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

said, “I didn’t mind if they were going to kill me. But they weren’t going to kill me baby.”
     
    That evening she came in with a customer, and as she went upstairs, she saw that the door of the gold and silver room was open. She told the man to undress in a cubicle, and slipped into the room. There was a lot of money on a table. She grabbed five pounds and ran like mad, out into the street and away.
     

FLIGHT
     
     
     
    Mary ran for her life, and the life of her baby. She hadn’t the faintest idea of where she was going, so she just ran, driven by fear. It was night-time, and in her heightened imagination, she thought that someone was pursuing her with every step. She mainly kept to the unlit side streets, because under the lights of the main roads, she thought she would be recognised.
     
    “I turned corner after corner, and hid in doorways, then doubled back and ran down another dark street, always avoiding the lights of the big roads. I spent nearly the whole night running.”
     
    In fact, Mary must have run round in circles, because she described the river and the docks and boats, and a church where she rested in the porch, which sounded very like the famous Bow Bells church. She did not get very far. After her sleep in the church porch, the terrors of the night departed, and she thought she would take a bus, to get a long way away, to a place where no one would look for her. It was not until she had actually boarded the platform of a bus and saw the bus conductor clipping tickets and taking one and two penny fares, that she realised her predicament with the five pounds. She could not possibly use it. She leapt off the bus just as it started to move, and fell into the gutter. Several people came over to help her up, but she was so terrified that she brushed them aside, and ran, hiding her face in her hands.
     
    Mary spent the whole day hiding. It did not seem rational. I asked her, “Why did you not go to a police station and claim protection?”
     
    Her reply was interesting.
     
    “I couldn’t. I was a thief. They would have locked me up, or taken me back to the café, and made me give the money back to Uncle.”
     
    Her terror of Uncle was almost tangible, so she spent the whole day wandering, and hiding from people. She must have headed south again from Bow towards the river as it was in the East India Dock Road that she finally had the idea of asking someone, a lady who did not look as though she could possibly be mixed up in prostitution, to change the five pound note. As I stepped off the bus that evening she had approached me and I had taken her back to Nonnatus House where she had had the first good meal, and the first night’s sleep in a secure, warm environment that she had had since leaving the sheelin’ back in County Mayo.
     
     
    It was Sister Julienne who made the arrangements for Mary to go to Church House in Wellclose Square. This house had been set up, and staffed by volunteers as a refuge for prostitutes by Father Joe Williamson.
     
    Father Joe was a saint. Saints come in all sorts of shapes and sizes - they don’t have to wear halos. Father Joe was born and bred in the slums of Poplar in the 1890s. Somehow he survived cold, hunger, neglect, and four years at the front during the First World War. He was a rough, tough East End street kid, crude and loud mouthed, yet when he was no more than a child, he had a vision that God was calling him to be a priest. He overcame a lack of proper education, a thick Cockney accent that no one else could understand, the inability to express himself, and class prejudice. He was ordained in the 1920s, and many years later, after serving as a parish priest in Norfolk, returned to the East End, to St Paul’s parish in Stepney, right in the heart of the red-light district. He saw at first hand the appalling life these girls led. From then on, he devoted the rest of his life to helping prostitutes who wanted to escape. The Wellclose Trust still exists in the twenty-first century, and is still engaged in the same work.
     
    At Church House Mary was given a bath, clean warm clothes and good food. She was with about six other girls who, with varying degrees of success, were trying to kick the habit of prostitution. Mary was too frightened to go out, but gradually her fears about being found and murdered subsided, colour returned to her pale cheeks, and her Irish eyes began to sparkle.
     
    I visited her several times during this period of