Jennifer Worth - Call The Midwife - A True Story Of The East End In The 1950S

A hospital confinement had to be booked in advance by the expectant mother concerned through her doctor. I was not at all sure that Molly would do this; she seemed too slovenly and apathetic to bother about anything. If she won’t go to antenatal clinic, she won’t bother to change the arrangements for delivery, I thought, and I could imagine a midnight call to Nonnatus House in two or three weeks’ time to which we would have to respond. I resolved to see her mother, and report to her doctor.

The Canada Buildings, named Ontario, Baffin, Hudson, Ottawa and so on, were six blocks of densely populated tenements lying between Blackwall Tunnel and Blackwall Stairs. They were about six storeys high, and very primitive, with a tap and a lavatory at the end of each balcony. It was beyond me how anyone could live there, and maintain cleanliness or self-respect. It was said that there five thousand people living in the Canada Buildings.

I found her mother Marjorie’s address in the Ontario Buildings, and knocked. A cheery voice called “Come on in luvvy”. The usual invitation of an East Ender, whoever you were. The door was unlocked, so I stepped straight into the main room. Marjorie turned round as I entered with a bright smile. The smile vanished as soon as she saw me and her hands dropped to her sides.

“Oh no. No. Not again. You’ve come about our Moll, ’aven’t you?” She sat down on a chair, buried her face in her hands, and sobbed.

I was embarrassed. I didn’t know what to do or say. Some people are good at dealing with the problems of others, but not me. In fact, the more emotional people get, the less I am able to cope. I put my bag on a chair and sat down beside her, saying nothing. It gave me the chance to look around the room.

Having seen Molly’s squalor, I had expected to see her mother’s place in the same sort of condition, but nothing could have been more dissimilar. The room was clean and tidy, and smelt nice. Pretty curtains hung at clean windows. The mats were clean, well brushed and shaken. A kettle was bubbling on the gas stove. Marjorie was wearing a clean dress and pinafore, her hair was brushed and looked nice.

The kettle gave me an idea, and as the sobs lessened I said, “How about making a nice cup of tea for us both? I’m parched.”

She brightened up and said, with typical cockney courtesy, “Sorry nurse. Don’t mind me. I gets that worked up about Moll, I do.”

She got up and made the tea. The activity helped her, and she sniffed away the tears. Over the next twenty minutes, it all came out, her hopes and her heartache.

Molly was the last of five children. She had never known her father, who had been killed at Arnhem during the war. The whole family had been evacuated to Gloucestershire.

Marjorie said, “I don’t know if that upset her, or what, but the others turned out all right, they did.”

The family returned to London, and settled in Ontario Buildings. Molly seemed to adapt to the new surroundings and her new school, and was reported to be doing well.

“She was that bright,” Marjorie said. “Always top o’ the class. She could’ve been a secitary an’ worked in an orfice up West, she could. Oh, it breaks my heart, it do, when I thinks on it.”

She sniffed and pulled out her handkerchief. “She was about fourteen when she met that turd. His name’s Richard, an’ I calls ’im Richard the Turd.” She giggled at her little joke. “Then she was stopping out late, saying she was down the Youth Club, but I reckoned as how she was telling me lies, so I asks the Rector, an’ he tells me Moll wasn’t even a member. Then she was stoppin’ out all night. Oh, nurse, you can’t even know what that does to a mother.”

Quiet sobs came from the neat little figure in the flowered apron. “Night after night I walked the streets, looking for ’er, but I never found ’er. ‘Course I never. She’d come home in the morning, an’ tell me a pack of lies, as though I was daft, an’ go off to school. When she was sixteen, she said she was going to marry her Dick. I reckoned as how she was pregnant anyhow, so I says, ‘That’s the best thing you can do, my luvvy.’”

They married, and took two rooms in Baffin Buildings. From the start, Molly never did any housework. Marjorie went in and tried to show her daughter how to keep her rooms clean and tidy, but it was no use. The next time she went, the place was as dirty as ever.

“I don’t know where she gets her lazy ways from,” Marjorie said.

At first Dick and Molly seemed fairly happy, and although Dick did not appear to be in any regular job, Marjorie hoped for the best for her daughter. Their first baby was born, and Molly seemed happy, but quite soon, things began to get worse. Marjorie noticed bruises on her daughter’s neck and arms, a cut above her eye, a limp on one occasion. Each time Molly said she had fallen down. Marjorie began to have her suspicions, but relations between her and Dick, never cordial, were breaking down.

“He hates me,” she said “and won’t never let me come near her or the boys. There’s not nuffink I can do. I don’t know what’s worse, knowing he hits me daughter, or knowing he hits the kids. The best time was when he done six months inside. Then I knew as how they was safe.”

She started crying again, and I asked her if social services could do anything to help.

“No, no. She won’t say a word against him, she won’t. He’s got such a hold on her, I don’t think she’s got a mind of her own any more.”

I felt deeply sorry for this poor woman, and her silly daughter. But most of all I felt sorry for the two little boys, whom I had seen in a pitiful state on the occasion when I had interrupted a fight. And now a third child was coming.

I said, “My main reason for coming to see you is about the new baby. Molly is booked for a home confinement, but that, I believe, is only because you had cleaned the place up before our assessment.” She nodded. “We think now that a hospital delivery would be best, but she has got to book it, and she must go to antenatal clinics. I don’t think she will do either. Can you help?”

Majorie burst into tears again. “I’ll do anything in the world for her and the kiddies, but the Turd, he won’t let me go near them. What can I do?”

She bit her fingernails and blew her nose.

It was a tricky situation. I thought perhaps we would simply have to refuse a home delivery, and inform the doctors. Molly would then be told that she must go into hospital when labour started. If she refused antenatal treatment, that would be entirely her own fault.

I left poor Marjorie to her sad thoughts, and reported back to the Sisters. A hospital confinement was in fact arranged without Molly’s active consent, and I thought that would be the last we heard of her.

It was not to be. About three weeks later the Midwives received a phone call from Poplar Hospital asking if we could arrange post-natal visits for Molly, who had discharged herself and the baby on the third day after delivery.

This was almost unprecedented. In those days it was accepted by everyone, medical and lay people alike, that a new mother should stay in bed for two weeks. Apparently Molly had walked home, carrying the baby and this was considered to be very dangerous. Sister Bernadette went straight round to Baffin Buildings.

She reported back that Molly was there, looking a good deal cleaner, but as sullen as ever. Dick was not at home. He was supposed to have been looking after the children whilst Molly was in hospital, but whether he had or not was anyone’s guess. Majorie had offered to take care of them, but Dick had refused, saying they were his kids, and he wasn’t going to let that interfering old bag poke her nose into his family.