The Angels of Lovely Lane (44 page)

‘Get it to the sluice,’ she said. ‘I will see to the rest of the delivery. We will need another bedpan in here for the final grand contraction. You call into the office on the way and tell Sister what has happened.’

Just at that moment, the door swung open as Mr Scriven and Sister Antrobus stormed in.

Pammy snatched up the bedpan before Mr Scriven could reach it. She looked in at the contents and there lay a perfect little boy. He was breathing and helpless and he stared right back up at her.

‘Oh my God,’ gasped Pammy, stating the obvious. ‘It’s a baby.’

‘No it is not. It is a foetus,’ snapped Mr Scriven. ‘Leave it in the sluice room and Sister will arrange for it to be transferred to the incinerator.’

‘It’s a baby boy and he’s alive,’ Pammy responded without thinking.

Mr Scriven ignored her, keeping his gaze fixed on the TPR chart in his hand. ‘What is her blood pressure now?’ he asked Staff Nurse Bates.

‘Get it into the sluice room, now,’ Sister Antrobus hissed.

Pammy looked frantically at the girl, at the doctor and back at Sister Antrobus. As she opened her mouth to speak again, she felt herself grabbed sharply by the top of her arm. Sister Antrobus marched her out of the cubicle and down to the sluice room. Pammy didn’t feel the pain in her upper arm, she could only think of the baby boy, alive in the bedpan she was clutching. As the sluice-room door slammed behind them she squealed, ‘Sister, it’s a baby boy and he’s breathing.’

She shook her arm free and, laying the bedpan down in the long stone sink, scooped out the baby. She grabbed a towel from a trolley that someone had left ready just inside the door for a bed bath, and wrapped it carefully around the tiny body.

‘Oh my God, would you look, the little love, what can we do? Should I run down to Maternity with him? Should I? Or up the stairs to the children’s ward. What shall I do?’

Pammy never forgot the moments that followed, or the words spoken while the struggling baby boy lay in her arms. His eyes wide open, deep blue eyes looking up at her imploringly. He was begging her to help him. He was gasping. His mouth making small shapes as he desperately tried to part his lips to breathe. There were blisters down his right arm, Pammy assumed where he had been touched by the carbolic solution, but his eyes were clear and knowing. They were pleading to live.

‘It is NOT breathing. Give it to me and telephone the porter for transfer to the incinerator, now.’

Pammy let out a small scream and clutched the baby to her. ‘No.’ She pulled the bundle closer, but as she did so the little boy cradled in her arms lost his fight for life. She saw his eyes close and his chest become immobile as it ceased to rise and fall. He had lived for less than five minutes.

Memories of Lorraine flooded Pammy’s mind as she clutched the little man to her. She lifted him up and began to cry pitiful tears on to the unknitted scalp that had never known a mother’s kiss. She had been there at the moment of his birth. Hers were the only eyes to look into his own. She felt responsible, and if no one else stood up for him, she would. She was aware that the only person in the whole world who cared that he had lived was her. He was her responsibility.

‘Give him to me now, if you know what is good for you,’ hissed Sister Antrobus. Her tone was vicious.

‘No, I won’t. He lived. He needs to be buried, not put in an incinerator. He needs a priest and a birth certificate and everything. He is a little boy, not a severed limb. I want the priest now. I may be only a first year, but I know what a little life deserves. He lived. He did. I saw him.’

Pammy was by now on the verge of hysteria. She had lost all reason and was oblivious of the potential consequences of her actions. But she truly didn’t care. She had held a living, breathing baby in her arms and they would have to put her in the incinerator before she allowed them to take the baby boy who had gone from feeling firm and alive to being a limp weight in her arms.

Half an hour later, Pammy sat on a chair in the ward office. Opposite her sat Sister Antrobus, her face like thunder. Matron sat behind the desk and there was a heavy and troubled silence while they waited for Mr Scriven to join them. Pammy had been assured that the baby would not be taken anywhere and would remain in the sluice. She was not budging on that one and Sister Antrobus knew it.

Mr Scriven looked like thunder as he walked into the office and closed the door tight behind him. Glancing through the window, Pammy could see Staff Nurse Bates in the cubicle with their Miss Smith.

‘What have we here?’ Mr Scriven asked in a cold voice.

