CONSTANCE AND THE MIDWIFE

Poor old Constance is at a loss when a heavily pregnant young woman, calls at the library

There was the usual hum of very little going on in Brumpton public library one Monday morning in early summer. The air conditioning provided most of the background to the never frenetic sound-track marking the start of a new week, with the occasional rattle of tea-spoon against porcelain as Constance stirred her first cup of the week of an indeterminate hot drink, and the hum was completed with a subtle sigh as she smilingly recollected an hour spent with her cat in front of the television last night.

And then the usual gentle hum was broken as a shriek capable of stirring the bones of the long dead where they lay in graveyards all around, from Brumpton to Swanspottle and back, and the door creaked and squealed open and a second shriek hit the air as a young woman almost fell in.

“Whoaaa...” came the shriek, and the young woman, dripping with what seemed to be an alien and strange yet plentiful fluids staggered in through the door, which swung back with a clatter behind her.

“Whoaaa,” she repeated in the agonised tones of one who knows what is going on and just wants it to pause in its progress so that she can find somewhere more suitable.

Constance, however, did not know what was going on. Constance, despite an erudite learning and a wide grasp of the world and its multifarious ways, had gaps in her knowledge, and one of them had to do with the trials of womankind when it comes to the march into life of a brand new generation.

“It’s bloody coming!” shrieked the leaking woman, and she staggered towards the desk.

“It’s coming? What’s coming?” asked Constance, not having the least idea of what the young woman might be going on about.

“I need an ambulance,” the shrieking girl tried to tell her, as succinctly and clearly as she could under the circumstances.

“Oh dear,” muttered a confused librarian, “are you certain?”

“Look at me!” wailed the woman, “it’s bloody coming and it’s two weeks early!”

The combination of something coming and being two weeks early clicked in Constance’s mind, made a sort of sense, and she suddenly grasped what was happening in her library. This woman or girl or whatever she was, the poor soul, was having a baby and it was coming two weeks early. But this, the thought flashed through the Constance mind, is no hospital or maternity unit, this is a library. Yet it was happening here.

What must she do? Obviously doing nothing wasn’t an option.

Hot water and towels. That’s what they always demand in dramas on the television when babies are on their way. Loads of them. Gallons of really hot water, piles of towels.

“I haven’t got any...” she whispered, knowing the library was completely out of towels of all sorts.

When she washed her hands she used a hot-air blower to dry them, for hygiene purposes. Everyone did these days when facilities were shared, didn’t they? It stands to reason that towels might help to dry wet hands but they are also a devilish device for the transfer of germs from one person to another in no time at all.

Telephone.

That’s it. She must gather all of her frantic thoughts together and make a telephone call. She must summon a midwife, and then all would be well. The library could dispense books again and things would return to glorious normality.

“Whoaaa...” repeated the mother-to-be, still leaking, “I can feel the little devil and he’s battering my parts, the little devil!”

Does that mean her baby’s actually on its way, here and now, with nobody experienced at how it’s done anywhere near? Constance asked herself. The next “Whooaaa” convinced her that must be the case.

“You’d better lie down,” she told the woman, “over here, on this nice big table.”

It was a nice big table too. It was also quite old, being a left over from an earlier incarnation of the library, before the computers were put in and when daily newspapers and magazines for experts in just about everything were on public display and used regularly by the library’s clientele as well as by a few odd down-and-outs who were allowed to catch up on the latest news on cold days by a kindly library staff.

“Yes,” she repeated, “this table will be just the job.”

The woman was in no condition to complain, though she wanted to, that the table was hard and she wanted something soft, or that she might roll off it, that she wanted a hospital bed,. But like a child being led to safety by a kindly grandmother she allowed Constance to guide her to the table and help her onto it for no better reason that because it was the only thing she could do..

“I’ll telephone,” said Constance to her.

She looks so young to be going through this, thought Constance as she almost ran to her desk where the telephone awaited her.

To Constance’s eyes the woman was no woman really, but almost a child herself, and that made her focus her mind on courses of action, like telephoning. The girl needed real, intelligent help.

She picked up the phone. This was an emergency, surely? So shouldn’t she dial the emergency number? That would get an ambulance, wouldn’t it?

“Emergency services. Which service do you require?” asked the telephone.

“It’s a baby and it’s coming,” she explained, knowing that brevity is the soul of everything including wit.

“What baby?” asked the telephone, and at that the library door squeaked as if in reply. Somehow an all-knowing deity must have noted that help was needed and was actually about to provide it.

A matronly woman swept into the library and she took in everything in an instant. She was obviously that kind of woman, with the sort of brain that latched onto a complex situation and somehow saw through all the layers of reality and arrived, in a fractured instant, at the crux of whatever was going on. And then, the saints be praised, she seemed to know exactly what to do.

“Ah, get an ambulance!” she barked at Constance, and she rushed to the young woman on the table in a most reassuring way.

Then there was a great deal of tutting, and orders to push and then orders not to push followed by more orders to push, and at the same time underclothes had been removed and screwed up and pushed into a bag out of the way whilst the girl gasped and groaned and gasped again.

And all the while Constance gazed, open-eyed, at the birth of someone new.

Eventually the telephone dragged her mind back to the technological age of communication, and she managed to explain that a very efficient woman who she didn’t recognise had the situation well in hand, but she wanted an ambulance.

“Where are you?” beseeched the telephone.

“The library,” sighed Constance, “Brumpton Public Library...”

And then two things happened at once, before an ambulance could think of arriving.

A baby with an extraordinary pair of lungs decided to shout at the top of its voice having just arrived in a place it didn’t recognise, and Constance, still completely out of her depth, fell to the hard library floor in a dithery sort of faint.

“Lucky I was passing by,” the matronly woman said to Constance as she came round and did her utmost to pull herself together because, as she told herself, this wasn’t about her at all even though it was in her library.

By then, during Constance’s blackout, the new mother had been helped into an almost comfortable chair, was holding the squawking infant close to her as though terrified someone would snatch it and had, about her face, the seraphic look of the truly contented.

“Yes,” continued the woman, “you really are lucky I was a midwife coming for a book because, let’s be honest, I might have been just about anyone, and then where would you have been?”

There was, decided Constance, no answer to that.

© Peter Rogerson 04.01.18