First, the voice of Jenny. She is candid and real - her storytelling doesn't sugar-coat her experiences or her mistakes. She never pretends that the East End was anything other than what it was: a hard place to live where people still found things worth living for. She shares her prejudices with us and shows us how they crumbled as she became more intimate with the people she cared for, both as a midwife and as a nurse. Life in the convent, its routines and relationships - Jenny relates these things with an unaffected and honest candor. Every once and a while the narrative felt a bit jumpy (moving between time periods, etc.), but because I was interested wherever she took me, it didn't bother me. Jennifer never allowed the challenges of life to defeat her. Some years ago, she suffered from a painful bout of eczema and asthma. She undertook a regime of swimming and bicycling, as well as home cures, and detailed some of her ideas in Eczema and Food Allergy: The Hidden Cause? (1997).

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. As such, this book might usefully be required educational reading for every budding social worker, nurse, and care worker.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. 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.

I preferred the format of this one compared to the second book, there was a lot more focus on Jenny's experiences, her patients, and midwifery in general.

Become a Member

Some of the characters didn’t come across as quite the same as in the TV series. Others like Sister Julienne came across so clearly. Sister Monica Joan provides a number of moments of amusement. Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is in itself the very stuff of drama and melodrama” (p. xi). Yet in all probability it will be as a major historical document that her trilogy enjoys its most enduring reputation. By the late 1950s slum clearance and comprehensive redevelopment were starting to transform large parts (including Poplar) of the East End, far more effectively than the Luftwaffe had ever managed; and by the end of the 1960s they were almost wholly unrecognisable from the intimate, squalid, overcrowded, intensely human environment that had sprung up during the 19th century and then stayed largely unchanged. She marries a Scottish man called Philip Worth. Philip was staying with his pregnant cousin Jeanette who was a patient of Jenny’s. He was an artist. They would leave Poplar together and marry. They have two daughters together, Susannah and Juliette. Philip suggests Jenny should write a memoir about her experiences.