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

by Jennifer Worth

  “I do not pretend to understand your superior wisdom, doctor, but we will go with God in all things. Am I to understand that I can have visitors?”

  Yes indeed, Sister Monica Joan could have visitors (as long as they did not tire her), whatever she wanted to read (provided it did not strain her eyes), and whatever she wanted to eat (provided it did not upset her digestion).

  Sister Monica Joan settled back on her pillows, contented. Books were provided and Mrs B. was instructed to attend to her every wish.

  A nun’s bedroom is properly called a cell and is small, bare, and plain, without comfort. However, since her retirement from active midwifery, Sister Monica Joan had managed to wangle things so that her cell was comparatively large, comfortably furnished, and pretty: an elegant bedsitting-room would be the more appropriate description. Lay people are not normally admitted to a nun’s cell, but Sister Monica Joan had just extracted the doctor’s assurance that she could have visitors, and thus began a very happy period of my life.

  Every day I visited her, and as I entered the room, an almost tangible feeling of peace and tranquillity surrounded me. She was always sitting up in bed, with no outward signs of illness or fatigue, her veil perfectly adjusted, her white nightie high in the neck, her soft skin opaque, and her large eyes clear and penetrating. Her bed was always covered in books, and she had a number of notebooks in which she wrote voluminously in a firm stylish hand.

  I discovered that she was a poet. I suppose it should not have surprised me, but it did. All her life she had written poetry, and had in her notebooks a collection of several hundred poems dating from the 1890s.

  I am no judge of poetry - I do not have an ear for it. But the consistency of her output impressed me and I asked if I might have a look. She shrugged negligently.

  “Take it. I have no secrets, my dear. I am but a spark in the divine fire.”

  Over many long evenings I studied these poems. I had expected them all to be religious poetry, having been written by a nun, but they were not. Many were love poems, many satirical, and many were humorous, as:

  One of the sweetest things in life to see

  Is a calm, settled fly,

  Cleansing its fastidious face

  On my chosen reading place;

  He twines his legs around his arse

  And takes his time,

  As Beauty with her glass.

  or:

  Lyric of an Obese Dachshund Bitch

  They are equally pretty,

  My toes or my tittie,

  To ramble or gallop upon;

  Whatever will happen

  When I must re-cap’em

  The days that my nipples wear out

  And are gone?

  This is my favourite:

  It’s OK to be tight on

  The seafront at Brighton

  But I say, by Jove

  Watch out if it’s Hove.

  It may not be great poetry, but I thought it had charm. Or perhaps it was the charm of Sister Monica Joan that coloured my assessment.

  I found a revealing poem about her father, which told a lot about her early life:

  Fretful, unloving, mannerless Papa,

  What a crustaceous old boy you are -

  How you do go it!

  Blowing your bugle, like a ham stage-star,

  How you do blow it!

  And where does it get you, Papa?

  Or is it wasted breath?

  “Leave everything to me”

  Vainly the old man saith.

  With an arrogant, domineering father her struggle to assert herself and to leave home must have been monumental. A weaker character would have been crushed.

  For a lovesick young girl, her love poems spoke to my heart, and brought tears to my eyes. As:

  To an Unknown God

  I sang to you

  In the day of my bliss

  And you were near

  I thought of you

  In my lover’s kiss

  And felt you there

  I turned to you

  When our love was too brief

  And found your strength.

  I needed you

  In the years of my grief

  And knew you, at length.

  “Our love was too brief.” Oh, I knew all about that. Does one have to suffer so dreadfully in order to know the unknown God? Who, when, what was the story of Sister Monica Joan’s lost love? I longed to know, but dared not ask. Did he die, or did her parents object? Why was he unobtainable? Was he already married, or did he just cease to care, and leave her? I longed to know, but could not ask. Any intrusive questions would deserve, and receive, a caustic comment from that barbed tongue.

