Jennifer Worth’s Call the Midwife is a fascinating book on a number of levels. First, it is a startling account of medicine and midwifery in the 1950s. Secondly, it provides a detailed and moving social history of life in the hugely deprived East End of London in the 1950s, chronicling the lives and struggles of numerous characters whose experiences might otherwise be lost to time. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, Call the Midwife is the inspirational story of one woman’s life and the positive impact that an individual can have on the lives of people around them.
The Life of a Midwife
Jennifer Worth was 22 and a promising music student when she left her comfortable middle-class family home to train as a midwife with the nuns of St Raymond Nonnatus. After qualifying Worth served as a midwife in the poverty stricken East End of London in areas such as Stepney, Limehouse, Poplar, Bow, Mile End and Whitechapel. Given the poverty and depravation that they encountered on a daily basis, it was lucky that the nuns of Nonnatus House were progressive, practical, hardworking and highly experienced midwives.
Worth spent a few years working with the nuns in the East End during the course of her thirty year career as a nurse and the nuns she trained with remained a constant source of inspiration to her.
The Miracle of Birth
Jennifer Worth certainly doesn’t believe in sugar-coating her experiences as a midwife and spares no details when describing various women's experiences of labour and the moment of birth (the opening description of a breech birth is particularly vivid) but she is always careful to avoid excessive sentiment and sensationalism.
Worth makes it clear that the life of a midwife working in the East End in the 1950s was no happy clappy experience. Indeed, some of the lives and experiences recorded in Call the Midwife are so distressing that they stay with the reader long after the book has been finished.
The story of Mary, a young Irish girl who was imprisoned for stealing a baby, proves a particularly tragic example. Mary’s own baby had been taken from her against her will after the nuns that were caring for her were unable to find her a job where she would be able to keep the baby with her.
It would have been interesting to know what ultimately became of Mary and the baby that was taken from her, as well as many of the other people that Worth introduces the reader to, but it is understandable why this is not possible. As a midwife, Worth was only involved in these people’s lives for a fleeting, albeit hugely important, time.
While some of the practices that Worth used are still common today, reading of the pain and hardship that women living on or below the poverty line had to endure when giving birth in the 1950s really emphasises how far the world of midwifery and medicine in general has come in relatively few years. It some cases it was frankly amazing that both mother and child survived the birth.
However, Worth makes it clear that her career was not all doom and gloom. Many of the stories she recounts in Call the Midwife are full of hope, bravery and a sense of family and community that is all too often lacking in modern society. The Cockney sense of humour is captured beautifully in Call the Midwife and the escapades of some of the nuns that Worth worked with are hilarious.
Call the Midwife is a riveting book that pulls no punches yet never loses its heart.
Jennifer Worth’s second book, Shadows of the Workhouse, is available in hardback now.
Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s by Jennifer Worth
ISBN 978-0753823835, Phoenix, 2008, £6.99, pp 376
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