Call The Midwife: A True Story Of The East End In The 1950s

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These stories are incredible! I wish I'd read the books before watching the series, but I was still blown away! It is absolutely amazing and awful and beautiful the kinds of conditions these women who were giving birth lived in. The midwives are incredible as well, but I read some of these stories and just felt almost embarrassed at how much I have and how whiny I can be about it. A wonderful look at a specific time and place and the women who played such a vital role. The first book was the most interesting to me, being more of a general collection of stories from Worth's experiences. The second and third were more general and had fewer stories of midwifery and the interesting people she met. Still, all of them were worth every minute reading. Can't recommend it enough and I adore the series as well (though not as much with Nurse Lee gone from the scene). In this 3rd and last volume of the “Call the Midwife” series, Jennifer Worth ties the loose ends of her first two volumes describing the hardships and joys of nursing in the East End in the 1950s. Call the Midwife is based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth (known in the show as Jenny Lee), featuring narration – and an on-screen appearance in the 2014 Christmas Special – by Vanessa Redgrave as an older Jenny. The midwives that Jennifer trained and worked with were mostly nuns. Some were peaceful, some were fierce. One nun, Sister Monica Joan, was very elderly and becoming senile, retired in Nonnatus House, where the nuns lived and operated. There were several funny anecdotes about her—at least they are funny now as they are read, I'm sure they were incredibly frustrating at the time! Call the Midwife creator Heidi Thomas: TV series won't suffer when source material runs out". Radio Times. 12 February 2013. Archived from the original on 24 September 2015 . Retrieved 24 June 2014.

Chummy and the police officer romance was lovely, they made a really cute couple. It was great how Chummy managed to follow through with her missionary dreams, I was expecting her to end up being a stay at home mum… But she actually got to live out her dreams and do her missionary and midwife work in Sierra Leone.

Lee was hired as a staff nurse at the London Hospital in Whitechapel in the early 1950s. With the Sisters of St John the Divine, an Anglican community of nuns, she worked to aid the poor. She was then a ward sister at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in Bloomsbury, and later at the Marie Curie Hospital in Hampstead. The writing style changes, the outlook changes the length of the stories changes............and I love it. This book is filled with essays about the East End. I had mixed feelings about Hilda's unwanted pregnancy — she already had loads of kids and the flat her family were living in was a dump, she and her husband couldn't cope with another baby. But what they did to the baby once it was born was awful. They were cruel to just let it drown in a chamber pot full of blood and afterbirth. Why couldn't they have left it at a church or the workhouse? Why did they have to let the baby die in such a horrific way? It was unforgivable what they did, no matter what their circumstances were. I admit to skipped through bits that described behaviour in the brothels. Too much info there that I did need to know. Didn’t need it to be graphically described how Mary got into prostitution.

There are also lively stories of Sister Monica Joan, who discovered the joys of taking a cab ride instead of the bus, and we learn about the woman who ran the local pub. The end of the book discusses how the neighborhood changed in the 1960s, and why the midwives and nuns eventually closed their practice. Fear, perhaps. Fear of the power these things have over human life. Knowing that we don’t control everything, maybe. I’m not quite sure. Perhaps an anthropologist could tell you, or a philosopher. Mystery and magic have always surrounded childbirth, mostly due to ignorance. Likewise midwives have been reviled and ridiculed, even feared as witches. Sex, birth, and death are still taboo subjects in varying degrees in different cultures.Really enjoyed it. The stories were engrossing, the people were fascinating, and the 1950s East End setting was easy to imagine and immerse into.