The Midwife’s Here!: The Enchanting True Story of One of Britain’s Longest Serving Midwives

‘I’m thinking of going into nursing,’ I replied meekly, blushing at her reference to my ‘indiscretion’. She meant the time I was caught breaking a cardinal rule and talking to boys on the bus. This had been seen as such a scandalous breach of conduct that a letter was sent home to my parents, warning of severe consequences should I ever compromise my reputation in such a way again.

‘Nursing is a good choice for you,’ Sister Mary Francis deemed. ‘But only the best will do for my girls. I want you to apply to the Manchester Royal Infirmary. It is a teaching hospital, and the most prestigious in the region. Please promise me, Linda, that you will always work hard for your living.’

I nodded obediently, grateful that Sister Mary Francis had not probed any deeper, as I had just three rather fragile reasons behind this big decision.

Number one: my best friend Sue Smith from school had an older sister called Wendy who was a nurse. She was always smiling when she told us tales about her job, and I thought she looked wonderful in her smart uniform. I admired her, and I wanted a uniform like hers.

Number two: my mum always said I was a caring person, telling me that I’d insisted on looking after my teddy bear right up to the age of eleven. I thought I’d be good at tucking patients into bed and giving them tea and sympathy.

Number three: I didn’t want to work in a bank and I didn’t want to teach. My parents never wanted me to work for the family business, even though their bakery shop near our home in Stalybridge was very successful. It was hard graft being self-employed, Mum always said. She wanted better for me.

Nursing it was to be, and that is how I found myself standing before Miss Morgan, Matron of the Manchester Royal Infirmary, in September 1966.

‘You must see me as your other mother!’ she boomed. I was eighteen years old and I had just started my three-year training course at the MRI, which was situated on Oxford Road, a mile and a half outside the city centre.

Though I knew next to nothing about nursing I had quickly cottoned on to one very important fact: Matron was like God, and her word was Gospel.

‘I want you to be able to talk to me at all times,’ Miss Morgan instructed forcefully, her extremely large bust somehow expanding further still as she snorted in her next breath. ‘You are my girls!’

I looked at her in horror. She seemed completely unapproachable and absolutely nothing like my own mother. My mum was so gentle-natured she practically had kindness dripping from her pores. Miss Morgan was a bulldozer in a bra by comparison. Her voice penetrated my eardrums with considerable force, and her facial expressions were as stiff as the large, starched white frill cap that was clamped on her head.

I nervously glanced from left to right to see how the other new girls in my group were reacting. There were thirty-six teenage girls in my intake, and we were divided into groups of six. As my name then was Linda Lawton, I’d been placed with two other student nurses whose surnames began with the letter L, as well as with three whose surnames began with M and P.

I took some small comfort from the fact Nessa Lawrence, Anne Lindsey, Jo Maudsley, Linda Mochri and Janice Price all looked as startled as I felt.

‘You will be taken down shortly to be measured for your new uniforms,’ Matron went on, forcing a rather frosty smile to her lips. I imagined her heart was probably in the right place, but she seemed oblivious to the fact she’d turned us into a group of baby rabbits caught in the glaring headlights that were her wide, all-seeing eyes.

‘Be warned, girls, that if I catch any of you shortening your uniform I will unpick the hem myself forthwith and restore it to its correct length, which is past your knee, on the calf.

‘Hair is to be clean and neat and worn completely off the collar, stocking seams are to be poker straight, and make-up and jewellery are strictly forbidden. Strictly forbidden!

‘You will require two pairs of brown lace-up shoes which are to shine like glass every day. Cleanliness is next to godliness, never forget that, girls!’

We listened attentively, scarcely daring to breathe lest we incur Matron’s wrath.

‘Furthermore,’ she went on, ‘I will not tolerate lateness, sloppiness or untidiness of any nature and I expect best behaviour at all times.

‘Good luck, girls,’ she added briskly, smoothing her hands down the front of her exceptionally well-pressed grey uniform. ‘Don’t forget you must come and talk to me at once about any concerns you may have. I am here to help you.’

