My plan with every interview, of course, was to get the basic details right up front. Very often, as I noted in my introduction to Mrs N. B’s interview, my plan was sidelined by my subject’s enthusiasm and her eagerness to tell her stories. In this interview with Mrs B, I didn’t get a chance to ask her how old she was until half way through our talk, which is where Part Two begins.

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KAREN: Okay, I’ve got to back up a bit. My usual question, right at the start, is how old are you? Do you mind telling me?

MRS B.: Eighty-four.

KAREN: You’re 84. So your mother would have been having these babies, your siblings, around about…?

MRS B.: She had them starting in 1906 to 19… Well, S______ was 65 last year, the baby. So I think twenty five years she was having babies.

KAREN: (Gasping) Twenty-five years? (Assuming S______ would turn 66 in 1997 then, yes, 25 years.)

MRS B.: Yeah, and I think she had them every two years.

KAREN: And how many did she have?

MRS B.: She had eleven.

KAREN: My, what a strong lady. To keep going.

MRS B.: Yeah and sometimes she was lucky and had three years between them but ordinarily it was two.

KAREN: Did they all thrive?

MRS B.: Yeah, they did. And when my dad passed away, every one of the eleven was living, and when my mother passed away every one of the eleven was living. And she never was to a doctor or a hospital in her entire life.

KAREN: She never had any prenatal care that you know of?

MRS B.: No. None. She let the doctor know she would be needing him.

KAREN: She “let him know”?

MRS B.: That she would be needing him, yeah. And approximately when.

KAREN: Really.

MRS B.: To my knowledge, I never, ever remember my mother going to a doctor.

KAREN: This strange lady, that you talked about, do you recall her being the same strange lady every time?

MRS B.: No, because we moved then, you see. Like I was born in the Qu’Appelle Valley near Regina, the beautiful valley there. And then, you see, we moved from there to another place when my dad got a better job, a better section with the railway with a greater salary and in a bigger town, and then we moved again.

KAREN: But there was always somebody around, then, that your mother would have known to call? How was she aware who to call? Which strange lady would come?

MRS B.: Well, there was always a lady in the little town that attended women when they had births.

KAREN: Was she known as a midwife?

MRS B.: No, she wasn’t known as a midwife, maybe there was one that was known as a midwife. Old Mrs. Moen (phonetic spelling) but when she didn’t get there on time for my brother’s wife’s baby, I had to help the doctor.

KAREN: Okay, this would be a great story.

MRS B.: Yeah, it was their first, and a terrible blizzard came up that day. They lived maybe three blocks from where my mother lived in a small town, and Mother said to me, “Maybe you’d better go down and see how R______ doing, she’s pretty close to her time.”

KAREN: How old were you at the time?

MRS B.: Oh, I’d been gone from home and I’d been in training as a nurse for a year, and I was home on holiday.

KAREN: Oh, and you understood the way of the world by this time? (See <a Part One for the reference.)

MRS B.: Oh yes, I knew all that stuff by then. But I hadn’t worked in the maternity yet. I was home on holiday and Mother said you’d better go down and see how she is because she’s all alone. My brother was at work and the midwife’s got to come from the next little town which was like miles away, and then she lived in the country, out of that little town, so she had to come into town about seven miles, and then eleven miles to the town where we lived.

KAREN: Which town? Oh, you were living in Hanley?

MRS B.: Yeah.

KAREN: And she was living…?

MRS B.: At Kenaston.

KAREN: Okay, I know it.

MRS B.: So then I went down and R_____ was in good spirits. She was glad I came. You used newspaper in those days and she had laid it right out, the whole newspaper, and covered it with a cotton batting. And you put big stitches through it to make pads for the bed and then afterwards when they were soiled, you just rolled them up, because you had so many thicknesses of newspaper, you rolled them up and put them in the stove or the heater. We always had a heater in the living room and a coal stove in the kitchen. And she had made all these pads and she had made very large ones for the birth.

But her bed had a dip in the spring and I was wondering how the doctor was going to manage because I knew in the hospital that they were on a table. You know, a flat table? I just wondered what the doctor was going to say.

Well, we had to get the doctor from another town in the other direction, from Dundurn and that was a little further away, maybe fourteen miles. And this blizzard was blowing and no-one knew what was going to happen.

