2. THE MIDWIFE'S TALE

It's the turn of the midwife to tell her tale.

The Undecided Deity smiled broadly at his pupil.

“What did you make of that, then?” he asked, scratching his left armpit with, spookily, his left foot.

“I didn’t like it,” replied the pupil nervously. “It took me back to when I made what you saw as a grievous mistake in my rendition of the Undecided Creed and as fearsome punishment you took me behind an arras and smacked my bottom until I couldn’t sit down without weeping, and then to rub it my wickedness in you forced me to not only sit down on a hard chair but wriggle in my seat. I did not like it. Not one little bit. I can still feel the after effects. They keep me awake at night.”

The Deity eyed him loathsomely. “You weren’t meant to enjoy it,” he chirruped. “Now pay attention to what’s happening next.”

And the pupil did. He looked down through a mist that cleared as if by magic, which it was.

The scene was the room in The Westminster Arms, which was nowhere near Westminster in much the same way as the chimes on this author’s clock are called Westminster but are many, many miles from there.

“You weren’t the first to smack that particular bottom,” said the midwife to the policeman, “I was, and I slapped it jolly hard, and with no regrets. Let me tell you about it.”

“Please do. It will perchance help to pass the time while the landlord replenishes our glasses with good ale,” murmured the judge pompously.

“Then it happened like this. Miss Tomkins was heavily pregnant...”

“Surely you mean Mrs?” put in the policeman, “I knew the father of the Tomkins girl back when I was a constable on the beat and he was surely married to her mother...”

“They married after the girl was born and the paperwork done, the birth certificate issued and so on. The girl was Edna Tomkins but the man who married her mother was George Badgering. Anyway, as I was saying, Miss Tomkins was heavily pregnant...”

“That’s not an everyday name, Badgering,” mused the Butler, “we never entertained anyone of that name at Buckleyham Manor...”

The midwife eyed him sharply and he shrivelled back into himself. “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, Miss Tomkins was heavily pregnant and I could tell that the baby was anxious to join us in the world when her waters broke like one of those fountains in Barney Park. They fair gushed out and I had to get the poor woman on her back before we were all flooded out!

“Then Miss Tomkins started moaning and screaming as if she was the first woman in the known universe to know birthing pains. You never did hear such a noise, not in all your natural! We gave her gas and air to ease the pain of her contractions, but all that did was make her shouting and screaming go all woozy. ‘Get me outta here,’ she screamed, ‘I wanna go home! Let me go home! I wanna go home right now!’ And the silly cow tried to climb off the bed we’d put her on! She tried, right there and then, to escape the agonies of childbirth by going back to her council house tip, with all the disgusting germs and microbes clamouring for attention roaming around in it!”

“That’s not right, not when she’s not here to defend herself,” put in the judge, “it wouldn’t be allowed in my court, no madam it wouldn’t.”

“Then it’;s just as well she isn’t in any court of yours!” said the midwife sharply, “now if you’ll just be quiet I’ll carry on with the story.”

“If I must,” muttered the judge.

“The first baby to pop out took nearly no time at all,” continued the midwife.

“The first? You mean Edna Tomkins has got a twin?” gasped the pastor, doing something unprintable in his trousers.

“As I said,” scowled the midwife, “as I said, the first baby to pop out took nearly no time at all, and that baby was dead mutton. The little devil never so much as breathed even as its mother took it to her breast and tried to make it suckle. ‘Why, he’s an ugly devil,’ she said when she looked at it, and truth to tell it was. There was something more wrong than its unwillingness to breathe. It’s features were all distorted and even though they were shut I could tell that it was cross-eyed. But I didn’t have the time to pay much attention to it because the second urchin started crawling out, and whilst the first was dead as a dodo from the moment it was pushed out from its watery bier, the second one set up the sort of noise that would waken the dead two continents away!”

“So did it waken the first baby?” asked thr prostitute.

The midwife shook her head. “I guess that was beyond the power of the row the second baby was creating,” she said, “but that second baby was different in every possible way from the first, which was a dead boy. The second was a lively girl, and its mother called it Edna.”

“She’s not stopped squawking ever since,” commented the policeman, “cheeky little madam that she became.”

“Anyway, I wasn’t the sort of midwife to give up easily on the dead one, so I laid it down across my knees whilst the mother was cooing at the noisy one, and swiped its bottom with a gently massive swipe. I wasn’t going to do it any harm, you understand, I just wanted to shock it into breathing even though it was ugly as a cabbage. But that bottom was cold, too cold to belong to the living, and I gave up before a minute was up. Sometimes I wish I’d given that chilly arse another swipe. Sometimes I wonder if it might have finally gasped at the sharpness of the pain, but I didn’t like to.

“Meanwhile, the girl baby was still howling like a demented wolf, so I laid that one across my knees after shoving the corpse into a basket, and took a mighty swipe at its bottom. I have never swiped a baby’s arse with such vehemence before or since that day. My hand cracked down like a cleaver on its tender cheeks! And as I did it there came to be a sudden silence and the creature opened its eyes and gave me such a look that I shivered from my topmost hair to my bottommost toenail. It was scary, was that look the lump of flesh gave me, and then, to make a point, it cried again, loud as ever. But I knew one thing. That second howling cry was one of pain, so there was a cause for it. And that thought made me proud. Anyway, as I packed my gear away and got ready to go I said to that scrap of life that one day, in the fullness of time, it would either grow into a fishwife or a politician, and I weren’t far wrong, were I?”

“It meant you were cruel, though,” commented the pastor.

“Not as cruel as I might have been,” replied the midwife, and then, “what’s that stuff on your fingers, vicar?”

The pastor shuffled awkwardly in his seat and took a sip of the holy wine in its goblet before him.

“I know what it is,” giggled the prostitute, “I surely do!”

“And that’s your story?” asked the policeman, “one of slapping the innocent. One of almost criminal brutality...”

“Yeah,” smiled the midwife, “and I bit like yours, I’d say.”

© Peter Rogerson 21.09.18