Call the Midwife -- Jennifer Worth

     

I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction lately, among them a series of books titled Call the Midwife. I started this series because I was fascinated with the TV show. (New season airing now!) Call the Midwife is the story of Jennifer Lee a new midwife sent to work in the East End of London during the 50s and 60s. Jenny Lee fresh out of school leaves a relationship with one of her professors to help the women of the East End without really understanding what she was getting into. From a privileged family, she doesn’t understand how poverty and the aftermath of war affect large groups of people. The midwifery practice she joins is run by a group of nuns who have lived, worked, and taken care of the people of the East End for generations. Over the course of the books, Jenny Lee discovers herself and what it means to help people who can’t help themselves. She learns to overlook poor sanitation and hygiene and look at what makes people human. She included so many stories of both tragedy and overcoming the odds that it’s hard not to be emotionally moved while reading. Knowing that it’s a biography makes the whole thing feel closer to home. This type of thing makes me want to break out a recorder and capture every story that people on the street are willing to tell me, from the most mundane to the most extraordinary.

     Comparing the book to the show is really only possible because the writers tried to follow the story while adding things to make it interesting. Good writers help TV shows and movies sell books. The show has its tense moments but with the exception of the season finales the episodes almost always have happy endings. Of course, it is best to remember it is a fictional dramatization of a biography and only follows the outline of the books. They start with the same basic main characters but as the show goes on characters get combined, new ones get made up and introduced, the history and future of the characters get left out or not explained, and events get moved around. It’s narrated by Vanessa Redgrave who I’ve always thought has the perfect voice for it. My only real complaint about the show is even when the real story ended with a bad ending, death, loss of faith, etc., the writers almost always changed it to something happy. The few sad endings that were included were the ones where Jenny learned something important from it. Some of the stories that changed were very powerful and taught a lesson about endurance and making the best of things and how people cope with tragedy but since, one of the other nurses and not Jenny learned a lesson, the story got abbreviated. With time constraints and budgets, the writers/producers have to pick and choose what gets rewritten and they did a fairly good job. Anyway, I think I’ve started rambling. If you like TV shows with depth to the story and emotional storytelling, this is a good choice despite all of the baby birthing scenes. The same goes for the book, definitely a story that needs to be read and reread to absorb the overall narrative.