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

caused by the snuff dropping out of her nose.
     
    Not surprisingly, shopkeepers would not serve her. One green-grocer told me he would serve her outside the shop, but wouldn’t allow her in.
     
    “She picks over all me fruit. She squeezes me plums an’ me tomatoes, then puts ’em back. Then no one’ll buy ’em. I got a business to run, I can’t have ’er in ’ere.”
     
    Mrs Jenkins was a local “character”, known by name only, avoided, feared, ridiculed, but a complete mystery.
     
     
    The Sisters received a request from a locum doctor in Limehouse to visit a house in the Cable Street area of Stepney. This was the notorious prostitutes’ area which I had explored during my brief friendship with Mary, the young Irish girl. The doctor reported that an elderly lady with mild angina was living in appalling conditions, and probably suffering from malnutrition. The patient’s name was Mrs Jenkins.
     
    I turned off Commercial Road, heading towards the river, and found the street. Only half a dozen buildings remained standing; the rest were just bomb sites with a jagged wall sticking up here and there. I found the door and knocked. Silence. I turned the door handle, expecting to find it open, but it was locked. I went round the side, which was littered with filth, but a thick layer of dirt covered the windows and I could not see through. A cat rolled sensuously on its back, whilst another sniffed at a pile of garbage. I returned to the front door, and knocked louder several times, feeling glad that it was daylight. This was not the sort of area to be alone in after dark. A window opened in a house opposite, and a female voice called out: “What you want?”
     
    “I’m the district nurse, and I have come to see Mrs Jenkins.”
     
    “Throw a stone up a’ ve second floor winder,” was the advice given.
     
    There were plenty of stones lying around, and I felt a perfect fool standing in nurse’s uniform, with my black bag at my feet, throwing stones up at the second floor. “How on earth did the doctor get in?” I wondered.
     
    Eventually, after about twenty stones, some of which missed, the window opened, and a man’s voice called out in a thick foreign accent, “You see old woman? I come.”
     
    Bolts were pulled back, and the man stood well behind the door as it opened so that I could not see him. He pointed along the passage to a door at the end, saying: “She live there.”
     
    Victorian tiles flagged the passageway which passed a staircase with a fine carved oak banister. This was still in beautiful condition, although the stairs were crumbling and looked highly dangerous. I was glad that I did not have to walk up them. The house had obviously been part of a fine old Regency terrace once, but was now in the last stages of decay. It had been classed as “unfit for human habitation” twenty years previously, yet people were still living there, hidden away amongst the rats.
     
    No sound came when I rapped on the door, so I turned the handle and walked in. The room had been the back scullery and wash house of the premises. It was a single storey extension with a stone-flagged floor. A large copper boiler was attached to an outside wall, and next to it was a coke stove with an asbestos flue running up the wall and out of the ceiling through a huge and jagged hole open to the sky. A large wood and iron framed mangle and a stone sink were the only other objects that caught my eye. The room appeared empty and abandoned and smelled powerfully of cats and urine. It was very dark, because the windows were so black with dirt that no light could penetrate. In fact, most of the light in the room came from the hole in the roof.
     
    As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom I discerned a few other things: several saucers lying around on the floor with bits of food and milk in them; a small wooden chair and table with a tin mug and teapot on it; a chamber pot; a wooden cupboard with no door. There was no bed, no sign of a light, nor of gas or electricity.
     
    In the corner furthest away from the hole in the ceiling was a decrepit-looking armchair in which an old woman sat, silent, watchful, her eyes filled with fear. She shrank back in the chair as far as she could go, her old coat pulled tight round her, a woollen scarf over her head and covering half her face. Only her eyes showed, and they penetrated mine as our gaze met.
     
    “Mrs Jenkins, the doctor tells us you are not well and need home