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Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End
Автор: Jennifer Worth
Текст читает Nicola Barber
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Leaving a middle-class childhood to become a midwife in London’s poor East End, Jennifer Worth not only delivered babies, she touched numerous lives and recounted with depth the heartrending story of a neighborhood in transition. Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End is the last book in Worth’s memoir trilogy, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “powerful stories with sweet charm and controlled outrage” in the face of dire circumstances.
Here, at last, is the full story of Chummy’s delightful courtship and wedding. We also meet Megan’mave, identical twins who share a browbeaten husband, and return to Sister Monica Joan, who is in top eccentric form. As in Worth’s first two books, Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times and Call the Midwife: Shadows of the Workhouse, the vividly portrayed denizens of a postwar East End contend with the trials of extreme poverty—unsanitary conditions, hunger, and disease—and find surprising ways to thrive in their tightly knit community.
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Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End
Автор: Jennifer Worth
Текст читает Nicola Barber
Описание
Leaving a middle-class childhood to become a midwife in London’s poor East End, Jennifer Worth not only delivered babies, she touched numerous lives and recounted with depth the heartrending story of a neighborhood in transition. Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End is the last book in Worth’s memoir trilogy, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “powerful stories with sweet charm and controlled outrage” in the face of dire circumstances.
Here, at last, is the full story of Chummy’s delightful courtship and wedding. We also meet Megan’mave, identical twins who share a browbeaten husband, and return to Sister Monica Joan, who is in top eccentric form. As in Worth’s first two books, Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times and Call the Midwife: Shadows of the Workhouse, the vividly portrayed denizens of a postwar East End contend with the trials of extreme poverty—unsanitary conditions, hunger, and disease—and find surprising ways to thrive in their tightly knit community.
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This is a compelling, thought provoking look at midwifery in the slums of post war London. Reading this affirms my feeling that it's a miracle so many healthy babies have been born over the centuries to mothers who made it through the birth just fine. Some of the book was too graphic for me, but it's easy enough to skip a few pages. Highly recommend.
Rating: 4:) :) :) : )
Jennifer Worth is the bomb-dot-com. Read it all!
Rating: 5Jennifer Worth is the bomb-dot-com. Read it all!
Digital audiobook narrated by Nicola Barber. Originally titled: The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy and Hard Times. This was renamed to coincide with the popular television series. And in case you haven’t seen the TV show, the subtitle is really all the synopsis you need.Worth was a 22-year-old young woman, with no particular religious affiliation, who found herself assigned to Nonnatus House, a convent, for her training as a midwife. She got an excellent education, more practical experience than she bargained for, and an appreciation for the spiritual beliefs that helped the sisters cope with the realities of their work. Worth has been criticized for how brutally honest and graphic some of these recollections are. But I was not particularly bothered by this. She was working in an impoverished area of London, in the 1950s. Times were hard, many buildings were still in dilapidated condition following damage sustained in WW2, prostitution was rampant, and tenements were crowded. I felt that the gritty reality of her experiences added to the memoir.She also makes time to show the tenderness of a loving marriage, parents who are devoted to raising their children despite their limited resources, and friends / colleagues on whom one can rely. I think she did a good job of honestly recollecting her experiences during this time frame.The printed book includes a Appendix that addresses the difficulties of “writing the Cockney dialect” and a glossary of terms. These are not included in the audio version.Nicola Barber does a fine job narrating the audiobook. I’m sure that my devotion to the TV series helped, because I clearly pictured the scenes/actresses from the show.
Rating: 4This woman has seen a lot. Being a midwife really gets you in amongst the real lives of people, and it shows with this book. The author went from nursing into midwifery training under the care of Nuns, and even though she wasn't religious, lived in the convent while practicing. 1950s East End London was a poor and rough place but her nurses uniform afforded her respect. Just how poor and crowded the area was shocked me. Most families lived packed into small 2 room places, and it was the norm to have at least 5 or 6 kids. Most families kept clean and tidy homes, but descriptions of some who lived in squalor- piles of human waste indoors, flies, half naked dirty children- astounded me. People couldn't afford to get a doctor for the delivery of a baby, and as mothers grandmothers, aunts and any older woman about could tell you, you didn't really need one. Such was the level of knowledge amongst them all, things were managed at home with the local midwife and GP if needed. Chapter by chapter Worth reveals the personal stories of the people she encountered in the course of her early career. So often, the stories are sad. Families were destroyed upon the early death of the husband/father, and few options were left for a mother trying to support a large brood of kids, and little or no income and no social security. Alcoholism, prostitution, condemned housing tenements. And then stories of loving and supportive families, sober hard-working, proud men who loved and helped their wives in the home- which was so unheard of then. The mixed bag that is humanity. A fantastic social history.