‘Nurse Tanner believes the foetus breathed and lived, Mr Scriven. I have told her it could not possibly have done so. Nurse Tanner is stepping well beyond her station and is requesting a priest. I thought we should inform you.’

‘Come with me,’ said Mr Scriven to Pammy. ‘Now.’

Pammy jumped up out of her seat and followed him out of the room, with Sister Antrobus trailing behind. Pammy could hear the crackle of the starch in Sister’s dress as she moved. She knew that she was in dreadful trouble. Her earlier bravery had almost deserted her and she felt herself weakening in the face of the opposition lined up against her. Now that Mr Scriven had joined them, she wasn’t sure what she would do. Maybe they were right. Had she been over-emotional?

Mr Scriven stood under the central green glass lampshade in the sluice room and picked up one of Branna’s buckets. He placed it under the sluice sink tap and began to fill it with water.

‘You see this?’ he snapped. ‘If that baby breathed and lived, when I put it in this bucket of water it will float. If it didn’t, it will sink.’

‘It was a he, sir,’ whispered Pammy.

‘What?’

‘It was a he. He was a little boy.’ Pammy saw a vein in Mr Scriven’s neck twitch and pulsate and she thought he was about to explode. Instead, he placed the bucket on the floor.

‘Is this it?’ he asked Sister, who nodded an affirmative.

Pammy was aware that someone else had joined them in the room, but her eyes remained fixed on the bundle of towelling.

Without looking at the child, he took the towel to the bucket and plopped the dead baby into the water, where it floated, face down. Pammy could hardly believe what she was seeing. She was incredulous.

Mr Scriven looked startled. For a split second, he hesitated before he snatched the baby back up and wrapped him in the towel. ‘See?’ he said. ‘He sank.’

‘But he didn’t,’ Pammy whispered. ‘He didn’t sink. That’s not the truth, sir. He floated.’

‘Take it to the incinerator,’ said Sister Antrobus.

‘But...’ Pammy faltered. She was frozen to the spot. ‘I can’t, Sister,’ she muttered. Her mind was reeling at what she had just witnessed.

‘I did not ask for a reply. I gave you an order. Do as you are told.’ Sister Antrobus was almost shouting again. She looked to Mr Scriven for confirmation that this was what he wanted and he nodded back, the expression on his face cold and unmoved.

‘I shall take the waste product to the incinerator myself, Sister,’ he said coldly.

Sister Antrobus looked humiliated, and she blushed red. She had been late on this fateful day, and now it would appear to Mr Scriven as though she were losing control of her ward and her staff. There was a moment’s silence, broken shockingly by Matron, who, unbeknown to Pammy, had stood silently in the sluice room and witnessed the entire scene. ‘You are a disgrace to nurses everywhere.’ Her words sliced through the air. They were full of menace and sent a chill of fear running through Pammy. ‘Get out of this hospital, pack your belongings at Lovely Lane and be out before this evening. You will never set foot in St Angelus again.’

Pammy tried to move, but her legs had turned to jelly.

‘Get out of this ward and this hospital. Do it now. I shall send you an official dismissal by post.’

‘But Matron, it was a baby boy. Don’t you understand?’ Pammy’s voice wobbled. Her words petered out and she realized that somewhere in Matron’s eyes there was a gleam of human kindness, but not for Pammy. Not for the nameless little boy who had just died in her arms.

‘If that baby goes anywhere, I’m calling the police.’ As soon as she spoke those words, her knees began to shake.

She was already trying to work out what she would tell her parents, but she knew instinctively that they would understand. They would even praise her actions. At home in Arthur Street, a welcome would be waiting. That thought emboldened her.

‘You are a liar,’ she screamed at Mr Scriven. ‘A liar, do you hear me?’

She had nothing to lose and was beyond containing her anger. With tears pouring down her cheeks, Pammy took her cape down from its peg in the cloakroom. Her eyes searched for Branna, but she was nowhere to be seen. Feeling very alone, she wrapped her cape around her and shivered. She would have liked to say goodbye to Staff Nurse Bates, who was tending to their patient. They would never see each other again, and Pammy wanted to say thank you. But they would never let her, and anyway she felt a need to be out of this place and in the fresh air. The condemnation of Sister Antrobus and Matron and the coldness and anger of Mr Scriven were all too much for her. She had never been shouted at like that by anyone in her life before and the experience had been deeply upsetting. She had barely eaten since her snatched breakfast, and as a result she felt weak. Her emotions had been assailed by events and she still could not comprehend what she had witnessed, although she was sure she would never forget the image of the floating baby or the deep blue eyes staring up at her.