  Her religious poetry was surprisingly slender, and as I was eager to know more about her religion, I asked her about this aspect of her poetry. She replied with these lines from Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn:

  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” - that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

  “Do not ask me to immortalise the great Mystery of Life. I am just a humble worker. For beauty, look to the Psalms, to Isaiah, to St John of the Cross. How could my poor pen scan such verse? For truth, look to the Gospels - four short accounts of God made Man. There is nothing more to say.”

  She looked unusually tired that day and, as she lay back on the pillows, the wintry light from the window accentuating her pale, aristocratic features, my heart filled with tenderness. I had come to a convent by mistake, an irreligious girl. I would not have described myself as a committed atheist for whom all spirituality was nonsense, but as an agnostic in whom large areas of doubt and uncertainty resided. I had never met nuns before, and regarded them at first as a bit of a joke; later, with astonishment bordering on incredulity. Finally this was replaced by respect, and then deep love.

  What had impelled Sister Monica Joan to abandon a privileged life for one of hardship, working in the slums of London’s Docklands? “Was it love of people?” I asked her.

  “Of course not,” she snapped sharply. “How can you love ignorant, brutish people whom you don’t even know? Can anyone love filth and squalor? Or lice and rats? Who can love aching weariness, and carry on working, in spite of it? One cannot love these things. One can only love God, and through His grace come to love His people.”

  I asked her how she had heard her calling, and come to be professed. She quoted lines from The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson.

  I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

  I fled Him down the arches of the years;

  I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways

  Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

  I hid from Him.

  I asked her what was meant by “I fled Him”, and she became cross.

  “Questions, questions - you wear me out with your questions, child. Find out for yourself - we all have to in the end. No one can give you faith. It is a gift from God alone. Seek and ye shall find. Read the Gospels. There is no other way. Do not pester me with your everlasting questions. Go with God, child; just go with God.”

  She was obviously tired. I kissed her and slipped away.

  Her constant phrase, “Go with God”, had puzzled me a good deal. Suddenly it became clear. It was a revelation - acceptance. It filled me with joy. Accept life, the world, Spirit, God, call it what you will, and all else will follow. I had been groping for years to understand, or at least to come to terms with the meaning of life. These three small words, “Go with God”, were for me the beginning of faith.

  That evening, I started to read the Gospels.

  APPENDIX

  On the difficulties of writing the Cockney dialect

  London Cockney is as distinct and as clearly defined a dialect as Scottish or Yorkshire or any other. Its origins can be traced back to Kentish, East Anglian, Mercian and Saxon speech forms. Certain idioms of colloquial Cockney language appear in Chaucer.

  I have never understood why Cockney speec
h is said to be lazy English. It is the opposite. Cockneys love language, and use it continually, with a rich mixture of puns, slang, spoonerisms and rhymes. They carry a verbal library of anecdotes, ditties and yarns in their heads, which can be improvised to suit any occasion. They love long, colourful words. They can throw in description and simile with lightning speed, with a sure instinct for effect. Rhythm is important, and the compelling rhythm of a cockney dialogue is equal to that of a Mozart opera. Cockneys have a verbal mastery second to none in my opinion. The only trouble is, it is so fast and so idiomatic that it goes straight over the heads of most people.

  To listen to a group of Cockneys talking together, when they do not suspect they are being overheard, is like listening to another language. Most people will only be able to understand the odd word here and there. The speed of speech goes like an express train. Half a dozen words are slurred, condensed, abbreviated, swallowed whole, and the end result is one word, understandable to another Cockney, but to nobody else, for example Wachoofinkovisen? (What do you think of this, then?)

  To achieve this rapid delivery of speech, an essential device has been developed to a high degree of perfection - the glottal stop. This is a consonant sound, easier to execute than to explain. Most consonants are produced by the tongue, teeth and hard palette. The glottal stop is produced by rapid opening and shutting of the glottis (the entrance to the windpipe). It is a conscious action, but with continued use becomes unconscious. Cockney babies, in my experience, used to produce this sound before they could speak.

  Singers use the glottal stop to prefix a vowel. It is used a great deal in the German language. In English it is used to separate two vowels in words like ‘pre-empt’, ‘re-enforce’, ‘co-opt’, ‘re-enter’, and a few others. Most people saying these words will place a glottal stop between the vowels, and the movement can be felt in the throat.

