Winter is Coming: Period Pieces for Snowbound Souls

With only a couple more of weeks of autumn to enjoy (and New Yorkers can’t complain, we’d had decent weather this fall) we must brace ourselves for more at-home nights, all bundled up, in front of tv screens. For us, historical fiction freaks, there will be no lack of good material to enjoy this cold season, starting with Ragnar’s sons wreaking havoc in Saxon land and further away, and ending with Tom Hardy and his ship of the damned, bound to a land where there is no “Taboo.”

End of November has had us reconnect with the dysfunctional family of Ragnar Lodbrok, or what’s left of it. Fans are either wondering which of her stepsons will do away with Lagertha, or are looking forward to Jonathan Rhys-Myers debut as Heathmund, the warrior-bishop that will give Ivar, the Boneless, some humble pie to eat, at least on the battlefield. To be quite honest since my favorite characters (Aslaug, Echbert and Helga) were killed, I only care to know what is Rollo up to in Paris and about Bjorn’s explorations in “sunny places.” November the 29^th will be the date for the “Vikings” to land on History Channel.

“Vikings” shall not be History’s only venture in historical fiction this winter. December 6^th will bring us the awaited arrival of “Knightfall,” a tale of the Templar Knights. Starring Tom Cullen as Sir Landry, a Templar Master, the story merges the last days of the Order of the Temple with the search for the Holy Grail. Combining fact and fiction, this series will take place in 1306, a year before the downfall of the Templars.  “Knightfall” pretends to show us how wealth, power and a clandestine lifestyle brought a tragic end to the powerful monastic order. The Templars harbored secrets, they knew too much, they represented a hazard for the Papacy as well as for the King of France.

Although we are still months away from the eight-season of  “Call the Midwife, ” PBS will bring us its Christmas 2017 special, appropriately on December 25^th. It will take place during the 1962 Big Freeze, the coldest Christmas in British history. Heavy blizzards had the country at a standstill, but as we know, you can’t put a standstill on labor. Chances are that the midwives will have to brave weather and waddle through snow to bring babies into the world.

New Year takes us back to Buckingham Palace to rejoin Victoria and Albert on a new season that will bring new babies and new troubles for the royal couple. Here are some spoilers:  Lord Melbourne departs for good, but the Queen of Thorns resurrects when Dame Diana “Olenna” Rigg joins the Queen’s entourage as a new lady of chamber. Albert will run into his old papa, but poor old Ernest will have his heart broken again by prudish Duchess of Sutherland. There will be romance upstairs and downstairs,  and even a hint of gay love among Victoria’s retainers. Season 2 of “Victoria” debuts on PBS, on January 14^th.

After New Year,  we can count on TNT to bring us the perfect historical thriller, “The Alienist, ”based on Caleb Carr’s bestseller . On January 22th  we’ll meet Dr. Lazlo Kreisler (Daniel Bruhl), proper Viennese psychiatrist,  who is summoned by Theodore Roosevelt (then Manhattan Police Commissioner) in turn-of-the-century New York to solve the crimes of an American Jack the Ripper. Dr. Kreisler will be assisted by crime reporter John Schuyler Moore (Luke Evans) and genteel secretary Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning).

FX just drops hints  that “Taboo” fans must translate. It may happen sometimes in  late February or perhaps in early March,  when snow is still on the ground. Then, we’ll get to know where James Keziah Delaney is bound with that crew of freaks he managed to wrangle up. Will the East India Company ever give up the Nootka Sound? Will Robert find out he is the cannibal’s son? Will James learn what made his late mother try to murder him? Is Zilpha, James sister-lover, truly dead? So much to know, please  don’t keep us waiting!

I don’t usually dwell in what the streaming world brings, but since I have become a crownie (e.g. one who is addicted to  “The Crown”), I might as well review Netflix’s basket of period pieces. November has started unloading it with the 4^th Season of “Peaky Blinders,”  in BBC, but Netflix will run it complete after December the 21th. For those of you who are following Jason “Drogo” Momoa’s adventures in fur trapping in Colonial Canada, you can enjoy the second season of “Frontier” after November the 24^th.

Michelle Dockery is really shaking Lady Mary’s shadow off her and she shows it by moving to the Far West, in “Godless,” Netflix new western. Set in New Mexico, “Godless” tells of a mining town where all miners are killed, and it is left to their widows to wear the pants and sling the guns, especially when marauding bandits lurk nearby. As of November 22, you can follow this seven-part series.

On December the 8^th, the second round of “The Crown” begins. Reconciliation and new babies are in store for Lilibet and her Duke (he will be called “Prince” at some point this season,  and his children will get his last name too). Nevertheless, hideous scandals will rock the monarchy. The troubles shall not come from within the royal family but from misguided ministers and their cabinets. Margaret, the family minx, will marry and settle down (of sorts), and Elisabeth II will entertain Jackie (Jodi Balfour) and President Kennedy (Charles C. Hall). Get ready to see Dexter playing Jack! This incoming season will dwell more on Philip’s early life, a subject that Peter Morgan, the brains behind “The Crown,” finds fascinating.

Netflix will go big time in January when it becomes a streaming platform for the hottest and most expensive series made in Germany.  Based on a historical whodunit series by Volker Kutscher, “Babylon Berlin” deals with the adventures of PTD sufferer and morphine addict, police Inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) who will solve crimes in Weimar Germany.

Now that sounds pretty much like Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, right?  But even as a Kerr-Gunther fan, I must agree that something written by a German, in Goethe’s language and made in Der Vaterland is bound to be of better quality. Or so we hope. So far, the series has been available only to Sky’ subscribers (in Germany, Austria, Italy and the UK). Therefore, I’ll be looking forward to when Netflix decides to gift us with the properly subtitled version of “Babylon Berlin.”

Which one of these series will you be following?

History and Midwifery: Six Seasons of Call the Midwife

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

“Call the Midwife” is a good example of how a TV show may tackle serious and somber issues while keeping a cheerful attitude and not falling into dark realism. These stories are full of sad moments, the constant presence of death, and problems that sometimes don’t have immediate solutions, but the final message is always uplifting. At least in my case, I always end the program feeling happy and hopeful.