And then R____ said, “I’m going to have a roast for supper, because the doctor’ll need a meal and so will Mrs. Moen when she comes.” And so she said, “Will you stay and look after the roast?” And so she peeled the potatoes and carrots and she said, “See the vegetables all get on because I don’t know when it’s going to start.” It was her first baby and she was nervous about it. She said, “I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do.” And she said, “Don’t be upset if I scream too loud.” And so I said, “Okay, I’ll watch for you.”

And pretty soon the doctor did arrive and I was thankful that he did come because by this time R____ had lost some water and she had a showing and so I knew something was going to happen so she got undressed and got into a loose nightgown but she stayed on her feet because it was better to walk around and exercise. And then the doctor arrived and he examined her and he said, “She’s very close to having the baby but it’s the first one.”

And then he told her, and she says, “Well, you know, my bed sinks in the middle and I’ve been going to get my husband to put a board there but he never did get around to it.” And he says, “Oh no, I won’t be doing it that way, you’re going to have to lay this way across the bed.” So she was down like this. (She indicates sideways across the bed.) He told me to get him a kitchen chair and he sat on the kitchen chair right there like this.

KAREN: So he pretty well made for himself the same kind of hospital set-up that he would have been used to?

MRS B.: Yes. And he just took the basin and it was right between his feet and the edge of the bed. And he said to me, “Now I’ll tell you when to put the chloroform cone on, because,” he said, “I want her to help herself as much as she can.” And this was sort of a frightening thing to me because I thought if there are any complications while she’s birthing, what will he do? Because the midwife hadn’t come and I was depending on her and I was wishing I had more knowledge and I was wishing I was further along in my training then she had this very, very large pain and he examined her and saw that she had dilated and he said, “Now, just bear down really hard and I’ll give you some chloroform and you won’t feel any pain.” And so just as she did bear down I put the cone on her nose and all of a sudden she was gone.

KAREN: She was unconscious?

MRS B.: Yeah… Not… She knew enough to… He said, “Pretend you’re going to the toilet, bear down like you’re going to the toilet!” And she just gave that bearing down and the baby just came. And so anyway, I said, “Oh, it’s a girl!” Because I saw right away when it came out that it was a girl, and this doctor, I guess he thought he would kind of bug me and have some fun with me and he said, “How do you know?” and I said, “Well I think it’s a girl!” and he said, “No, I think you’re wrong! I think it’s a boy.” Well, I distinctly saw what it had and it was a girl! But he was going to put me on the spot and he said, “Well how would you know if it’s a boy or a girl?” See, he wanted to find out if I’d ever been with a boy, you see.

KAREN: How old were you?

MRS B.: Well, I don’t know, I must have been about eighteen or nineteen. And I didn’t want to tell him that I know because I had little brothers.

KAREN: Well of course.

MRS B.: I didn’t think to tell him that. But he wanted me to say well, I could tell because of the genitalia. You see I wasn’t going to tell him that I was too embarrassed. But anyway it so happened the baby was born and he handed me the baby and I had to wrap it up. I wrapped it up in a blanket and he said, “Just hold it, just hold it.” Because that’s kind of a bonding thing to do and he said, “I’ll attend to her and get rid of the afterbirth.”

He said he didn’t want the baby bathed in water. He wanted the baby’s first bath to be with olive oil, because that’s what he did with the babies, so he wanted warm olive oil. He said, “Just take your hands and go all over the little body and everywhere.” And then he said, “I want you to wrap it up in a couple of blankets.” He didn’t want me to put clothes on it.

Then my brother had finished work and he dropped in at my mother’s house because neither my brother nor my mother had telephones. Mother was always frightened of the telephone, and my brother was always too tight to put one in. So there was no way they could find out the baby was born. The blizzard got even worse. Then finally my brother stopped in at Mother’s and my mother had done some baking and she said, “You’d better take some of this down in case R______ didn’t have enough, while she’s going to be in the hospital.” And then she said, “I don’t know what’s happened and B. hasn’t come home.”

And so my brother came and he was so frightened. It shows you what men are like when babies are born at home; he was so frightened he didn’t want to hear her moaning and groaning and crying out. (Interesting that Mrs. B characterizes men’s reactions like this. It’s not at all how she characterizes her own father’s responses in Part One of her story. He just took a shovel and went outside the door and when the doctor opened the back door—he had scrubbed himself all up by this time—and said, “You’ve got to come in and see this new baby of yours!” And then my brother T___. said, “Oh it’s been born already?” And he was so relieved he put the shovel down real quick. It shows you what men are like, they’re real chicken.

