Discuss the Church’s decision to take away Mary’s baby. Would she have been able to provide for it without turning to prostitution? 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.

Continuing the popular “Call the midwife” trilogy, this second book contains many more stories of hardship, resilience, heartbreak, strength and courage featuring memorable characters from Poplar tenements (in London) in the ‘50s. Farewell to the East End (Jennifer Worth, RN RM, published in 2009 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and then Phoenix/Orion). Always remember you are part of the most wonderful, the most important, and the most privileged calling in the world. Nursing and midwifery are a vocation, not just a job.

READERS GUIDE

Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is in itself the very stuff of drama and melodrama” (p. xi). Call the Midwife (First book in the Midwife trilogy) Worth, Jennifer (September 2012). Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s. Orion Publishing Group, Limited. ISBN 978-0297868781. (2002)

In this educational, warm, easy, and humane book, the reader gets a glimpse of sleeping by the Cut, pig breeding, boys never found in secret hideouts, the discrete lives of nuns, and the maddening heartbreak of poverty, adoption, and brutal loss. 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? Not exactly. The show was inspired by a series of memoirs written by Jennifer Worth— Call the Midwife, Shadows of the Workhouse, and Farewell to the East End. Though many of the characters and situations, particularly in the early seasons, are borrowed from Worth's books, the show is nonetheless a work of fiction. Are any of the characters inspired by real people? 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.Despite my doubts, I enjoyed this second book as much as the first one and I will certainly finish the series. Well, in my day it was said that it took seven years to make a good midwife, so obviously experience counts a good deal. I think the innate ability to inspire confidence in a woman in travail must be high on the list. Training, knowledge, judgment, patience all come into it, and the capacity for hard work. Jenny" Lee was hired as a staff nurse at the London Hospital in Whitechapel in the 1950s. With the Sisters of St John the Divine, an Anglican community of nuns, she worked to aid the poor. [2] She was then a ward sister at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in Bloomsbury. She left midwifery to work in palliative care at the Marie Curie Hospice in Hampstead. [4] I admit to skipped through bits that described behaviour in the brothels. Too much info there that I did need to know. Didn’t need it to be graphically described how Mary got into prostitution. The midwives that Jennifer trained and worked with were mostly nuns. Some were peaceful, some were fierce. One nun, Sister Monica Joan, was very elderly and becoming senile, retired in Nonnatus House, where the nuns lived and operated. There were several funny anecdotes about her—at least they are funny now as they are read, I'm sure they were incredibly frustrating at the time!

Follows on a brother and sister who escape from the workhouse and become a couple living together, with a tragic end. Mr Collett's story was the most heartbreaking and moving, I couldn't stop thinking about it afterwards. He had such a hard life filled with so much tragedy, he was all alone and had no friends or family left. It was especially interesting to see the discussion on how much England's National Health Service changed health care for the people. Worth frequently comments that certain medical procedures had previously not been available or affordable to the lower classes. Based on the real Jenny Lee, the character is medium height and slender. Jenny has shoulder-length hair, maintained in a "bob" style. She has arched eyebrows, the fashion of the time, and large lips.A frank and unsentimental view of the conditions of the East End in 1950s London. Conditions were deplorable with overcrowding, poverty and large families with women producing more children each year. This was all before the Pill and other forms of contraception. Attitudes too were very closely aligned to gender and what was considered women’s work and what was men’s work. Rarely did those lines cross or even blur. Worth saw it all clearly, level-headedly and without illusion. We are fortunate she was there to capture with such compassion a world that – for good or ill – we have irrevocably lost. I had mixed feelings about Hilda's unwanted pregnancy — she already had loads of kids and the flat her family were living in was a dump, she and her husband couldn't cope with another baby. But what they did to the baby once it was born was awful. They were cruel to just let it drown in a chamber pot full of blood and afterbirth. Why couldn't they have left it at a church or the workhouse? Why did they have to let the baby die in such a horrific way? It was unforgivable what they did, no matter what their circumstances were. I loved Trixie, she had such a strong and endearing personality. I especially loved her no nonsense attitude and her refusal to pander or listen to anyone else's rubbish… She made a change from the usual doormats in literature. Frank and Peggy's relationship was engrossing to read about. They were siblings and also lovers, they didn't read as creepy or perverted though as their love came across as rather pure and beautiful. It wasn't a surprise they ended up being lovers, they didn't grow up together but since they only had each other and had no other love in their life the natural thing for them was to get together, it was the only thing that kept them going day to day. So yea, I was rooting for them to be happy, they should have been allowed that bit of peace. I was pissed that they had such a sad and somewhat bittersweet end.

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. Worth, Jennifer (2007). Eczema and Food Allergy: The Hidden Cause?: My Story. Merton Books. ISBN 978-1872560182. Christine explains: “It was during the writing of this book that my daughter told me of much that she and Jennifer had shared, and so I finally came to learn the painful truth... When Joanna revealed that all through Jennifer’s life she had felt eclipsed by me whenever I walked into a room. I was utterly horrified. Simply by virtue of my being the person I am, and looking as I do, my sister had felt diminished. This book is special. It is informative, keeps you attention every second of the way and draws you in emotionally. It mixes sadness and happiness. It has a touch of philosophizing, theorizing about life and death, but this is not overdone. It makes you stop and think about how you want to die. Both the prose and the layout are excellent. 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.

Success!

The structure of the book is anecdotal, but even I who dislikes short stories, was in no way disappointed. The sisters of the convent become as members of a family, each with their own idiosyncrasies. Each child born is a wonder. And Jennifer, the author, is surprisingly honest about her own weaknesses and failings. 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. In God's mercy, I met an allergy specialist, a man of eighty-four, who took pity on me and guided me through an elimination diet. Within three months the eczema had cleared. Orphaned brother and sister Peggy and Frank lived in the workhouse until Frank got free and returned to rescue his sister. Bubbly Jane's spirit was broken by the cruelty of the workhouse master until she found kindness and romance years later at Nonnatus House. Mr. Collett, a Boer War veteran, lost his family in the two world wars and died in the workhouse. I regret that I have not been able to get to know the men of the East End. But it is quite impossible. I belong to the women's world, to the taboo subject of childbirth. The men are polite and respectful to us midwives, but completely withdrawn from any familiarity, let alone friendship. There is a total divide between what is called men's work and women's work. So, like Jane Austen, who in her writing never recorded a conversation between two men alone, because as a woman she could not know what exclusively male conversation would be like, I cannot record much about the men of Poplar, beyond superficial observation."