Farewell To The East End

firm.
    ‘Now relax, Kathy. Put your legs down and breathe in and out deeply. Relax as much as you can. I am going to press on your tummy. It will be uncomfortable, but it won’t hurt.’
    Using the fundus as a piston, and with firm but gentle pressure, she pressed her left hand in a downward and backwards direction. Her right hand took hold of the cords and lifted the emerging placenta from the vault of the vagina. Two cords were attached. One remained hanging from the vagina, indicating that one placenta remained in utero.
    At this point Ruth massaged and kneaded the fundus vigorously, and another contraction developed. ‘Start pushing again, Kathy, like you did before. We have to get this out with this contraction.’
    ‘What’s going on?’ moaned poor Kathy.
    ‘I’ll tell you later. Just push with all your strength.’ Kathy did so, and a few seconds later the other placenta slid out onto the mattress.
    A huge gory mass of placentae lay on the bed. Ruth scooped them up into kidney dishes and placed them on the table. She had not the slightest chance of examining them, because the torchlight was dim and growing dimmer by the minute as the battery failed.
    Kathy was wide awake now. ‘What’s been happening?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got twins. Where are they?’ She looked around her.
    ‘No. You’re wrong. You’ve got triplets, and they are in the chest of drawers.’
    ‘Triplets! You mean three babies?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘Well, you were exhausted and fell asleep after the second baby was born, so the third baby must have slid out with hardly any pain worth speaking of. Not enough to wake you up, anyway. I didn’t see it, because the meter had run out, and I’d dropped my torch.’
    ‘And I’ve got three babies?’
    ‘Yes. Three little boys.’
    Kathy leaned back with an incredulous sigh.
    ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God – what’s me mam going to say? Oh be-Jesus, illegitimate triplets. Trust a sailor!’

    Ruth cleared up and returned to the convent, where arrangements were made for Kathy and the babies to be admitted to the London Hospital. The girl had no one to look after her, and she was quite unable to look after the babies in the room where she was lodging. She had no money, no clothing, no heating, no food even, and the babies were small and vulnerable.
    We did not find out what happened to them after they left hospital. If the sailor could not be traced and persuaded to marry Kathy and support his children, the prospects for them were bleak. Returning to the family in Ireland would have been the best thing, but in rural Ireland in the 1950s poverty and the shame of illegitimacy drove many families to reject their grandchildren. Places in a children’s nursery in London would have been offered, with access for the mother, but she would have had to live separately and support herself. It is unlikely that she would ever have earned enough money to have the boys with her and to support them. Adoption would have been possible, if Kathy had agreed, but the chances of anyone wanting to adopt all three babies were slender, so the boys would probably have been separated and would have grown up not knowing they had brothers.
    Whilst I cannot record a happy ending, Kathy was buoyant, cheerful and resourceful, and we cannot be sure that life treated her harshly. It might have been quite the opposite. So often in medicine we see and become deeply involved with people at the most intimate and dramatic time of their lives. But then, like ships, they pass in the night; they are gone and we see them no more.

CYNTHIA

    I was cycling back to the convent after a morning’s work, weaving my way in and out of the lorries on the East India Dock Road, singing to myself as I pedalled the old Raleigh, which was as heavy as lead with two of its three gears not working, and perfecting my no-hands-steer-with-knees-and-bodyweight technique, when I saw Cynthia ahead of me. She was cycling more slowly than me, and her bike was wobbling about on the road. I called out, ‘Hi, there!’ as I drew level; but my high spirits quickly changed to concern. She was crying.
    ‘What’s up? Oh, Cynthia dear, what’s happened?’
    She looked round, tears streaming down her face. A lorry screeched past, hooting noisily, its driver gesticulating obscenely.
    ‘Here, we had better pull into the kerb, or we’ll have an accident. Now what’s up? Tell me. I’ve never seen you like this before.’
    Cynthia was the