Miss Morgan was clearly exempt from the make-up ban as she had thickly painted red lips, which she now stretched into the shape of a wide smile. Despite this she still managed to look incredibly intimidating as she waved us out of her office and instructed us to follow a grey-haired home sister down to the uniform store, a visit she hoped we would all ‘thoroughly enjoy’. Miss Morgan sounded sincere, but in that moment I felt a pang of real fear and homesickness.

The home sisters were typically older, unmarried sisters who had retired from working on the wards but ran the nurses’ home, and usually lived in. This one was glaring at us impatiently, which did nothing to ease my anxiety.

Dad had driven me in to Manchester and dropped me off earlier that day, and my small suitcase was still unopened. I’d felt as if I was going on an exciting adventure as we pulled up outside the grand red-brick façade of the enormous teaching hospital. It was opposite the sprawling university campus on Oxford Road, and I felt honoured to be entering the heart of such a vibrant, progressive community.

As I waved Dad off and joined the other eager-looking student nurses gathered in reception, I was buzzing with anticipation. I was actually going to be a nurse, and not just any nurse: I was going to be an MRI nurse!

Now, however, reality was rapidly starting to dawn. I felt lost and abandoned in this unfamiliar environment, with the imposing Miss Morgan thrust upon me as my ‘other mother’. Home was less than ten miles away, just a half-hour car ride east of Manchester. It was tantalisingly close, which only made me long for it all the more.

I’d been on just one previous visit to the MRI several months earlier after my letter of application, vetted and approved by Sister Mary Francis, was swiftly accepted. It was June 1966 when I was invited on a whistle-stop tour of the hospital, and when I met some of the other student nurses for the very first time.

Now, I realised, I had scarcely taken anything in. At the time I was preoccupied with finishing my A-levels and going on a summer holiday with my best friend Sue from school. We’d been invited to Beirut in the August, where my brother John, who was ten years older than me, worked as a journalist. It was a very safe and beautiful place to visit in 1966, and we were looking forward to exploring it, then spending two weeks sunning ourselves in Turkey afterwards.

When I got back from that first visit, my boyfriend Graham, who I’d been seeing for about a year, asked, ‘What was it like at the MRI?’

‘Well, there was nothing I disliked,’ I replied cheerfully. ‘I think I’ll like it,’ I added naïvely. ‘Shall we go to the cinema in Manchester tonight? I have to get used to the city before I live there!’

How I was ruing my blasé attitude. I was pitifully unprepared for my new life. I had absolutely no clue what I was letting myself in for and I had foolishly committed myself to the MRI for three long years of my life. That’s how long it took to qualify as a State Registered Nurse (SRN). Three whole years! I’d be twenty-one before I finished my training. It felt like a lifetime.

Walking along the windowless corridors on the first day of training, I felt like an inmate. Miss Morgan had said we would be ‘taken down’ to the uniform store, but I felt as if I was being taken down quite literally, to be incarcerated. There was no way out, and I saw nothing to cheer me up.

Plain, white walls were pitted with monochrome signs I didn’t understand. Metal trolleys were pushed by porters with faces as dull as cobbles. The hard floors appeared to have been scrubbed clean of any hint of colour. It was just like watching a boring old documentary on television, where everything was a grim shade of black and white.

Big doors loomed everywhere, swinging heavily on their hinges in the wake of white coats and pale green uniforms, which disappeared into goodness knows where. The world beyond the doors was, as yet, a complete mystery to me. The wards and clinics and theatres filled me with a mixture of curiosity and fear. I was in uncharted territory. That’s how the hospital seemed to me as I proceeded towards the uniform store with the other girls, marching rigidly on the left-hand side of the corridor, as instructed.

Turning a corner, I felt a gentle dig in the back of my ribs and whipped my head round to see that one of the girls in my group, Linda Mochri, was giving me a cheeky smile.

‘What d’ya think of our second Ma, hey Linda?’ she asked in a friendly Scottish brogue.

I sniggered and whispered behind my hand: ‘I don’t think I’d like to fall out with her!’

Linda screwed up her eyes and gave a little chuckle. ‘I might have to risk it if the uniform makes me look like a nun!’ she joked.

We continued in silence, fearful of receiving a ticking off from the home sister who was accompanying us, but thanks to Linda I felt ever so slightly less alone. We were all in the same boat, weren’t we? We ‘newbies’ would stick together and have a laugh and make the best of it, wouldn’t we?

