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

caterpillar.
     
    “Well look, let’s go into that café and get you a meal. I will pay with your five pounds, and then anyone who sees will think it’s mine. How’s that for a scheme?”
     
    The girl’s face brightened with a joyful smile. “You had better take it now, so no one will see me giving it to you.”
     
    She looked around her, and then thrust the huge white crackling bank note into my hand. She is very trusting, I thought. She is afraid of someone, but she’s not afraid that I will pocket the five pounds and run off.
     
    In the café we ordered steak and two eggs and chips and peas for her. She took her jacket off and sat down. It was then that I saw she was pregnant. She wore no wedding ring. Pregnancy outside marriage in those days was a terrible disgrace. It was not as bad as it had been twenty or thirty years previously. Nonetheless, she would have a hard time ahead of her, I reflected.
     
    She ate in hungry concentration, whilst I sipped a coffee, looking at her. Her name was Mary and was an Irish beauty, with tawny brown hair, delicate bone structure, and pale skin. She could have been a Celtic Princess, or the spawn of a drunken Irish navvy, it was hard to tell - perhaps there is not much difference, I thought.
     
    The first of her hunger was assuaged, and she looked up at me with a smile.
     
    “Where do you come from?” I asked.
     
    “County Mayo.”
     
    “Have you ever been away from home before?”
     
    She shook her head.
     
    “Does your mother know you are pregnant?”
     
    Fear, guilt and resentment came into her pretty eyes. Her lips tightened.
     
    “Look, I’m a midwife. I notice these things. I’m trained to do so. I don’t suppose anyone else has noticed yet, though.”
     
    Her face relaxed, so I said again, “Does your mother know?”
     
    She shook her head.
     
    “What are you going to do?” I asked.
     
    “I don’t know.”
     
    “You will have to go back home,” I said. “London is a big and scary place. You can’t bring up a child by yourself here. You need your mother’s help. You will have to tell her. She will understand. Mothers hardly ever let their daughters down, you know.”
     
    “I can’t go back home. It’s impossible,” she said.
     
    She wouldn’t answer any more questions on that subject, so I said, “How did you get to London, and why did you come, anyway?”
     
    She was more relaxed now, and looked more inclined to talk. I ordered apple pie and ice cream for her. Slowly, and in bits and pieces, the story came out. I was so charmed by the lilting music of her voice, that I could have listened all night, regardless of whether she was reading a laundry list or telling me the age-old pathos of her life.
     
    She was the eldest of five living children. Eight of her brothers and sisters had died. Her father was a farm worker and peat cutter. They lived in what she called a sheelin’. Her mother did washing for “the big house”, she told me. When she was fourteen her father caught pneumonia in the west Irish winter, and died. The family was left with no protector. The sheelin’ was tied to the lands worked by the father and, as none of the sons was old enough to take over the labour, the family was evicted. They moved to Dublin. The mother, a country woman who had never travelled more than walking distance from the mountains and meadows where she had been brought up, was quite unable to cope with the alien environment. They found lodgings in a tenement, and at first the mother took in washing, or tried to, but there was so much poverty and competition from other women similarly placed that she soon gave up the struggle. They couldn’t pay the rent, and were again evicted. Mary took a job in a factory, working sixty hours a week for a pittance. Mick, her brother of thirteen, lied about his age and left school, taking a job in a tannery. For both of them it was child slave labour.
     
    The combined efforts of these two might have been just enough to keep the family afloat, had it not been for their mother.
     
    “Me poor mam! I hate her for what she did to us, yet I can’t hate her really. She never could get herself away from the hills and the broad sky, from the sound of the curlew and the skylark, the sea, and the silence of the night.”
     
    Her voice was like the sad, plaintive cry of an oboe rising from an orchestra.
     
    “At first she just drank Guinness ‘because it does me good” she said. Then she took to any