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

where the bar was to be found.
     
    “What’s yer poison, then?”
     
    I had to think quickly. I had had only half a Christmas lunch, and nothing to eat since then. Spirits would have knocked me out, so I accepted a Guinness and a mince pie. I didn’t really want to hang around. The delivery had been a beautiful Christmas experience, but the party was really not my scene. I had loved hearing it in the background, but to be in the midst of all those buxom, hiccupping aunts with their paper hats and red-faced, sweating uncles, was more than I could take at that moment. I just wanted to be alone.
     
     
    Out in the street, after the excessive warmth of the delivery room, the cold cut me like a knife. It was a cloudless night, and the stars shone brightly. There was very little street lighting in those days, so starlight was a reality. A heavy frost had descended in all its beauty, covering the black stones of the pavements, the walls, the houses, even my bicycle. I shivered, and decided I must pedal very hard to keep myself warm.
     
    Only a mile or two away from Nonnatus House a sudden impulse made me turn right into West Ferry Road and on to the Isle of Dogs. To go all the way round the Isle before rejoining the East India Dock Road is a seven or eight mile ride, and I can’t tell you what prompted me to do it.
     
    No one was about. The docks were closed, and the ships in port were silent. The splash of the water was the only sound as I cycled over the West Ferry Bridge. On the Isle there were no lights, apart from the starlight and the Christmas tree lights in the windows of many houses. The great, majestic Thames was on my right, closely guarding all its secrets. I cycled more slowly, as though afraid to break the spell. As I turned westwards, a low moon started to rise, and a silver path shone across the river from Greenwich to my feet, or so it seemed. I had to stop my bicycle. It looked as though I could have walked on silvered feet from the north to the south bank of the Thames.
     
    My thoughts were fleeting and flickering, like the moonlight on the water. What was happening to me? Why was the work so engrossing? Above all, why were the Sisters affecting me so deeply? I remembered my scornful reaction, only twenty-four hours earlier, to the crib in the Chapel, and then the calm beauty of Sister Bernadette’s face as she said her daily office by the soft moving flames. I couldn’t match the two up. I couldn’t understand. All I knew was that I couldn’t dismiss it.
     

JIMMY
     
     
     
    ‘Is that Jenny Lee? Where the hell have you been hiding all this time? We haven’t heard from you in months. I had to get on to your mother to find out where you were. She said you are a midwife in a convent. I had to tell her, gently, that nuns don’t do it, so she must be wrong, but she wouldn’t listen. What? You are? You must be mad! I’ve always said you had a screw loose somewhere. What? You can’t talk? Why not? The house phone reserved for expectant fathers! Look, that’s not funny. All right, all right! I’ll hang up, but not till you agree to meet us at the Plasterer’s Arms on your evening off. Thursday? OK that’s a date. Don’t be late.”
     
    Dear Jimmy! I had known him all my life. Old friendships are always the best, and childhood friends are very special. You grow up together, and know the best and the worst of each other. We had played together for as long as I could remember, then left home and gone our separate ways, only to meet again in London. Jimmy and his friends came to all the parties and dances organised in the various nurses’ homes to which I was attached, and I joined their fraternity in sundry pubs in the West End when I could. It was an excellent arrangement, because they could guarantee meeting lots of new girls, and I could enjoy their company without any commitment.
     
    I had no boyfriends at all when I was young. This was not (I hope) because I was unattractive or boring or sexless, but because I was so in love with a man I couldn’t have, and for whom my heart ached more or less all the time. For that reason no other male held the slightest romantic interest for me. I enjoyed the company and conversation of my men friends, and their lively and wide-ranging minds, but the mere idea of a physical relationship with any man other than the one I loved was abhorrent to me. In consequence I had a great many friends, and was in fact very popular with the boys. In my