  Cockneys use the glottal stop to replace ‘t’ and several short words. Phonetically, the glottal stop is represented by two dots ‘:’ like a colon. The words ‘water’ or ‘little’, written with a glottal stop, become wa:er, li:le. Thousands of English words contain ‘t’ and to replace them all with a glottal stop sign makes the written word look ridiculous. Consider: ‘eedin:aw::oo ’ave ’i:i: (he didn’t ought to have hit it.)

  This rapid succession of vowels would be unintelligible in speech without the use of the glottal stop.

  ‘t’ can come in for other changes. Sometimes it becomes a ‘d’, e.g. bidda budder (bit of butter), arkadim (hark at him), all ober da place (all over the place).

  ‘t’ followed by ‘r’ becomes ‘ch’, e.g. chrees (trees), chrains (trains).

  ‘t’ followed by another word beginning with a vowel again becomes ‘ch’, e.g. whachouadoin’ov? (what are you doing?), doncha loike i:? (don’t you like it?).

  Sometimes ‘t’ is heavily emphasised, becoming ‘ter’, e.g. gichaw coa-ter, we’re goin’ah-ter (get your coat, we’re going out).

  ‘th’ is nearly always replaced by ‘f’ or ‘v,’ e.g. vis, va’, vese and vose (this, that, these and those); and fink, fings, fanks, frough (think, things, thanks, through).

  ‘f’ and ‘v’ were so common in the 1950s and the sound was so impressed into my aural memory that I have found it very difficult to write the Cockney speech without using them. Ve baby, ve midwife, and so on, came more naturally than Standard English. The widespread use of ‘f’ and ‘v’ may have arisen early in the twentieth century because practically all men, and not a few women, usually had a limp, wet Woodbine hanging off the lower lip. The articulation of an ‘f’ or ‘v’ would leave the soggy appendage undisturbed, but the fricative ‘th’ might result in it being spat out!

  Over decades speech changes, and I believe that the ‘f’ and ‘v’ are dying out. Perhaps this is because cigarettes are filter tipped and thrown away! The succulent remains of a Woodbine are not preserved and cherished and rolled around the lips as they used to be.

  On the subject of change, the Dickensian reversal of ‘v’ and ‘w’ seems to have dropped out of Cockney speech altogether, e.g. vater (water) and wery (very). Occasionally an old-fashioned shopkeeper (are there any left?) can be heard to say welly good, sir, but not welly often!

  As speed is all important, ‘h’ is seldom used. However, the suggestion (which is a sort of tasteless joke) that Cockneys trying to ‘talk proper’ put ‘h’ in the wrong places is not quite correct. I have listened very carefully, and only noticed an aspirated ‘h’ used for special emphasis, often with a glottal stop thrown in as well, e.g. oie was :henraged (I was enraged); bleedin’ ca:s :heverywhere (bleeding cats everywhere).

  ‘L’ in the middle or end of a word is usually lost and replaced by ‘oo’ or ‘w’. This is just about impossible to write convincingly. Consider: li:oo (little); bo:oo (bottle); vere’s a sayoo of too-oos darn Mioowaoo (there is a sale of tools down Millwall).

  ‘N’ and ‘m’ seem to be virtually interchangeable; a patient of mine had an emforced rest due to an emflamed leg. Another found aoo vose en:y bo:oos ah:side ve ’ahse enbarrussin’. (all those empty bottles outside the house embarrassing). In Poplar people used to eat bre:m bu:er (bread and butter).

  There are many other consonant changes, which vary from family to family and from street to street. ‘Sh’, ‘ch’, ‘zh’ (as in treasure) and ‘j’ replace almost anything, e.g. we’re garn :a shea-shoide (we’re going to the seaside). Ve doctor, ’e shpozhezh, vish fing wazh a washp shting azh wha: ‘azh shwelled up loike (the doctor he supposes, this thing was a wasp sting that has swelled up).

