Call The Midwife: A True Story Of The East End In The 1950S

by Jennifer Worth

  Her eyes smiled at me, and she added: “You could not have done otherwise my dear.”

  Once again, I was struck by the kindness and flexibility of the Sisters, compared with the rigid inflexibility of the hospital systems under which I had worked. Had I taken anyone into a nurses’ home without permission for a night, there would have been hell to pay, simply because it was against the rules.

  Mary did not wake up until four o’clock in the afternoon. It was our teatime, just before we started the evening work, so I did not have long to see her before I had to go out. Sister Julienne had taken her some tea and bread and butter, which she was eating when I went into the sitting room. Sister was explaining to Mary that she could not stay at Nonnatus House, but could go to a house where she would be welcome to stay. Antenatal care would be provided, and arrangements made for delivery. Mary looked at me with big solemn eyes, and I nodded and said that I would come to see her.

  And that is how I got into the world of pimps and prostitutes, the foul brothels, masquerading as all-night cafés, that lined Cable Street and the surrounding area of Stepney. It is a hidden world. The same goes on in every town and city the world over, and always has done, but few people know anything about the business, nor indeed do they want to.

  There are two sorts of prostitutes: the high class ones, and the rest. The French courtesans were probably the top of the market, and we read about their salons, their lavish entertainments, their artistic and political influence with amazement.

  In London, the smart West End call girls today normally work within a very expensive establishment with a few select clients, and can command enormous fees. These are usually very intelligent women who have worked it all out, planned it, studied it, and entered prostitution with a true professionalism. One such girl said to me: “You have to go into it at the top. This is not a job where you start at the bottom and work your way up. If you start at the bottom, you just sink lower.”

  The vast majority of prostitutes start at the bottom, and their life is pitiable. Historically, prostitution has been the only means of earning a living for a woman who is destitute, particularly if she has children to feed. What woman worthy of the name Mother would stand on a high moral platform about selling her body if her child were dying of hunger and exposure? Not I.

  Today - and indeed in the 1950s - such starvation is not seen in Western societies, but there is a different type of hunger which feeds the prostitution trade. It is starvation of love. Thousands run away from desperate circumstances, and find themselves alone and friendless in a big city. They are craving affection, and will attach themselves to anyone who appears to offer it. This is where the pimps and madams score. They offer the child food and lodgings and apparent kindness, and within days, prostitution is forced upon them. The only difference between the twenty-first century and the 1950s is that back then, the children procured for soliciting were around fourteen years of age. Today the age has dropped to as low as ten.

  Mary’s lorry driver was heading for the Royal Albert Docks, and so he had dropped her off in Commercial Road. She told me, “I felt so terribly alone, more alone than I had ever felt before. In Ireland, when I was making my plans to come to London, I was all excited. The journey was thrilling, because I was going to the beautiful city of London, and I didn’t feel alone, because my thoughts were full of dreams. But when I got here I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

  Who was it that said “’Tis better to travel hopefully than to arrive?” I daresay we have all experienced this in one way or another.

  Mary went into a confectioner tobacconist, bought a bar of chocolate, and ate it as she wandered down the busy road. At the time, Commercial Road and East India Dock Road were said to be the busiest roads in Europe, because the Port of London was the busiest port in Europe. The continuous stream of lorries bewildered and frightened her. By contrast, Dublin had been as quiet as a country village. The shrill blast of a siren nearly gave her a heart attack, and then she saw thousands of men pouring out of the dock gates. She flattened herself against a doorway as they passed, chatting, laughing, squabbling, shouting and talking to each other. But not one of them spoke to the shy, small figure in the doorway. In fact it is doubtful if any of them even noticed her. She said, “I nearly cried with loneliness. I wanted to shout out ‘I’m here, just beside you. Come and say hello to me. I’ve come a long way just to be here.’”

  She didn’t like Commercial Road much, so she turned off into a side street where she saw children playing. She was scarcely more than a child herself, but they didn’t want her to join in the game. She continued on until she came to what was known as the Cuts - the canal that went under Stinkhouse Bridge on its way to the Docks. It was pleasant standing by the bridge, looking down at the moving water, and she stood there a long time watching a water rat pop in and out of his hole and seeing the shadows lengthen.

  “I just didn’t know what I was going to do. I wasn’t cold, ’cause it was summer, and I wasn’t hungry, ’cause that nice lorry driver had given me sausage and chips. But I felt so empty inside, and sick with longing for someone to talk to me.”

  Night came, and she had nowhere to sleep, nor the money to purchase a night’s lodgings. She had already spent many nights in the open, and the prospect did not bother her. There were bomb sites all over the East End at the time, and she found one that looked as though it might do. However, it was a bad choice.

  “I was woken in the night by the most terrible noise. Men screaming and fighting and cursing and swearing. In the moonlight I saw knives and flashing things. I crawled deeper into the hole I was in, and hid under some foul-smelling sacks. I just kept quite, quite still, and didn’t breathe. Then I heard the police whistles and dogs barking. I was frightened the dogs would smell me, but they didn’t. Perhaps the sacks I was under smelt so bad they couldn’t smell anything else.”

