Louise to Lily, Phyllis’s cook-general, explaining what was happening, and asking her to feed the children their lunch and tea, and to make sure that Mr Woodcock’s dinner was ready for him when he came home from work. It was possible, Louise advised her, that Mrs Woodcock would not be home for a couple of days. She added that she would arrange for Mr Woodcock to be informed, at his office, of his wife’s predicament.
While Louise hastily scribbled a note to Arthur Woodcock, Phyllis sat on the edge of the wooden chair in the spare bedroom. Winnie helped to divest her of her sodden clothes and then slipped one of Celia’s huge cotton nightgowns over the young mother’s head.
‘Arthur’s going to be awfully cross,’ Phyllis whimpered to Celia. She gave a small shivering sigh, and then winced as a roll of pain commenced.
Startled, Celia looked up at her. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘It’s his baby, too!’ She had been inspecting the soft pad of old sheets Winnie had contrived in the middle of the bed, and now she shook out and spread over it another clean sheet and a light blanket to keep her friend warm. She was surprised at Phyllis’s remark; it contradicted all that she had learned from the many romances she had read. Didn’t men love their wives for producing their children?
Phyllis gritted her teeth and waited for a spasm to pass before she said hopelessly, ‘Oh, he’ll be cross about everything. For my being such an idiot as to get caught like this – and having to help Lily care for the other little ones. He always gets angry if his routine is upset, and Lily will have her work cut out with three children and the house to look after.’
Winnie interrupted the exchange, to get Phyllis into bed before the pain increased. She smiled benignly down. ‘Don’t you worry about your hubby, Ma’am. You just concentrate on the baby, and relax as much as you can between your pains. You’d be surprised how men can manage, if they have to.’
But Phyllis knew her husband too well to hope for anything other than constant complaints and weak bursts of sudden rage, and she closed her eyes to try to stop the tears rolling down her cheeks.
Celia gently folded the bedclothes over her friend, and bent to kiss her. When she saw that Phyllis was crying, she took her handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped the tears away. Then she hesitantly kissed her again. Though she was quite frightened at being so close to a birthing mother, she said cheerfully, ‘Winnie’s right. Mother will talk to Arthur, I’m sure. She’s just gone downstairs to write a note to him – Ethel will take it to his office – and she can write today to your mother, if you’ll give her the address, to ask her to come like she did for the other children. If we post a letter soon, she’ll get it by tomorrow afternoon’s post.’
Phyllis conjured up a small smile. Her mother would certainly come and would run the family like a general conducting a battle – and Arthur would hate her more than ever. And take it out on Phyllis the day her mother left.
Winnie had gone to look at the old clock on the mantelpiece to check the timing of the recurrence of Phyllis’s pangs of pain. As Louise bustled back into the room after dispatching Ethel, Winnie said to her, ‘The baby will be a while yet, Ma’am. Shall I make some tea? Miss Celia could sit with Mrs Woodcock while I do it; and you could get dressed before the doctor comes.’
Louise had forgotten her own bedraggled state. She glanced down at her dressing gown, and laughed. ‘Yes, indeed, I must, mustn’t I?’ She hastened off to her own bedroom, saying to Phyllis as she went that she would send Ethel to Arthur’s office as soon as she returned from delivering Eric to Lily.
The laugh surprised and pleased Celia. Though childbirth was not a normal thing to her, it obviously was to her mother; and a sense of normality was what they all needed. As Winnie pushed the bedroom chair towards her, so that she could sit by the patient, she took Phyllis’s hand and squeezed it.
‘Is there anything I need to do for Mrs Woodcock?’ she asked Winnie, hoping that she herself would not faint if the baby came while the other two women were out of the room.
‘If the pains are sharp, you just hold Mrs Woodcock to comfort her until they pass. If they start to come close together, pull the bell immediately and I’ll run up. But she’ll know, won’t you, Ma’am?’
Phyllis nodded. She knew only too well from experience, and, in her despair, she wondered how she could endure being racked by childbirth almost every year of her life.
As it happened, Celia was not left alone with Phyllis, because Dorothy came up with buckets of coal and wood chips and yesterday’s newspaper tucked under her arm, to make a fire to warm the room for the arrival of the new infant. She had reluctantly relinquished Eric to a buoyant Ethel, who was undeterred by Eric’s howls and flying little fists. She picked him up and held him firmly against her shoulder, as she ran down the front steps.
As Dorothy expertly built the fire, she realised that she was enjoying the unusual morning. ‘Young Eric went off quite happy with Ethel, Ma’am,’ she told Phyllis. She paused while she screwed up the newspaper and laid loose balls of it in the fire grate. ‘She comes from a family of thirteen, so she’s fine with children. Lovely little fella, he is,’ she added.
Phyllis nodded, and then gave a long, slow moan. God help me if I have to go through this thirteen times, she thought.
Celia leaned over and put an arm round her. Phyllis’s face was contorted; then, to Celia’s relief, she relaxed, and said in her usual soft tones, ‘Thank you, Dorothy, for managing him so well.’
‘It were nothin’, Ma’am.’ Dorothy was acquainted with Mrs Woodcock’s Lily and knew all about Arthur Woodcock’s relations with his wife. Both maids had lost sweethearts in France and had little hope of marrying. They were agreed, however, that it was better to be single than have a nit-picking husband like him. She picked up a pair of bellows lying in the hearth and blew the struggling fire until the coals had caught thoroughly.
As she tidied up the hearth, and with a polite bob towards the bed, went slowly down the stairs to the kitchen, her mood changed. If her Andy had survived the second battle of the Marne and come home last year, she could have been hoping for a baby now, even though she was middle-aged. Andy would have made a great dad, like the old man who was his dad, she thought wistfully. Pity they’d waited so long, though seven years’ engagement wasn’t that long. After all, you were supposed to save before you could marry. Not that she had saved when she had been working in the ordnance factory. Easy come, easy go.
As she washed the coal dust off her hands in the pannikin in the kitchen sink, she smiled and shrugged her shoulders at the memory of the good times she and Andy had had when he had come home on leave.
Forget it, she told herself. You could have been stranded now, with a young baby to bring up alone. It was going to be hard enough to find a new, decent place without a child. With one, she wouldn’t have a hope.
A bell on its spring near the kitchen ceiling rang suddenly.
She grinned wryly to herself as she dried her hands on the kitchen roller towel. Miss Celia getting into a panic, no doubt.
Winnie was busy pouring hot water into a big breakfast teapot. As she laid the pot on the tray she had prepared, she chuckled. A similar thought had occurred to her. As Dorothy quickly took off her enshrouding sacking apron which she used for rough work, the cook said, ‘It won’t hurt Miss Celia to see a birth – it’s probably the only chance she’ll get! And any woman ought to know what to do. Here, take the tray up to them.’
Dorothy’s small mouth quirked into a smile of agreement. ‘Oh, aye, if she does, she’s going to be proper shocked. She don’t know nothin’ about nothin’. I’d bet on it.’
Years later, after another war, looking back on that day, Celia had smiled. She had been terrified. But in a few hours, she had learned so much about women, she considered; that they could organise in a crisis, work through it together, be brave under suffering. And, further, that you did not know what friendship meant until you had faced crises together.
It changed for ever her ideas of what women could