Linda Fairley
Delivering my first baby is a memory that will stay with me forever. Just feeling the warmth of a newborn head in your hands, that new life, thereâ€™s honestly nothing like itâ€¦ Iâ€™ve since brought more than 2,200 babies into the world, and I still tingle with excitement every time.,Itâ€™s the summer of 1967and St Maryâ€™s Maternity Hospital in Manchester is a place from a bygone age. It is filled with starched white hats and full skirts, steaming laundries and milk kitchens, strict curfews and bellowed commands. It is a time of homebirths, swaddling and dangerous anaesthetics. It was this world that Linda Fairley entered as a trainee midwife aged just 19 years old.,From the moment Linda delivered her first baby â€“ racing across rain-splattered Manchester street on her trusty moped in the dead of night â€“ Linda knew sheâ€™d found her vocation. â€˜The midwifeâ€™s here!â€™ they always exclaimed, joined in their joyful chorus by relieved husbands, mothers, grandmothers and whoever else had found themselves in close proximity to a woman about to give birth.,Under the strict supervision of community midwife Mrs Tattershall, Lindaâ€™s gruellingly long days were spent on overcrowded wards pinning Terry nappies, making up bottles and sterilizing bedpans â€“ and above all helping women in need. Her life was a succession of emergencies, successes and tragedies: a never-ending chain of actions which made all the difference between life and death.,There was Mrs Petty who gave birth in heartbreaking poverty; Mrs Drew who confided to Linda that the triplets she was carrying were not in fact her husbandâ€™s; and Murial Turner, whose dangerously premature baby boy survived â€“ against all the odds. Forty years later Lindaâ€™s passion for midwifery burns as bright as ever as she is now celebrated as one of Britainâ€™s longest-serving midwives, still holding the lives of mothers and children in her own two hands.,Rich in period detail and told with a good dose of Manchester humour, The Midwifeâ€™s Here! is the extraordinary, heartwarming tale of a truly inspiring woman.
Nonfiction,Autobiography,Memoir,Biography,Biography Memoir,Medical,Nurses,Nursing,European Literature,British Literature,History,Biography,Autobiography,Womens
The Midwife's Here! The Enchanting True Story of One of Britain's Longest Serving Midwives