Excerpt
from The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy and Hard Times
by Jennifer Worth
Introduction
Nonnatus House was situated in the heart of the London Docklands.
The practice covered Stepney, Limehouse, Millwall, the Isle of Dogs, Cubitt
Town, Poplar, Bow, Mile End and Whitechapel. The area was densely
populated and most families had lived there for generations, often not
moving more than a street or two away from their birthplace. Family
life was lived at close quarters and children were brought up by a
widely extended family of aunts, grandparents, cousins and older
siblings, all living within a few houses, or at the most, streets of
each other. Children would run in and out of each other's homes all the
time and when I lived and worked there, I cannot remember a door ever
being locked, except at night.
Children were everywhere, and the streets were their playgrounds. In
the 1950s there were no cars in the back streets, because no one had a
car, so it was perfectly safe to play there. There was heavy industrial
traffic on the main roads, particularly those leading to and from the
docks, but the little streets were traffic-free.
The bomb sites were the adventure playgrounds. They were numerous, a
terrible reminder of the war and the intense bombing of the Docklands
only ten years before. Great chunks had been cut out of the terraces,
each encompassing perhaps two or three streets. The area would be
roughly boarded off, partly hiding a wasteland of rubble with bits of
building half standing, half fallen. Perhaps a notice stating DANGER --
KEEP OUT would be nailed up somewhere, but this was like a red rag to a
bull to any lively lad over the age of about six or seven, and every
bomb site had secret entries where the boarding was carefully removed,
allowing a small body to squeeze through. Officially no one was allowed
in, but everyone, including the police, seemed to turn a blind eye.
It was undoubtedly a rough area. Knifings were common. Street fights
were common. Pub fights and brawls were an everyday event. In the
small, overcrowded houses, domestic violence was expected. But I never
heard of gratuitous violence children or towards the elderly; there was
a certain respect for the weak. This was the time of the Kray brothers,
gang warfare, vendettas, organised crime and intense rivalry. The
police were everywhere, and never walked the beat alone. Yet I never
heard of an old lady being knocked down and having her pension stolen,
or of a child being abducted and murdered.
The vast majority of the men living in the area worked in the docks.
Employment was high, but wages were low and the hours were long. The
men holding the skilled jobs had relatively high pay and regular hours,
and their jobs were fiercely guarded. Their skills were usually kept in
the family, passed from father to sons or nephews. But for the casual
labourers, life must have been hell. There would be no work when there
were no boats to unload, and the men would hang around the gates all
day, smoking and quarrelling. But when there was a boat to unload, it
would mean fourteen, perhaps eighteen hours of relentless manual
labour. They would start at five in the morning and end around ten at
night. No wonder they fell into the pubs and drank themselves silly at
the end of it. Boys started in the docks at the age of fifteen, and
they were expected to work as hard as any man. All the men had to be
union members and the unions strove to ensure fair rates of pay and
fair hours, but they were bedevilled by the closed shop system, which
seemed to cause as much trouble and ill feeling between workers as the
benefits it accrued. However, without the unions, there is no doubt
that the exploitation of workers would have been as bad in 1950 as it
had been in 1850.
Early marriage was the norm. There was a high sense of sexual
morality, even prudery, amongst the respectable people of the East End.
Unmarried partners were virtually unknown, and no girl would ever live
with her boyfriend. If she attempted to, there would be hell to pay
from her family. What went on in the bomb sites, or behind the dustbin
sheds, was not spoken of. If a young girl did become pregnant, the
pressure on the young man to marry her was so great that few resisted.
Families were large, often very large, and divorce was rare. Intense
and violent family rows were common, but husband and wife usually stuck
together.
Few women went out to work. The young girls did, of course, but as
soon as a young woman settled down it would have been frowned upon.
Once the babies started coming, it was impossible: an endless life of
child-rearing, cleaning, washing, shopping and cooking would be her
lot. I often wondered how these women managed, with a family of up to
thirteen or fourteen children in a small house, containing only two or
three bedrooms. Some families of that size lived in the tenements,
which often consisted of only two rooms and a tiny kitchen.
Contraception, if practised at all, was unreliable. It was left to
the women, who had endless discussions about safe periods, slippery
elm, gin and ginger, hot water douches and so on, but few attended any
birth control clinic and, from what I heard, most men, absolutely
refused to wear a sheath.
