Katy had left her youth behind like a forgotten bag at a bus shelter. She had realized it was gone one day, but simply shrugged and carried on. Her face that had been as fresh as any spring petal years ago now looked more like potpourri, dried and a somewhat leathery. Her hair, once russet brown with waves was now a practical short length and for the most part silvery white. She had the kind of warm brown eyes that put the mothers-to-be at their ease, she was the voice of calmness and knowledge in the painful intensity of child-birth. She'd seen it all, the majority of births that went as nature intended and the ones where not everyone survived. She attended more christenings than the average pastor and more funerals than she ever cared to recall. With each new life there was risk. Now the wireless told of a new war, a new way for these precious sons and daughters to die - to survive birth and childhood diseases to be slaughtered in the trenches all over again.
Katy was about to drift into a melancholy moment when the phone rang. She picked up the receiver in her right hand, her left playing with the curled wire the way it always did. Mrs Lancer's waters had broken, contractions only two minutes apart. No time for refection, it was out to her Plymouth automobile and down the lanes two miles...