Cassie Giving Birth

Cassie Giving Birth

pic credit internet

 

“You’re nearly there,” Sarah Jane, Cassie’s neighbour and the women who help deliver all the babies and (on occasion washed the dead) lied pushing the damp hair back from her face. She stopped to draw breath and listened to the rain drumming against the ill-fitting sash window. It had been a long day and a long night’s labour, for her and even longer for poor Cassie, she thought.

She left the bedroom, just of the kitchen, and going over to the range, shook the heavy black kettle to check if there was any hot water left in it. Cassie would need a good strong mug of tea when this was all over.

She leaned her weary head against the fire -brace and made the sign of the cross. “It should have been born hours ago,” she moaned. She startled, when Tom, Cassie’s man, spoke from the shadows of the corner that led to the ‘big’ bedroom. “Leave that to me. I’ll see to it,” he said, gruffly, rising.

“It’s taking her too long. If it’s not born soon…”Sarah Jane’s words hung in the air between them.

Tom, shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, felt the hairs stand up on his bare forearms. He didn’t know if his Cassie could endure another stillbirth. Tears choked his throat. He bitterly regretted what he’d said earlier that day that all Cassie was good for was giving him daughters. He ran his hand over his face. He had sat in the dark kitchen all night listening to her screams of agony. He wanted a son but he loved his wee daughters with their bows and their chatter. He didn’t care what it was; all he wanted now was for Cassie’s labour pains to be over.

” Maybe, maybe you should take the bike and knock up, Mrs Walters, the midwife Or even Doctor Bradley,” Sarah Jane said hurrying back to Cassie.

In the “big room” in the stillness of the night, seven year old Lizzie, lay quiet as a mouse in the big bed between her sleeping younger sisters. In the dark she could make out the outline of the holy picture against the flowered wallpaper. She knew it was a picture of Our Lady gazing down tenderly on her baby son. She joined her hands and whispered at the picture. “Please, Our lady, let mammy have a son for daddy this time.”

Nurse Walter’s bustled in, a coat over her flannelette nightdress and her night cap still on her head of grey hair, a rough wire-haired terrier at her heels.

Tom opened the door to shoo it out. The midwife turned on him. “Let him be. He’s seen more births than you’ve seen,” she snapped. “Now,,” she said glowering at him, in the light of the tilly lamp “If you have nothing better to do, get that bucket ,” she said, pointing to the white enamel bucket sitting behind the kitchen door, “fill the kettle, see to the fire. And let me get on with what you got me out of my warm bed in the middle of the night to do – bring this child of your into the world.”

Her bosom heaved as she stopped to draw breath. “Why anybody would want to come into this mad place where Irishmen are killing each other over a bit of land I’ll never know,” she huffed bustling into the bedroom. The loose round door knob pinged as she closed the bedroom door behind her with a decided click that said it was no place for a man during labour.

Lizzie, heard the cross voice of the nurse ordering her daddy about. Then, she heard the rattle of the handle of the bucket as he went for the water and the sharp bark of a dog. Carefully, she slipped from the heat of her sister Mary Catherine’s back and edged her way over to the door of the bedroom. She stopped when he heard her old Uncle Ned’s bedsprings creak in the back room. He’s waiting for the baby to be born too, she thought.

Tom picked up the water bucket and headed for the pump at the mouth of the village. As he passed over the gurgling Deele Burn replenished by the heavy rain, his mind went back to when Cassie and the girls met him at the railway station. Sticking the bucket in, he drove the cold, wet steel arm of the pump up and down. As he watched the water spurt into the bucket and splash over his feet, he wanted desperately to tell Cassie he hadn’t meant a word of what he’d said to her earlier in the day.

She had got the wrath that should have been the Station Master’s. He gripped the cold steel of the pump handle. What was wrong with him lately? Cassie was the love of his life. She had been since he had set eyes on her at a dance in the parish hall at Murlog, nearly ten years ago now. She was only been fourteen then, – seven years younger than him; too young for courting. He had made up his mind he’d wait for her. “It was the happiest days of my life when she became my wife,” he murmured.

Yanking the overflowing bucket towards him he made for home. He needed to tell Cassie he was sorry. If she should die having this baby, this son, he wanted so desperately, he’d never forgive himself.

Gemma Hill 2022