  She giggled. I didn’t. My heart was too full for laughter.

  Apparently she had stumbled into a bomb site regularly used by the meths drinkers. After the police had cleared the place, Mary crept out, and spent the rest of the night by the Cuts.

  The next day was spent in much the same way as the first, just wandering around the Stepney end of Commercial Road with nothing to do.

  “There were a lot of buses around, and I wondered if I should get on one and go somewhere else, because I didn’t really like it where I was. But they all said places like Wapping and Barking, Mile End, and Kings Cross, on the front, and I didn’t know where these places were. I had wanted to come to London, and the lorry driver said it was London when he put me down, so I didn’t get on a bus, because I wouldn’t know where I was going to.”

  Two more days were spent like this. Completely alone, talking to no one, sleeping in the Cuts at night. On the third evening Mary spent the last of her pennies on a sausage roll.

  The fourth day in London would have been without food, had she not seen an old lady in a churchyard feeding the sparrows with breadcrumbs.

  “I waited until the old lady had gone, then I shooed the birds away, and crawled around scooping up the breadcrumbs and putting them in my skirt. The sun was shining, and the trees were nice. I saw a little squirrel. I sat on the grass and ate a whole lap full of breadcrumbs. They tasted all right. The next day I went to the churchyard again, thinking that the old lady would come to feed the birds. But she didn’t come. I waited the whole day but she still didn’t come.”

  In the evening she scavenged some bits of food from a dustbin.

  As she was talking, I wondered why it was that a bright young girl, who had had the initiative and enterprise to plan her journey all the way from Dublin, could not have been more resourceful and forward thinking when she arrived in London. There were places she could have gone - the police, a Catholic Church, the Salvation Army, the YWCA - where people would have helped her, sheltered her, and probably found her a job. But such a course of action did not seem to have occurred to her. Perhaps it would hav
e done, given a little more time. But instead she met Zakir.

  “I was looking in a baker’s window, sniffing the bread and thinking what I wouldn’t give to have some. He came and stood beside me, and said, ‘Do you want a cigarette?’

  “He was the first person who had spoken to me since the lorry driver. It was so nice just to hear someone say something to me, but I didn’t smoke. Then he said, ‘Do you want something to eat, then?’ and I said: ‘I’ll say I do.’

  “He looked down at me and smiled, such a lovely smile. His teeth were gleaming white, and his eyes were kind. He had beautiful eyes, a dark black-brown colour. I loved his eyes the moment I looked into them. He said, ‘Come on, let’s get some of their nice filled rolls. I’m hungry too. Then we’ll go and sit by the Cuts and eat them.’

  “We went into the shop, and he bought lots of rolls with different fillings, and some fruit pies, and some chocolate cake. I felt very scruffy beside him, because I hadn’t washed or changed my clothes for days, and he looked so smart and well dressed, and had a gold chain on.”

  They sat on the grass of the towpath, leaning their backs against the wall, watching the barges go by. Mary said she was tongue tied. She felt overwhelmed by this kind, handsome youth who seemed to like her, and she couldn’t think of a thing to say, even though for four or five days she had been longing for someone to talk to.

  “He talked all the time, and laughed, and threw bits of bread to the sparrows and pigeons, and called them ‘my friends’. I thought someone who is friends with the birds must be very nice. Sometimes I couldn’t understand quite what he was saying, but the English accent is different to the Irish accent, you know. He told me he was a buyer for his uncle, who had a nice café in Cable Street and who sold the best food in London. We had such a lovely meal sitting there on the towpath in the sunshine. The rolls were delicious, the apple pies were delicious, and the chocolate cake was out of this world.”

  She leaned back on the stone wall, and sighed with contentment. When she woke up the sun was behind the warehouse, and his jacket was over her. She found that she was leaning on his shoulder.

  “I woke up with his strong arm around me, and his beautiful brown eyes looking down at me. He stroked my cheek, and said, ‘You’ve had a nice big sleep. Come on, it’s getting late. I had better take you home. Your mother and father will wonder what has happened to you.’

  “I didn’t know what to say then, and he didn’t talk either. After a bit, he said: ‘We must get going. What will your mother think, you being out with a stranger all this time?’

  “Me mam’s a long way off in Ireland.’

  “Well, your dad then.’

  “Me dad’s dead.’

  “You poor little thing. I suppose you are living with an auntie in London?’

  “He stroked my cheek again when he said ‘you poor little thing’, and I thought I would melt with happiness. So I snuggled up in his arms, and told him the whole story - but I didn’t tell him about me mam’s man and what he’d done to me, because I was ashamed, and didn’t want him to think badly of me.”

  “He didn’t say anything. For a long while he just stroked my cheek and my hair. Then he said: ‘Poor little Mary. What are we going to do with you? I can’t leave you here by the Cuts all night. I feel responsible for you now. I think you had better come back with me to my uncle’s place. It’s a nice café. My uncle is very kind. We can have a good meal and then we can plan your future.’”

