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Mixed genres & speculations aside, I must say, this was an interesting & compelling, if sometimes terribly brutal read. However, as life itself is a mixture of loveliness & brutality, her accounts (a good 98% true overall, I’d say) make her literary works all the more profound. Mrs. Worth succeeds quite well in explaining the reasons behind the emergence of the dreaded workhouses and how, although established through good intentions, they failed abysmally. Most successfully conveyed, with heart-wrenching detail (even if some is speculative) is the way the author brings to life for the reader, how a life of constantly inflicted degradation within the walls of these sorely misguided institutions resulted in the devastating physical, emotional & spiritual crippling of many of societies poorest of the poor. I love this author - she writes so redemptively. The author chronicles a lot of sadness of the poor in this book and it will take a few days for some of it to sink in, and parts of the book really affected me emotionally.
Really enjoyed it. The stories were engrossing, the people were fascinating, and the 1950s East End setting was easy to imagine and immerse into. Lee was hired as a staff nurse at the London Hospital in Whitechapel in the early 1950s. With the Sisters of St John the Divine, an Anglican community of nuns, she worked to aid the poor. She was then a ward sister at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in Bloomsbury, and later at the Marie Curie Hospital in Hampstead. Two social interactions mentioned by the author which governed life in the old East End, are physical violence and community singing. The former is, alas, still with us, not improved by the use of illegal drugs; the latter has been seen off by the invention of technology which isolates the listening individual from group participation. More striking is her description of the havoc wreaked by disease; two examples being in the tragedy and treatment of tuberculosis (a victory even now, in 2013, not entirely won) and the massive social change resultant from the invention of the chemical contraceptive pill. Throughout the 1950s the Sisters delivered around 100 babies per month; a figure which by 1964 had fallen to 4 or 5 (pg. 313). For years, I had wondered why I could not get near my sister, and had never felt able to ask her. The wall she constructed around herself was too solid to breach. Now I understood why she was so remote. She was much too proud to ever have told me how she really felt. What I can say is that even knowing what I do now does not change the way I feel about her. I loved her, and I know that she loved me.”I did notice however that the audiobook version differs from the printed one, for example the story of an old Boer War veteran, in the audio version one of the twin sons is court martialed and executed, while in the printed version one twin dies and the other is missing presumed dead. I wonder why there are two different versions; it is possible that the author included a deserter’s execution to make the story more poignant? this discrepancy makes me question the authenticity of the story, is this a fact or fiction? I know some readers took exception with a vividly described scene of a young girl's induction into prostitution. This was also a very memorable episode arc in the show. I think Jennifer Worth is to be commended for showing how gritty life could really be in the East End. While the show never attempts to shy away from the harsh realities that people were living in at the time, it's Jennifer Worth's words that really drive home the spirit of what the East End women really endured. No matter how harsh the realities are, new life endures, and with it, new hope. Summary: Jennifer Worth's memoirs of her time as a midwife in the East End of London in the 1950s. There's stories of herself, her patients, and the nuns she lives and works with… And they're all great. Some of her patients include Mary and Pearl Winston. She has also nursed Joe Collet, Doris Aston, Monique Hyde and even her friend Jimmy when she was seconded. However the patient that shaped her the most was Lady Browne, Chummy's mother who inspired her to shift careers and work with the dying. Christine writes: “While working with the nuns, she learned to respect the power of prayer and was drawn by the tranquillity that seemed to emanate from the sisters. In the end, though, the life of a nun was not for her. ‘I could do poverty and chastity, Chris, but never, ever obedience!’ she said.” Jennifer was working at a maternity home near Hampstead in the 1960s when she took in a lodger, Philip Worth. Lodger and landlady married in 1963 and a daughter was born the following year.
She is survived by her beloved husband Philip, their daughters, and three grandchildren, Dan, Lydia and Eleanor. This is the second book by Jennifer Worth about her time as a midwife in London's East End during the 1950s. I loved the first book, Call the Midwife, and this one didn't disappoint either. Once again, Worth recounts the grinding poverty and unimaginable living conditions of the day. Once again, I'm astounded that this is a time within living memory and not some distant century; my mother would have been a young girl then. Midwifery in the East End with some more youthful moments thrown in like friendships and a crazy night trip to Brighton! Additionally, when Worth wants to make a moral point, she tends to ruin it by showing and then also telling, in very didactic terms. The story of her changing attitude toward religion is also predictable, superficial, and ultimately unsatisfying.However, it is also a glimpse of what the poor went through during that time frame. Mostly living in tenements or council housing, huge families lived in just a couple of rooms. Many of the women gave birth to more than TEN children—of course many didn't survive childhood, but it wasn't uncommon for women to have 13 or 14 births and ten kids to take care of. One woman in the book had the midwives out for her 24th birth!! This same woman, despite not speaking a word of English, instinctively hit on a modern treatment for premature babies, which was to “wear” the baby next to her skin in a sling. We now know that this helps the baby stay warm which means it uses fewer calories and needs less oxygen, but at the time, premature babies were generally whisked away and put in incubators with no cuddling or love. I decided to read this book because I recently watched the BBC/PBS show "Call the Midwife", which is based on the memoirs by Jennifer Worth. I absolutely fell in love with the TV show-- it has a perfect mix of happy and sad, with great characters.