Being measured for my uniform made me imagine I was joining the Army instead of the nursing profession. We had to stand in a stiff line like soldiers as we each took it in turns to have the tape measure wrapped around our bust, waist and hips. All the while we listened earnestly to a string of orders and instructions from the home sister.

‘You must wear your uniform at all times, even in school, though you must remove your apron during lessons.

‘You will each be provided with three brand new dresses and ten aprons. It is your duty to take good care of your clothing and to take pride in your appearance at all times.

‘As you are aware, the uniform consists of a light green dress with detachable white cuffs and collars and a white cap, which must be clean and stiffly starched at all times.

‘You will leave your dirty clothes in your named laundry bag outside your room once a week, and they will be taken away and laundered. It is your duty to collect your clean laundry from the uniform collection point.

‘You will be shown how to fold your hats correctly, don’t fret. You will soon be experts in the art. If you have not already done so you must purchase two pairs of brown lace-up shoes, and your stockings must be brown and seamed. Matron likes seams to be perfectly straight, and be aware she will check up on you without warning.’

As the day went on we were bombarded with more and more information, and my head began to ache. We were shown the stark schoolroom, which contained dark-wood desks, a full-sized skeleton and a dusty blackboard. Our daily routine was to begin at 8 a.m. prompt for lectures with Mr Tate, to whom we were briefly introduced. I scarcely took in a word he said because I was too busy taking in his demeanour. He had huge lips, wore a terrible green knitted tie and ill-fitting glasses, and had the worst comb-over you could ever imagine, with skinny strands of greying hair stretched desperately across his bald scalp. Odd, I thought. A very odd-looking man indeed.

We would spend our first eight-week ‘block’ based in the schoolroom, and classes would be punctuated with tours of the fourteen wards in the 400-bed hospital. I didn’t even know what some of the names of the wards meant, such as endocrinology and thoracic, let alone how to navigate my way through the three-floored maze to find them.

That first evening I sat on my single bed at the nurse’s home with all my day’s thoughts and fears clattering around inside my aching head. As students we all had to live in the nurses’ quarters adjacent to the hospital; there was no choice in the matter. The money for our board was taken out of our student wages before we received them, leaving us first years with £27 a month – not a bad sum to live on, I supposed.

This was the first time I had been alone all day, and I gulped as I sat on the unfamiliar bed, trying to absorb the huge step I was taking. I surveyed my new bedroom warily and felt my throat tighten. It was a large room with a wooden floor and a big fitted wardrobe, which was painted the same drab, off-white colour as the bare walls and had three hefty drawers underneath. I got up and tried to pull one of the drawers open, but found the task almost impossible. Puffing and panting, I eventually managed to heave the drawer free, feeling like a feeble little bird struggling to build a nest. I wanted to cry.

There was a stark white ceramic sink in one corner and a small dressing table with a chair in the other. My bed had two grey woollen blankets, and a starched counterpane lay across the top. I plumped my pillow and it felt stiff and scratchy to the touch, which made me even more miserable. To make myself feel better I took my John Lennon poster from my suitcase and stuck it on the wall above my bed. I knew it was against the rules to decorate the walls but I couldn’t really see what harm it could do, and I made a mental note to be careful not to damage the paint when I took it down in the future.

‘New linen will be left outside your door once a fortnight,’ the home sister had instructed. ‘You must strip your bed and leave your dirty laundry outside your door, in your laundry bag.’

She’d given us a brisk guided tour of the nurses’ accommodation earlier. ‘There are wooden blocks fitted to the inside of all of the windows,’ she told us in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘This is to stop intruders getting in.’

Sitting on my bed that evening, I looked over at the one small rain-smeared window and felt a film of tears mask my eyes. I was used to living in relative luxury, sheltered at my private convent school and cosseted by my parents in our comfortable suburban home. This was the first time in my whole life I had felt vulnerable – afraid, even. I’d imagined that after spending a month abroad in the summer I’d be absolutely fine living in Manchester. I was less than ten miles from home, but everything here seemed so alien to me.

