Midwives are there during the most powerful, emotional, traumatic and life-changing hours of a mother’s life, and so it was for centuries; for her mother, and her mother’s mother. They are there to share the elation when a baby comes out of its mother’s body, or to comfort a woman who is told that her baby won’t survive to draw breath – and everything in between.

  Whilst midwives have existed for hundreds of years, midwifery didn’t become legally recognised in Britain until 1902. Even then many midwives felt that childbirth was the domain of women and they were reluctant to receive training from male instructors. Also, many women were not literate, which made formal education near impossible. Beginning in the early 1800s, middle-class families started using doctors for childbirth. And by the early 1900s, delivery began shifting to hospitals. By the mid 1900s, midwives were only used for those who could not afford a doctor. It was seen as ‘lower class’ to use a midwife, but herein lay the problem; many doctors weren’t trained sufficiently in midwifery; a fraction of their medical training was in childbirth and even less attending actual births.

  Birth was viewed as a pathology that needed treatment. Babies were delivered with women lying on their backs with their legs in stirrups, in sterile and frightening medicalised environments, where the women weren’t listened to. The number of medical men practicing midwifery increased rapidly and the midwives, namely Tessa in our story, bitterly resented this invasion of their territory. Most who started in general practice had only the dimmest idea of the conduct of normal, let alone complicated, births, and learned by hard, often bitter experience, killing mothers and babies who would otherwise have survived.

  This idea fascinated me, because this pathological approach to birth echoes still in the modern day. The feeling of being out of control that so many new mothers who have their babies in hospital speak of. Of being not listened to, of intervention they didn’t want or need. Sadly, birth trauma is not uncommon today; the idea that you are completely at the mercy of the medics at the birth of your own child. And often with no pain relief, something which is seen as a badge of honour. Or sometimes even refused it, with women being told ‘it’s not called labour for nothing – it’s meant to be hard work’. Never in any other medical procedure would you be forced to suffer in unimaginable pain.

  Our heroine, Tessa James, has been a midwife for thirty years. She has saved countless lives and often works for women who can’t afford to pay. But she is born during a time of change, and our story begins just before the creation of the NHS, when women having babies were paying customers that the doctors wanted for themselves. There was a great deal of pressure on women such as Tessa James to step aside, women who often knew a great deal more about birthing babies than any doctor with his fancy degree.

  As a midwife I spoke to put it: doctors have their place, and sometimes medical intervention is absolutely necessary. But sometimes it is better to wait it out. Midwifery is the most anxious and trying of all medical work, and to be successfully practised calls for more skills, care and presence of mind on the part of the medical practitioner than any other branch of medicine. I started to see this picture of a woman’s plight, her midwifery knowledge as an immovable object meeting the unstoppable force of modern-day medicine. It was irresistible to me: a powerful story which I hope resonates with women to this day.

  Reading Group Questions

  1.How have attitudes to midwifery changed since 1945? What do you think prompted the move to a more medicalised birth experience around that time? And, with the foundation of the NHS three years later, in 1948, and therefore free access to medical treatment, do you think that slowed down or sped up the change of attitude to midwifery that is represented in the book by Wilfred Hilton and Dr Jenkins?

  2.Letters lost and found are integral to this story – how might things have been different in today’s world of instant (and endless) communication? And will future generations have as much insight into us as we have into past generations when so much of the evidence of our existence is ephemeral – literally, ‘in the cloud’ – rather than physical?

  3.If Eli hadn’t died and Bella hadn’t miscarried the baby conceived through sexual abuse at the hands of her employer in Portsmouth, do you think Eli would have accepted a baby that wasn’t his when he returned from the war? Or would Tessa have helped her daughter abort the pregnancy?

  4.Do the events of our childhood set the pattern for our adult lives? Can people turn their lives around, despite a poor start? Was Bobby James doomed to a life spent in and out of institutions and prison the moment he lied for Richard about the fire in the barn?

  5.Helen, Vanessa and Evelyn Hilton all suffer at the hands of their respective husbands, despite the outwards appearance of prosperity and success. Tessa James, meanwhile, has no male protector, which makes her vulnerable to attack. Have the Hilton women bargained away their freedom and happiness for financial security and social acceptance?

  6.Unless Willow decides to marry Charlie after all, her baby will be born ‘illegitimate’. Compare and contrast how different things will be for Willow’s baby than they were for Bella’s son, Alfie (Willow’s grandfather). Is there still a stigma to being born out of wedlock?

  7.How do you think the newspaper coverage of Alice’s disappearance in 1969 and Sienna’s in 2017 would have compared?

  8.It used to be that children were supposed to be ‘seen and not heard’, but this book shows that they often weren’t told anything either. How do you think it was for the children, like Nell, on the TB ward who didn’t understand what was happening to them and why no one came to visit?

  9.In many families, history repeats itself over the generations. Discuss how this happens with both the Hiltons and the Jameses. Has history repeated in your own family?

  Have you read Emily Gunnis’s gripping and heart-wrenching debut?

  1956. When Ivy Jenkins falls pregnant she is sent in disgrace to St Margaret’s, a dark, brooding house for unmarried mothers. Her baby is adopted against her will. Ivy will never leave.

  Present day. Samantha Harper is a journalist desperate for a break. When she stumbles on a letter from the past, the contents shock and move her. The letter is from a young mother, begging to be rescued from St Margaret’s. Before it is too late.

  Sam is pulled into the tragic story and discovers a spate of unexplained deaths surrounding the woman and her child. With St Margaret’s set for demolition, Sam has only hours to piece together a sixty-year-old mystery before the truth, which lies disturbingly close to home, is lost for ever . . .

  Available to download now

  Some secrets are locked away for years . . .

  Rebecca Waterhouse is just thirteen when she witnesses her mother’s death at the hand of her father in Seaview Cottage. But what else did she see?

  Years later, Rebecca’s daughters Iris and Jessie know their mother will never speak of that terrible night. But when Jessie goes missing, with her gravely ill newborn, Iris realises the past may hold the key to her sister’s disappearance.

  With Jessie in trouble, Iris must unravel a twisting story of love and betrayal in her mother’s family history.

  Only then will Seaview Cottage give up its dark and tragic secret . . .

  Available to download now

 

 

  Emily Gunnis, The Midwife’s Secret

 

 

  Thank you for reading books on GrayCity.Net
Share this book with friends