Mourning Doves by Helen Forrester

room after dispatching Ethel, Winnie said to her, ‘The baby will be a while yet, Ma’am. Shall I make some tea? Miss Celia could sit with Mrs Woodcock while I do it; and you could get dressed before the doctor comes.’
    Louise had forgotten her own bedraggled state. She glanced down at her dressing gown, and laughed. ‘Yes, indeed, I must, mustn’t I?’ She hastened off to her own bedroom, saying to Phyllis as she went that she would send Ethel to Arthur’s office as soon as she returned from delivering Eric to Lily.
    The laugh surprised and pleased Celia. Though childbirth was not a normal thing to her, it obviously was to her mother; and a sense of normality was what they all needed. As Winnie pushed the bedroom chair towards her, so that she could sit by the patient, she took Phyllis’s hand and squeezed it.
    ‘Is there anything I need to do for Mrs Woodcock?’ she asked Winnie, hoping that she herself would not faint if the baby came while the other two women were out of the room.
    ‘If the pains are sharp, you just hold Mrs Woodcock to comfort her until they pass. If they start to come close together, pull the bell immediately and I’ll run up. But she’ll know, won’t you, Ma’am?’
    Phyllis nodded. She knew only too well from experience, and, in her despair, she wondered how she could endure being racked by childbirth almost every year of her life.
    As it happened, Celia was not left alone with Phyllis,because Dorothy came up with buckets of coal and wood chips and yesterday’s newspaper tucked under her arm, to make a fire to warm the room for the arrival of the new infant. She had reluctantly relinquished Eric to a buoyant Ethel, who was undeterred by Eric’s howls and flying little fists. She picked him up and held him firmly against her shoulder, as she ran down the front steps.
    As Dorothy expertly built the fire, she realised that she was enjoying the unusual morning. ‘Young Eric went off quite happy with Ethel, Ma’am,’ she told Phyllis. She paused while she screwed up the newspaper and laid loose balls of it in the fire grate. ‘She comes from a family of thirteen, so she’s fine with children. Lovely little fella, he is,’ she added.
    Phyllis nodded, and then gave a long, slow moan. God help me if I have to go through this thirteen times, she thought.
    Celia leaned over and put an arm round her. Phyllis’s face was contorted; then, to Celia’s relief, she relaxed, and said in her usual soft tones, ‘Thank you, Dorothy, for managing him so well.’
    ‘It were nothin’, Ma’am.’ Dorothy was acquainted with Mrs Woodcock’s Lily and knew all about Arthur Woodcock’s relations with his wife. Both maids had lost sweethearts in France and had little hope of marrying. They were agreed, however, that it was better to be single than have a nit-picking husband like him. She picked up a pair of bellows lying in the hearth and blew the struggling fire until the coals had caught thoroughly.
    As she tidied up the hearth, and with a polite bob towards the bed, went slowly down the stairs to the kitchen, her mood changed. If her Andy had survived the second battle of the Marne and come home last year, she could have been hoping for a baby now, even though she was middle-aged. Andy would have made a great dad, like the old man who was his dad, she thought wistfully.Pity they’d waited so long, though seven years’ engagement wasn’t that long. After all, you were supposed to save before you could marry. Not that she had saved when she had been working in the ordnance factory. Easy come, easy go.
    As she washed the coal dust off her hands in the pannikin in the kitchen sink, she smiled and shrugged her shoulders at the memory of the good times she and Andy had had when he had come home on leave.
    Forget it, she told herself. You could have been stranded now, with a young baby to bring up alone. It was going to be hard enough to find a new, decent place without a child. With one, she