Sue and I had stayed at my brother’s apartment in Beirut for two fun-filled weeks. He worked for United Press International and had a wonderful lifestyle. A cleaner came in every morning while Sue and I sunned ourselves by the pool. Afterwards we met John for lunch at the plush St George’s Hotel, and in the evenings he took us to fancy parties. I remembered how he smiled when we asked for Ovaltine at bedtime on our first night. ‘Why don’t you try a gin and tonic instead?’ he suggested. We did, and we never stopped giggling for the whole holiday.

Sue and I both felt so grown-up. We booked ourselves on a three-day excursion to Jerusalem, where I bought a beautiful leather-bound bible, and then we spent two weeks holidaying in Turkey with John’s Turkish wife Nevim, who looked after us really well. I was an independent woman of the world – or so I thought.

There was a rap on my door that made me jump. ‘Can I come in?’ a lovely Scottish voice sang, and I shot up gratefully and unlatched the door.

I knew it was Linda Mochri, and her voice instantly made my tears evaporate.

‘Of course you can!’ I said, and when I opened the door I was delighted to see she had Nessa, Anne, Jo and Janice in tow.

‘Your room’s the biggest, you lucky thing!’ Linda said as she lit a Marlboro cigarette and sat cross-legged on the end of my bed. The other girls filed in and found themselves a place to sit. Nessa was last through the door and she settled on the scratched wooden floor, folding her enviably long legs beneath her.

Janice also lit a cigarette, which she pulled from a fashionable lacquered case that covered her pack of twenty. She looked confident to the point of cockiness as she took a long drag.

‘How are you all settling in, then?’ she asked, after blowing out a plume of smoke. She looked at each of us in turn.

‘Feels like we’re in the Army!’ Linda snorted. ‘Curfew at 11 p.m., girls!’ she said, mimicking the home sister’s briefing from earlier in the day. ‘Any nurses not home by 11 p.m. will have Matron to deal with and will lose the right to request a late pass! Late passes allow you to be home by midnight – but be warned, you have to earn them, girls!’

We fell about laughing and, with the ice broken, we began to gently pick over the long day we’d had.

‘What do you think of our tutor?’ Anne asked with a mischievous glint in her eye. Anne was quite plump, with one of those smiley, rosy faces larger girls often have.

We all chipped in with our views on Mr Tate, who for the first two months would teach us anatomy, physiology and basic nursing techniques in the schoolroom. After that he would continue to teach us between our practical training and placements on the wards.

‘He’s the strangest-looking man I’ve ever seen,’ I volunteered with a shy giggle.

This was no exaggeration. Everyone admitted they had been taken aback at his appearance, particularly his precarious-looking comb-over.

‘I dread to think what he looks like when the wind blows,’ chuckled Jo.

She and Janice were two of a kind, I thought. Both exuded self-confidence, while Linda and Anne were definitely the jokers in the pack. Nessa seemed more like me. She was softly spoken and came from Cheadle, not too far from where I grew up. We were the only two who didn’t smoke, and when Nessa contributed something to the conversation it usually struck a chord with me.

‘Is it just me or does anyone else think the blocks on the windows are a bit alarming?’ she ventured.

‘I hate them!’ I admitted. ‘It makes me think a mad man is going to break in at any moment.’

‘Will you listen to yerself!’ Linda mocked gently. ‘We’re holed up here like prison inmates. I reckon the blocks are there to stop us escaping rather than to stop men breaking in!’

We all laughed again.

‘What shall we dissect next?’ Anne asked.

‘Bathrooms!’ Jo and Janice chimed in unison, and we all bemoaned the fact we had one bath and toilet to share between twelve of us.

The nurses’ quarters were shaped like a letter ‘H’ and my new-found friends and I were grouped together down one leg of the ‘H’. It was pot-luck that I got the biggest room. We were all allocated a number and I happened to be student nurse number six, which meant I was allocated the sixth room on the corridor.

‘It’s certainly not what I’m used to,’ Anne said wistfully, and we shared snippets of our lives back home.

With the exception of Linda Mochri we had all grown up in the region. Linda’s family had relocated from Scotland because her mother was ill with cancer, and the best treatment was available to her in the North West of England. Apart from that, we seemed to have a fair amount in common, all having come from good schools and supportive families. I learned that Linda, Jo and Janice had long-term boyfriends like me, but Nessa and Anne did not.

‘This is certainly a far cry from what any of us are used to,’ Janice declared, wrinkling up her nose.

