
The Sunday Times bestseller ' Delivering my first baby is a memory that will stay with me forever. Just feeling the warmth of a newborn head in your hands that new life there's honestly nothing like it...I've since brought more than 2 200 babies into the world & I still tingle with excitement every time.' It's the summer of 1968 & St Mary's Maternity Hospital in Manchester is a place from a bygone age. It is filled with starched white hats & full skirts steaming laundries & milk kitchens strict curfews & bellowed commands. It is a time of homebirths swaddling & dangerous anaesthetics. It was this world that Linda Fairley entered as a trainee midwife aged just 19 years old. From the moment Linda delivered her first baby
- racing across rain-splattered Manchester street on her trusty moped in the dead of night
- Linda knew she'd found her vocation. ' The midwife's here!' they always exclaimed joined in their joyful chorus by relieved husbands mothers grandmothers & whoever else had found themselves in close proximity to a woman about to give birth. Under the strict supervision of community midwife Mrs Tattershall Linda's gruellingly long days were spent on overcrowded wards pinning Terry nappies making up bottles & sterilizing bedpans
- & above all helping women in need. Her life was a succession of emergencies successes & tragedies: a never-ending chain of actions which made all the difference between life & death. There was Mrs Petty who gave birth in heartbreaking poverty; Mrs Drew who confided to Linda that the triplets she was carrying were not in fact her husband's; & Muriel Turner whose dangerously premature baby boy survived
- against all the odds. Forty years later Linda's passion for midwifery burns as bright as ever as she is now celebrated as one of Britain's longest-serving midwives still holding the lives of mothers & children in her own two hands. Rich in period detail & told with a good dose of Manchester humour The Midwife's Here! is the extraordinary heartwarming tale of a truly inspiring woman.