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

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

“Do not ask me to immortalise the great Mystery of Life. I am just a humble worker. For beauty, look to the Psalms, to Isaiah, to St John of the Cross. How could my poor pen scan such verse? For truth, look to the Gospels - four short accounts of God made Man. There is nothing more to say.”

She looked unusually tired that day and, as she lay back on the pillows, the wintry light from the window accentuating her pale, aristocratic features, my heart filled with tenderness. I had come to a convent by mistake, an irreligious girl. I would not have described myself as a committed atheist for whom all spirituality was nonsense, but as an agnostic in whom large areas of doubt and uncertainty resided. I had never met nuns before, and regarded them at first as a bit of a joke; later, with astonishment bordering on incredulity. Finally this was replaced by respect, and then deep love.

What had impelled Sister Monica Joan to abandon a privileged life for one of hardship, working in the slums of London’s Docklands? “Was it love of people?” I asked her.

“Of course not,” she snapped sharply. “How can you love ignorant, brutish people whom you don’t even know? Can anyone love filth and squalor? Or lice and rats? Who can love aching weariness, and carry on working, in spite of it? One cannot love these things. One can only love God, and through His grace come to love His people.”

I asked her how she had heard her calling, and come to be professed. She quoted lines from The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him down the arches of the years;

I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

I hid from Him.

I asked her what was meant by “I fled Him”, and she became cross.

“Questions, questions - you wear me out with your questions, child. Find out for yourself - we all have to in the end. No one can give you faith. It is a gift from God alone. Seek and ye shall find. Read the Gospels. There is no other way. Do not pester me with your everlasting questions. Go with God, child; just go with God.”

She was obviously tired. I kissed her and slipped away.

Her constant phrase, “Go with God”, had puzzled me a good deal. Suddenly it became clear. It was a revelation - acceptance. It filled me with joy. Accept life, the world, Spirit, God, call it what you will, and all else will follow. I had been groping for years to understand, or at least to come to terms with the meaning of life. These three small words, “Go with God”, were for me the beginning of faith.

That evening, I started to read the Gospels.

London Cockney is as distinct and as clearly defined a dialect as Scottish or Yorkshire or any other. Its origins can be traced back to Kentish, East Anglian, Mercian and Saxon speech forms. Certain idioms of colloquial Cockney language appear in Chaucer.

I have never understood why Cockney speech is said to be lazy English. It is the opposite. Cockneys love language, and use it continually, with a rich mixture of puns, slang, spoonerisms and rhymes. They carry a verbal library of anecdotes, ditties and yarns in their heads, which can be improvised to suit any occasion. They love long, colourful words. They can throw in description and simile with lightning speed, with a sure instinct for effect. Rhythm is important, and the compelling rhythm of a cockney dialogue is equal to that of a Mozart opera. Cockneys have a verbal mastery second to none in my opinion. The only trouble is, it is so fast and so idiomatic that it goes straight over the heads of most people.

To listen to a group of Cockneys talking together, when they do not suspect they are being overheard, is like listening to another language. Most people will only be able to understand the odd word here and there. The speed of speech goes like an express train. Half a dozen words are slurred, condensed, abbreviated, swallowed whole, and the end result is one word, understandable to another Cockney, but to nobody else, for example Wachoofinkovisen? (What do you think of this, then?)

To achieve this rapid delivery of speech, an essential device has been developed to a high degree of perfection - the glottal stop. This is a consonant sound, easier to execute than to explain. Most consonants are produced by the tongue, teeth and hard palette. The glottal stop is produced by rapid opening and shutting of the glottis (the entrance to the windpipe). It is a conscious action, but with continued use becomes unconscious. Cockney babies, in my experience, used to produce this sound before they could speak.

Singers use the glottal stop to prefix a vowel. It is used a great deal in the German language. In English it is used to separate two vowels in words like ‘pre-empt’, ‘re-enforce’, ‘co-opt’, ‘re-enter’, and a few others. Most people saying these words will place a glottal stop between the vowels, and the movement can be felt in the throat.

Cockneys use the glottal stop to replace ‘t’ and several short words. Phonetically, the glottal stop is represented by two dots ‘:’ like a colon. The words ‘water’ or ‘little’, written with a glottal stop, become wa:er, li:le. Thousands of English words contain ‘t’ and to replace them all with a glottal stop sign makes the written word look ridiculous. Consider: ‘ eedin:aw::oo ’ave ’i:i: (he didn’t ought to have hit it.)

This rapid succession of vowels would be unintelligible in speech without the use of the glottal stop.

‘t’ can come in for other changes. Sometimes it becomes a ‘d’, e.g. bidda budder (bit of butter), arkadim (hark at him), all ober da place (all over the place).

‘t’ followed by ‘r’ becomes ‘ch’, e.g. chrees (trees), chrains (trains).

‘t’ followed by another word beginning with a vowel again becomes ‘ch’, e.g. whachouadoin’ov? (what are you doing?), doncha loike i:? (don’t you like it?).

Sometimes ‘t’ is heavily emphasised, becoming ‘ter’, e.g. gichaw coa-ter, we’re goin’ah-ter (get your coat, we’re going out).

‘th’ is nearly always replaced by ‘f’ or ‘v,’ e.g. vis , va ’, vese and vose (this, that, these and those); and fink , fings , fanks , frough (think, things, thanks, through).

‘f’ and ‘v’ were so common in the 1950s and the sound was so impressed into my aural memory that I have found it very difficult to write the Cockney speech without using them. Ve baby , ve midwife , and so on, came more naturally than Standard English. The widespread use of ‘f’ and ‘v’ may have arisen early in the twentieth century because practically all men, and not a few women, usually had a limp, wet Woodbine hanging off the lower lip. The articulation of an ‘f’ or ‘v’ would leave the soggy appendage undisturbed, but the fricative ‘th’ might result in it being spat out!

Over decades speech changes, and I believe that the ‘f’ and ‘v’ are dying out. Perhaps this is because cigarettes are filter tipped and thrown away! The succulent remains of a Woodbine are not preserved and cherished and rolled around the lips as they used to be.

On the subject of change, the Dickensian reversal of ‘v’ and ‘w’ seems to have dropped out of Cockney speech altogether, e.g. vater (water) and wery (very). Occasionally an old-fashioned shopkeeper (are there any left?) can be heard to say welly good, sir , but not welly often!