It's been with much anticipation that I've finally picked up the first volume of memoirs by Jennifer Worth, Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times. I've seen the first season of the TV adaptation and thought it was excellent. I hadn't really planned on watching the series to be honest. Not having children myself I wasn't sure if it would be of interest as it is so outside of my scope of experience, but if you've watched it, too, you'll know that doesn't matter a bit.
The show is so compelling to watch and it's easy to get caught up in the lives of the midwives, the nuns and their patients. Too, postwar London, and specifically the East End, is a fascinating place to read about. I seem to have an endless capacity of interest in British history--particularly that era. And now just a couple of chapters into the book I find myself completely under the spell of Worth's storytelling. It's the sort of book you start reading and then realize that it's the perfect fit for your mood, so much so that when you think about it you sort of get goosebumps. Does that sound weird? That's how books affect me sometimes.
What a different world it was in the 1950s. It's not that I didn't know that of course, but the anecdotes Worth shares brings it all home vividly. I have a feeling that my book is going to be dog eared by the time I get to the end of it. I could share lots of teasers, but will try and just pick out a few that I found particularly interesting. A few facts to begin with first, however. Worth went to work in Nonnatus House in the heart of the London Docklands. This was a densely packed area of the East End. Nonnatus by the way stands for "non natus" which is Latin for "not born". Despite working in the slums of London Worth never felt in danger despite being out on her bicycle going to tend births both day and night. There was a deep respect for the work of the midwives by even those who appeared most rough and tumble.
"The bomb sites were the adventure playgrounds. They were numerous, a terrible reminder of the war and the intense bombing of the Docklands only ten years before. Great chunks had been cut out of the terraces, each encompassing perhaps two or three streets. The area would be roughly boarded off, partly hiding a wasteland of rubble with bits of building half standing, half fallen. Perhaps a notice stating DANGER - KEEP OUT would be nailed up somewhere, but this was like a red rag to a bull to any lively lad over the age of about six or seven, and every bomb site had secret entries where the boarding was carefully removed, allowing a small body to squeeze through. Officially no one was allowed in, but everyone, including the police, seemed to turn a blind eye."
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"Life has changed irrevocably in the last fifty years. My memories of the Docklands bear no resemblance to what is known today. Family and social life has completely broken down, and three things occurring together, within a decade, ended centuries of tradition--the closure of the docks, slum clearance, and the Pill."
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"The Pill was introduced in the early 1960s and modern woman was born. Women were no longer going to be tied to the cycle of endless babies; they were going to be themselves. With the Pill came what we now call the sexual revolution. Women could, for the first time in history, be like men, and enjoy sex for its own sake. In the late 1950s we had eighty to a hundred deliveries a month on our books. In 1963 the number had dropped to four or five a month. Now that is some social change!"
She muses on the fact that simply by the nature of her work she gets to know the women of the Docklands much better, really almost exclusively, than the men. I had never really thought about this, but she mentions that in Jane Austen's work "never recorded a conversation between men alone, because as a woman she could not know what exclusively male conversation would be like".
I'm in the midst of a number of really good books at the moment, and it is continually a dilemma in the mornings deciding which will go with me to work (and which must be left behind!). A good problem to have actually. Needless to say, this one will find a place in my bookbag this week!