Читать книгу Parents Who Kill - Shocking True Stories of The World's Most Evil Parents - Carol Anne Davis - Страница 30

In late 1918, Beth became pregnant for the fifth time. She was now 40-years-old and in poor physical and mental health, convinced that she was going to die and that Bert would have to cope with the children without her. She cried every day and worried about whether her second-born son, due to leave school the following year, would be able to find employment in these difficult post-war times. She suffered from insomnia so would rise early and scrub the floors and the front step until she was exhausted. Her diet was meagre and, when she did eat, it was a less-than-nutritious slice of bread with margarine.

On 16 August 1919, she went into labour three weeks early. She was in pain throughout the night, though attended by a caring and experienced midwife. Everyone was expecting Beth to have one baby during the home birth, but, when her daughter was born, the midwife could see another baby girl in the birthing canal and that it was breech. She manually moved the baby into a head-down position, causing Beth further agony.

The second baby was born and, unaware that a third child was still in the womb, the midwife gave Beth a dose of the medicine ergot to help expel the placenta. This made the third baby’s heart stop beating. The uterus contracted violently and, 15 minutes later, the dead or dying baby was born, whereupon Beth haemorrhaged massively. The midwife tried desperately to revive the infant which, like its siblings, weighed only 3lbs, but to no avail.

Beth almost lost consciousness during the grisly birth, and had to be taken to hospital in a taxi for a blood transfusion. The doctor told her that once her health had recovered she would need a major operation to restore her lacerated perineum, the area between her rectum and vagina, which was badly torn. On her return home, she was told to rest in bed for a month but found it impossible to relax and began to fret about the impending operation, telling Bert that she feared the surgery, especially as it might leave her incontinent. In the space of 18 months she had lost two children and now had premature twins to nurture, yet she had nothing left to give.

For several days she remained in the marital bedroom, following doctor’s orders, but still directed the entire household from her sickbed. In retrospect, she was either going into a manic phase or reacting to the ergot that she was being given regularly to prevent post-partum bleeding. Ergot can produce dramatic mood swings and even hallucinations or full-blown psychosis in some patients and, desperately thin and undernourished, Beth Wood must have been particularly susceptible to this.