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

He didn’t speak. He just looked at me solemnly, and shook his head.

I loosened the flannel sheet, and the baby lay naked on my knee. There was a united gasp, and several voices cried, “What’s that?”

“That is part of the cord,” I explained. “When Carol was in her mother’s tummy, she had a cord linking her to her mother. Now that she is born, we have cut it off, because she doesn’t need it any more. You all used to have a cord where your tummy button is.”

Several skirts were pulled up, or trousers down, and several tummy buttons were proudly shown to me.

I took the baby in my left hand, with her head resting on my forearm, and immersed her whole body in the water. She wriggled her tiny limbs, and kicked and splashed. All the children laughed, and wanted to join in.

Ivy said firmly, “Now mind what I says. No noise. You don’t want to frighten the baby.”

There was instant silence.

I patted the baby dry with a towel, and said, “Now we must put her clothes on.”

All the little girls wanted to help, of course. It was just like dressing a doll. But Ivy restrained them, saying they could dress Carol later, when she was a bit bigger. Suddenly, at that moment, there was a piercing scream from a little girl. “It’s Percy! It’s Percy! He’s come to see the baby. He knows, and he wants to say hello.”

There were shrieks from the children, and Ivy’s discipline ruled no more. They were all pointing in one direction, clamouring round something on the floor.

I followed their gaze and, to my astonishment saw, progressing slowly and in a stately manner from under the bed, an exceedingly large tortoise. He looked one hundred years old or more.

Dave roared with laughter. “Of course he wants to see the baby. He knows all about it. He’s a clever one, our Perce.” He picked the tortoise up, and the children tickled its wrinkled old skin, and felt its hard toenails.

“Perhaps he wants his Christmas dinner an’ all. We’ll get ’im some, shall us?” Dave said.

Most of the children were now more interested in the tortoise than in the baby, and Ivy wisely said, “Off you go, downstairs, an’ see about Percy’s Christmas dinner.”

The children left and I was told the reason for this apparition. Percy was kept in a cardboard box under the bed to hibernate for the winter. The bedroom was usually cold. The warmth from the fire, and, perhaps, the movements for several hours, must have woken him up, and, thinking it was spring, he had made his appearance. In theatrical terms, his timing was perfect.

It was seven o’ clock by the time I had packed up and was ready to leave. But Dave wouldn’t let me go. “Come on, nurse. It’s Christmas day. You’ve got to wet the baby’s head.”

He pulled me towards the back room where the bar was to be found.

“What’s yer poison, then?”

I had to think quickly. I had had only half a Christmas lunch, and nothing to eat since then. Spirits would have knocked me out, so I accepted a Guinness and a mince pie. I didn’t really want to hang around. The delivery had been a beautiful Christmas experience, but the party was really not my scene. I had loved hearing it in the background, but to be in the midst of all those buxom, hiccupping aunts with their paper hats and red-faced, sweating uncles, was more than I could take at that moment. I just wanted to be alone.

Out in the street, after the excessive warmth of the delivery room, the cold cut me like a knife. It was a cloudless night, and the stars shone brightly. There was very little street lighting in those days, so starlight was a reality. A heavy frost had descended in all its beauty, covering the black stones of the pavements, the walls, the houses, even my bicycle. I shivered, and decided I must pedal very hard to keep myself warm.

Only a mile or two away from Nonnatus House a sudden impulse made me turn right into West Ferry Road and on to the Isle of Dogs. To go all the way round the Isle before rejoining the East India Dock Road is a seven or eight mile ride, and I can’t tell you what prompted me to do it.

No one was about. The docks were closed, and the ships in port were silent. The splash of the water was the only sound as I cycled over the West Ferry Bridge. On the Isle there were no lights, apart from the starlight and the Christmas tree lights in the windows of many houses. The great, majestic Thames was on my right, closely guarding all its secrets. I cycled more slowly, as though afraid to break the spell. As I turned westwards, a low moon started to rise, and a silver path shone across the river from Greenwich to my feet, or so it seemed. I had to stop my bicycle. It looked as though I could have walked on silvered feet from the north to the south bank of the Thames.

My thoughts were fleeting and flickering, like the moonlight on the water. What was happening to me? Why was the work so engrossing? Above all, why were the Sisters affecting me so deeply? I remembered my scornful reaction, only twenty-four hours earlier, to the crib in the Chapel, and then the calm beauty of Sister Bernadette’s face as she said her daily office by the soft moving flames. I couldn’t match the two up. I couldn’t understand. All I knew was that I couldn’t dismiss it.

‘Is that Jenny Lee? Where the hell have you been hiding all this time? We haven’t heard from you in months. I had to get on to your mother to find out where you were. She said you are a midwife in a convent. I had to tell her, gently, that nuns don’t do it, so she must be wrong, but she wouldn’t listen. What? You are? You must be mad! I’ve always said you had a screw loose somewhere. What? You can’t talk? Why not? The house phone reserved for expectant fathers! Look, that’s not funny. All right, all right! I’ll hang up, but not till you agree to meet us at the Plasterer’s Arms on your evening off. Thursday? OK that’s a date. Don’t be late.”

Dear Jimmy! I had known him all my life. Old friendships are always the best, and childhood friends are very special. You grow up together, and know the best and the worst of each other. We had played together for as long as I could remember, then left home and gone our separate ways, only to meet again in London. Jimmy and his friends came to all the parties and dances organised in the various nurses’ homes to which I was attached, and I joined their fraternity in sundry pubs in the West End when I could. It was an excellent arrangement, because they could guarantee meeting lots of new girls, and I could enjoy their company without any commitment.

I had no boyfriends at all when I was young. This was not (I hope) because I was unattractive or boring or sexless, but because I was so in love with a man I couldn’t have, and for whom my heart ached more or less all the time. For that reason no other male held the slightest romantic interest for me. I enjoyed the company and conversation of my men friends, and their lively and wide-ranging minds, but the mere idea of a physical relationship with any man other than the one I loved was abhorrent to me. In consequence I had a great many friends, and was in fact very popular with the boys. In my experience nothing arouses a young man’s interest more than the challenge of a pretty girl who for some inexplicable reason does not appear to find him the sex symbol of the century!

Thursday evening came. It was nice to be stepping up west for a change. I had found life with the sisters and the work in the East End so unexpectedly absorbing that I hadn’t wanted to go anywhere else. However, the chance to dress up couldn’t be resisted. Dress was rather formal in the 1950s. Long full skirts that flared outwards at the hem were in vogue; the smaller the waist and the tighter the waistband the better, irrespective of comfort. Nylon stockings were fairly new, and had seams that, de rigueur , had to be straight up the back of the leg. “Are my seams straight?” was a girl’s constant worried whisper to her friends. Shoes were killers, with five to six inch steel-capped stiletto heels and excruciating pointed toes. It was said that Barbara Goulden, the top fashion model of the day, had had her little toes amputated in order to squeeze her feet into them. Like all the smartest girls of the day, I would totter around London in those crazy shoes, and wouldn’t have been seen dead in anything else.