Based on true stories, and set in the late Fifties, “Call
the Midwife” deserves to be described as a period piece. The classification
became evident on its sixth season, when the BBC series moved into more realistic
settings while tapping actual events that affected 1962 midwives and people in general.
The time has come to consider the staff of St. Raymond Nonnatus House and its
patients as part of the historical fiction realm.
Based on Jennifer Worth’s memoirs, “Call the Midwife” follows
the life and times of a group of midwives centered around St. Raymond Nonnatus
House, a religious nursing order located in London’s East End. On the first season,
we met upper-middle class Jenny Lee (Jessica Raine) who, in 1957, leaves behind
her world of Parisian trips and cocktail parties to work in Poplar, a low-income
neighborhood near the docks. Jenny’ slumming expedition is propelled by an
urgency to flee the married man she’s been involved with. The show’s first three seasons describes the
experiences of Jenny and her colleagues which include secular nurses as well as
midwife nuns. Jessica Raine left before the fourth season but the series has managed
to continue without her.
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| Jenny's arrival at Poplar |
Working in Poplar puts the Nonnatus personnel in contact with
patients afflicted by poverty, disease, and mistreatment. The show familiarizes
its audiences with the immigrants that turned the East End into a melting pot. We
have seen mothers coming from India, China and the West Indies. On several occasions,
the midwives have clashed with cultural mores that affect a patient’s health. On
Season 6, Val (Jennifer Kirby), new midwife and former military nurse, had to
help a Somalian suffering from a perilous infection due to sexual mutilation.
And yet, despite the nurse’s effort, the patient insisted on her eldest
daughter going through a ritual that seemed to be a point of pride among the
women of her culture.
Cultural struggle is an everyday thing in a diverse world as
Poplar is. It’s usually presented as a battle between old ways and
progress. On its sixth season, the show posed
the dilemma of an Asian girl conflicted between her modern lifestyle and the
traditional ways of her mainland China mother-in-law.
We also witnessed the
poignant case of a Holocaust survivor that since her release from the camps had
been suffering from agoraphobia. She finally discarded her fear and ventured into
the world to meet her grandchild.
“Call the Midwife” is steadfast in its denunciation of
racism. It began with the case of a young Jamaican mother’s introduction to
bigotry; then in a piquant moral tale of an adulteress whose black baby tells
of her indiscretion. This past year we got to see how interracial marriages affect
their offspring. Fleeing his chums’ prejudiced taunting, the son of a black
father and a white mother was accidentally run over by Nurse Crane (how lovely
to see Linda Basset from “Larkrise to Candleford,” again).
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| Nurse Crane in shock after running over a little boy. |
This is a wholesome show that doesn’t shy away from social
criticism. From bad housing conditions to work accidents due to an employer’s
negligence, all sorts of issues are exposed. The series frankly describes how
the authorities are not always on the side of the weak and the innocent. Babies
are taken away from whoever the authorities consider unfit mothers, whether
they are teen prostitutes or Down’s Syndrome patients. This past season showed
the law siding with a wife-beater instead of helping his abused wife and
children.
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| Fleeing from an unjust law. |
Sixties Britain is a changing world and nuns and nurses
adapt to it. In the early twentieth century, when Sister Monica- Joan (Judy
Parfitt) took the veil, her aristocratic family disowned her. In the late 1950s,
Lady Browne (Cheryl Campbell) may disapprove of her daughter marrying a
policeman or pursuing a career in midwifery, but she can’t stop Chummy (Miranda
Hurt) from following her call. The Honorable Camilla Fortescue-Cholmeley-Browne
is friends with Princess Margaret, but also feels at home with the East End
mothers she looks after.
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| Chummy's wedding |
Many viewers may stay away from “Call the Midwife” fearing
it will be full of religious preachiness. Quite the contrary. Faith plays an important
part in the nun’s lives, but religion does not become a divisive issue. The
nuns display an extremely open mind and so does Tom Hereward (Jack Ashton), the
young parish vicar, who at the end of this last season married nurse Barbara Gilbert
(Charlotte Ritchie). Weddings have
become a traditional way of giving closure to seasons, a detail that helps
identify “Call the Midwife” as a historical romance.
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| Barbara's wedding |
With all its traps,
romance has been a constant presence in the show. As the prettiest of the
bunch, Jenny and Trixie (Helen George) almost compete on who has the most
beaus. Their mutual attraction for the parish priest taxes the friendship
between Trixie and Barbara. Love comes to the oldest and the plainest. Fred
(Cliff Parisi), Nonnatus’ handyman, ends his loneliness when he marries Violet
(Anabelle Apsion), the local store owner. Even Phyllis, tall and plain, gets a suitor
who is hiding away a demented wife, just like in gothic romances. And Chummy, Nonnatus’
Brienne of Tarth, found herself a husband in the local constabulary.
