In 1966, 18-year-old Linda Lawton enrolled in the
Manchester Royal Infirmary to begin training as a nurse. It was expected that
the ‘young ladies’ in her private, all-girls convent school would enter
suitably respectable employment at the age of eighteen. That meant choosing between nursing, teaching
or working in a bank. Linda’s best friend’s sister was a nurse, and Linda
thought she looked wonderful in her smart uniform; she wanted one just like it.
So she chose nursing.
After a year or so, she was beginning to feel like
nursing wasn’t for her; she was too tender-hearted for all the pain she saw. A
wise supervisor sent her for a rotation in a maternity hospital, and she was
hooked; she wanted to be a midwife. After her 3-year training at MRI, she began
training to be a midwife at St. Mary’s Maternity Hospital in Manchester.
She describes the first time she delivered a baby:
‘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, there’s honestly nothing like it… I’ve since brought more
than 2,200 babies into the world, and I still tingle with excitement every
time.’
That feeling never left her, and she is
still working as a community midwife two days a week. She retired in 2008, but
found that she just couldn’t give up delivering babies.
I found this to be an enchanting
autobiography of a remarkable woman.
320 pages