Rating: 5I loved this memoir into the life of midwife Jenny Lee. She writes with poignant and in depth detail of her cases and her personal life. This book will move you, have you laughing, have you astonished, and at times near tears. I can't wait to read the next book.
Rating: 5Summary: In the 1950s, Jenny Lee arrives at St. Nonnatus House in the East End of London. She was trained as a nurse and was now to apprentice with the nuns of St. Nonnatus to learn midwifery. In post-war London, contraception was rare and unreliable, families were large, wages from jobs at the docks were low, and home births were common, so the midwives of Nonnatus House were a vital part of their community. Call the Midwife is a memoir of Nurse Lee's first few years at Nonnatus, and through her, we get to know the other inhabitants of Nonnatus House, from the sharp tongued Sister Evangelina to the aging and increasingly distracted Sister Monica Joan. We also get glimpses into the lives of the people of the East End, including a woman with twenty four children who spoke no English, a young Irish girl who ran away from a terrible situation at home only to find herself turned out as a prostitute, and an older woman who is still haunted by her time in the workhouse. Through them, Jenny learns the craft of midwifery, and finds kindness and cruelty, heartache and hope, and ultimately, compassion and faith. Review: I had never heard of these books before I began watching the TV series on PBS. And I absolutely fell in love with the show - it reliably makes me cry both happy and sad tears, sometimes at the same time, and it's just warm and caring and full of people who care for and about each other, and I just find it absolutely delightful, even though midwifery is not something I would necessarily care about in and of itself. And while I will do my best to review the book separate of the TV show, the truth is that they're very much intertwined. Many of the stories in this book have been used as episode plots in the show, sometimes with minor or not-so-minor changes, but pretty much all of the bones of this book were stories I was familiar with. This wasn't necessarily a hindrance - the book does present things in a somewhat different light than the show, with more detail and more contextual and historical information than can be presented in the television show. I also knew the main characters quite well before I started the book, so I can't really judge how well the book does in terms of characterization - it feels fabulous but that could just be because I already had them well pictured in my head. (The one exception is Chummy, who's one of my favorite parts of the show but appears in the book much less than I was expecting/hoping.)I listened to the audiobook of this, which was great as well; Worth does her best to transcribe the Cockney dialect (the printed version has an appendix with a dialect and pronunciation guide!), but nothing beats hearing it out loud.Overall, I really enjoyed this book, as I rather suspected I would. The stories don't always connect to one another cleanly, and there are some places where I got the sense that Mrs. Worth was over-editorializing or romanticizing her life (not often, though; she's usually pretty straightforward about the bad parts along with the good.) But it's also interesting from a historical perspective as well as a personal one - the 1950s don't seem like all that long ago, and yet it was a very, very different world in many ways. But the human element of the story has remained remarkably similar, and that's the part I enjoyed most. This book just felt warm and welcoming and full of compassion and grace, which made for a lovely listening experience. 4 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: Fans of the TV show will find much that's familiar (and therefore much that's enjoyable) about the book. Otherwise, it's an interesting piece of medical and social history that's told from a very humanizing perspective.
Rating: 4A true account of a young midwife's experiences in a poor section of England in the 1950's. The vibrancy with which the author recounts her experiences amazed and fascinated me, especially since she wrote about things 50 years later!
Rating: 5I really enjoyed this book - it was a tremendous memoir. I loved the characters (the actors in the TV series were very well matched). I loved reading about the history of the convent and the sisters and about the East End of London in the 1950s. My dad was born in Stepney so must have lived in these atrocious conditions. My heart goes out to all of those poor women who had to live in such abject poverty.Back Cover Blurb:At the age of twenty-two, Jennifer Worth leaves her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in post war London's East End slums. The colourful characters she meets while delivering bables all over the East End of London - from the plucky, warm-hearted nuns with whom she lives, to the woman with twenty-four children who can't speak English, to the prositutes and dockers of the city's seedier side - illuminates a fascinating time in history. Beautifully written and utterly moving, Call the Midwife will touch the hearts of anyone who is, and everyone who has, a mother.
