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

In London, the smart West End call girls today normally work within a very expensive establishment with a few select clients, and can command enormous fees. These are usually very intelligent women who have worked it all out, planned it, studied it, and entered prostitution with a true professionalism. One such girl said to me: “You have to go into it at the top. This is not a job where you start at the bottom and work your way up. If you start at the bottom, you just sink lower.”

The vast majority of prostitutes start at the bottom, and their life is pitiable. Historically, prostitution has been the only means of earning a living for a woman who is destitute, particularly if she has children to feed. What woman worthy of the name Mother would stand on a high moral platform about selling her body if her child were dying of hunger and exposure? Not I.

Today - and indeed in the 1950s - such starvation is not seen in Western societies, but there is a different type of hunger which feeds the prostitution trade. It is starvation of love. Thousands run away from desperate circumstances, and find themselves alone and friendless in a big city. They are craving affection, and will attach themselves to anyone who appears to offer it. This is where the pimps and madams score. They offer the child food and lodgings and apparent kindness, and within days, prostitution is forced upon them. The only difference between the twenty-first century and the 1950s is that back then, the children procured for soliciting were around fourteen years of age. Today the age has dropped to as low as ten.

Mary’s lorry driver was heading for the Royal Albert Docks, and so he had dropped her off in Commercial Road. She told me, “I felt so terribly alone, more alone than I had ever felt before. In Ireland, when I was making my plans to come to London, I was all excited. The journey was thrilling, because I was going to the beautiful city of London, and I didn’t feel alone, because my thoughts were full of dreams. But when I got here I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

Who was it that said “’Tis better to travel hopefully than to arrive?” I daresay we have all experienced this in one way or another.

Mary went into a confectioner tobacconist, bought a bar of chocolate, and ate it as she wandered down the busy road. At the time, Commercial Road and East India Dock Road were said to be the busiest roads in Europe, because the Port of London was the busiest port in Europe. The continuous stream of lorries bewildered and frightened her. By contrast, Dublin had been as quiet as a country village. The shrill blast of a siren nearly gave her a heart attack, and then she saw thousands of men pouring out of the dock gates. She flattened herself against a doorway as they passed, chatting, laughing, squabbling, shouting and talking to each other. But not one of them spoke to the shy, small figure in the doorway. In fact it is doubtful if any of them even noticed her. She said, “I nearly cried with loneliness. I wanted to shout out ‘I’m here, just beside you. Come and say hello to me. I’ve come a long way just to be here.’”

She didn’t like Commercial Road much, so she turned off into a side street where she saw children playing. She was scarcely more than a child herself, but they didn’t want her to join in the game. She continued on until she came to what was known as the Cuts - the canal that went under Stinkhouse Bridge on its way to the Docks. It was pleasant standing by the bridge, looking down at the moving water, and she stood there a long time watching a water rat pop in and out of his hole and seeing the shadows lengthen.

“I just didn’t know what I was going to do. I wasn’t cold, ’cause it was summer, and I wasn’t hungry, ’cause that nice lorry driver had given me sausage and chips. But I felt so empty inside, and sick with longing for someone to talk to me.”

Night came, and she had nowhere to sleep, nor the money to purchase a night’s lodgings. She had already spent many nights in the open, and the prospect did not bother her. There were bomb sites all over the East End at the time, and she found one that looked as though it might do. However, it was a bad choice.

“I was woken in the night by the most terrible noise. Men screaming and fighting and cursing and swearing. In the moonlight I saw knives and flashing things. I crawled deeper into the hole I was in, and hid under some foul-smelling sacks. I just kept quite, quite still, and didn’t breathe. Then I heard the police whistles and dogs barking. I was frightened the dogs would smell me, but they didn’t. Perhaps the sacks I was under smelt so bad they couldn’t smell anything else.”

She giggled. I didn’t. My heart was too full for laughter.

Apparently she had stumbled into a bomb site regularly used by the meths drinkers. After the police had cleared the place, Mary crept out, and spent the rest of the night by the Cuts.

The next day was spent in much the same way as the first, just wandering around the Stepney end of Commercial Road with nothing to do.

“There were a lot of buses around, and I wondered if I should get on one and go somewhere else, because I didn’t really like it where I was. But they all said places like Wapping and Barking, Mile End, and Kings Cross, on the front, and I didn’t know where these places were. I had wanted to come to London, and the lorry driver said it was London when he put me down, so I didn’t get on a bus, because I wouldn’t know where I was going to.”

Two more days were spent like this. Completely alone, talking to no one, sleeping in the Cuts at night. On the third evening Mary spent the last of her pennies on a sausage roll.

The fourth day in London would have been without food, had she not seen an old lady in a churchyard feeding the sparrows with breadcrumbs.

“I waited until the old lady had gone, then I shooed the birds away, and crawled around scooping up the breadcrumbs and putting them in my skirt. The sun was shining, and the trees were nice. I saw a little squirrel. I sat on the grass and ate a whole lap full of breadcrumbs. They tasted all right. The next day I went to the churchyard again, thinking that the old lady would come to feed the birds. But she didn’t come. I waited the whole day but she still didn’t come.”

In the evening she scavenged some bits of food from a dustbin.

As she was talking, I wondered why it was that a bright young girl, who had had the initiative and enterprise to plan her journey all the way from Dublin, could not have been more resourceful and forward thinking when she arrived in London. There were places she could have gone - the police, a Catholic Church, the Salvation Army, the YWCA - where people would have helped her, sheltered her, and probably found her a job. But such a course of action did not seem to have occurred to her. Perhaps it would have done, given a little more time. But instead she met Zakir.

“I was looking in a baker’s window, sniffing the bread and thinking what I wouldn’t give to have some. He came and stood beside me, and said, ‘Do you want a cigarette?’

“He was the first person who had spoken to me since the lorry driver. It was so nice just to hear someone say something to me, but I didn’t smoke. Then he said, ‘Do you want something to eat, then?’ and I said: ‘I’ll say I do.’

“He looked down at me and smiled, such a lovely smile. His teeth were gleaming white, and his eyes were kind. He had beautiful eyes, a dark black-brown colour. I loved his eyes the moment I looked into them. He said, ‘Come on, let’s get some of their nice filled rolls. I’m hungry too. Then we’ll go and sit by the Cuts and eat them.’

“We went into the shop, and he bought lots of rolls with different fillings, and some fruit pies, and some chocolate cake. I felt very scruffy beside him, because I hadn’t washed or changed my clothes for days, and he looked so smart and well dressed, and had a gold chain on.”