I couldn’t have agreed more. As a child I moved house frequently, always to somewhere bigger and better as Lawton’s Confectioners went from strength to strength. My parents sold teacakes, puff pastries, parkin, pies, bread and apple tarts from their double-fronted shop on the High Street in Stalybridge, all hand-made in the bake-house by my father, John.

He was a gentleman who ‘never wanted to be on the front row’, as my mother Lillian often said. That was absolutely true. You couldn’t have met a kinder or more unassuming man, and he never once so much as raised his voice to me. My mother wore the trousers in their relationship and was also the one who controlled the business, but that didn’t stop her being a very kind and caring mum.

My brother John and I wanted for absolutely nothing. The fine career in journalism he’d carved out for himself made both my parents very proud and the two of us were the apples of our parents’ eyes, in our own distinct ways.

I shared a little bit about my family background with the other girls, and also told them about Graham, who I’d been going out with for about a year.

‘I love dancing and we met at the Palais in Ashton last year when I went to a dance with my old school friend Sue,’ I told them. ‘He works as a car salesman and drives a little blue bubble car.’

‘Lucky you! Is he good-looking?’ Janice asked cheekily.

‘Well, I think so,’ I blushed. ‘He’s got blond hair and blue eyes and wears very nice clothes.’

‘Ooooh!’ Anne chucked. ‘I’m jealous!’

‘Come on!’ Jo said, sparing me any further interrogation as she stood up and stubbed out her cigarette in my sink, having failed to locate an ashtray. ‘We’ve got an early start tomorrow.’ All the other girls took the cue and shuffled to the door.

As I bid them goodnight and got myself ready for bed I couldn’t help thinking about my bedroom at home with its soft cotton sheets, plush wool carpet and pretty pictures hung against the stylish floral wallpaper I’d been allowed to pick out from the chic Arighi Bianchi store in Macclesfield. I longed to be back in my bed at home, and for my father to knock gently on my door to wake me up in the morning, as he always did. But then, I thought to myself, what would I do all day?

Here I felt terribly homesick despite the girls’ comforting chitchat, but I realised I also felt very much alive and stimulated. My head was filled with hundreds of questions about what tomorrow would bring, and my emotions were on red alert. This experience was unsettling, but it was undeniably exciting too.

It had been an exhausting day, and if my tiredness hadn’t knocked me out I’m pretty sure the thick clouds of smoke the girls left behind in my room would have done. I had one of Graham’s handkerchiefs, which smelled of his Brut aftershave, and I placed it on my scratchy pillowcase for comfort, and to block out the smell of smoke. I didn’t stir until my alarm clock rang at 7.15 a.m., heralding my first full day as a student nurse.

Chapter Two

‘I really am becoming an MRI nurse!’

‘A patient will not die if you forget to take their blood pressure,’ Sister Craddock pealed in her rich Welsh accent as she escorted us from the schoolroom, ‘but dirty floors breed bacteria, and bacteria kill.’

Sister Craddock had very curly red hair and a face dotted all over with freckles. Her figure was as round and curvy as her tightly sprung ringlets, and I was as captivated by her appearance as I was by her staunch philosophy on hygiene.

We’d spent the morning studying anatomy with Mr Tate, and my head was brimming with medical facts. I’d enjoyed the lessons and found them easy to follow, because I’d studied chemistry and biology for my A-levels. I pictured myself using my new knowledge, hopefully in the not-too-distant future, to help me bandage a wrist or give a patient an injection. The thought was nerve-racking yet exhilarating.

‘Cleanliness is next to godliness,’ Sister Craddock chimed, echoing Miss Morgan’s words on our very first day here. Spinning on her tightly laced brogues, she looked each of us in the eye one by one as she warned very seriously: ‘As a nurse, it is imperative never, ever to forget that.’

This was clearly very important at the MRI. We were student nurses, not cleaners, but I figured I’d better listen as attentively to Sister Craddock as I did to Mr Tate. ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness.’ I let the phrase settle in my head, wondering what Sister Mary Francis would make of it. In all my years at my convent school I had heard hundreds, if not thousands, of references to ‘godliness’ but I did not recall that particular phrase. However, I had a pretty good idea I’d be remembering it regularly from now on.