Rating: 5Medical care in the slums East London set in the 50's hardly seemed appealing but I am trying to be more open minded in my choice of reading material. I have never watched the series either. The beginning of the book had me telling myself "I told you so". My attention kept wandering but I was not ready to abandon the book yet. I am really glad I stuck it out because the stories told by Jenny were interesting. Some of them were funny and charming while others were heartbreaking. This is not a gentle book. Some of the stories are a bit graphic but I would say they appear realistic.
Rating: 4Each chapter is a story of the difficulties of daily life for women; illegal abortion, premature birth, diseases that we never think about today. The stories are about very real people and their resilience in very difficult situations. I enjoyed the PBS series, I loved the memoir.
Rating: 5A truly fascinating biography that hooked me right away. The stories are heartbreaking, funny and completely eye opening about giving birth in the east end of London during the 50s and 60s. Jennifer is candid and honest about the conditions she worked in, the poverty and abuse she saw. But also the beauty she found in the simple joys of people who did not have much. Some of the stories are quite funny and others so painful to read, you will find tears running down your eyes. You will fall in love with the nuns she worked with and her patients. You will also learn so much and truly be grateful (and somewhat saddened strangely enough) by the changes in medical practices dealing with childbirth (Done it twice myself, and holy hell thank you I cannot imagine what would have happened to Jacob if I had giving birth during that era) I really enjoyed the story about Princess Diana's bodyguard and also the one about the husband who accepted another mans child as his own. I will be picking up the other books by her before I sit down to watch the series.
Rating: 5An interesting look back to a not-so-distant time when obstetrics and maternity medicine was still in its infancy.
Rating: 4Absolutely charming....and if you are a grammarian, do not miss the Appendix which gives a brief education on the Cockney language - the language of Shakespeare and King Henry VIII!
Rating: 4This is a memoir of a nurse midwife during the 1950's living and working in the heart of London Docklands. Being a nurse myself, I had many laughs about the stories shared in this book.
"Why did I ever start this? I must have been mad! There were dozens of other things I could have been - a model, air hostess, or a ship's stewardess. The ideas run through my head, all glamorous, highly paid jobs."
Although deeply rewarding, the life of a midwife can be filled with both joy and sorrow. It is a true calling requiring dedication and compassion.
Rating: 4"Why did I ever start this? I must have been mad! There were dozens of other things I could have been - a model, air hostess, or a ship's stewardess. The ideas run through my head, all glamorous, highly paid jobs."
Although deeply rewarding, the life of a midwife can be filled with both joy and sorrow. It is a true calling requiring dedication and compassion.
Not sure what to say. I liked it. There were several interesting and fun characters- and I'm sure I learned much more than I ever thought I would.
However, my first thought was... I can't read every detail about every birth person has witnessed. After the first chapter, it moved into other stories, some of which were excellent. My only objection was - it felt a little choppy. (Because it really was a book with many different scenarios, it felt like a book of short stories, and I'm not a fan.)
Rating: 4However, my first thought was... I can't read every detail about every birth person has witnessed. After the first chapter, it moved into other stories, some of which were excellent. My only objection was - it felt a little choppy. (Because it really was a book with many different scenarios, it felt like a book of short stories, and I'm not a fan.)
This is the last of the three books in Jennifer Worth's trilogy about her life as a midwife in London's East End, and this book is the weakest of the three. While some of the stories from the television series are here, there is way too much technical jargon, as well as expository chapters about the conditions of London's East End, medical practices, etc. for this to be a truly enjoyable read.I did, however, like reading the real story of Chummy's romance with the policeman and the further stories of Sister Monica Joan, and as such it's a good companion to the televised series.
Rating: 3I enjoyed the whole series
Rating: 4These three books are based on the journal of a young midwife working in London's poor lower east end post WW II. The stories evoke so many mixed emotions. Very good glimpse at the post war era in London.
