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

dangers from infected water. If you add to all this the attitude of indifference and neglect that often surrounded childbirth it is not hard to understand how childbirth came to be known as “the curse of Eve”, and how women could often expect to die in order to bring forth new life.
     
     
    The Midwives of St Raymund Nonnatus held their clinic in a church hall. The idea today of conducting a full-scale antenatal clinic in a converted old church hall is horrifying, and sanitary inspectors, public health inspectors, every inspector you can think of would be there condemning it. But in the 1950s it was by no means condemned, in fact the nuns were highly praised for the initiative and ingenuity they had shown in the conversion. No structural changes had been made, apart from the installation of a lavatory and running cold water. Hot water was obtained from an Ascot water heater fixed to the wall near the tap.
     
    Heating was provided by a large coke fire in the middle of the hall. It was a black cast iron construction which had to be lit earlier in the morning by Fred, the boilerman. Such coke fires were very common in those days, and I have seen them even in hospital wards. (I recall one ward where it was the practice to sterilise our syringes and needles by boiling them in a saucepan placed on the stove). These stoves were very solid, flat topped, and you had to fill them by opening the circular lid and tipping the coke in from a coke-hod. It required quite a bit of muscle power. The stove was situated in the middle of the space, so that heat was radiated all around. The flue went straight up the middle, to the roof.
     
    A few examination couches were available, with movable screens to provide privacy, and wooden desks with chairs, where we wrote up our notes. A long marble-topped surface stood near the sink, upon which we placed our instruments and other equipment. A gas jet stood on this surface, with a box of matches beside it. This single jet of flame was used continuously for boiling up the urine. I can smell it now, more than fifty years later!
     
    The clinic, and those like it all over the country, may sound primitive today but it had saved countless thousands of lives of both mothers and babies. The Midwives’ clinic was the only one in the area until 1948, when a small maternity unit of eight beds was opened in Poplar Hospital. Prior to that, the hospital had no maternity unit even though Poplar was said to have a population of fifty thousand people per square mile. When the decision was taken after the war to open a hospital unit, no special provision was made. Quite simply, two small wards were allocated for maternity - one for lying-in, and the other for delivery, doubling-up as an antenatal clinic. This was inadequate, but it was better than nothing at all. Accommodation, equipment, technology, were not really important. What was important was the knowledge, skill and experience of the midwife.
     
    Clinical examination was what I shrank from the most. It can’t be as bad as last week, I thought as we prepared to open the doors. I shuddered as I remembered it. Thank God I was wearing gloves, I thought. What would have happened if I had not?
     
     
    She had been in my mind on and off for the whole of the past week. She had flounced into the clinic at about 6 p.m. in her hair curlers and slippers, a fag hanging from her lower lip, and with her were five children under seven. Her appointment had been for 3 p.m. I was clearing up after a not too stressful afternoon. Two of the other student midwives had left, and the third was still with her last patient. Of the Sisters, only Novice Ruth remained, (a “novice” in the religious life, not in midwifery). She asked me to see Lil Hoskin.
     
    It was Lil’s first antenatal visit, even though she had had no periods for five months. This is going to take another half an hour, I sighed to myself as I got out the notes. I scanned through them: thirteenth pregnancy, ten live births; no history of infectious disease; no rheumatic fever or heart disease; no history of tuberculosis; some cystitis but no evidence of nephritis; mastitis after the third and seventh babies, but otherwise all babies breastfed.
     
    Her previous notes gave me most of her obstetric history, but I needed to ask some questions about the present pregnancy.
     
    “Have you had any bleeding?”
     
    “Nope.”
     
    “Any vaginal discharge?”
     
    “A bit.”
     
    What