Chapter: THE MATERNITY RECEIVING HOME BRENT HOUSE, HACKNEY

This Home serves a somewhat similar purpose as that at Lorne House,
but the young women taken in here while awaiting their confinement are
not, as a rule, of so high a class.

In the garden at the back of the house about forty girls were seated
in a kind of shelter which protected them from the rain, some of them
working and some talking together, while others remained apart
depressed and silent. Most of these young women were shortly expecting
to become mothers. Certain of them, however, already had their
infants, as there were seventeen babies in the Home who had been
crowded out of the Central Maternity Hospital. Among these were some
very sad cases, several of them being girls of gentle birth, taken in
here because they could pay nothing. One, I remember, was a foreign
young lady, whose sad history I will not relate. She was found running
about the streets of a seaport town in a half-crazed condition and
brought to this place by the Officers of the Salvation Army.

In this house there is a room where ex-patients who are in service can
bring their infants upon their holidays. Two or three of these women
were here upon the occasion of my visit, and it was a pathetic sight
to see them dandling the babies from whom they had been separated and
giving them their food.

It is the custom in this and other Salvation Army Maternity Homes to
set apart a night in every month for what is called a Social Evening.
On these occasions fifty or more of the former inmates will arrive
with their children, whom they have brought from the various places
where they are at nurse, and for a few hours enjoy their society,
after which they take them back to the nurses and return to their
work, whatever it may be. By means of this kindly arrangement these
poor mothers are enabled from time to time to see something of their
offspring, which, needless to say, is a boon they greatly prize.

 Dr. Rivers returns to Craiglockhart and tells Bryce about the job offer in London. Bryce encourages him to accept it, explaining that he will most likely leave soon anyway due to his ongoing disagreements with his superiors on how the hospital should be run. Dr. Rivers cannot imagine being at Craiglockhart without Bryce and and Bryce feels the same. Yet Dr. Rivers still sees his work at the hospital as meaningful. Later, Sassoon comes to see Dr. Rivers and asks him for a new roommate. His current one is insufferable, Sassoon claims, because he waves away the pain and damage of the war with simple platitudes. Dr. Rivers encourages Sassoon to wait the ten days until his roommate's transfer. Sassoon then starts describing his hallucinations, explaining that they are subdued enough to feel real. Dr. Rivers shares that he once heard the whistling of the dead when he was studying native practices in the Solomon Islands. He was attending a funeral, during which the dead are expected to make noise; Rivers cannot be sure whether he was pulled into a mass hallucination or if he really heard dead souls whistling. Sassoon explains that in his visions, departed soldiers look at him puzzlingly, wondering why he is not on the front lines. Consumed by his guilt, Sassoon tells the doctor that he has agreed to return to the front.