  Wocha is the most common of all Cockney greetings, which has passed into Standard English. It is a very old form of “What are you (doing)?” The ‘ch’ in wocha replaces two or three words.

  ‘J’ can replace ‘d’. Jury Lane’s a jraugh:y ole plashe. (Drury Lane’s a draughty old place.)

  ‘J’ and ‘zh’ frequently join words together, e.g. Izee comin’, djou fink? (Is he coming, do you think?) ’Azhye mum? (How is your Mum?).

  The softening of fricatives may have arisen from the fag-end already mentioned. In fact to speak the dialect, one only has to purse the lips, imagine a Woodbine stuck somewhere on the lower lip, and let the words roll out with the minimum of mouth movement, and you’ve got it!

  If you think representing consonants in written Cockney speech is hard, that is only because you haven’t tried the vowels! There are five vowels in the alphabet, plus ‘y’ and ‘w’, and no possible combination of these seven sounds can convey the complexity of Cockney vowels, which are washed and soaped and rinsed and put through the wringer, then stretched and twisted beyond anything that any phonetician can imagine. Italian is the language of pure vowels (the singer’s delight). English has diphthongs and a few triphthongs. Cockney has quadraphthongs and quinquaphthongs, septaphthongs and octophthongs, and God knows how many more. They all differ from person to person, from time to time, from place to place, and from meaning to meaning. Vowels are the vehicle by which voice inflexion is carried, and singers spend years studying the tone, colour and meaning that can be placed on vowels. The Cockney does it from birth.

  Many Cockney vowels are elongated and made unnecessarily complex, e.g. loiedy, lahoiedy (lady). Others are reduced to almost nothing, e.g. fawna (foreigner).

  Diphthongs in Standard English can become a single pure vowel in Cockney, e.g. par (power), sar (sour).

  In writing, to render ‘I’ as ‘oi’ gives the wrong impression, because Cockneys do not say ‘oi’, as in oil or joy. They say something like aoiee.

  ‘Ow’ becomes an approximation of ‘aehr’, e.g. aehr naehr braehn caehr (how now brown cow).

  ‘O’ (as in go) is ‘eao’ (or something like it), e.g. ‘e breaok ’is leig, feoo off of a waoo, ’e did (he broke his leg, fell off of the wall, he did); ’e niver aw: :oo ’ave bin up vere, aoiee teoozh’im (he never ought to have been up there, I tells him).

  I was struggling to express the Cockney accent in
written form, until a professor of English Literature said to me, “You will not succeed, because it cannot be done. People have been trying since the fifteenth century, but it has never been successful.”

  What a relief! I will struggle no more.

  Grammar, Syntax and Idiom

  In all countries at all times in history, the poorest of the poor have tended to live around the docks. Trapped by poverty, they have become isolated, and remained more or less static. This may be why Poplar of the 1950s existed in a sort of time warp, with habits, customs and family life being somewhat behind the times. With the closure of the docks, this changed.

  Speech is a living entity, changing with the people. But Cockney language changes have lagged far behind those of middle-class English. Many Cockney speech forms - idioms, grammar and syntax - which today are considered flawed, are, in fact, very ancient speech forms that can be traced back to Tudor times.

  Here are some typical examples:

  Possessive (conjugated)

  The ‘-self’ form becomes:

  Verbs frequently take the third person singular for the whole conjugation:

  Some expressions in the past tense use the past participle on its own, without the auxiliary (have, did):

  The form of the past participle may itself be changed:

  The demonstrative adjectives ‘these’ and ‘those’ are usually replaced by ‘them’, pronounced with a ‘v’, e.g. vem sosjis (these sausages), vem cabjis (those cabbages).

  The relative pronouns ‘who’, ‘which’, and ‘that’ are replaced by ‘as’ and ‘what’, or sometimes both, e.g. a bloke wha: oie knows, or ve bloke as wha: oie knows (the bloke that I know).

  ‘So’ is often replaced by ‘that’, e.g. moei col’s va: bad, oei can: smeoo nuffink (my cold’s so bad, I can’t smell anything).