Not even the nuns are free from Cupid’s arrows. On Season 3,
we discovered that proper and saintly Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) had a
lover in the days when she was just “Louise.” Nonnatus most daring romance was that of Sister
Bernadette (Laura Main), Sister Julienne’s right hand. A no- nonsense,
pious nun, she suddenly became rebellious, despondent and longing for things
that apparently could not be found in contemplative life. The source of Sister
Bernadette’s problems had first and last names: Dr. Patrick Turner (Stephen
McGann) who headed the neighbor’s infirmary. After surviving a bout of TBC, the
nun decided to be plain “Shelagh” and wear the doctor’s ring. Their engagement
closed Season 2 and their wedding took place on the Christmas Special.
All these contacts with love pangs have prepared the midwives,
with or without wimples, to face passion’s consequences, which usually lead to
wanted and unwanted pregnancies. Over the years, “Call the Midwife” has been a
Ripley’s Believe or Not, when it comes to strange romantic liaisons. For example,
the elderly couple who were in fact brother and sister, or the twin sisters
that shared the same husband.
On the first episode, Jennie attended a Spanish war bride’s
labor. Her husband, a former member of the International Brigades, had brought
her over in ‘39’and since then she had been delivering a baby per year. Extraordinarily,
the active baby-making had been conducted with none of the partners speaking
each other’s language. The nuns reminisced that when Conchita had arrived in
London she couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old. What today would
have been construed as child abuse had no repercussions in an era when the age
of consent was much younger than now. In fact, in Spain it still is fourteen.
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| Conchita's children |
The darker side of sex is also present, Trixie was almost
date-raped once and on the docks, a sexual predator attacked young Sister Mary
Cynthia (Bryony Hannah). Twice the midwives had to deal with pregnant young
prostitutes, and of course there is the love that dares not say its name. In
those days, homosexuality was a crime punished by law. A fact the audience learned,
after meeting a young father arrested on those grounds. Trixie’s disapproval
was based more on his hreating on his pregnant wife than on his sexual preferences.
But prejudices will play their part when Nonnatus finds out that the order have
been harboring a couple of lesbians under its roof. Although, British law was
concerned only with sodomy, lesbianism was socially frowned upon. Exposed gay women
lost their jobs. It’s fortunate that so far, only Phyllis Crane knows about the
Patsy-Delia romance.
Their slow awareness that their affection ran deeper than friendship made Patsy (Emerald Fennell) and Delia (Kate Lamb) conscious that they will have to dare much to live their love. This season had Patsy in the Far East, caring for her dying father, so the girls have been apart. Delia’s longing for the absent Patsy, and the ultra-romantic reunion on the season’s finale, hit a nerve on me. Although heterosexual, I do know what it feels to have a lover on the other side of the continent.
“Call the Midwife” is full of allusions to English history
and a lost world. There are those in Poplar old enough to remember the Victorian
workhouse. The midwives haven attended labors on ancient itinerant communities
like the Irish Tinkers and the Thames barge-dwellers. But as any 50s story would
have, the most memorable recent historical event is the Second World War. Its
presence is felt on bombed out sites all over the docks. The old Nonnatus house
perished due to an UXB hidden inside its premises which exploded a decade after
the Germans dropped it there. Both Violet and Fred lost their spouses in the war,
as did Dr. Turner who almost lost his mind due to his traumatic experiences as
a military doctor.
Lady Browne may look down on her son-in-law for being just a
police constable, but Peter Noakes (Ben Caplan) is also a highly decorated
military hero. We saw the darkest side of the war with the young Holocaust mother
and with Patsy, another victim, the survivor of a Japanese camp where her
mother and youngest sister died. However, WWIII was not the last conflict the
world was to see. After all, “Call the Midwife” is set during the Cold War. We met a father who was suffering from battle
trauma after serving in the Korean War; on its fourth season, the midwives went
through preparation for a possible nuclear attack, and this last season brought
us the terror lived throughout the world during the1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
A well-researched historical aspect are the differences
between being pregnant then and now. Having babies at home with a midwife/nurse
in constant attendance may seem like a desired luxury, but the truth is that
even in hospitals, childbirth was a dangerous affair. In those decades
eclampsia could kill a mother as syphilis killed babies. Although abortion was
then a crime, we learned that the law allowed the termination of the pregnancy
of a diabetic teenager. In those days, diabetic mothers and their babies had
little chances for survival.
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| Diabetes made Paulette a candidate for a legal abortion |
Pregnancy is not the only female ailment that the personnel must
deal with. We’ve seen them treating women who suffered miscarriages; women who
had illegal abortions; women experiencing venereal disease, and Sister
Evangelina had to undergo a hysterectomy before she passed away due to cardiac
failure. On this season, Violet endured the annoying effects of “The Change”, a
50s euphemism for menopause.
