
Call the Midwife - Jennifer Worth
- Hardback
- Condition: Good
- 440 pages
- Non-Fiction: Memoir, History
- Book 1/3 in The Midwife Trilogy
Life in London's docklands in the 1950s was tough. The brothels of Cable Street, the Kray brothers and gang warfare, the meths drinkers in the bombsites - this was the world that Jennifer Worth entered when she became a midwife at the age of twenty-two. Babies were born in slum conditions, often with no running water. Yet the Cockney people, survivors of the war who crowded into bomb-torn tenements, showed her another side of life - a true sense of community, extended families, warmth, fun and bawdy humour.
Attached to an order of nuns that had been working in the slums since the 1870s, Jennifer tells the story not only of the women she treated, but also of the close community of nuns and of the other midwives with whom she trained. She describes the romance and beauty of the great port of London, the bug-infested tenements, the spectre of disease and the incredible resilience of women who bore more than ten children.