London's East End, the 1950s, winter. A thick yellow smog keeps the local doctors busy treating respiratory problems; elderly folks die by the hundreds. But Conchita Warren, pregnant for the 25th (yes, the 25th) time, has suffered a fall and gone into labor two months early.
The young midwife who has been providing Conchita's prenatal care receives the late-night call, and bicycles through the soupy cloud of pollution to tend to her charge. Jenny is an experienced midwife by now, but has never had to deal with a premature birth. The mother is very sick; the baby is born successfully, tiny but alive. Finally doctors arrive and order the baby transferred to hospital, but Conchita won't let go of the minute infant. No amount of pressure can pry her hand off it, and her husband, Len, takes her side.
This is but one of many dramatic episodes ("adventures" wouldn't be an inaccurate term) recounted by Jennifer Worth in her absorbing, eye-opening, wise, touching, and sometimes suspenseful memoir of life as a nurse-midwife in the poor parts of London in the postwar years. Times were tough and crime always threatened, but unlike policemen, who patrolled in pairs for "mutual protection... we nurses and midwives are always alone, on foot or bicycle. We would never be touched. So deep is the respect, the reverence, of the roughest, toughest docker for the district midwives that we can go anywhere alone, day or night, without fear."
And they had to. Jenny visits bombed-out buildings, condemned many years before but still inhabited by the dirt-poor. She encounters women who've been abused by husbands, by pimps, and by the infamous workhouses, and ravaged by illnesses ranging from rickets to eclampsia. Yet moments of amazing grace shed a different light on the human condition: a first-time father has an unexpected reaction to his new baby's suspiciously dark skin; a young boy befriends a clumsy, socially inept midwife, gallantly defending her against ridicule; Jennifer discerns the startling secret to Conchita and Len's everlasting, unconditional love. And as the young agnostic grows to respect the nuns who run the midwives' practice, she inches towards a religious revelation.
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