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

hopefully than to arrive?” I daresay we have all experienced this in one way or another.
     
    Mary went into a confectioner tobacconist, bought a bar of chocolate, and ate it as she wandered down the busy road. At the time, Commercial Road and East India Dock Road were said to be the busiest roads in Europe, because the Port of London was the busiest port in Europe. The continuous stream of lorries bewildered and frightened her. By contrast, Dublin had been as quiet as a country village. The shrill blast of a siren nearly gave her a heart attack, and then she saw thousands of men pouring out of the dock gates. She flattened herself against a doorway as they passed, chatting, laughing, squabbling, shouting and talking to each other. But not one of them spoke to the shy, small figure in the doorway. In fact it is doubtful if any of them even noticed her. She said, “I nearly cried with loneliness. I wanted to shout out ‘I’m here, just beside you. Come and say hello to me. I’ve come a long way just to be here.’”
     
    She didn’t like Commercial Road much, so she turned off into a side street where she saw children playing. She was scarcely more than a child herself, but they didn’t want her to join in the game. She continued on until she came to what was known as the Cuts - the canal that went under Stinkhouse Bridge on its way to the Docks. It was pleasant standing by the bridge, looking down at the moving water, and she stood there a long time watching a water rat pop in and out of his hole and seeing the shadows lengthen.
     
    “I just didn’t know what I was going to do. I wasn’t cold, ’cause it was summer, and I wasn’t hungry, ’cause that nice lorry driver had given me sausage and chips. But I felt so empty inside, and sick with longing for someone to talk to me.”
     
    Night came, and she had nowhere to sleep, nor the money to purchase a night’s lodgings. She had already spent many nights in the open, and the prospect did not bother her. There were bomb sites all over the East End at the time, and she found one that looked as though it might do. However, it was a bad choice.
     
    “I was woken in the night by the most terrible noise. Men screaming and fighting and cursing and swearing. In the moonlight I saw knives and flashing things. I crawled deeper into the hole I was in, and hid under some foul-smelling sacks. I just kept quite, quite still, and didn’t breathe. Then I heard the police whistles and dogs barking. I was frightened the dogs would smell me, but they didn’t. Perhaps the sacks I was under smelt so bad they couldn’t smell anything else.”
     
    She giggled. I didn’t. My heart was too full for laughter.
     
    Apparently she had stumbled into a bomb site regularly used by the meths drinkers. After the police had cleared the place, Mary crept out, and spent the rest of the night by the Cuts.
     
    The next day was spent in much the same way as the first, just wandering around the Stepney end of Commercial Road with nothing to do.
     
    “There were a lot of buses around, and I wondered if I should get on one and go somewhere else, because I didn’t really like it where I was. But they all said places like Wapping and Barking, Mile End, and Kings Cross, on the front, and I didn’t know where these places were. I had wanted to come to London, and the lorry driver said it was London when he put me down, so I didn’t get on a bus, because I wouldn’t know where I was going to.”
     
    Two more days were spent like this. Completely alone, talking to no one, sleeping in the Cuts at night. On the third evening Mary spent the last of her pennies on a sausage roll.
     
    The fourth day in London would have been without food, had she not seen an old lady in a churchyard feeding the sparrows with breadcrumbs.
     
    “I waited until the old lady had gone, then I shooed the birds away, and crawled around scooping up the breadcrumbs and putting them in my skirt. The sun was shining, and the trees were nice. I saw a little squirrel. I sat on the grass and ate a whole lap full of breadcrumbs. They tasted all right. The next day I went to the churchyard again, thinking that the old lady would come to feed the birds. But she didn’t come. I waited the whole day but she still didn’t come.”
     
    In the evening she scavenged some bits of food from a dustbin.
     
    As she was talking, I wondered why it was that a bright young girl, who had had the initiative and enterprise to plan