She was on the verge of storming back into the office and shouting that Mr Scriven was a brute. Her mind screamed out, rejecting the reality of what had occurred. Putting the baby in a bucket of water to test if he had lived had been the last straw. Pammy began to shake. Her arms were crossed defensively and she felt her fingernails digging deeply into the skin of her forearms. The speed of events had left her speechless and tearful. Could she have got this all wrong? In the world of hospitals and surgery, of medicine and nursing, the world she had chosen, how could a baby be born and breathe but be condemned and written off? But Pammy was her mother’s daughter, and even as she doubted herself she thought of Maisie and asked herself what would her mam do. In a flash, the thought gave her strength. Pammy had seen her entire community, women with a dozen children each, fight to save the smallest scrap of a life and if her mam were here she would have done the same as Pammy. Her instincts had been right.

She felt weak with relief and the tears almost cascaded from her eyes. Pulling her cape around her for warmth and protection, she opened the cloakroom door to leave. Then she heard Branna’s voice, and turning towards the ward she saw that the doors were wide open. Branna was standing outside the cubicle with her arms folded, and her words clear for all to hear. It looked as though she could be the second person to be dismissed that day on ward two.

‘Is anyone here going to tell Elsie what her missing girl Martha is doing in that bed?’

*

In the school of nursing, Biddy picked up the telephone. Another minute and she would have been gone. Her bag was packed, her scarf was fastened and she had been heading for the door.

‘’Tis always someone wanting something,’ she muttered as she picked up the handset. She recognized the voice right away. It was Dessie.

‘Biddy, where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to call you all day.’

‘We haven’t had no phone all day. You know that, for pity’s sake. ’Twas you what organized to have the new phone put in. I haven’t been anywhere but here.’

Dessie had spent his whole day running up and down to Maternity with gas bottles. The requests were never-ending, and Jake had disappeared. Dessie could hardly believe it. There had been no word, not a message from his mother or another of the lads, nothing. He banged his fist to his forehead. ‘How could I have forgotten?’ he said.

Dessie didn’t bother to argue with Biddy. Not least because she was right. He had ordered the new telephone system to be installed in the school of nursing. It was a measure of how frantically busy he was that he hadn’t remembered that fact.

All day long he had been trying to call Biddy each time he was anywhere near the lodge.

‘I have news, Biddy, and it isn’t good. Are you sitting down?’

Biddy ran down the entry as fast as was physically possible with a wicker shopping basket in one hand and a seven-pound bag of King Edwards in the other. By the time she reached Elsie’s house she was out of breath and had to set both down on the floor in front of her before she could push open the back door.

For a brief moment, she stopped and smiled as it dawned on her that she had completed the journey without embarrassment.

Biddy, you have to know that almost all women who give birth to a large number of babies in rapid succession suffer with your problem.

Emily had taken her to Dr Jackson’s clinic. It had been an uncomfortable experience and she had thought that the ring he had placed inside her would surely fall out, but it hadn’t. He told her that it didn’t work for everyone, but maybe life wasn’t always that bad, because for Biddy it had.

‘Elsie,’ she roared, almost falling in through the door. ‘Elsie, I’m nearly dying from lack of breath here. Where are you?’

Elsie’s neighbour Hattie had been bringing in her washing. She was Welsh. Biddy didn’t like the Welsh. She thought that every English person who claimed the Irish were dirty should visit the home of a Welsh woman first.

Hattie wore a blue floral housecoat and a red and green paisley scarf, worn like a turban, to cover her wire curlers.

‘Get them feckin’ curlers out,’ Biddy had jibed at her during the war. ‘Jerry’s using them to get a signal for his bombers, so he is.’ She only said it once. The following morning, after the worst bombing of Liverpool, Hattie whipped out her wire curlers with their holding spike antennae and put them in a box under the bed. She did not put them in again until VE day.

‘What you yellin’ like that for? There’s no one home. She’ll be down the bingo, either that or still looking for their Martha. Not settled, she hasn’t, since Martha went missing. Told me she was calling on Josie’s mam. What news have you got then?’