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

I squeezed past the ladder and the prams in the hallway, and was directed down to the basement kitchen. Len Warren was sitting on a wooden chair by the table, comfortably smoking a roll-up. A baby was on his knee, another crawled along the table, and he had to keep pulling him back by his pants to prevent him falling off. A couple of toddlers sat on his foot and he was jigging them up and down singing, “Horsey, horsey don’t you stop”. They were screaming with laughter, and so was the father. Laughter lines creased his eyes and nose. He was older than his wife, about fifty-ish, not at all good-looking in the conventional sense, but so frank and open, so downright pleasant-looking, that it did your heart good to see him.

We grinned at each other, and I told him that I wanted to examine his wife and take some notes.

“That’s OK. Con’s doing the supper, but I spek she can leave it to Win.”

Conchita was calm and radiant, standing by the boiler, which in the morning had been doing the washing and was now cooking an enormous quantity of pasta. Copper boilers were common in those days. They were tubs, large enough to contain about twenty gallons, standing on legs, with a gas jet underneath. A tap at the front was the means of emptying them. They were intended for washing, and this was the first time I had seen one used for cooking, but I surmised that this would be the only way of catering for such a huge family. It was sensible and practical, if unusual.

“Here, Win, you tek over the supper, will you, love? Nurse wants a look at yer mum. Tim, come ’ere, lad, you tek the baby, an’ keep them two away from the boiler. We don’t want no accidents in vis ’ouse, do we now? An’ Doris, love, you lends a hand to our Win. I’ll tek yer mum and the nurse upstairs.”

The girls spoke rapidly to their mother in Spanish, and Conchita came towards me, smiling.

We went upstairs, Len chatting all the time to different children, “Now then Cyril, now then. Let’s get that lorry off them stairs, shall we, there’s a good lad. We don’t want the nurse to break ’er neck, do we nah?

“Good on yer, Pete. Doin yer ’omework. He’s a scholar, our Pete. He’ll be a professor one of these days, you’ll see.

“’Allo, Sue, my love. Got a kiss for yer ol’ dad, then?”

He very seldom stopped talking. In fact I would say that in all my acquaintance with Len Warren, he never stopped talking. If occasionally he ran out of something to say, he would whistle or sing - and all executed with a thin roll-up in his mouth. These days health workers would be very disapproving about smoking around babies and a pregnant woman, but in the fifties no connection had been made between smoking and ill health, and nearly everyone smoked.

We went into the bedroom.

“Connie, love, the nurse just wants to have a look at your tum.”

He smoothed down the bed, and she lay down. He started to pull up her skirt, and she did the rest.

Her abdomen showed stretch marks, but nothing excessive. From appearances, this could have been her fourth pregnancy, not her twenty-fourth. I palpated the uterus - about five to six months.

“Any movements?” I enquired.

“Oh yeah, yer can feel the li’l soul kickin’ an’ wrigglin’. He’s a right little footballer, that one, ’specially at night when we wants ’a get some sleep.”

The head felt uppermost, but that was to be expected. I couldn’t locate the foetal heart, but with all the kicking described, it hardly mattered.

I examined the rest of her. Her breasts were full, but firm - no lumps or abnormalities. Her ankles were not swollen. There were a few superficial varicose veins, but nothing serious. The pulse was normal, as was her blood pressure. She seemed to be in perfect condition.

I wanted to try to establish her dates. Merely going on clinical observation can be deceptive. A small baby and a large baby of the same gestation can give the appearance of about four to six weeks’ difference, so you need some dates to back up observation. However, with a baby of about seven to eight months old downstairs, it seemed unlikely that Conchita had had a period at all. I was not accustomed to asking such delicate questions of a man. In the 1950s such things were never mentioned in what was called “mixed company”, and I felt myself blush scarlet.

“Ah, nah, nuffink like that,” he said.

“Could you ask her, please; she might not have mentioned it to you.”

“Yer can tek it from me, nurse, she ain’t ’ad no periods for years.”

I had to leave it at that. If anyone knows, he should, I thought.

I mentioned that we had an antenatal clinic every Tuesday, and we preferred patients to come to the clinic. He looked dubious. “Well, she don’t like goin’ out, yer know. Not speakin’ the lingo an’ all, like. And I wouldn’t want ’er to get lost or frightened, like. ‘Sides, she’s got all them babies to look after at home, yer know.”

I didn’t feel I could insist, so I put her down for home antenatal visits.

In all this time, Conchita hadn’t said a word. She just smiled, and submitted passively to being felt and prodded all over, to hearing herself talked about in a foreign language. She got up from the bed with grace and dignity, and moved to the chest of drawers, searching for a hairbrush. Her black hair looked even more beautiful being brushed, and I observed hardly a grey hair. She adjusted the crimson band, and turned with proud confidence to her husband, who took her in his arms and murmured, “There’s my Con, my gel. Oh yer looks lovely, my tresher.”

She gave a contented little laugh, and nestled in his arms. He kissed her repeatedly.

Such a display of unashamed love between husband and wife was unusual in Poplar. Whatever the relationship in private, the men always kept up a show of rough indifference in front of other people. A good deal of lewd banter often went on between them, which I found very amusing, but they did not openly speak of love. I found the tender, gentle and adoring looks of Len and Conchita Warren very affecting.

I returned many times to the house over the next four months, checking Conchita’s progress. I always went in the evenings, in order to speak with Len about the pregnancy. Anyway, I liked his company, liked listening to him talk, enjoyed the atmosphere of this happy family and wanted to find out more about them all. This was not difficult, due to Len’s insatiable volubility.

Len was a painter and decorator. He must have been a good one because 90 per cent of his jobs were “up West”. “All the nobs’ houses” was how he described his work.

Three or four of his elder sons worked with their father in the business, and apparently he was never short of work. With low running costs there must have been quite a bit of money coming into the household. Len worked from home, from his shed in the backyard, where he also kept his barrow.

Workmen in those days didn’t have vans or trucks to go around in. They had barrows, usually made of wood, and often homemade. Len’s was made out of the chassis of an old pram, with the upholstered pram part removed, and an elongated wooden construction fitted to the highly sprung base. It was perfect. The springs made for lightness of movement, and the huge, well-oiled wheels made it easy to push. When going out to a new job, Len and his sons would load up the barrow with their equipment and push it to the address. They may have had to push for ten miles or more, but that was all part of the job. In that respect, a painter and decorator was lucky, because a job usually lasted a week or so, and they could leave their stuff at the house and go home by tube as far as Aldgate.

Plumbers, plasterers and suchlike were less fortunate. Their jobs usually lasted only a day, so they had to push the tools to the job, and then push them home in the evening. In those days you would see workmen laboriously pushing their barrows all over London. They had to walk on the road, which held up the traffic considerably. But drivers were used to it and just accepted it as part of the London scene.