Angel of Death (2 page)

The surrounding peaceful, rolling Lincolnshire sheep country, winding lanes and unspoilt villages, was the childhood playground of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. Her father, Alfred Roberts, a town Alderman and Mayor of Grantham, paid £900 for a corner shop in North Parade, not far from the town centre, in 1919 and ran it as a greengrocers, tobacconists and sub-post office.

Her father sold the shop in 1959 as a going concern for £3500. Nowadays the old shop is a high-class restaurant, aptly named The Premier, and many of the original fittings remembered by schoolgirl Margaret Roberts have been restored and preserved. Across the road is a new development of homes, called Premier Court. The town likes to remember its handful of famous residents.

During the plague year of 1665 Sir Isaac Newton watched an apple fall from a tree at his home just outside Grantham, and established the law of gravity. Modern-day jokers, fuelling the story of the town’s boring image, unfairly say the falling apple was probably the most exciting event ever to happen in the town. Now there’s a statue of the legendary mathematician on the green outside the Guildhall, there is a new shopping mall named in
his honour, the Isaac Newton Centre, and also the Sir Isaac Newton pub where you can drink to his memory. His family home, Woolsthorpe Manor, is owned by the National Trust and open to the public.

Modern, bustling Grantham, the administrative centre of the south-western corner of Lincolnshire, known as South Kesteven, has a high-speed rail link to London’s Kings Cross station, taking just an hour, and maintains its links with the surrounding farming communities with a Cattle Market on Thursdays. In the town centre stands the Angel and Royal Hotel, one of the oldest coaching inns in Britain, dating back to the twelfth century, a wonderfully preserved relic of the days when Grantham was important as a staging post for travellers on the Great North Road. The inn, which still has a set of medieval stocks by its main entrance, proudly boasts several Royal visitors in the past, including Richard III, King John, Charles I and Edward VII. On the opposite side of the High Street stands the George Hotel which was mentioned by Charles Dickens in his novel,
Nicholas Nickleby
.

About a mile out of town, on the road north to Lincoln, is the Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital, its stone and red-brick facade set behind pretty, well-kept flowerbeds. Like many small-town hospitals, the friendly, 120-year-old complex has spread over the decades and now consists of a maze of added-on buildings, including some new
structures built since 1981. Now builders were back again, constructing a huge new extension at a cost of £5.5 million on the town side of the complex behind a notice board which announced proudly: ‘New Hospital for Grantham. Opening May 1992’.

By the entrance to the original Victorian building are Wards Nine and Ten, occupied mainly by geriatric patients; a long, wide, cream-painted corridor leads straight ahead, brown direction signs hanging from its ceiling. There’s a spur off it to the pathology laboratory on the right and doorways on the left to the cardiology unit, orthopaedic ward and Wards One, Two and Three.

Halfway down the corridor a smaller corridor leads to the old out-patients department and, further on, another spur goes to the hospital chapel, the midwifery school and the entrance to the modern, three-storey maternity unit which attracts mums-to-be from a wide area around and as far away as Newark in neighbouring Nottinghamshire.

At the very far end of the long corridor, where the colour of the paint changes from cream to light green, opposite an old, original red telephone box, well used by parents and relatives, is Ward Four, the Children’s Ward, a cosy, friendly place with large windows, where colourful paintings and pictures drawn by children adorn the light-green walls.

It is divided into two smaller wards, one with six beds and the other with four, with three consultancy rooms, a kitchen, a large playroom full
of toys, games and a TV to occupy the young patients and visiting children, a treatment room with specialist equipment for emergencies and six individual rooms, called cubicles, for children who were more seriously ill.

It was here, early in 1991, while the world’s eyes were fixed firmly on the War in the Gulf, that youngsters began collapsing in numbers never seen before.

Sue and Peter Phillips first met on 26 June 1985 at the Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital, a remarkable coincidence for the hospital was to play such a huge part in the tapestry of their marriage.

At seventeen, Sue was attractive with blue eyes. She had just broken off an engagement. Lorry driver Peter, at twice her age, was divorced from his policewoman wife and was playing the role of mother and father to his two daughters, Nicola, eleven, and nine-year-old Emma.

