Call the Midwife
good books for bigs and littles
Having never watched the PBS series, Call the Midwife, I had no expectations--good or bad--of the memoir on which the series is based. However, after the first chapter, I was hooked. Call the Midwife, by Jennifer Worth, is a memoir of Worth's experiences training as a midwife in London's East End during the fifties. Worth arrives for her first day of training only to unexpectedly find herself in a convent; her training, unbeknownst to her, is to be conducted by nuns.
While Worth's memoir is partly a chronicle of her journey from agnostic to believer, I found her recollections of the families of the East End more powerful and personally resonant. The book was also a wonderful reminder of how the whole process of birth, labor and delivery has changed in the last hundred or so years, as well as how it has stayed the same.
The book is an eye opener and reminder about the hardships of life in poverty, and in particular, the kind of poverty experienced by many, many people in post-World War II London. It's the kind of book (much like Orphan Train, which I also read recently) that inspires gratitude for all the lives you don't have. Particular vignettes really stood out to me--Chummy and her bodyguard, Mary from Ireland, the Holy Fool--but none so much as Worth's story of the Warren family. Without spoiling it, I think I can share that Conchita Warren's story is a great, light-handed musing on the nature of love--its blindness, its power and its sweetness.
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