The Yorkshire Shepherdess by Amanda Owen

Author:Amanda Owen [Owen, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780283071980
Publisher: Sidgwick & Jackson

9

Edith on the Way

Edith was born on a lovely hot day in August 2008. I was very busy serving cream teas, and the customers were all lapping up the sunshine and the scenery. It was a perfect summer’s afternoon.

I told Clive at lunchtime that I was feeling a bit rough, but I was so busy with the teas that I pushed the thought aside. Clive will tell you that he has to nag me to take the feeling seriously. As soon as he hears I’m feeling a bit off, he’s on full alert.

I’d been given a whole set of instructions by the midwife: ‘Do not under any circumstances set off for the hospital in the Land Rover. Call for an ambulance the minute you think the baby is coming.’

They were getting to know me: very rapid births, no contractions. I hate ringing for an ambulance, I feel I’m a drain on the system when there are people in more need than me. But Clive was very much in favour. As he says, ‘If she’s gonna have t’babby in a lay-by, I don’t wanna be t’one delivering it.’

The midwife primed the ambulance service control centre by letter explaining that they should expect this woman to ring up feeling only slightly ill, but they were to take her seriously and send an ambulance. That’s the theory: but every time we ring up ambulance control the person at the other end has no idea what we are talking about. When we tell them the baby is coming they imagine me lying on the floor counting the gap between contractions.

Instead, I was busy sorting out whether Clive had enough scones to carry on with the cream teas, whether he should put the CLOSED sign up, wondering whether the older two, Rav and Reuben, would be home from school in Gunnerside before I went, deciding what they would all be having for their tea.

Our local ambulance depot is a forty-minute drive away, over in Wensleydale, and if there’s an ambulance on standby it can be with us in that time, which may sound a long wait if you live in a town, but up here it’s pretty good. By the time they arrived I’d decided to turn the sign round to say we were closed, but it makes no difference, the customers still come. As it was such a lovely summer day some of them were still sitting there, drinking tea in the sunshine, so new arrivals couldn’t understand why they couldn’t have a cream tea too. It’s no good telling them I’m in labour, because I’m busying around clearing tables, not looking like I’m going to give birth in the next hour or so.

I began to feel a bit more tetchy, so sat quietly on the garden wall in the sunshine. We can see every car that turns into our road a good five minutes before it gets to us, so I watched the ambulance approach.

‘Oh, it’s you again,’ the ambulance man Steve said, as I leapt healthily up into the back of the ambulance.

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