Jennifer Worth - The Midwife: A memoir of birth, joy, and hard times

Table of Contents

Praise for The Midwife

Worth is indeed a natural storytellerin the best sense of the term, with apparent artlessness in fact concealing high artand her detailed account of being a midwife in Londons East End is gripping, moving, and convincing from beginning to end.... [The Midwife] is also a powerful evocation of a long-gone world... and in Worth it has surely found one of its best chroniclers.

David Kynaston, Literary Review

A chilling insight into life for the average mother [in the 1950s].

Worth is a stylish and dramatic writer.

Matthew Parris, Spectator

This delightful memoir brings to vivid life Londons East End... full of humor... Worths talent shines from every page.

In her marvelous new book... there are desperately sad stories here, but tales of great hope too. Of ordinary people living, giving birth and building their families despite enormous hardship and poor sanitation. And of midwives delivering superb care in the toughest conditions.

Nobody who reads [The Midwife] will ever forget it.

The Docklands in Londons East End in the 1950s seems more like the nineteenth century than fifty years ago.

Sheer magic.

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This book is dedicated to Philip, my dear husband

The history of Mary is also dedicated to the memory of Father Joseph Williamson and Daphne Jones

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All nurses and midwives, many long since dead, with whom I worked half a century ago

Terri Coates, who fired my memories
Canon Tony Williamson, President of The Wellclose Trust
Elizabeth Fairbairn for her encouragement
Pat Schooling, who had courage to go for original publication
Naomi Stevens, for all her help with the Cockney dialect
Suzannah Hart, Jenny Whitefield, Dolores Cook, Peggy Sayer,
Betty Howney, Rita Perry
All who typed, read and advised
Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives
The Curator, Island History Trust, E14
The Archivist, The Museum in Dockland, E14
The Librarian, Simmons Aerofilms

PREFACE

In January 1998, the Midwives Journal published an article by Terri Coates entitled Impressions of a Midwife in Literature. After careful research right across European and English-language writing, Terri was forced to conclude that midwives are virtually non-existent in literature.

Why, in heavens name? Fictional doctors grace the pages of books in droves, scattering pearls of wisdom as they pass. Nurses, good and bad, are by no means absent. But midwives? Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all. Why then does she remain a shadowy figure, hidden behind the delivery room door?

Terri Coates finished her article with a lament for the neglect of such an important profession. I read her words, accepted the challenge, and took up my pen.

INTRODUCTION

Nonnatus House was situated in the heart of the London Docklands. The practice covered Stepney, Limehouse, Millwall, the Isle of Dogs, Cubitt Town, Poplar, Bow, Mile End and Whitechapel. The area was densely populated and most families had lived there for generations, often not moving more than a street or two away from their birthplace. Family life was lived at close quarters and children were brought up by a widely extended family of aunts, grandparents, cousins and older siblings, all living within a few houses, or at the most, streets of each other. Children would run in and out of each others homes all the time and when I lived and worked there, I cannot remember a door ever being locked, except at night.

Children were everywhere, and the streets were their playgrounds. In the 1950s there were no cars in the back streets, because no one had a car, so it was perfectly safe to play there. There was heavy industrial traffic on the main roads, particularly those leading to and from the docks, but the little streets were traffic-free.

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.

It was undoubtedly a rough area. Knifings were common. Street fights were common. Pub fights and brawls were an everyday event. In the small, overcrowded houses, domestic violence was expected. But I never heard of gratuitous violence children or towards the elderly; there was a certain respect for the weak. This was the time of the Kray brothers, gang warfare, vendettas, organised crime and intense rivalry. The police were everywhere, and never walked the beat alone. Yet I never heard of an old lady being knocked down and having her pension stolen, or of a child being abducted and murdered.

The vast majority of the men living in the area worked in the docks.

Employment was high, but wages were low and the hours were long. The men holding the skilled jobs had relatively high pay and regular hours, and their jobs were fiercely guarded. Their skills were usually kept in the family, passed from father to sons or nephews. But for the casual labourers, life must have been hell. There would be no work when there were no boats to unload, and the men would hang around the gates all day, smoking and quarrelling. But when there was a boat to unload, it would mean fourteen, perhaps eighteen hours of relentless manual labour. They would start at five in the morning and end around ten at night. No wonder they fell into the pubs and drank themselves silly at the end of it. Boys started in the docks at the age of fifteen, and they were expected to work as hard as any man. All the men had to be union members and the unions strove to ensure fair rates of pay and fair hours, but they were bedevilled by the closed shop system, which seemed to cause as much trouble and ill feeling between workers as the benefits it accrued. However, without the unions, there is no doubt that the exploitation of workers would have been as bad in 1950 as it had been in 1850.

Early marriage was the norm. There was a high sense of sexual morality, even prudery, amongst the respectable people of the East End. Unmarried partners were virtually unknown, and no girl would ever live with her boyfriend. If she attempted to, there would be hell to pay from her family. What went on in the bomb sites, or behind the dustbin sheds, was not spoken of. If a young girl did become pregnant, the pressure on the young man to marry her was so great that few resisted. Families were large, often very large, and divorce was rare. Intense and violent family rows were common, but husband and wife usually stuck together.