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

soft skin opaque, and her large eyes clear and penetrating. Her bed was always covered in books, and she had a number of notebooks in which she wrote voluminously in a firm stylish hand.
     
    I discovered that she was a poet. I suppose it should not have surprised me, but it did. All her life she had written poetry, and had in her notebooks a collection of several hundred poems dating from the 1890s.
     
    I am no judge of poetry - I do not have an ear for it. But the consistency of her output impressed me and I asked if I might have a look. She shrugged negligently.
     
    “Take it. I have no secrets, my dear. I am but a spark in the divine fire.”
     
    Over many long evenings I studied these poems. I had expected them all to be religious poetry, having been written by a nun, but they were not. Many were love poems, many satirical, and many were humorous, as:
    One of the sweetest things in life to see
Is a calm, settled fly,
Cleansing its fastidious face
On my chosen reading place;
He twines his legs around his arse
And takes his time,
As Beauty with her glass.
     
     
     
    or:
    Lyric of an Obese Dachshund Bitch
     
    They are equally pretty,
My toes or my tittie,
To ramble or gallop upon;
     
     
     
    Whatever will happen
When I must re-cap’em
The days that my nipples wear out
And are gone?
     
     
    This is my favourite:
    It’s OK to be tight on
The seafront at Brighton
But I say, by Jove
Watch out if it’s Hove.
     
     
     
    It may not be great poetry, but I thought it had charm. Or perhaps it was the charm of Sister Monica Joan that coloured my assessment.
     
    I found a revealing poem about her father, which told a lot about her early life:
    Fretful, unloving, mannerless Papa,
What a crustaceous old boy you are -
How you do go it!
Blowing your bugle, like a ham stage-star,
How you do blow it!
And where does it get you, Papa?
Or is it wasted breath?
“Leave everything to me”
Vainly the old man saith.
     
     
     
    With an arrogant, domineering father her struggle to assert herself and to leave home must have been monumental. A weaker character would have been crushed.
     
    For a lovesick young girl, her love poems spoke to my heart, and brought tears to my eyes. As:
    To an Unknown God
     
    I sang to you
In the day of my bliss
And you were near
     
     
     
    I thought of you
In my lover’s kiss
And felt you there
     
     
     
    I turned to you
When our love was too brief
And found your strength.
     
     
    I needed you
In the years of my grief
And knew you, at length.
     
    “Our love was too brief.” Oh, I knew all about that. Does one have to suffer so dreadfully in order to know the unknown God? Who, when, what was the story of Sister Monica Joan’s lost love? I longed to know, but dared not ask. Did he die, or did her parents object? Why was he unobtainable? Was he already married, or did he just cease to care, and leave her? I longed to know, but could not ask. Any intrusive questions would deserve, and receive, a caustic comment from that barbed tongue.
     
    Her religious poetry was surprisingly slender, and as I was eager to know more about her religion, I asked her about this aspect of her poetry. She replied with these lines from Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn :
    “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
     
     
     
    “Do not ask me to immortalise the great Mystery of Life. I am just a humble worker. For beauty, look to the Psalms, to Isaiah, to St John of the Cross. How could my poor pen scan such verse? For truth, look to the Gospels - four short accounts of God made Man. There is nothing more to say.”
     
    She looked unusually tired that day and, as she lay back on the pillows, the wintry light from the window accentuating her pale, aristocratic features, my heart filled with tenderness. I had come to a convent by mistake, an irreligious girl. I would not have described myself as a committed atheist for whom all spirituality was nonsense, but as an agnostic in whom large areas of doubt and uncertainty resided. I had never met nuns before, and regarded them at first as a bit of a joke; later, with astonishment bordering on incredulity. Finally this was replaced by respect, and then deep love.
     
    What had impelled Sister Monica Joan to abandon a privileged life for one of hardship, working in the slums of London’s Docklands? “Was it love of people?” I asked her.
     
    “Of course not,” she snapped sharply. “How can you love ignorant,