Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950S

from immature vital organs, especially lungs and liver. The baby did indeed become very jaundiced, more than once, in the first few months, but each time it passed. It was a miracle, after I had heedlessly left the baby in a kidney dish, that his lungs were not wholly, or even partly collapsed from birth. I can take no credit for that. However, the fact is, he breathed. I like to think that by holding him upside down, and tapping his fragile back with a finger, I facilitated his first breath. His mother was advised to do the same after each feed, because, if fluid enters the trachea, a premature baby cannot cough as a full-term baby would. She was also given a very fine suction tube, and shown how to use it.
     
    Apart from that, which was very little, the baby received no medical treatment. The constant temperature of his mother’s skin kept his body temperature stable. Possibly the constant rise and fall of her breathing helped him over the first critical weeks. I am sure that her feeding policy - a few drops of breast milk placed on the lips at frequent intervals - was the right one. She even did this all through the night, I was told. Conchita took no precautions about sterilising her feeding equipment. I doubt if she had ever heard of such a thing. The saucer and the glass rod were simply wiped clean after each use, ready for the next time. The baby survived. Either he is the ultimate survivor, or we put far too much emphasis on technology and techniques, I thought.
     
    We visited three times a day every day for six weeks, then twice a day for a further six weeks. Domiciliary care was good in those days. At four months he weighed six and a half pounds and was responding with smiles, and turning his head. He reached out a tiny hand to grasp a finger. He gurgled and chuckled to himself. I was told he hardly ever cried.
     
    Several times in those post-natal months I thought of that dreadful night when he was born, and remembered Sister Julienne’s words to me as I left. “God be with you, my dear. I will pray for Conchita Warren and her unborn baby.” She had not just said that she would pray for Conchita. Nor had she assumed that the foetus would be born dead. She had said, with equal emphasis, that she would pray for them both. In fact, she prayed for us all.
     
     
    One happy day in midsummer I made a routine call to check the weight of the baby. Laughter was coming from the downstairs kitchen as I descended the stairs. The baby was lying in a cot with his brothers and sisters around him. They were all laughing. A delicious smell wafted towards me. Conchita, smiling and in full command, was standing over the steaming copper boiler making plum jam. The copper boiled ferociously as she stirred with a huge wooden spoon. Thank God she had had the wisdom and the strength not to let the baby go, I thought. Had she done so, I felt sure that she would have died, and all the happiness of the household would have died with her.
     

OLD, OLD AGE
     
     
     
    Whilst I was fascinated and captivated by Sister Monica Joan, I could not for the life of me decide if she really was verging on senility or not. I could not avoid the suspicion that she might craftily be manipulating us all, in order to get her own way - an old lady’s prerogative down the ages! Without doubt she was highly intelligent, well informed, and in some ways deeply learned, though it was often hard to disentangle the muddled strands of her discourse. In view of her history, fifty years professed nun, nurse and midwife in the East End of London, there could be no doubt of her Christian vocation. Yet her behaviour was often far from Christian. She was often selfish and inconsiderate. Flashes of brilliance and flashes of senility crossed and recrossed each other in lightning streaks; goodness and cruelty rubbed shoulders; memory and forgetfulness were intertwined. The old are deeply interesting and I watched her often. Which was the real Sister Monica Joan? I could not tell.
     
    No doubt she had always been eccentric. Even the manner in which she went to church was singular. She would leave Nonnatus House, walk swiftly down Leyland Street, round the corner and straight across the East India Dock Road, without so much as glancing to right or left. Lorry drivers would slam on their brakes, tyres would scream, lorries would come to a shuddering halt, whilst this elderly nun, gown and veil billowing out behind her, crossed the busiest road in