Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times: 1 (Midwife Trilogy) - Softcover

Worth, Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143123254 ISBN 13: 9780143123255

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2012

Synopsis

Call the Midwife "Previously published as 'The midwife.'"

About this title

Review:

"Jennifer Worth's memories of her years as a midwife were at once hilarious and tremendously moving." -Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

"Worth is indeed a natural storyteller. . . . Her detailed account of being a midwife in London's East End is gripping, moving, and convincing from beginning to end." -Literary Review

"I loved the people, the nuns, the tough dockers, the prostitutes and pimps, seen with the fresh eyes of youth." -The Guardian

"Readers will fall in love with Call the Midwife . . . an affirmation of life during the best and worst of times." -Elizabeth Brundage, author of The Doctor's Wife

From the Author:

Comedy and tragedy are the faces of the double mask of the ‘Commedia dell’Arte’. This is the Theatre of Life where the writer must start. Writers with no experience of life have nothing to say. The writer must dwell in the thick of human life and get the hands dirty. Truth is always richer and stranger than fiction.
What is more central to life than birth? A midwife is always present, yet a midwife’s role has never before been documented. I was a district midwife fifty years ago, going around the slums of the London Docklands on a bicycle.
The docks were fully operational and employed most of the men. The bug- infested tenements (those that were still standing after the Blitz) housed tens of thousands of people, and overcrowding was chronic. There was no Pill, and families were large, sometimes huge. None of the flats or houses had a telephone. Few of them had running water or even a lavatory. Babies were born by gaslight, lamplight, or the meter ran out in the middle of labour.
The setting is rich material for the Commedia dell’Arte tradition. The fever-ridden slums of Naples or the dark, sinister canals of mediaeval Venice could not be more redolent of atmosphere for drama and melodrama. Yet time and place alone are of limited interest. There can be no comedy or tragedy without people.
The Cockneys are the people I write about. I knew and loved them. I entered their crowded homes at the most intimate times of life – the birth of new babies. I saw their strengths and weaknesses, their open-heartedness and narrow prejudices, their humour and courage, their irresistible passion for enjoyment.
The book is teeming with unforgettable characters: Conchita and Len who produced twenty-five babies between them, the last one born prematurely in a London smog; Brenda who had rickets; Lilly who had syphilis; Molly, beaten up and on the game a fortnight after delivery; a breach delivery on Christmas day; Margaret, who died of eclampsia; Mary, a fourteen year-old Irish girl dragged into the seamy brothels of Cable Street (I am told that the strip show in a brothel is amongst my most powerful writing!); Fred, the boiler man at the Convent; and Mrs. Jenkins, who had spent eighteen years in the workhouse. And how does a white man deal with his wife (also white) after the birth of a half-black baby? How would any man react today? There are three such stories in Call the Midwife. We are not talking about an IVF error. This is not racism. This is adultery. This is the Commedia dell’Arte.
I have mentioned a convent. I worked with an order of nuns, heroic nuns who had been nursing in the slums of London since the 1870s, when no-one would go into those areas, except the police. The nuns are central to the book. They are saintly and wise, worldly and witty, sometimes infuriating, often eccentric. Sister Monica Joan’s verbal battles with Sister Evangelina are among the funniest things in the book, I am told.
The book is social history in story form. It is not a dull chronicle of events. It is about the living, breathing, suffering, laughing people whose lives were shaped by the docklands in which they lived fifty years ago.
As we grow older the days of our youth are illuminated by a golden glow that seems to grow ever brighter as the years pass. My memories of midwifery in Poplar approach high romance: the great cargo boats coming and going ceaselessly, with thousands of men entering the dock gates, loading and unloading; the pilots guiding a great white vessel as big as an iceberg through a narrow canal to her resting wharf; the constant deep-throated growls of the ships’ funnels and the shrill of the sirens. I recall the open-hearted friendliness of the people who lived cheerfully in grim conditions, who never locked their doors and who kept open house to just about everyone. I remember cycling home in the grey light of dawn when the docks were beginning to stir, my body tired after eighteen hours work, but my mind alight with the thrill of having achieved the safe delivery of a beautiful baby to a joyous mother

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0143123254
• ISBN 13: 9780143123255
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352