Washing, drying and ironing took up the biggest part of a woman's
working day. Washing machines were virtually unknown and tumble driers
had not been invented. The drying yards were always festooned with
clothes, and we midwives often had to pick our way through a forest of
flapping linen to get to our patients. Once in the house or flat, there
would be more washing to duck and weave through, in the hall, the
stairways, the kitchen, the living room and the bedroom. Launderettes
were not introduced until the 1960s, so all washing had to be done by
hand at home.
By the 1950s, most houses had running cold water and a flushing
lavatory in the yard outside. Some even had a bathroom. The tenements,
however, did not, and the public wash-houses were still very much in
use. Grumbling boys were taken there once a week to have a bath by
determined mothers. The men, probably under female orders, carried out
the same weekly ablution. You would see them going to the bath-house on
a Saturday afternoon with a small towel, a piece of soap, and a dour
expression, which spoke of a weekly tussle once again waged and lost.
Most houses had a wireless, but I did not see a single TV set during my
time in the East End, which may well have contributed to the size of
the families. The pubs, the men's clubs, dances, cinemas, the music
halls and dog racing were the main forms of relaxation. For the young
people, surprisingly, the church was often the centre of social life,
and every church had a series of youth clubs and activities going on
every night of the week. All Saints Church in the East India Dock Road,
a huge Victorian church, had many hundreds of youngsters in its youth
club run by the Rector and no less than seven energetic young curates.
They needed all their youth and energy to cope, night after night, with
activities for five or six hundred young people.
The thousands of seamen of all nationalities that came into the
docks did not seem to impinge much upon the lives of the people who
lived there. "We keeps ourselves to ourselves," the locals said, which
meant no contact. Daughters were carefully protected: there were plenty
of brothels to cater for the needs of the seamen. In my work I had to
visit two or three of them, and I found them very creepy places to be
in.
I saw prostitutes soliciting in the main roads, but none at all in
the little streets, even on the Isle of Dogs, which was the first
landing place for the seamen. The experienced professional would never
waste her time in such an unpromising area, and if any enthusiastic
amateur had been rash enough to attempt it, she would soon have been
driven out, probably with violence, by the outraged local residents,
men as well as women. The brothels were well known, and always busy. I
daresay they were illegal, and raided from time to time by the police,
but that did not seem to affect business. Their existence certainly
kept the streets clean.
Life has changed irrevocably in the last fifty years. My memories of
the Docklands bear no resemblance to what is known today. Family and
social life has completely broken down, and three things occurring
together, within a decade, ended centuries of tradition -- the closure
of the docks, slum clearance, and the Pill.
Slum clearance started in the late 1950s, while I was still working
in the area. No doubt the houses were a bit grotty, but they were
people's homes and much loved. I remember many, many people, old and
young, men and women, holding a piece of paper from the Council,
informing them that their houses or flats were to be demolished, and
that they were to be rehoused. Most were sobbing. They knew no other
world, and a move of four miles seemed like going to the ends of the
earth. The moves shattered the extended family, and children suffered
as a result. The transition also literally killed many old people who
could not adapt. What is the point of a spanking new flat with central
heating and a bathroom, if you never see your grandchildren, have no
one to talk to, and your local, which sold the best beer in London, is
now four miles away?
The Pill was introduced in the early 1960s and modern woman was
born. Women were no longer going to be tied to the cycle of endless
babies; they were going to be themselves. With the Pill came what we
now call the sexual revolution. Women could, for the first time in
history, be like men, and enjoy sex for its own sake. In the late 1950s
we had eighty to a hundred deliveries a month on our books. In 1963 the
number had dropped to four or five a month. Now that is some social
change!
The closure of the docks occurred gradually over about fifteen
years, but by about 1980 the merchant ships came and went no more. The
men clung to their jobs, the unions tried to defend them, and there
were numerous dockers' strikes during the 1970s, but the writing was on
the wall. In fact the strikes, far from protecting jobs, merely
accelerated the closures. For the men of the area, the docks were more
than a job, even more than a way of life -- they were, in fact, life
itself -- and for these men, the world fell apart. The ports, which for
centuries had been the main arteries of England, were no longer needed.
And therefore the men were no longer needed. This was the end of the
Docklands as I knew them.
The above is an excerpt from the book The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times by Jennifer Worth. The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.
Reprinted by arrangement
with Penguin, a member of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from The
Midwife
Copyright © Jennifer
Worth, 2002