  CABLE STREET

  Pre-war Stepney, just east of the City, with Commercial Road to the north, the Tower and Royal Mint to the West, Wapping and the Docks to the South, and Poplar to the east, was the home of thousands of respectable, hard-working, but often poor East End families. Much of the area was filled with crowded tenements, narrow unlit alleyways and lanes and old multi-occupant houses. Often the old houses had only one tap, and one lavatory in the yard, to serve between eight and a dozen families, and sometimes a whole family of ten or more might occupy one or two rooms. The people had lived like this for generations, and were still doing so in the 1950s.

  This was their inheritance and their accepted lifestyle, but after the war, things changed dramatically, for the worse. The area was scheduled for demolition, which did not actually take place for another twenty years. In the meantime, the area became a breeding ground for vice of every description. The condemned houses, which were privately owned, could not be sold on the open market to responsible landlords, so they were bought up by unscrupulous profiteers of all nationalities, who let out single, derelict, rooms for fantastically low rents. The shops were bought up in the same way and turned into all night cafés, with their ‘street waitresses’. They were, in fact, brothels, making life hell for the decent people who had to live in the area, and bring their children up in the midst of it all.

  Overcrowding had always been part of the East Ender’s life, but the war made it far worse. Many homes had been destroyed by the bombing and not replaced, so people lived anywhere they could find. On top of this, in the 1950s, thousands of commonwealth immigrants poured into the country with no provision made for where they were going to live. It was not uncommon to see groups of ten or more West Indians, say, going from door to door, begging for a room to let. If they did find one, in no time at all it would be filled with twenty to twenty-five people, all living together.

  This sort of thing the East Enders had seen before, and could absorb. But when it came to the blatant widespread use of their streets, their alleys and closes, their shops and houses, as brothels, it was a very different matter. Life became sheer hell, and women were terrified to go out of doors, or to let their children out. The tough, resilient East Enders, who had lived through two world wars, lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s, survived the Blitz of the 1940s, and come up smiling, were to be crushed by the vice and prostitution that descended in their midst in the 1950s and ’60s.

  Try to imagine, if you can, living in a derelict building, renting two rooms on the second floor, with six children to bring up. And then try to imagine that there is a new landlord, and through threats, intimidation, fear, or genuine rehousing, one by one, all the families you have known since childhood have moved out. All the rooms of the house in which you live have been divided up and filled with prostitutes, as many as four or five to each room. The general store, which used to be the ground floor of the building, has been turned into an all-night café with noise and loud music, parties, swearing, fights, going on all night. The trade of prostitution goes on all night and all day, with men tramping up and down the stairs, and hanging around on the stairways or landings, waiting their turn. Imagine it, if you can, and imagine the poor woman who has to take her toddlers out shopping, or get the children off to school, or go down to the basement alone to get a couple of buckets of water with which to do her washing.

  Many such families were on the council waiting list for rehousing for as much as ten years, and the biggest families had the least chance of getting other accommodation because the council (under the Housing Act) was not allowed to put a family of ten into a four-room flat, even though the two room conditions under which they were living had been condemned for human habitation.

  Into this environment came Father Joe Williamson, who was appointed Vicar of St Paul’s in Dock Street in the 1950s. He devoted the rest of his life, his considerable energies, his powerful mind and above all his Godliness, to cleaning up the area and helping the East End families who had to live there. Later, he began his work of helping and protecting the young prostitutes, whom he loved and pitied with all his heart. It was he who opened the doors of Church House, Wellclose Square, as a home for prostitutes, and this was the place Mary went the day after I had picked her up at the bus stop. I visited her there several times, and it was during these visits that she told me her story.

  “Zakir put his coat around my shoulders, because it was getting chilly, and he carried my bag. He put his arm round me, and led me through the crowd
s of men leaving the docks. He escorted me over the road like a real gentleman, and I can tell you I felt like the greatest lady in London by the side of such a handsome young man.”

  He took her down a side street off Commercial Road, which led into other side streets, each one narrower and dirtier than the last. Many windows were boarded up, others broken, others so dirty that it would have been impossible to see through them. There were very few people around, and no children played in the streets. She looked up the height of the black buildings. Pigeons flew from ledge to ledge. A few of the windows looked as if someone had tried to clean them, and had curtains. One or two even had washing hanging out on a little balcony. It looked as though the sun never penetrated these narrow streets and alleys. Filth and litter were everywhere; in the corners, the gutters, piled up against railings, blocking doorways, half filling the little alleys. Zakir carefully led Mary through all this dirt, telling her to be careful, or to step over this or that. The few other people they met were all men, and he protectively drew her closer to him as they passed. One or two of them he obviously knew, and they spoke to each other in a foreign language.

  Mary said, “I thought he must be so clever and educated to speak a foreign language. He must have been to a very expensive school to have learned it, I thought.”

  They came to a wider, longer street, which was Cable Street and Zakir said to her, “My uncle’s café is just up there. It’s the best and the busiest one in the street. We can have a meal together, just you and me. Won’t that be fun? My uncle also owns the whole building and he lets out rooms, so I’m sure he would find one for you. That way you won’t have to sleep by the Cuts any more. Perhaps he could find a job for you in the café, washing up, or peeling the vegetables. Or he could put you in charge of the coffee machine. Would you like to work the coffee machine?”