Home for Christmas by Lizzie Lane

for the few new-borns that were born at the hospital.
    Lydia had asked why the new-borns were not next door to the children’s wards. Sister Bertha had drawn herself up to her loftiest and widest before informing her that small children carry infection and were best kept away from babies.
    ‘Babies have little resistance to infection during their early years. We must do the best we can to help them achieve some immunity before they go home to mix with older children.’
    The main thing Lydia learned in those early days was that the regime at the hospital was strict, but their attention to detail and their attitude to modern medicine was quite astonishing.
    In order to retain what she learned, Lydia didn’t just study, she kept notes on her patients, sticking them into an exercise book for future reference.
    One of the other nurses asked her whether she would have a bonfire of those notes once she’d passed her finals.
    Lydia shook her head, her eyes sparkling and a faint smile on her wide pink mouth.
    ‘They might come in useful. I might need to refer to them in future. Isolate infection. That’s what Sister Bertha says.’
    The nurse, Sally Hoffman, shrugged. ‘You are the most dedicated student here. I’m only going to be a nurse until I marry.’
    Lydia laughed. ‘I might marry too, but still, if I have children it pays to know how to keep them healthy. Whooping cough, measles and chicken pox can kill the very young. If I can learn something about isolation, I will.’
    Although founded by Lutherans in the nineteenth century ostensibly to cater for the German community in the East End of London, the German hospital offered treatment to anyone.
    One of the deaconesses, Sister Ursula, was a midwife who made home visits. Only the more difficult births were hospitalised, mothers preferring to give birth at home.
    Lydia felt extremely privileged to be chosen to accompany her on a home visit. This was the sort of thing she wanted to do, reaching out in the wider community, to those crammed into the narrow, damp tenements in the East End of London.
    Sister Ursula flitted around, adding the things they would need to her bag. To Lydia’s surprise, forceps were included. Sister Ursula noticed her surprise, keeping up her speed of preparation as she explained their presence.
    ‘I know that only doctors are supposed to use forceps except in dire emergency. I have a mother who has been in labour for twenty-four hours. The father is worried. It would be good if both the forceps and you came with me.’
    Sister Ursula stopped tipping things into her bag to eye her sceptically, almost as though she might or might not tip her into the bag too.
    ‘I hope you will be up to this. The place we are going to is not Kensington. It is not pretty and not very clean.’
    ‘I’ll be fine,’ Lydia declared, aware that Sister Ursula was studying her, though in truth she had visualised a cosy bedroom, a mother’s joy on bringing a baby into the world.
    Sister Ursula was weighing up whether her confidence might dissolve once faced with dire reality. Finally, she nodded. ‘All right. We will now go. Come along.’
    It was no surprise, of course, that most mothers gave birth at home, usually attended by a midwife who might or might not be qualified. Some mothers to be did not send for someone qualified, but preferred ‘a woman that knew’, someone from their own community, which might mean the next street, or could just as easily mean of the same nationality, someone who spoke their language. In their hour of need, they didn’t care about the law that had been passed in 1902 specifically stating that only qualified midwives should attend a birth. The habits of centuries were hard to break – together with the financial considerations.
    The house they went to was at the very end of a series of squat-fronted houses in a narrow street, squashed up against the wall of a railway viaduct. At the passing of a train, the windows of the house