This last season has brought us close to two factors that
played an important part in the life of women of childbearing age of that era.
The first dealt with the horrors brought on by the thalidomide. We, of the
twentieth-first century, are not familiar with the name of drug that is still
in use for leprosy. Developed in 1953 by the German pharmaceutical company Grunenthal
(notorious for harboring Nazi doctors after the war) thalidomide was marketed
in 1957 as a “wonder drug” that successfully fought morning sickness. In 1959,
and under the name “Distival,” it hit the British market. Soon, it spread all
over the world. Doctors were happy to prescribe it, until a 1961 Australian study
linked its usage to a wave of malformed babies. It is estimated that 100.000
mothers were affected by the wonder-drug, and about 10.000 of the Thalidomide
babies reached adulthood, despite their deformities.
At the end of Season 4, we saw Dr. Turner prescribe the drug
to his patients. Season 5 brought us the birth of the Thalidomide babies. By
the end of the season, Dr. Turner received news that related the wonder drug to
an increase of births of deformed children. In Season 6, we were witnesses to
Dr. Turner battling his guilt issue while struggling to find help for the afflicted
children and their bereaved parents.
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| Susan a thalidomide baby |
The 60s saw the rise of other drugs, those that would impede
pregnancy. St Raymond Nonnatus has entered the Birth Control Era not without
some problems. Usually progressive Sister Julianne was overcome with fear that The Pill would
lead to libertine orgies in Poplar. She wasn’t convinced even when Nurse Crane,
in her most naturalistic language, explained that men were not into condoms so
it was up to women to look after themselves. It was hilarious when Sister
Julienne sought Reverend Hereward’s support, but her colleague, who had just
been involved into some heavy hanky-panky with Barbara, wasn’t much help there
either.
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| Reverend Hareward flirts with sin. |
This year, a family planning clinic was set up at Dr. Turner’s infirmary. And yet, while everyone else
was thrilled at the possibility of free and accessible diaphragms and The Pill, birth control
has its side effects. I was shocked to see a woman die, in the show, of an
embolism provoked by the Pill. I had given up on the Pill years ago since it
made me nauseous and caused me to gain weight, but I didn’t know it could kill
you. So, I guess, we are all learning something with “Call the Midwife” that
after all qualifies as medical drama.
Because the secular midwives are also registered nurses they
are bound to face all sorts of illnesses, and we get to see how those were
treated back then. Throughout six seasons we have seen the Nonnatus staff fight
dysentery, polio, tuberculosis and diphtheria. Although the series tend to be
modern and open-minded, little details reveal a world that lacked knowledge of
what today we take for granted. It’s curious that for women so involved in obstetrics, the term “post-partum depression” was still unknown.
Whatever affected the mind of mothers after labor was then terribly
misunderstood. It was labeled madness just like other deviant behavior. Thus, homosexuals were forced to choose
between jail sentences or painful and useless treatments (hormone shots and
electric shocks).
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| Trixie and her friendly glass. |
On the other hand, Trixie was lucky to live at a time where
at least Alcoholic Anonymous saw her alcoholism as an illness and not as a vice.
Madness, and the term covered several maladies, was a stigma. When time came for
Dr. Turner to adopt a child, his past as a mental institution patient came to
work against him and his plans.
This year we caught a glimpse of how bleak madhouses were,
like Linchmere Hospital, where Sister Mary Cynthia was confined after her breakdown.
Nowadays, there are special therapies to cure rape trauma. The young postulant
only got electroshock sessions. Fortunately, a more humane and progressive
sanatorium was found for her. Nonnatus staff discovered Cynthia’s
whereabouts while searching for a place to put Reggie, a young man affected by
Down’s Syndrome. In the Fifties and Sixties mental retardation was part of a
long list of mental illness, and Down’s Syndrome patients were locked together with
other asylum inmates. Luckily, Reggie found lodgings at a specialized and
modern facility where he could learn a trade and interact with others like him.
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| Fred and Violet sort of adopted Reggie |
On reviewing the show's portrayal of the mentally
ill, one can’t bypass Sister Monica- Joan. Delightful as she is, the oldest
midwife in residence is clearly experiencing some form of senility. And yet, as
someone who has been dealing on daily bases with dementia patients, I could not
describe her as a representative case. She is too sensible, too sensitive, too conscious
of right and wrong. But she has a habit of babbling nonsense and losing her
grip with reality when confronted with stressful situations.
I don’t think her case is an idealization of senectitude or an
unrealistic portrayal of dementia. My conclusion is that Sister Monica- Joan is
on an early stage of her illness. Her frailty remains under control because the
nun is in a familiar environment surrounded by loving, caring people. She also keeps
a certain degree of independence and still feels useful. After all, she was the
only person Sister Mary Cynthia allowed near her after her assault.
