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

so every day after school Jack would turn up at Nonnatus House to escort her on her evening visits. His instinct that the children of the Docks would tease and torment her were right, because on the whole the cockneys did not take to Chummy, and made fun of her behind her back. Her huge size, pedalling steadily along the streets on an ancient solid-wheeled bicycle, brought crowds of children to a standstill, and they lined the pavement shouting things like “what-ho” and “jolly good show, actually” or “steady on, old bean” amid loud-mouthed guffaws. And, to rub salt into the wound, they called her “The Hippo”. Poor Chummy treated it with good humour, but we all knew how deeply it hurt her. But when tough, pugnacious, street-wise Jack was with her, the children kept their distance. We all saw him on different occasions, standing in the street or the tenement courtyards, holding two bicycles, his lower jaw thrust forward, his stocky legs slightly apart, coolly looking around him, confident that a look was all that was needed to to protect “Miss”.
     

     
    Twenty-five years later, a shy young girl called Lady Diana Spencer became engaged to marry Prince Charles, heir to the throne. I saw several film clips of her arriving at various engagements. Each time when the car stopped, the front nearside door would open, and her bodyguard would step out and open the rear door for Lady Diana. Then he would stand, jaw thrust forward, legs slightly apart, and look coolly around him at the crowds, a mature Jack, still practising the skills he had acquired in childhood, looking after his lady.
     

ANTENATAL CLINIC
     
     
     
    There must be aspects of every job that are disliked. I did not like antenatal work. In fact I would go so far as to say that I hated antenatal clinic, and dreaded the arrival of each Tuesday afternoon. It was not just the hard work - though that was hard enough. The midwives tried to organise the day-book so that we could finish our morning visits by twelve noon. We had an early lunch, and at one-thirty we started to set up the clinic in order to open the doors at 2 p.m. Then we worked through until we were finished, often as late as 6 or 7 p.m. After that, our evening visits began.
     
    That did not bother me - hard work never did. What really got me, I think, was the sheer concentration of unwashed female flesh, the pulsating warmth and humidity, the endless chatter, and above all the smell. However much I bathed and changed afterwards, it was always a couple of days before I could get rid of the nauseating smells of vaginal discharge, urine, stale sweat, unwashed clothes. It all mingled into a hot, clinging vapour that penetrated my clothes, hair, skin - everything. Many times, during the routine antenatal clinics, I had to go out into the fresh air and lean over the rail by the door, heaving, forcing down the urge to be sick.
     
    Yet we are all different, and I did not meet any other midwife who was affected in this way. If I mentioned it, the reaction was one of genuine surprise. “What smell?” or “Well, perhaps it got a bit hot.” So I didn’t make any further comments about my own reaction. I had to remind myself continuously of the huge importance of antenatal work, which had contributed so greatly to the drop in maternal deaths. Memory of the history of midwifery, and the endless sufferings of women in childbirth, kept me going when I was thinking, I just cannot bring myself to examine another woman.
     
    Total neglect of women in pregnancy and childbirth had been the norm. Among many primitive societies, women menstruating or with child, or in labour or suckling the child, were regarded as unclean, polluted. The woman was isolated and frequently could not be touched, even by another woman. She had to go through the whole ordeal alone. Consequently only the fittest survived, and by the processes of mutation and adaptation, inherited abnormalities, such as disproportion in the size of the pelvis and the foetal head, died out of the race, particularly in remote parts of the world, and labour became easier.
     
    In Western society, which we call civilisation, this did not occur, and a dozen or more complications, some of them deadly, were superimposed on the natural hazards: overcrowding, staphylococcal and streptococcal infection; infectious diseases such as cholera, scarlet fever, typhoid and tuberculosis; venereal disease; rickets; multiple and frequent childbirth; the