Kit de Waal

Kit de Waal

Never Forget

Weekends were mother-free. She volunteered to work Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, the most unpopular shift at the big old hospital that covered the poor, immigrant, working-class north of the city. She was an auxiliary nurse but we never really understood the difference between that and the real thing. She wore a beige uniform and a little upside-down watch. She wore man-like lace-up shoes and always smelt of disinfectant when she came home in the morning, ashen-faced sometimes at what she had seen.

‘A little thing was born last night,’ she would say and then whisper, ‘hardly a baby at all.’

We winkled the details out of her – the missing limbs, the extra limbs, the strangeness. But it became too terrible when she described the mothers’ pain, the wailing and endless agonies of labour, so we would wander away from her mid-sentence to the television or garden.

She was a little Irish woman built for rabid industriousness. It suited her personality – hefting patients, straightening sheets, scrubbing, cleaning and making things right. She’d walk through the door at breakfast time and start the washing-up, telling us about her night’s work and casually drop in phrases like ‘bed pans’, ‘fifteen stitches’, ‘rectal tear’ and ‘bloody sanitary pads’ and we, teenage girls, would gag and shudder.

With Christmas came a bumper crop of chocolates and biscuits, and there were year-round flowers and thank you cards from the mothers who made a special trip back to the ward to thank her specially, bringing the swaddled infant and grinning father. She loved to be needed and was a sucker for a bit of praise. She would talk about bathing newborns, cradling the precious head in the palm of her hand, the first cry, her eyes wide and still marvelling at the miracle and beauty of new life.

The African ward sister was worshipped. It was ‘Sister Abuoa this’ and ‘Sister Abuoa that’. We imagined a stern, unsmiling headmistress, all tough compassion, cutting through protocol when needed, sticking to it like a barnacle when it was the right thing to do. It was my mother’s deepest regret that she would never be a proper midwife, with the whole of the birth, the child’s and the mother’s life under her care and control.

She always took it hard when babies were born dead. She had lost a couple herself between the two of us, siblings we never knew about so never missed. Sister Abuoa would send my mother off to the canteen or staff room after the terrible job was done, and just once she sent her home.

We were sitting in the kitchen with tea and toast when she opened the door. She had a big bag of shopping so we took that as the reason she slumped in a chair, exhausted and red-eyed. We paid her no attention.

‘I’ve been walking around since four o’clock in the morning,’ she said. We looked at one another. She spoke from somewhere far away, still in her thick coat and woolly hat, her square hands knitted together on her lap. ‘I had to wait for the market to open.’

She got up suddenly and looked around the kitchen like she was seeing it for the first time. ‘I’ll start the dinner,’ she said. ‘Then I’m off for a sleep. You two can tidy this kitchen.’

We sat where we were, me reading an old magazine that told me how best to pluck my eyebrows and my sister half asleep, unfurling her black hair from big sponge rollers.

My mother threw her hat and coat on a chair, tipped the vegetables out of the bag and started peeling the potatoes, cleaving them in half and dropping them into a saucepan of cold water. It was our job to put the dinner on late afternoon so it was ready when she woke up, before she went back to work.

I don’t know what made me look up. She gasped, I think. She was staring at the chicken she had bought. She turned it over, front then back, and put one hand tenderly on its breast. She stayed like that for a moment. Then she stuck her other hand in, wrist-deep, right up to the neck, and grabbed something. I heard the suction as she pulled it out. It was the heart. The tiny heart.

She turned and looked at me. ‘We did everything we could,’ she said. ‘No one could have done more,’ she whispered.

‘Yes, Mum,’ I said.

‘You never forget,’ she said. ‘That’s part of the job. Being there and remembering.’

She rinsed her hands and wiped her face with the tea towel. She wrapped the chicken back in the newspaper and put it in the fridge.

‘Fish and chips tonight,’ she smiled. ‘For a treat.’

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