Hetty did that.
She is a midwife and she is about forty and she had been on since eight the previous evening, and she wrapped Marnie and left one shoulder out because the room was warm and because that is what you do when you want a father to get skin on his first hold.
She has no idea. None. She did a small kind thing at about twelve minutes past midnight and then handed a baby over and went to write something up.
And in the January I wrote to that unit to thank them and I named her, and I got a lovely reply.
And I did not say what the shoulder did. I could not work out how to put it in a letter without it sounding like a complaint.
So there is a woman at St Jerome’s who has a nice note from a patient in her file, and who will never know that the way she folded a blanket at midnight ended six years of silence in somebody’s marriage.
