So I picked up the memoir which Call The Midwife is based on recently. I figured, there’s no way it can be more harrowing than the series, right?
BOY WAS I WRONG
It’s… a really, really difficult read. Worst of all are the things that Jenny Worth herself doesn’t single out as worthy (pun not intended, honestly) of further comment but make my twenty-first century self go WHAT THE HELL? Like the man who marries a foreign woman when she’s aged twelve (or at least, is implied to be in a relationship with her at that age) never bothers to learn her language, and ends up having over twenty kids with her?!!
(I know they featured in the TV series too, but I seem to remember that again, that aspect of HER BEING ESSENTIALLY A CHILD BRIDE was glossed over a bit)
And when I got to the description of Jane in the second book, my heart just broke, because she very obviously had OCD and anxiety (Worth mentions an incident where she couldn’t stop cutting potatoes into exact halves), and yet those descriptors hadn’t even been invented yet, and everyone treats her as a nuisance or a figure of fun. It’s so sad. God.
I feel like I need to bingewatch the later episodes of the show, possibly all in one night, to make me feel less unhappy about it all, because in the show at least some of those real-life people were given happier endings…
Okay, I know the whole story of Jane now and holy fuck, holy FUCK, that was one of the most horrible things I’ve ever read.
(I do wonder how Worth knew it all, though. Surely the real Jane wouldn’t have gone into such detail, even in letters? Are some of the details invented? Maybe it’s for the best that I don’t know.)
Considering her story, I’m suddenly not surprised that they changed Jane’s backstory for the TV series, and didn’t feature her that much. But the poor, poor woman. I was so damn relived that the real Jane got a real happy ending, even better than the rather vague one she got in the TV show, and married a man who adored her. But god, I don’t think I’ll forget the horrific scenes from her childhood, ever. (Knowing that the perpetrators were never punished, and life in the workhouse continued to be just as bad for many other girls just like her, is another thing I won’t forget. :( )
A few more things, now that I’ve finished the first two books:
I admire Jenny Worth greatly but I’m not sure if I can forgive her for the dildo story. That sounds hilarious but it really isn’t. Basically, she accompanies Jane (who spends an awful lot of her adult life completely traumatized from being essentially physically and emotionally tortured as a child) to a Christmas market and some dick tries to trick Jane into buying a dildo, telling her it’s a ‘honey stirrer’. Jenny does nothing. Jane announces she’ll buy it as a present for one of the nuns who likes honey. Jenny still does nothing. Jane gives it to the nun and everyone is too polite to say anything. Jesus christ, Jenny.
An awful lot of what was in the first series of the show is in the book, including the workhouse incest story, which is treated with more or less equal sensitivity, although goes into somewhat more detail with regards to, uh, certain aspects.
Call the Midwife the show did two ‘baby is born and it’s obviously not the father’s’ stories and both of them are detailed here. The terrible one where it ends badly is true, but it turns out the one where the man involved immediately accepts the child as his own and raises him with love is also true. So that was a rare moment of heartwarming.
But it also turns out there’s a third story, which wasn’t in the show, where halfway through labour the white mother starts screaming that she had an affair and her baby will have dark skin. And the grandmother starts screaming that she’s a slut who ought to just die and take the baby with her, and if the baby does survive she’ll ‘get rid of it’. It’s absolutely freaking awful, and then the baby is born white anyway and presumably grows up never finding out that her family might HAVE KILLED HER if she’d been born a different colour. So that was horrible and I really hope the child in question had grown up and passed away before Worth published that, even if all the names were changed, god, can you imagine reading that one day and adding up that it was you?
The Joe story was sad but I note that the TV series didn’t mention his involvement (under coercion but still) in what would very much be called war crimes today.
God this book really drove home to me how lucky I have it, sitting here in a warm house with plenty of food and water and enough money to replace the 2 important household appliances which decided to break today and yesterday. And I have reliable contraception and the NHS available to me too. So… yeah. Dead lucky.