‘Me?’ Bridget squeaked. Bridget was only fourteen but she knew a lot about babies, not much of it good. She had watched her own mother die in childbirth but she had never told this to Mrs Todd. Now clearly wasn’t the time to mention it. She helped Sylvie back down the stairs to her own room.
‘There’s no point in trying to get a message to Dr Fellowes,’ Sylvie said. ‘He’ll never get through this snow.’
‘Mary, Mother of God,’ Bridget yelped as Sylvie dropped on all fours, like an animal, and grunted.
‘The baby’s coming now, I’m afraid,’ Sylvie said. ‘It’s time.’
Bridget persuaded her back into bed and their long, lonely night’s labour commenced.
‘Oh, ma’am,’ Bridget cried suddenly, ‘she’s all blue, so she is.’
‘A girl?’
‘The cord’s wrapped around her neck. Oh, Jesus Christ and all the saints, she’s been strangled, the poor wee thing, strangled by the cord.’
‘We must do something, Bridget. What can we do?’
‘Oh, Mrs Todd, ma’am, she’s gone. Dead before she had a chance to live.’
‘No, that cannot be,’ Sylvie said. She heaved herself into a sitting position on the battlefield of bloodied sheets, red and white, the baby still attached by its lifeline. While Bridget made mournful noises, Sylvie jerked open the drawer of her bedside table and rummaged furiously through its contents.
‘Oh, Mrs Todd,’ Bridget wailed, ‘lie down, there’s nothing to be done. I wish Mr Todd was here, so I do.’
‘Shush,’ Sylvie said and held aloft her trophy – a pair of surgical scissors that gleamed in the lamplight. ‘One must be prepared,’ she muttered. ‘Hold the baby close to the lamp so I can see. Quickly, Bridget. There’s no time to waste.’
Snip, snip.
Practice makes perfect.
The Broad Sunlit Uplands
May 1945
THEY WERE AT a table in the corner of a pub on Glasshouse Street. They’d been dropped in Piccadilly by the American army sergeant who’d given them a lift when he saw them hitch-hiking at the side of the road outside Dover. They had crushed themselves on to an American troop transport ship at Le Havre instead of waiting two days for a flight. It was possible that, technically, they were AWOL, but neither of them gave a damn.
This was their third pub since Piccadilly and they were both agreed that the two of them were very drunk but had the capacity to get a good deal drunker yet. It was a Saturday night and the place was packed. Being in uniform they hadn’t paid for a single drink all night. The relief, if not the euphoria, of victory was still in the air.
‘Well,’ Vic said, raising his glass, ‘here’s to being back.’
‘Cheers,’ Teddy said. ‘Here’s to the future.’
He had been shot down in November ’43 and taken to Stalag Luft VI in the east. It hadn’t been bad, in that it could have been worse, he could have been Russian – the Russians were treated like animals. But then at the beginning of February they were roused from their bunks with a familiar ‘Raus! Raus!’ in the middle of the night and made to set out on the march west, away from the advancing Russians. Another day or two and they would have been liberated, it seemed an especially cruel twist of fate. There followed weeks of marching on starvation rations, in the freezing cold, minus twenty degrees most of the time.
Vic was a rather cocky little flight sergeant, the navigator of a Lancaster shot down over the Ruhr. War made strange bedfellows. They had kept each other going on the march. It was a comradeship that had almost certainly saved their lives, that and the very occasional Red Cross package.
Teddy had been shot down near Berlin, only managing to escape from the cockpit at the last minute. He’d been trying to keep the plane level to give his crew a fighting chance to bail out. A captain didn’t leave his ship until everyone on board had left. The same unspoken rule applied to a bomber.
The Halifax had been on fire from end to end and he had accepted that it was over for him. He had begun to feel lighter somehow, his heart swelling, and he suddenly knew that he would be all right, that death when it came would look after him. But death didn’t come because his Aussie wireless operator crawled to the cockpit and clipped Teddy’s parachute on his back and said, ‘Get out, you stupid bastard.’ He never saw him again, never saw any of his crew, didn’t know if they were alive or dead. He jumped at the last minute, his parachute had barely opened when he hit the ground and he was lucky to fracture only an ankle and a wrist. He was taken to a hospital and the local Gestapo came and arrested him on the ward with the immortal words, ‘For you the war is over,’ which was the greeting that nearly every airman had heard when he was taken prisoner.
He had dutifully filled in his Capture card and waited for a letter from home, but nothing came. He was left wondering for two years if the Red Cross had him on their list of prisoners, if anyone at home knew he was alive.
They were on the road somewhere outside Hamburg when the war ended. Vic had taken great pleasure in saying to the guards, ‘Ach so, mein Freund, für sie der Krieg ist zu ende.’
‘So, Ted, did you get through to your girl?’ Vic asked when Teddy came back from sweet-talking the landlady behind the bar into letting him use the pub phone.
‘I did,’ he laughed. ‘I’d been given up for dead, apparently. I don’t think she believed it was me.’
Half an hour and another couple of drinks later, Vic said, ‘Aye up, Ted. By the smile on her face I would say that woman who just came through the door might belong to you.’
‘Nancy,’ Teddy said quietly to himself.
‘I love you,’ Nancy mouthed silently to him across the din.
‘Oh, and she brought a little friend along for me, how thoughtful,’ Vic said and Teddy laughed and said, ‘Watch it, that’s my sister you’re talking about.’
Nancy was clutching her hand so hard that it hurt but the pain meant nothing. He was there, he was actually there, sitting at a table in a London pub, drinking a pint of English beer, as large as life. Nancy made a funny choking sound and Ursula stopped herself from crying out. They were like the two Marys, dumb in the face of the Resurrection.
Then Teddy spotted them and a grin split his face. He jumped up, almost knocking over the glasses on the table. Nancy pushed her way through the crowd and threw her arms around him but Ursula stayed where she was, worried suddenly that if she moved it would all disappear, the whole happy scene break into pieces before her eyes. But then she thought, no, this was real, this was true, and she laughed with uncomplicated joy as Teddy let go of Nancy long enough to stand to attention and give Ursula a smart salute.
He shouted something to her across the pub but his words were lost in the hubbub. She thought it was ‘Thank you,’ but she might have been wrong.
Snow
11 February 1910
MRS HADDOCK SIPPED a glass of hot rum, in what she hoped was a ladylike way. It was her third and she was beginning to glow from the inside out. She had been on her way to help deliver a baby when the snow had forced her to take refuge in the snug of the Blue Lion outside Chalfont St Peter. It was not a place she would have ever considered entering, except out of necessity, but there was a roaring fire in the snug and the company was proving surprisingly convivial. Horse brasses and copper jugs gleamed and twinkled. The public bar, where the drink seemed to flow particularly freely, was an altogether rowdier place. A sing-song was currently in progress there and Mrs Haddock was surprised to find her toe tapping in accompaniment.