Call The Midwife - Trip down memory lane

Categories: tv, bbc

Date: 05 February 2012 19:20:00

[caption id="attachment_931" align="aligncenter" width="216" caption="Pupil midwife - Mum's casebook 1946-7, Aberdeen Maternity Hospital"][/caption]

Though I watch very little TV nowadays, there are some honourable exceptions and the current drama series 'Call The Midwife,' based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, starring Jessica Raine and Miranda Hart is a Sunday evening highlight for me. To be honest, I wasn't that keen at first, the cynic in me wondering if it would turn out to be a kind of 'All Creatures Great And Small'-style nostalgia fest, with mums and babies instead of animals. I needn't have worried. By the end of Episode One I was hooked. By last week's episode Mr M had got used to full senseround sound effects of women in full second stage labour wafting over into the next room and disturbing his games playing sessions. It really is no holds barred, blood and gore with nary a painkiller in sight, this being the 1950s.

Where memory lane applies is because my own mother was a midwife. The pic above is of her casebook as a pupil midwife in Scotland during the early post-war years. She subsequently worked as a district midwife in Stockport and in a hospital in Nigeria. Finally during the late 1950s as Jennifer Worth was starting out, Mum was a midwife tutor. As was my godmother, one of her close friends.

Mum was always happiest with babies, longed to have her own, which she eventually did, though very late and at considerable danger to her own health; when my youngest brother was born she was in her mid-forties. Finding midwifery impossible to fit in round small children, she was forced to diversify, ending up, maybe rather paradoxically, as a family planning nurse. Much of the latter was in London with places like the Marie Stopes and the Brook Advisory Centre. She wasn't particularly happy with some of the cases she saw or actions she had to condone there; prescribing the pill or worse advising terminations to girls in their early teens must have gone against the grain for her. Still as she said to me, it might seem strange that somebody who felt called to bring children into the world was now co-operating in preventing them being conceived in the first place, but as someone who'd grown up in poverty during the depression, before the widespread availability of contraception, she'd seen the effect of continual childbearing upon women, often those who were least able to help themselves and wouldn't wish to go back to those times.

You could tell she missed her midwifery days however. I had a few alarms and excursions during my pregnancies, and although she was naturally concerned (she was my mother after all), I got the distinct impression that she quite relished the excitement. I well remember she and my Dad being called out to meet us at the hospital in the wee small hours to collect our daughter and her watching me disappearing into the labour ward with the obligatory shopping trolley for all my gear. (Poor little Ms M must have thought that babies are bought at the supermarket!). She loved looking after her, but I suspect that Granny would far rather have been allowed in on the act. Just as well she wasn't. The poor midwife wouldn't have been allowed to get a word in!

Sadly Mum died nearly twenty years ago now, which makes watching 'Call The Midwife' a bit of a bittersweet experience for me. How she would have loved it!