It's the summer of 1968 and St Mary's Maternity Hospital in Manchester is a place from a bygone age. It is filled with starched white hats and full skirts, steaming laundries and milk kitchens, strict curfews and bellowed commands. It is a time of homebirths, swaddling and 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 and 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 and sterilizing bedpans -- and above all helping women in need. Her life was a succession of emergencies, successes and tragedies: a never-ending chain of actions which made all the difference between life and death.