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

In the houses she was bluff and gruff, and not at all polite (I thought), but nonetheless everyone seemed to take it in good part.

“Now then, Mr Thomas, have you got your sample ready? Don’t keep me waiting; I’ve got to test it, and I haven’t all day to hang around waiting for you. Right, hold still for the injection. Hold still, I said. Now, I’m off. If you start eating sweets, they’ll kill you. Not that I would care, and I dare say your missus would be glad to see the back of you, but the dog would miss you.”

I was shocked. This was no way to talk to patients, according to the nursing textbooks. But the old man and his missus roared with laughter, and he said: “If I goes first, I’ll keep a place warm for yer, eh, Sis Evie? An’ we can share the ol’ toasting fork.”

I thought she would be furious at such effrontery, but she stomped downstairs in good humour, with “Out of my way, boy” to a child we met in the passage.

Her good humour, and her rough badinage with all the patients, continued throughout the morning. I ceased to be startled, because I realised that this was what the patients liked about her. She approached them all without a trace of sentimentality or condescension. The older Docklanders were accustomed to meeting middle-class do-gooders, who deigned to act graciously to inferiors. The Cockneys despised these people, used them for what they could get, and made fun of them behind their backs, but Sister Evangelina had no patronising airs and graces. She would have been incapable of them. Imagination was not her strong point, and she could not have contrived nor invented anything. She was unswervingly honest, and reacted to every person and every situation without guile or affectation.

As the months passed I began to understand why Sister Evangelina was so popular. It was because she was one of them. She was not a Cockney, but had been born into a very poor working-class family from Reading. She never told me this (she hardly ever spoke to me) but, from remarks made to the patients, it became perfectly clear. For example, “These young housewives, they don’t know they’re born. What! A lavatory in every flat? Remember the old middens, do you, Dad, and the newspaper on the seat, and queueing up in the frost when you’re bursting?” This was usually followed by laughter, and some coarse lavatorial humour, ending up with the old chestnut about the chap who fell in a midden and came up with a gold watch. Lavatory humour was not considered vulgar or in bad taste amongst the working class during the early part of the last century, because the natural bodily functions were a conspicuous event. There was no privacy. A dozen or more families shared one midden, which had only half a door, the upper and lower portions being missing. So everyone knew who was in it, could hear everything and, above all, could smell everything. “She’s a stinker” was not a moral observation, but a statement of fact.

Sister Evangelina shared this robust humour. Before an enema: “Now then, Dad, we’re going to put a squib up your arse, shake your insides about a bit. Got the jerry ready, Mother, and the clothes pegs to clip on our noses.” Laughter would continue about how he hadn’t “been” for a fortnight, and there must be a turd inside as big as an elephant’s. And no one was the slightest bit embarrassed, least of all the patient.

No, indeed, Sister Evangelina was not humourless. The only trouble was that at Nonnatus House her humour was different from everyone else’s. She was surrounded by middle-class values, and the safety-valve of humour, which was common to all the nuns, was perpetually closed to her. She simply couldn’t understand their jokes, so she always had to watch to see when everyone else was laughing and then joined in, somewhat half-heartedly.

Equally, her own brand of humour would definitely not have been appreciated in the convent. In fact it would have been greeted with severe disapprobation. Perhaps she had tried in the past, and been required by the Reverend Mother to do penance for loose or unguarded speech, so the young novice had simply buttoned herself up, and outwardly appeared solemn and heavily serious. It was only with her patients in the docklands that she could truly be herself.

Even her speech slipped from the middle-class pronunciation that she had acquired over the years into an approximation of the Cockney dialect. She never spoke broad Cockney - that would have been an affectation of which she was incapable - but certain phrases and idioms came naturally to her. She would talk freely about “Mystic Spec”, which puzzled me greatly, until I discovered it was Cockney slang for Mist. Expect., “Mist.” being medical Latin, short for “mixture”, and “expect.”, short for “expectorant”. This meant Ipecacuanha, which could be bought at any chemist’s, and was the sovereign remedy for just about everything. She also talked about “pew-monica” for pneumonia, and “the screws” for rheumatism, “Uncle Dick” for a bit sick, or “a touch of the inkey blue”, meaning flu. She had a variety of expressions for an intestinal disorder - the runs, the squitters, the gripes, the cramps, the needles - all of which were greeted with howls of laughter. She obviously understood a lot of Cockney rhyming slang, although she did not use it much. Having said that, I remember being flummoxed when she told me to get her “weasel”, and just stared at her, not daring to ask what she meant. Someone else fetched her coat.

She shared the older people’s fear of hospitals, a fear which was widely expressed through scorn and derision. Most hospitals in England, even in the 1950s, were converted workhouses, so the buildings alone had an aura of degradation and death for people who had lived all their lives with the terror of being sent to the workhouse. Sister Evangelina did nothing to dispel this fear of hospitals; in fact she actively encouraged it, an attitude that would have been heavily censored by the Royal College of Nursing, had they known about it. She would say things like, “You don’t want to go into hospital to be messed about by a lot of students”, or “They only make out they treat the poor for the benefit of the rich”, both statements implying that the hospitals liked to experiment on their poor patients. She proclaimed, from experience, that women who went into hospital with complications after a back-street abortion were deliberately given a rough time. That Sister Evangelina was incapable of inventing, or even exaggerating, anything, spoke to the truth of her statement. Whether or not such treatment was widespread in England in the early part of this century I am unable to say. However, in the mid 1950s, I had witnessed the appalling truth of her remark in a Paris hospital, an experience I have been unable to forget to this day.

Sister Evangelina had plenty of homespun advice to offer her patients: “Where-ere you be, let your wind go free”, to which the reply was always chanted: “In Church and Chapel let it rattle”. Once an old man followed this by “Oops! sorry, Sister, no disrespect”, and she replied, “None taken - I’m sure the Rector does it an’ all.” Constipation, diarrhoea, leeks and greens, gripes and pipes, flutes and fluffs provided more hilarity than any other subject, and Sister Evangelina was always in the thick of it. After recovering from my initial shock, I realised that it was not considered to be vulgar or obscene. If the Kings of France had been able to defecate daily before his entire Court, so could the Cockneys! On the other hand, sexual obscenities and blasphemy were strictly taboo in respectable Poplar families, and sexual morality was expected and enforced.

But I digress. Sister Evangelina interested me greatly because of her background: the slums of Reading in the nineteenth century, and the fact that she had raised herself from abject poverty and semi-literacy to become a trained nurse and midwife. It would have been hard enough for a young man, but for a girl to break free from ignorance and poverty and become accepted in a middle-class profession was exceptional. Only a very strong character could have achieved it.