I grew up in a close-knit farming community in rural Lancashire in the sixties and seventies and spent many long, happy days on my grandparents’ farm – bringing in the cows for milking, collecting eggs, feeding calves or being part of a lively group around the farmhouse kitchen table. There were many tales told around that table and reflecting on it now has brought back my grandmother’s voice and her laughter. I see her again in her favourite chair by the Rayburn lighting up a cigarette, her apron dusted with flour from the batch of pies or delicious cakes she’s just put in the oven. Then as she rests back, she starts to chat and inevitably this leads to the telling of a story. And one account of a violent storm that raged one night causing a power cut has stayed with me…
Plunged into darkness she lit her candles and retreated to the sitting room where she could keep warm beside the coal fire. The wind howled, the rain poured, and she prayed the slate roof of the ancient farmhouse would hold. When a loud hammering came to the door, shocked she jumped up from her chair. Before she got there the door burst open and a bedraggled woman carrying a leather bag staggered in dripping rainwater over the linoleum. ‘Sorry I’m late, my car got bogged down in a ditch,’ she gasped, then asked where she could find her patient, a pregnant woman about to give birth. That’s when my grandmother realised the intruder was a district midwife. Once she’d directed her to the neighbour’s house she watched as undaunted the midwife walked into the lashing rain and rumbling thunder guided only by the thin light of her torch. By morning the storm had passed and there was news of the baby boy who’d been safely delivered. Also, the midwife’s car had been located and pulled out of the muddy ditch by a farmer’s tractor.
Stories told can shape how we choose to live our lives and the midwife who walked through a storm along dark country lanes to attend her patient certainly made a lasting impression on me.