The Complete Call the Midwife Stories Jennifer Worth 4 Books Collection Collector's Gift-Edition (Shadows of the Workhouse, Farewell to the East End, Call the Midwife, Letters to the Midwife)

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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. She met her last illness with courage. Jennifer was determined to put into practice the ideas that she wrote about in her last book, In the Midst of Life (2010) – namely, the absolute dignity of the dying person, whose wish for a natural end should be respected. Jennifer had a very happy family life, the deep peace of a life well lived, and a death committed to God. Really enjoyed it. The stories were engrossing, the people were fascinating, and the 1950s East End setting was easy to imagine and immerse into.

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! The tuberculosis/pub/Julie's story was utterly depressing. I felt so sorry for Julie, she lost all her siblings, wasn't really loved by her parents, and then lost her own beloved child. She didn't deserve all that loss and suffering, at least she still had her pub at the end, which was probably some comfort to her. There was no house by the sea any more. It had been sold to one of my aunts, but Jennifer and I never went there again.” Mary, Mrs Jenkins, Conchita's, and Ted/Winnie's story were the most moving and impactful for me. Conchita was amazing to cope with so many pregnancies, and Ted was the best husband and father ever — their stories put a huge smile on my face. But reading about Mary and Mrs Jenkins was so sad and upsetting, they had such terrible hardships and it was clear that they never got a happy ending in life… They deserved much more than what they got.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.” Jennifer was in her 60s when she began drawing on her experiences and wrote Call the Midwife, the first in the trilogy that spawned the TV series. “Although I knew she was writing, I did not know precisely what the book would be about until it was published in 2002,” says Christine in her book. Edit: This is where I got angry. Really angry. In a passage describing how married women were "free" to cheat on their husbands because a pregnancy wouldn't be as difficult as for a single woman, Worth writes: I'm writing this as I'm just about halfway through so I may revise this later. For now, oh man. I have some issues with this book. I started reading it after I watched all of the first season of Call the Midwife on Netflix. I loved the show and got excited to see they were based on actual books. The story with Hilda/the abortionist/chamber pot baby and the Swedish ship/incest/ship's woman were horrifying. How could a dad let his entire crew (inc. himself) sleep with his daughter for decades just so the men would be happier and work harder? Ugh, the perverted paedo.

Call the Midwife (Jennifer Worth, RN RM, first published in 2002 by Merton Books. Republished in 2007 by Orion).Closed after the outbreak of war, it was discovered by Christine and Jennifer. Too tempting. “We just climbed over the rails and found all these rusting skates hanging out of the cupboards. And so we decided to try them!” Christine said. I liked the way the author gives a balanced presentation about workhouses - that the theory behind them was good, and that in some ways this system under good Masters did serve a social purpose, and I liked the ending of the book which recorded how one woman said the workhouse had been her life-line. When Jennifer Worth met Jane many years after her workhouse experience, she could not reconcile the story of that lively child with the woman she saw before her. The Jane that Jennifer Worth met never spoke above a whisper and moved about as if she were expecting someone to strike her. She seemed to live in a perpetual state of anxiety and she was consumed by her need to be approved of by the sisters of Nonnatus House. In the end, Jane's story DID have a happy ending. One of the nuns engaged in a bit of matchmaking and Jane married a kind man… a reverend.. who performed missionary work in Africa. Jane finally belonged to someone.. and he belonged to her. Although created with the best of intentions, the workhouses were soon managed by heartless, ruthless masters set on gaining a profit, and humiliating those seeking refuge. The rules regarding admittance and life inside made my blood run cold. Those children that survived and made it out never recovered from the effects thereafter. She is survived by her beloved husband Philip, their daughters, and three grandchildren, Dan, Lydia and Eleanor.

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. a very powerful and moving account of life in Britain from the early 20th century to the late 1950s

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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."

Midwifery in the East End with some more youthful moments thrown in like friendships and a crazy night trip to Brighton! There's Jane, who cleaned and generally helped out at Nonnatus House - she was taken to the workhouse as a baby and was allegedly the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat. Peggy and Frank's parents both died within 6 months of each other and the children were left destitute. At the time, there was no other option for them but the workhouse. The Reverend Thornton-Appleby-Thorton, a missionary in Africa, visits the Nonnatus nuns and Sister Julienne acts as matchmaker. And Sister Monica Joan, the eccentric ninety-year-old nun, is accused of shoplifting some small items from the local market. She is let off with a warning, but then Jennifer finds stolen jewels from Hatton Garden in the nun's room.The second section focuses on Sister Monica Joan. That was very well-written and much more immediate, dealing as it did with events that happened to and around Worth herself. It was also the part that was the least gripping for me - simply because I find the character of Sister Monica Joan far less interesting than any of the other nuns. 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. For the working class, life was nasty, brutish and short. Hunger and hardship were expected. Men were old at forty, women worn out at thirty-five. The death of children was taken for granted.