In this 3rd and last volume of the “Call the Midwife” series, Jennifer Worth ties the loose ends of her first two volumes describing the hardships and joys of nursing in the East End in the 1950s. In the early seasons of the show, St. Joseph's Missionary College in London was used as a filming location for Nonnatus House, but the building was sold, leading the cast and crew to move to a new Nonnatus—a set built at Long Cross Film Studios in Surrey. In addition to the exterior of the house itself, the set also includes the famous arch leading up to Nonnatus, Fred's garden allotment, Violet's shop, and some of the adjacent streets and buildings to create an authentic feel. Was Poplar really like it's shown on the show? In the early 1950s she became a staff nurse at the London hospital in Whitechapel, east London. There she lived with an Anglican community of nuns, the Sisters of St John the Divine, who worked among the poor and who inspired her lifelong dedication to the Christian faith. The friendships between Jenny, the midwives, and the nuns was wonderful. There was no negative feelings, jealousy, or resentment between them even though they worked such long hours and were constantly under high pressure. They were supportive, caring, and all around good people. Similarly, the varying roles of the nurses of Nonnatus House—including home visits for the elderly and infirm as well as prenatal care—would have been representative of the kind of work nurses during the time period would have done as part of the National Health Service or NHS. The NHS was instituted after the end of WWII as part of the UK's welfare state in an effort to ensure that all Britains had access to medical care.Others have noticed that the tales of people Worth couldn't possibly have known when they were young have been rather heavily embroidered, and I think we stray more into fiction than memoir at various points. But that doesn't make the stories any less entertaining, indeed compelling, and this book gets five stars simply for being a goldmine of great stories centered around the East End, complete with vivid renderings of dialect and slang.
Well, half a century is a long time and everything has changed. I would say there is more anxiety attending childbirth these days; more caesarian sections, more inductions, more drugs, more drips, more medicine in other words. Childbirth has drifted away from being a natural event into a medical condition requiring medical treatment. In 'Shadows of the Workhouse', Ms. Worth relates a number of heartbreaking stories of people she met who had been housed in these workhouses; and it was clear that if you had the misfortune of entering these institutions as a child, you would come out of the experience forever changed and sometimes irreparably broken. Ms. Worth writes…."For the working class, life was nasty, brutal and short. Hunger and hardships were expected. Men were old at forty. women worn out at thirty-five. The death of children were taken for granted. Poverty was frankly regarded as a moral defect……" The first section was about the workhouses and the children who were forced to live there. It was awful reading about how the workhouse kids were treated, how their spirits were broken, and how most people believed they deserved to be treated like utter rubbish even though they couldn't help the circumstances they were born in. It was kind of terrifying that such atrocities only occurred in very recent history. After devouring, within 2 days, and very much enjoying the first book in this trilogy entitled Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy and Hard Times, which is presented in a more traditional memoir format, I'm sorry have to admit that I’m ever so slightly irritated with the second book. Whereas the first book was more expressive of Mrs. Worth’s own personal experiences as both a nurse and midwife and spoke of several of her patients, the second book in the series is more of a social commentary, accompanied by second hand stories as well as the author’s own experiences. While I can & did appreciate the social commentary, what I found just a tiny bit irritating was that Mrs. Worth chose to include speculative dialogue in her second book; for she could not have possibly known the thoughts of several of the characters nor been privy to certain conversations such as the ones she writes of having taken place between such persons as Sir Ian and his wife or the workhouse Master & Mistress. However, in continuing to thoroughly enjoy the read, I soon forgave her this.In this,the second book of the trilogy, Jennifer Worth writes more specifically about a number of the people she met while attending to her duties as midwife. Not only are these stories a personal accounting of the grinding poverty and hardships experienced by the people, they are also a sociological commentary on what was a common practice in the time period at the beginning of the 20th century. She describes the development of workhouses, which to me, were nothing more than the sanctioned institutionalization of the poor.I suppose the intentions in developing the workhouses could have been good ones; but as with many ideas which are based on good intentions, the workhouses turned out to be a horrible, dehumanizing experience for those who were corralled inside of them… mothers, fathers and children… all housed separately so they could not even offer each other the smallest comfort. What began as theoretically a solution to the housing of the poor and homeless became places of imprisonment, overseen by often cruel 'masters'. Also in the first book, Ms Worth takes the reader with her on a bicycling tour (the nuns used bicycles to get around), witnessing what it was truly like to be a midwife in some of the most harrowing circumstances. Women gave birth in the most deplorable conditions in tenements which were overcrowded and filthy… some of which were the remainders of buildings which had actually suffered damage from German bombs during World War II. Ms Worth relates humorous tales and tales that will absolutely break your heart. I couldn't help but feel such sadness at the thought of each new child fighting his way into a life full of such squalor and desperation. It seems to me that with as difficult as life can be, at the very least, EVERY child should enter the world in much better circumstances. The first section, dealing most specifically with the children of the workhouse, was horrifying and heartbreaking to read. Unfortunately, the very style that Worth employs to make it more real and personal - telling the stories from the children's perspective - also works against her in making it seem more like fiction. That's the difficulty, I think, in trying to include other people's lives in a memoir. I did enjoy her account of Sister Julienne's matchmaking instinct, and Jane's makeover! While this sounds horrific, these kids were much better off than the orphaned ones. They went to “the workhouse”, where they were separated from their siblings and raised in what was the equivalent of prison.
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