Rating: 4so interesting to listen to life back then and the way people lived in different parts of the world. Very good diary of an interesting person's life.
Rating: 3Love these books by Jennifer Worth. This one was one of the best as it wraps up her time at Nonnatus house (a convent which provides widwifery services to the poorest of the poor in the east end London). Such horrifying and beautifully written stories. Makes me feel very lucky to be living in a time when I can give life to my beautiful girls without worrying how I will feed them or if they will fit into our bomb site one bedroom apartment.
Rating: 5Being quite interested in the days gone by... i stumbled across this book a while ago by chance, the book itself contains the memoirs of a young midwife. The book was wonderful and easy to read probably because it feels a little like a diary of events. The book is ideal to pick up and put down as the chapters are broken down detailing individual cases / patients. The recent tv series that was adapted from the book was also entertaining and casting Miranda Hart as Chummy was spot on
Rating: 4The third of Jennifer Worth's memoirs of her times as a nurse/midwife in London's 1950's East End.. Her books have been the basis of the wildly popular series "Call the Midwife." Her very personal stories about her friends and their patients are interspersed with discourses on poverty, birth control, abortion, and tuberculosis. I found the personal stories far more successful and grew to love Trixie, Cynthia, Chummy and Sister Monica Joan and the other nuns of St. Nonantus House.
Rating: 4
Loved knowing how it ends for all the characters. Thank you for sharing.
Rating: 4A young nurses accounts of what it was like working in the East End of London in the 1950's. An enjoyable eye-opening read. I loved reading the accounts of how things were and it makes you appreciate how well things are now and we really have nothing to complain about. The conditions in which these families were living were actually awful but they had to make do and got on with it. The birth rate was absolutely huge as well with women having up to 25 babies - my goodness! Thank goodness for contraception. Also the fact that babies are living when being born prematurely and the maternal death rate has decreased dramatically. Reading of how things were for the nurses/midwives was very interesting. They had a huge workload and Jenny seemed very devoted. Overall a great insight and its definitely worth reading.
Rating: 4I was fascinated by this window into the lives of women in London's East End in the 1950s. It made me realize, once again, how much the lives of women have changed in the last 60 years.
Rating: 5Too disturbing for me were the chapters detailing rape and abortion and infanticide. I was looking forward to more uplifting scenes of birth and pregnancy. I know there is a lot of horrible stuff that has happened to women but at least balance it out with the good. I felt this volume of stories was very depressing and graphic with gratuitous descriptions of violence against women and children.
Rating: 2I would give the writing style of this book a 3 star, but I found the stories very interesting and unusual. There is a lot of "hard times" in it, but much goodness and joy as well. There is heroism as well as evil in what appears to have been everyday life among the poor. It struck me that this was at a time when I was about 4 years old. It was hard to see this as the same period of time that I was living in. I learned a lot from this book.
Rating: 4Well done audiobook with stories set in the 50s around life as a midwife in the East End of London amongst the poorest of the poor. Life was incredibly hard the assistance given by the midwives was invaluable in preserving lives and giving women safer pregnancies. A long gone time. Some of the stories were very touching.
3.5 stars.
Rating: 33.5 stars.
Call the Midwife is the story of a young nurse who learns midwifery from nuns in the slums of 1950s London. She lives at a convent dedicated to nursing the community and delivering babies of the area neighborhoods. She tells of her relationship with the nuns and how their faith affects her own life and beliefs. She describes some of the other nurses with whom she lives and comes to know as friends. And she portrays the people who live in this poverty-stricken area of London, how they live, love, suffer, and prosper. She gives many accounts of the deliveries that she is involved in and sometimes goes into quite a bit of detail! But it just shows the high expectations of the people regarding midwives at that time, and of the high esteem in which they were held. I thought this book was extraordinary and also liked that the author told some of the history of the area, of how the people lived and why, even getting into the issues of prostitution and workhouses. An amazing read!
Rating: 5I read this after falling in love with the show. It's the memoir of a midwife who served East End London during the 1950s. That a subject I never thought I'd be interested, but the stories are incredible. I will say this is one of the few examples of a book that is outshone by its film/TV counterpart. The BBC show is just wonderful!
Rating: 4