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

quietly out of the house, leaving their keys on the hall table, and spent the rest of the night in Regent’s Park. It was a fine September evening, and after a reasonable sleep they stepped jauntily off to work, congratulating each other on an excellent plan well executed. They reckoned they could continue such a modus vivendi indefinitely, and thought what fools they had been ever to have paid rent to that dragon of a landlady in the first place.
     
    Jimmy was training to be an architect, while Mike was a structural engineer. They were both attached to the best firms in London (such training in those days was based on the old apprentice system, and students were not college based). Though they could wash and shave in the public lavatories, they could not change their clothes (they had none), and a smart London firm would not tolerate its staff turning up for work day after day covered in autumn leaves! After about a fortnight they began to think that another plan would have to be formulated. Unfortunately, both had an entire wardrobe of clothes still to purchase, so money was very tight.
     
    A third pint was ordered as we discussed the problem. Jimmy asked, “Isn’t there perhaps a boiler room or something like that in the nurses’ home where we could camp out for a little while?”
     
    Old friends are old friends. I did not even consider the risk I would be taking. I said, “Yes there is, although it’s not a boiler room. It’s the drying room at the top of the building. All the water tanks are in it, and it’s used for drying clothes. I think there’s a sink in it too.”
     
    Their eyes lit up. A sink! They could wash and shave in comfort!
     
    “As far as I know,” I continued “it’s only used in the daytime - not at night. There is a fire escape that goes up the back of the building, and presumably there will be a window or door from the drying room on to the fire escape. It’s probably locked from the inside, but if I opened it for you, you could get in. Let’s go and have a look.”
     
    We had another pint or two before leaving for the nurses’ home in City Road. The boys went round the back to the fire escape, and I entered the front door. I went straight to the drying room, and found that the slide windows opened easily from the inside. I signalled to my friends below, and each of them in turn climbed the iron ladder. It was not a staircase, just a ladder fixed to the wall, and the drying room was on the sixth floor. Normally, such a climb would be hair-raising but, fortified by several pints, it proved no trouble at all to the boys, and they entered the drying-room jubilantly. They hugged and kissed me, and called me a “brick”.
     
    I said, “I don’t see why you shouldn’t stay here, but don’t come before about ten at night, and you must leave before six each morning so that no one sees you. You must keep quiet, too, because I will be in trouble if you are found.”
     
    No one ever found out, and they stayed in the drying-room of the nurses’ home for about three months. How they managed that terrifying fire-escape in the middle of winter at six o’clock in the morning I shall never know; but when you are young and full of life and vitality, nothing is a problem.
     
     
    The cry “Aldgate East - all change” broke into my reverie. I found my way to the familiar pub. It was a glorious June evening when the endless daylight lingered on and on - the kind of evening that fills you with gladness. The air was warm, the sun shone, the birds sang. It was good to be alive. By contrast the enclosed atmosphere of the pub seemed dark and gloomy. This was usually our favourite hostelry. This evening the beer was right, the time was right, the friends were right, but, somehow, the venue didn’t feel quite right. We chatted a bit, drank a few glasses, but I think we were all feeling a bit restless.
     
    Suddenly someone shouted out, “Hey! Let’s all go down to Brighton for a midnight swim!”
     
    There was a chorus of approval.
     
    “I’ll go and get Lady Chatterly.”
     
    This was the name given to the communal car. Who now remembers the furore that surrounded the proposed publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, written in the 1920s, and the court case brought against the publishers for intending to make widely available an “obscene publication”? All that happens in the book is that the lady of the manor has an affair with the gardener, but the case