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

Buildings. Molly seemed to adapt to the new surroundings and her new school, and was reported to be doing well.
     
    “She was that bright,” Marjorie said. “Always top o’ the class. She could’ve been a secitary an’ worked in an orfice up West, she could. Oh, it breaks my heart, it do, when I thinks on it.”
     
    She sniffed and pulled out her handkerchief. “She was about fourteen when she met that turd. His name’s Richard, an’ I calls ’im Richard the Turd.” She giggled at her little joke. “Then she was stopping out late, saying she was down the Youth Club, but I reckoned as how she was telling me lies, so I asks the Rector, an’ he tells me Moll wasn’t even a member. Then she was stoppin’ out all night. Oh, nurse, you can’t even know what that does to a mother.”
     
    Quiet sobs came from the neat little figure in the flowered apron. “Night after night I walked the streets, looking for ’er, but I never found ’er. ‘Course I never. She’d come home in the morning, an’ tell me a pack of lies, as though I was daft, an’ go off to school. When she was sixteen, she said she was going to marry her Dick. I reckoned as how she was pregnant anyhow, so I says, ‘That’s the best thing you can do, my luvvy.’”
     
    They married, and took two rooms in Baffin Buildings. From the start, Molly never did any housework. Marjorie went in and tried to show her daughter how to keep her rooms clean and tidy, but it was no use. The next time she went, the place was as dirty as ever.
     
    “I don’t know where she gets her lazy ways from,” Marjorie said.
     
    At first Dick and Molly seemed fairly happy, and although Dick did not appear to be in any regular job, Marjorie hoped for the best for her daughter. Their first baby was born, and Molly seemed happy, but quite soon, things began to get worse. Marjorie noticed bruises on her daughter’s neck and arms, a cut above her eye, a limp on one occasion. Each time Molly said she had fallen down. Marjorie began to have her suspicions, but relations between her and Dick, never cordial, were breaking down.
     
    “He hates me,” she said “and won’t never let me come near her or the boys. There’s not nuffink I can do. I don’t know what’s worse, knowing he hits me daughter, or knowing he hits the kids. The best time was when he done six months inside. Then I knew as how they was safe.”
     
    She started crying again, and I asked her if social services could do anything to help.
     
    “No, no. She won’t say a word against him, she won’t. He’s got such a hold on her, I don’t think she’s got a mind of her own any more.”
     
    I felt deeply sorry for this poor woman, and her silly daughter. But most of all I felt sorry for the two little boys, whom I had seen in a pitiful state on the occasion when I had interrupted a fight. And now a third child was coming.
     
    I said, “My main reason for coming to see you is about the new baby. Molly is booked for a home confinement, but that, I believe, is only because you had cleaned the place up before our assessment.” She nodded. “We think now that a hospital delivery would be best, but she has got to book it, and she must go to antenatal clinics. I don’t think she will do either. Can you help?”
     
    Majorie burst into tears again. “I’ll do anything in the world for her and the kiddies, but the Turd, he won’t let me go near them. What can I do?”
     
    She bit her fingernails and blew her nose.
     
    It was a tricky situation. I thought perhaps we would simply have to refuse a home delivery, and inform the doctors. Molly would then be told that she must go into hospital when labour started. If she refused antenatal treatment, that would be entirely her own fault.
     
    I left poor Marjorie to her sad thoughts, and reported back to the Sisters. A hospital confinement was in fact arranged without Molly’s active consent, and I thought that would be the last we heard of her.
     
    It was not to be. About three weeks later the Midwives received a phone call from Poplar Hospital asking if we could arrange post-natal visits for Molly, who had discharged herself and the baby on the third day after delivery.
     
    This was almost unprecedented. In those days it was accepted by everyone, medical and lay people alike, that a new mother should stay in bed for two weeks. Apparently Molly had walked home, carrying the baby and this was considered to be very dangerous. Sister Bernadette