And then he came in the house and took off these big boots and there was snow everywhere. And the doctor said, “You’d better warm up your hands and that before you go in there.” And so then he said, “Oh what did we have?” And the doctor said, “Well, we haven’t agreed on that yet. Your sister seems to think it’s a girl and I think it’s a boy.”

Then of course my brother began to think, what have we got, a deformed child? And he said to the doctor, “Is there something wrong with the baby?” And the doctor said, “No, I don’t think so.” My brother said, “Well, why can’t you tell?” And he turned on me, “Why can’t you tell whether it’s a boy or a girl? You’re going to be a nurse!”

And I said, “Er, well, I’m sure it’s a girl.” And the doctor said, “I’m trying to get her to explain to me how she’s sure it’s a girl!” And I was still so mad that he was bugging me and I wasn’t quite sure either whether he was coming on to me too and wanting to find out what I knew about sex and so… Of course R___ knew it was a girl because he had told her.

Whatever the doctor was doing with his “teasing,” it sounds completely out of line to my modern ears. Telling this story, Mrs. B was not finding it amusing.

KAREN: I don’t think he thought it was right to fool with her as well.

MRS B.: Yes. So anyway, while we were having supper that night we got word through another man from Kenaston that they had phoned in to the central office in Hanley to get a message over that Mrs Moen couldn’t come until the next day because the municipal roads had to be ploughed out and she couldn’t get down. So was there somebody that could stay with her overnight? I said I’d stay with her overnight. The great thing that came out of all that was, he got a new bed for her, which they should have had a long time before. Then he wasn’t so frightened about childbirth because Becky was just her old self again and the baby was fine.

If anyone knows what “central office” means, please let me know.

KAREN: Did they have other children after that?

MRS B.: Yes, they had three others after that.

KAREN: And was he present for those births?

MRS B.: No, he was at work. He wouldn’t have been present. He couldn’t face things like operations and stuff such as that. He couldn’t be around for those things.

KAREN: So had they expected Becky to go to the hospital? Was it just the blizzard that kept her at home or did she choose to have it at home?

MRS B.: No, she chose to have the baby at home but the midwife couldn’t get through from Kenaston because of the blizzard. She was coming there to attend the birth and also to stay with her for ten days. I think in those days they got something like two dollars a day which was a lot of money, twenty dollars, you know. She was quite an elderly lady, she had white hair, but she was very good, she was well-known. Of course Mother had Mrs. Moen for several of our babies.

KAREN: Oh really?

MRS B.: Yes, and when she couldn’t get her she got another lady in town that did that quite often, who opened up her home as a birthing place.

KAREN: Really?

MRS B.: Yes, she had a two storey house and her family had grown and left home and she just opened it up as a place for people to come. Like farm wives could come in there, couple or three days or a week ahead of their baby and stay there and they just paid their board and they could be safe and she got quite a good business.

KAREN: What was her name?

MRS B.: Hanson. Mrs. Hanson. And she was well-known.

KAREN: Do you remember what town that was in?

MRS B.: That was in Hanley.

KAREN: That was in Hanley?

MRS B.: Yep. And Mrs. Hanson is dead now, but her daughter, married my second brother, and she lives in Calgary. Her mother and father are both dead now because the daughter is my age. No, she’s not, she’s only eighty.

I used to think, “Isn’t this terrible that people are so frightened of what’s going to happen? Men don’t want to stick around. Not because they think they’re going to be put to work, it’s because they haven’t got the courage. And Mother always used to say that childbirth, the pain was the most terrible pain in the world to bear but it was the most easily forgotten. That was her expression.

KAREN: That’s wonderful. And that’s absolutely true. Within weeks you’ve forgotten.

MRS B.: And it’s nothing that (unclear) when it’s finished. But you often think about those who have babies at home. I had thought many times when we were kids, we were in such wonder! And I got my education, mostly, when I was in training.

When Mrs B was in nursing training, she told me, she picked up a virus and developed a lesion on the lining of her lung. She had to go into the sanatorium where her lung was collapsed to allow the lining to heal. She lay in the sanatorium for nineteen and a half months, without a pillow, and with sandbags along her sides. When she was discharged from the hospital, she chose to take a legal secretarial course rather than finish her nursing training.

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