Sue had gone to the hospital to visit friend Simon Howlett in Ward Two and remembers instantly feeling sorry for the ‘poor bloke’ in the next bed whose face was in a terrible mess. Peter had been attacked and beaten up – left with a broken nose, broken ribs and cuts and bruises all over his body.

She offered to walk with him down to the rest room so he could smoke a cigarette. Romance followed quickly. Three months later she moved in with him, quickly taking over the role of
homemaker and mother to his daughters. They were happy and comparatively well off. Peter was working as a farm driver and she carried on her job as a computer programmer at Edisons, a fork-lift truck-hire firm in Grantham.

They were married on 7 June 1986 at the town’s rather smart registry office, less than a year after their first meeting. They lived in a rented cottage in the village of Sedgebrook, on the Duke of Rutland’s estate, and were allowed to use the Duke’s ancestral home, fairytale Belvoir Castle, as the romantic backdrop for their wedding pictures. It was a blissful start in some of England’s most beautiful countryside, famous for its fox hunting. Often in the village they saw Prince Charles, riding with the Belvoir Hunt and, occasionally, a glimpse of Princess Diana on a visit to the castle.

They both wanted a baby but, as is often the case with eager couples, it didn’t happen easily. They had to wait nearly two years. The birth of their first son, James, on 8 April 1988 took Sue back to the Grantham and Kesteven Hospital.

Sue had become seriously ill while she was pregnant and doctors at the hospital couldn’t decide why. She was sent to St Thomas’s Hospital, London, where specialists identified the germ causing the problem. It wasn’t a minute too soon. The couple were told that Sue’s life had been in jeopardy and there was a real danger she would lose the unborn baby. If she became pregnant again, her life could be at risk. Sue was allowed back to Grantham where, despite the fears, James
was born safely by emergency caesarian in the maternity ward on the first floor.

When, two years later, she became pregnant again, Sue remembered her experience with James’s birth and decided to have the pregnancy terminated. It just wasn’t worth the risk and her family doctor agreed to send her to the termination clinic. Sue recalled: ‘It was awful. I sat there with a load of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls, crying their eyes out because they’d got into trouble.

‘I didn’t like what I was doing but I knew I would be risking my life to go on any further.

‘When I got to see the doctor he insisted on giving me a scan. It was just part of the process as far as I was concerned, ready for the termination.’

Sue, now twenty-two, was not expecting the shock news the doctor gave her. First, he told her, she was thirteen weeks pregnant, not just two months as she expected. She knew the baby was now fully formed and instantly she felt it was too late for an abortion.

Secondly, the doctor announced, it was
twins
.

Sue said: ‘I was just numb. I had spoken to Peter before about abortions. We both said that we would never consent to a termination once the baby was fully formed because it would be like murder. We couldn’t do that. But then it was twins too.

‘I went straight to see him at work and I told him he had better sit down. I said, “I’m thirteen weeks,” and he said “Oh! my God.” He knew what that meant. Then I said: “There’s something else. I’m expecting twins.”

‘He just sat there, his mouth was just open and he said nothing. It was ages before he spoke. Then he said: “Oh my God,” again. But we both knew what was going to happen, that we would go ahead with having them and we just started to plan for two babies.’

They decided to invest in a new home, a modern, five-bedroomed house in a cul-de-sac just half a mile from the gates of the hospital. It was the roomy house they needed with a fast-growing family. There was a bedroom for themselves, one each for Nicola and Emma, another for baby James and the fifth … the new nursery for two.

Peter decorated the ‘twins’ room’, chosing neutral colours because they didn’t know whether to expect boys, girls or one of each. They splashed out on a twin pram, twin buggy, two cots, matching baby seats, two sets of baby clothes, double the number of bottles. They had got over the initial shock and were getting excited about the prospect of twin babies in the house.

Sue had to go into hospital in January 1991 for a rest and observation after doctors discovered sky-high blood pressure; although the babies were not due until April she was transferred to the specialist baby unit at Nottingham City Hospital where doctors prepared to deliver them early by caesarian section.

