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

it); boisterousness; singing in the clinical room; forgetfulness, the list was endless. I could do nothing right for Sister Evangelina. When Sister Julienne informed her that I was to work with her, she stared at me, her heavy features set in a dour expression, then said “Humph!” and turned and stomped away. Not a word more!
     
    We worked together for several months and, whilst I never grew close to her, I certainly grew to understand her better, and to realise that all nuns, by the very fact of their monastic profession, are exceptional people. No ordinary woman could live such a life. There must inevitably be something, or many things, that are oustanding about a nun.
     
    To me, Sister Evangelina looked about forty-five; an unimaginable age when you are twenty-three. But nuns always look years younger than they really are, and she had, in fact, been a nurse in the First World War, so therefore must have been over sixty at the time of which I am writing.
     
    The first morning did not start well. The clinical room boiler had gone out, and her instruments and syringes were therefore not sterile. She called loudly and crossly to Fred to come and attend to it, and grumbled about “that useless man” as he whistled his tuneless way downstairs with his shovels and rakes and pokers. She ordered me to “go to the kitchen, and boil these things up on the gas stove, whilst I sort out the dressings, and look sharp about it”. On the way to the door, a glass syringe fell out of the overflowing kidney dish and broke on the stone floor. She shouted at me about carelessness and clumsiness and what she has to put up with these days. When she got to the bit about “flighty young girls” I fled, leaving the broken glass behind me. In the kitchen, Mrs B. was at the gas stove with half a dozen saucepans boiling away merrily, and she did not receive me amicably. Consequently it took quite a long time to sterilise the things, and I could hear Sister Evangelina shouting before I had even left the kitchen. She took the equipment from me to pack the bags, commenting on my “dawdling around, and wool-gathering, as usual, and didn’t I realise we had twenty-three insulin injections, and four sterile dressings, and two leg ulcers, and three post-operative hernias, as well as two catheterisations, two bed-baths and three enemas to get through before lunch?”.
     
    All the midwives had gone, and we were the last to leave that morning. The bicycle shed was nearly empty. Sister Evangelina’s favourite bicycle had been taken, inadvertently, by someone else. Her nose grew red, her eyes bulged, and she muttered under her breath about how she “didn’t like this one, and that old Triumph was too small, and the Sunbeam was too high”, and she supposed she would have to make do with the Raleigh, but it wasn’t the one she liked.
     
    Respectfully, I pulled the Raleigh out for her, fixed the black bag on the back, and watched the tyres sag as her large, heavy body clambered onto it. I think I realised then that she was not in her forties. Her square, bulky frame had no agility, and it was only by sheer determination and will power that she got herself pedalling at all.
     
    Once out on the road her mood seemed to lighten, and she turned to me with something that resembled a smile. Along the streets numerous voices called out “Mornin’, Sister Evie.” She smiled brightly - I hadn’t seen her smile like that before - and called gaily back. Once she tried a wave, but the bike wobbled perilously, so she didn’t try again. I began to think that she was popular and well known in the area.
     
    In the houses she was bluff and gruff, and not at all polite (I thought), but nonetheless everyone seemed to take it in good part.
     
    “Now then, Mr Thomas, have you got your sample ready? Don’t keep me waiting; I’ve got to test it, and I haven’t all day to hang around waiting for you. Right, hold still for the injection. Hold still, I said. Now, I’m off. If you start eating sweets, they’ll kill you. Not that I would care, and I dare say your missus would be glad to see the back of you, but the dog would miss you.”
     
    I was shocked. This was no way to talk to patients, according to the nursing textbooks. But the old man and his missus roared with laughter, and he said: “If I goes first, I’ll keep a place warm for yer, eh, Sis Evie? An’ we can share the ol’ toasting fork.”
     
    I thought she would be furious at such