"Call The Midwife" - a true story of the East End Docklands in the 1950s

By Jayne Warren - 02/07/2007

To put it mildly, Jennifer Worth's book based on her personal experiences as a midwife in 1950s London is absolutely gripping from beginning to end. "Call The Midwife" conveys life, death, pain and joy in the tenement slums and bomb sites of the Docklands with such vividness that you feel as if you are in each room with her, or cycling along grey pavements in the early morning drizzle after a long night's work.

Attached to an order of nuns who had been working in the slums since the 1870s, Jennifer tells the story not only of the women she treated, but also of the loving, skilled community of nuns - and the camaraderie of the midwives with whom she trained.

Jennifer Worth came from a sheltered background when she became a midwife in the Docklands in the 1950s. The conditions in which many women gave birth just half a century ago were horrifying, not only because of their grimly impoverished surroundings, but also because of what they were expected to endure. Multiple births before the Pill were normal (between 6 and 12), and one woman had a staggering 25 children - all single births.

But while Jennifer witnessed brutality and tragedy, she also met with amazing kindness and understanding, tempered by a great deal of Cockney humour. She also earned the confidences of some whose lives were truly stranger, more poignant and more terrifying than could ever be recounted in fiction.

One such example is Mrs Jenkins, crippled with childhood rickets and a WW1 widow, who even sold her own hair and teeth to feed her four children. When she was finally forced into the dreaded workhouse for 13 years, all her four children died one by one. She was "informed" only after their funerals. When Jennifer found her living in squalor, she was not only half demented, making a haunting, animal cry (known by locals as "the workhouse howl"), but had not been able to change her clothes or shoes for such a long time that her toenails had grown to 12 inches long - inside her boots.

Prostitution at that time was rife - although the prostitutes nowadays are younger than in the 1950s. Jennifer finds Mary, a 14 year old Irish girl on the streets who was already a prostitute - and six months pregnant. Mary had boarded a ship from Dublin to London. Her father had died, her mother had hit the bottle, her younger siblings had been sent to an orphanage and her mother's new partner abused her. Within days of arriving, Mary had been lured into prostitution by a man called Zakir. Still a child herself, and desperate for affection, Mary thought Zakir cared for her - but he was actually a pimp.

Jennifer and the nuns gave Mary somewhere safe to stay in her pregnancy, and then, before she delivered, she was transferred to a home for mothers and babies run in Kent. But a fortnight after Mary gave birth to little Kathleen, she was taken away for adoption. Writes Jennifer: " Poor Mary, now just 15 and too young to bring up her child alone, was running from one end of the room to the other, hammering the glass with her fists and beating her head on the walls. I tried so hard to get her baby back - but couldn't.

"A few years later, I saw a front page story about a baby being snatched from a pram in Manchester. The woman was caught at Liverpool docks, about to board a boat for Ireland, carrying the missing child. It was Mary. She was jailed for three years. She was just 21."

Jennifer wrote Call The Midwife specifically to give a voice to midwives throughout history. She calls them the "unsung heroines", and her descriptions rival those of James Herriot. Childbirth in the 1950s was a very different experience from nowadays. Abortion was illegal, unwanted and illegitimate pregnancies were hushed-up, most births happened at home, and fathers were most definitely not present; but the midwife was a highly regarded member of the community, along with the vicar and the GP, and had sole responsibility for the care of her patient.

Funny, disturbing and incredibly moving, "Call The Midwife" opens a window onto the fascinating and colourful world of the East End in the 1950s. Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, it is available from June 21st priced £12.99. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0870 161 0870 or go to your nearest bookshop. Please mention the Mature Times.