On 31 January the twins were born. They were both small, Becky weighing 31bs 2ozs and Katie was even smaller at 21bs 12 ozs. Both babies were put into incubators and were ventilated because of
their premature arrival; they were fed through tubes. But they were healthy and doctors told Peter and Sue there were no fears for their safety.

How wrong they were to be.

At that time the couple were busy running a car-valeting company in Grantham, cleaning and polishing second-hand cars ready for the showrooms. It was Sue’s brainchild to start the business on an industrial estate in Grantham, and it became so successful that Peter gave up his driving job to join in. With Becky and Katie still in hospital building up their strength, Sue went back to work.

But a chance remark by a customer signalled the beginning of the nightmare that was eventually to devastate their lives. He told her: ‘Hey, Sue. Your babies are in the hospital, aren’t they? Well, a pal of mine’s baby has just died there. The baby had some sort of massive heart attack.’

Baby Liam James Taylor was affectionately called ‘Pudding Pants' by his parents because he was so chubby. He was just seven weeks old, a lovely, healthy boy, born in the maternity ward at the hospital weighing 9lbs 3ozs. He was Chris and Joanne's second child, a little brother for Jamie who was three years old.

He put on weight in the early weeks but then developed a worrying, heavy cold and, when it showed no sign of improving, Chris and Joanne called their family doctor. He made made several visits to their semi-detached home in Grantham, and diagnosed bronchiolitis. Despite the medications that were prescribed Liam still showed no sign of improving, and when the family's health visitor popped in the following week she advised Joanne to take him to the hospital where he could be properly monitored.

It wasn't an emergency and it wasn't even a major crisis when Liam arrived at hospital and was admitted to Ward Four, the children's ward. He was poorly, but not in any kind of danger, and
everyone thought he would be home in a couple of days. Being in hospital was ‘only a precaution', not life or death. Joanne, slim, with short blonde hair, was reassured. After all, wasn't Liam safer in the children's ward than anywhere else?

She and Chris could never have known the anguish that was soon to follow.

Tall, dark-haired Chris was busy at work as a suspended ceiling fitter when Liam went into hospital. He arrived home soon after 3pm on 21 February to find a note from Joanne pinned to the front door saying she had taken their little boy to Ward Four at the hospital. Chris didn't wait to change from his work clothes and went straight to the ward. He needn't have rushed. By the time he got there Liam seemed to be getting better already.

He was lying in a glass-sided incubator, dressed only in his nappy, and was smiling happily, seemingly over the worst of his problems. The staff had placed him on a nebuliser which fed him oxygen to clear his nasal passages and chest. One nurse reassured Joanne: ‘Don't worry, he'll be home in four or five days.'

A young, heavily built nurse with cropped blonde hair was looking after him, supervising his feed through a tube because Liam was so congested he couldn't suck from a bottle. Nurse Beverley Allitt had been given the job of caring for Liam on a one-to-one basis.

She was a newly qualified State Enrolled Nurse who had been been turned down just five days earlier for a job in the children's ward at the Pilgrim
Hospital in Boston, thirty miles away. They'd told her she didn't have enough experience treating very sick youngsters.

All her life Beverley Allitt had longed to be a nurse; it had been her consuming passion, her only ambition, since she was a child, but more than anything else she had set her heart on nursing children. She had always had a special affinity with youngsters, everyone knew that.

The young nurse, still only twenty-two, had trained for three years at Grantham and spent the last six months as a student with the children on Ward Four; as the ward was short of staff, she was asked to stay on. The hospital had advertised for a Staff Nurse but hadn't received a single application and so she'd been given a contract for six months. It would be six months in which she could learn. Then she could re-apply for the job at Boston six months later.

Beverley Allitt had taken the opportunity to gain the experience she needed and was determined not to waste a single day. On Ward Four she found herself in charge of caring for the newly admitted infant Liam, feeding him through a tube as his parents watched.

All was going so well that Chris, still dressed in his work clothes, was happy enough to leave the hospital with Joanne to go home and change. They were gone an hour but, when they returned, they were greeted by a nurse with unexpected bad news. She told them: ‘We have been trying to ring you. We are glad you've come back because Liam has taken a serious turn for the worse.'