Heidi Thomas - The Life and Times of Call the Midwife - The Official Companion to Series One and Two

‘No,’ I said to Pippa, ‘I don’t think it’s for me.’ Pippa didn’t listen. She and I have known each other for many years, having worked on our very first television job together – the series Soldier, Soldier – in the 1990s and there was a touch of stuff-and-nonsense in her tone.

‘Just read it,’ she said. ‘I know you, and I know you won’t be able to put it down.’

‘But it’s set in the 1950s!’ I replied, rather weakly. ‘It’s not historical, and it’s not modern either. It just won’t be my cup of tea – I want to do another Gaskell, or a Dickens.’

Pippa sent it to me anyway. I read it, and she was right – I couldn’t put it down until I’d finished. I can still recall the weight of it in my hands (this was the early, hardback edition) and the way my wrists ached as I compulsively turned page after page. It was my first encounter with the magic of Call the Midwife , and I will remember it all my days: the first sighting of the youthful Jenny Lee, picking her wasp-waisted way through the bomb sites of Poplar; the first batty utterance from Sister Monica Joan; the first time Chummy tumbled from her bike.

Over and over again, I was surprised and delighted by the characters, the stories and the sheer muscular vigour of Jennifer’s writing. I have never been sure whether I devoured the book, or the book devoured me, but by the time I closed it and crawled into bed, the die was cast: I was on board, and wouldn’t rest until I had brought Call the Midwife to the screen.

Looking back, I actually made that decision when reading page thirteen. I know this because my original copy of the book still sits on my desk, and I can see that on page thirteen I underlined a single sentence in pencil, and wrote one word in the margin alongside it. That word is ‘YES’, and it marked the first time Call the Midwife made me cry. In the middle of a crisp, factual description of childbirth in a working-class London home in the 1950s, Jennifer had dropped one beautiful comment that transcended all barriers of geography, class and time. It was this:

‘How much more can she bear, how much can any woman bear?’

Those words went straight to my heart. Here, at last, was a book that told the unflinching truth about an experience that defines the lives of women the world over, and has done so for countless generations. Furthermore, birth is something that happens to us all. We must all be born, just as we all must die. It is the one common miracle, an experience that unleashes every emotion we possess. As a midwife, Jennifer understood this more than most, and by setting down her memoirs, she shone an unprecedented light on her own profession.

In turning the books into a television series, it became my privilege to continue the work that Jennifer started. Much laughter was had – and many more tears shed – as the show evolved.

Getting a TV drama to the screen is always something of a journey. As the writer, I travelled alone at the outset. But Call the Midwife rattled onwards, a bit like a train, stopping to pick up people along the way. Producers, designers and directors came aboard. As filming approached, we were joined by actors, technicians and composers. There were babies in the mix, and medics to advise us. The challenges were legion, but we were a happy band, and this book is our attempt to share the graft, grind and sheer exhilarating joy of going back to the 1950s to make the show we loved so much.

As I write these lines, the cameras are about to start turning on the second series of Call the Midwife . Jennifer Worth died two weeks before we had begun to film the first. She would call me sentimental for this, but I find it impossible not to picture her standing alone on a railway platform, having got off the train several stations too soon.

Ours was an unusual friendship. Jennifer was bossy and I am stubborn, so it could have been a disaster. When we were first introduced, each of us was quite rightly nervous of the other. But in that rare way that happens when minds truly meet, we soon bypassed all the niceties and joined forces. That was that; we were in it together. And we still are.

On my desk, tucked into my very first copy of Call the Midwife , is the final letter Jennifer wrote to me. It contains some thoughts on the last script she was well enough to read. She ends, in her elegant spidery hand, with the words, ‘I leave it to you with confidence.’

But Call the Midwife is not mine, and I do believe that deep down Jennifer never really felt that it was wholly hers either. She always insisted that, in the books, she was simply bearing witness to the lives of others. In writing the television series, I followed her example and tried to do the same. Because birth is in the possession of humanity itself, and from our very first breath, these are stories we all share.

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