experience, unable as she was to lessen Kathy’s pain.

But now the birth was imminent and the exhausted girl had to make the final effort that pushed her baby’s head out through the narrow passage. Sister Lilley turned her over on to her left side for the actual delivery, and Mabel had to hold up the right leg as the child’s head emerged and the midwife received the limp body into her hands. Several vital moments passed before the child took a
first gasping breath; its bluish-white face made Mabel think of her lost brother Walter, and she stared with a silent prayer on her lips as Sister Lilley held it up by the heels, blew upon the body and slapped its bottom and soles.

‘Oh, the poor little thing—’ Mabel almost groaned aloud at what seemed very rough treatment of the tender newborn baby after such a long and difficult journey.

But within a minute it gasped, breathed and cried weakly. Sister Lilley cleaned its nose and mouth, and said, ‘It’s a girl.’ She handed it to Mabel while she attended to the mother, expelling the afterbirth and removing the blood-soaked mat of cotton wool and brown paper beneath her.

Mabel knew how to tie clean white string round the umbilical cord two inches from the child’s body, and to powder the cut stump and apply a cotton bandage round the belly. After wiping the baby dry she dressed it in a plain tie-up gown and napkin secured with a safety pin; then she wrapped it in a small square blanket. Kathy Bagshaw’s delivery was the fourth that she had seen, and the hardest and longest to date.

‘Can I see ’er, Sister? Can I ’old ’er?’ asked the mother.

The midwife handed the baby into her arms. ‘The sooner you give the first feed, the better, Katherine,’ she said. ‘Undo your nightgown and make a start. All right, Miss Court, you can go now.’

‘Fanks for all yer done, Mabel,’ added Kathy weakly. A shaft of golden autumnal sunlight fell across the pea-green walls of the room, illuminating her drawn features as she hugged her baby close, and Mabel forced a smile at the sight of another girl
becoming a mother, learning to breastfeed her child for six weeks and then . . .

Removing her white cap and rolling up her soiled apron, Mabel put on her hat and coat and went downstairs to the staff door at the side of the solid brick Victorian building. Out in the fading light of a late October evening she made her way down Lavender Hill, realising how tired she felt. It was not that the work itself was hard, on the contrary, the mothers themselves did most of the domestic work at the Rescue, both before and after delivery. They assisted in the kitchen, sewing room and laundry, and were responsible for cleaning their dormitories and living quarters. The only cleaning Mabel had to do was in the nursery and delivery room, so compared with the endless sweeping, dusting, brushing and sluicing at the Anti-Viv it was money for old rope, as Albert would say.

No, it was not the work that was hard. It was the situation of the relinquished babies that put an almost intolerable strain on Mabel. She yearned over the new lives in her care, each in his or her tie-up cotton gown and napkin, lying quietly asleep or awake and crying in the cots, peeping out at a world that was to take away a mother’s love even before it could be comprehended. And there was nothing that Mabel could do: she felt emotionally drained dry, as if the last ounce of pity had been wrung from her heart – and what use was pity? She anguished for the baby who would never again be held in a mother’s loving arms, or suck warm milk from her breast; from now on it would be held by a stranger and given a glass bottle with a hard rubber teat and a different kind of milk, sometimes too hot or too cold, not so satisfying, maybe causing the tender little
stomach to reject it, to suffer pain and discomfort, diarrhoea, soreness – and to be all alone in the world. Hurrying down towards the maze of side streets between Queenstown and the Wandsworth Road, Mabel knew she would never get used to the sorrows of the Rescue.

And there was no comfort to be had at home. Annie would not allow her to talk in front of Alice and Daisy about what happened behind the high red-brick walls of the Agnes Nuttall Institute and discreetly lowered her own voice when referring to Mabel’s place of work.

So where could she turn for counsel? Who would listen to the sad stories that haunted her? Who else but her best and dearest friend, her young man and future husband, Harry Drover. For him no subject was unmentionable, not if it concerned his dearest Mabel and he would listen endlessly on their walks while she poured out her thoughts and feelings about life at the Rescue. Looking down on her eager, upturned face, he realised how deeply she felt about the plight of the babies left motherless.

‘There’s this poor young girl we’ve got in at present, Harry, only fifteen, hardly older than Alice and so dazed by what’s happened to her. Her father’s a farmer in Surrey, honest country people – they must’ve been so shocked when they found she was . . . y’know, carryin’ a child.’

‘Who’d taken advantage of her, Mabel? Was she forced?’ he asked, frowning.

‘No, it seems she used to cross the fields to go to school with a boy o’ the same age from a family livin’ near. She told Mrs James they thought they were only playin’—’ She broke off abruptly, lowering her eyes, conscious that her mother would have a fit, as
the saying was, if she knew half of what Mabel confided in Harry Drover, things Annie Court would not have mentioned, let alone discussed.

But Harry’s association with the Salvation Army had taught him a great deal about the darker side of life and he was not hampered by any such false delicacy. On the contrary, he was quick to reassure her that he understood. ‘Ruby comes across cases like that, Mabel, and it’s wrong to label that poor girl as a fallen woman,’ he said in his thoughtful way. ‘Though it’s all too often the first step down the path to . . . to prostitution. There’s nothin’ sadder ’n a good girl ruined.’

‘It’s just as sad for the baby,’ rejoined Mabel quickly. ‘Yer never saw such a poor little wizened-looking mite, scarce five pounds. She just sits an’ stares at him when I put him in her arms. He’ll go to the babies’ home at Merton and she’ll go back to her parents as if nothing had ever happened. But Harry, that poor little boy, I’m sure he’ll die with nobody to love him.’

Tears welled up in her soft grey-blue eyes and Harry put his arm around her, ignoring the disapproving looks from a family group walking along the same path on the Common. ‘Dearest Mabel, yer do wonderful work among them poor women and girls. Ye’re an angel o’ light at that Rescue and I’m that proud o’ yer – and I believe the Lord’ll show yer a way to help that girl an’ her baby if that’s what He wants.’

‘Ye’re a tower o’ strength to me, Harry,’ she murmured, nestling close to his shoulder. For it was true: his positive, understanding attitude never failed to raise her spirits and in a way he took the place of Albert, for in spite of the outward differences
between the two they shared the same goodness of heart.

She told him that she was not really looking forward to Christmas at the Rescue. She could only see it as a difficult time for the young mothers waiting to give birth or contemplating the approaching separation from the new lives they had borne in pain. The Christmas story could hardly bring them comfort, she thought, for the Child born in a lowly stable had a loving young mother who kept Him and cared for Him throughout His childhood and young manhood;
and
she had the protection of a good husband to watch over her and the Child.

And what a pity that the arrival of a new baby should ever be cause of shame and disgrace. When she thought of her own mother’s views about the girls at the Rescue, she found herself quite shocked by it, far more than by the fact of their unmarried state. Her discussions with Harry on the subject were a much-needed outlet for her feelings and brought the pair into a closer intimacy. On his part he was touched that she felt able to share these confidences with him and privately regarded them as being like talks between a married couple, which of course they would one day be – though he did sometimes wonder if he should gently warn her against expressing such charitable sentiments to anybody else but himself. She was so innocent in many ways, he thought tenderly.