he Midwife’s Tale relies largely on the voices of the people who were interviewed by authors Nicky Leap and Billie Hunter. In this extract, Esther Silverton describes her first experience of attending a birth on her own as a student midwife during an air raid in the Second World War ...
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My first delivery ‘I was getting to the end of my training in Croydon out on the district. I loved it; I really loved it. … My midwife was called Mrs Treasure and I think she thought I had a little bit of sense. … She used to leave me a lot on my own, anyway. The biggest thrill of my life was when I knew I was going to do my first 20
delivery on my own on the district. ‘Of course, now it wouldn’t be so bad, but it was the times we were living in. You didn’t only have to cope with mum and baby, you had to cope with, well, everything. Keep yourself safe, so that you arrived – I mean, no good you pegging out on the way there, was it! You had to get there. You had to go through the middle of the night with all the flying bombs, on a bike with a cover over your headlamp. It was the blackout. And you wore navy blue, which I thought was dreadful because there were no lights anywhere. You get a very dark night with no moon and there’s nothing anywhere, absolutely pitch black! ‘Well, this particular delivery of
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mine, which was really the highlight of my life, I’ll never forget it. To me it was wonderful. … ‘So that particular night I went to bed all apprehensive. Now, the bed was underneath a Morrison shelter, d’you know? A table shelter – they were sort of iron, you see, dark green and very strong. Down the side there was more metal and then a little bit of strong mesh for air, and then there was a hole where you got underneath and the back was all filled in and then more mesh at the other end. Well, you were supposed to lay two people lengthways in those, but of course where I was w w w. d i s c o v e r y o u r h i s t o r y. n e t