Farewell To The East End

ADIEU

David and Chummy went to Sierra Leone. Chummy opened the first midwifery service at the mission station and ran the small hospital. David joined the police and became a senior officer in the force. They found the work harder and more demanding than they could ever have imagined, but they had the strength of youth and idealism to carry them through. Above all, they had the love to support and sustain each other in times of crisis. They stayed in Africa throughout their lives, and Chummy and I corresponded for a few years. They had a family, but she continued her work in a teaching capacity. She must have been desperately busy, and in the circumstances it is not easy to continue writing letters indefinitely to an old nursing colleague. We exchanged Christmas cards for a few years, but eventually they petered out. She was a unique character, and it was a happiness and a privilege to have known her.

Trixie was the only one of our small circle who did not continue nursing. She married a young man who had both feet firmly planted on the civil service ladder. He entered the diplomatic service, and Trixie went with him. I have often wondered how she managed, because diplomacy had never been her strong suit! I just could not imagine her in one of Her Majesty’s Embassies. When I knew her, she was fun, quick-minded and clever, but sharp-tongued and brutally blunt. Perhaps she introduced a breath of fresh air into the unctuous atmosphere of the diplomatic service. She travelled with her husband to many of the big capitals of the world and became quite sophisticated, but cutting comments delivered with lightning rapidity remained her trademark.

I did not see much of Trixie during these years. It was not until the couple had retired to Essex, by which time we were both grandmothers, that we met again. I noticed a small grand-daughter who looked exactly like Trixie when she was young. The little girl was about ten years old and had an answer to everything. She was an experienced manager already and bossed her three younger brothers around with consummate skill.

Trixie took me to the street market in Basildon, where we witnessed the daughters of Megan’mave at work selling their fruit and vegetables. Later, her comment was ‘We never change, do we? And what is more, our children and grandchildren don’t change.’

Trixie had certainly mellowed with the years.

Cynthia felt called to the religious life and was accepted as a Postulant and Novice in the order. She was a working Novice, as she was already a trained nurse and midwife. But the religious life is hard, and much is demanded spiritually and physically of any Novice. Cynthia’s goodness and purity had always impressed me and had influenced me more than she ever knew, but perhaps her mind could not stand the strain. She had shown signs of clinical depression around the time of puberty, and this was a state of mind that beset her for many years. She left the order and became a hospital staff nurse, then returned to the convent to resume her life vows, but left again. Why does God so often cause good people to suffer so greatly? It is a question I have often asked myself. Sister Julienne turned the question the other way, and said, ‘God loves greatly those whom he requires to suffer greatly.’ This is a riddle wrapped in a mystery we cannot comprehend.

Cynthia limped through life for many years, in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Many drugs were prescribed, and also electric shock therapy. A true depressive lives a life of inner hell, which little or sometimes nothing can alleviate. My heart bled for gentle Cynthia, but there was nothing I could do to help.

At the age of thirty-nine she met a clergyman who was a widower and had a son. They married, and his needs, mentally, were even greater than her own. Somehow the necessity to look after him and organise his life became the focus of her existence and cured her. We none of us can understand the complexities of the human mind. She became a very happy and successful vicar’s wife and a health visitor. Her husband Roger was also a classical scholar. At the age of sixty-five he retired from the ministry, and for several years they lived like a couple of hippy teenagers. With no more than a rucksack each, and a budget of £3 a day, they roamed hundreds of miles across Greece, Israel, Jordan and Turkey, examining the architectural ruins of ancient civilisations. They slept in little caf’s, on buses, under the stars on beaches, in fields, in olive groves and lemon orchards. They planned nothing, but simply went where the fancy took them.

After retirement, Cynthia’s husband joined the Church of England World Mission Association. This meant that he could be asked to act as a locum for any church, at home or overseas, which was temporarily without a priest.

The couple were both about seventy years of age when the telephone rang one evening.

‘This is the World Mission Association. Could you go to Lima? The vicar has just been shot.’

‘Sounds nasty. Well yes, certainly. When do you want me?’

‘The week after next.’

‘I dare say we could go. I must ask my wife.’

Aside: ‘Cynthia, could we go to Lima the week after next? The vicar has been shot.’

‘Where’s Lima?’

‘Peru. South America.’

‘Well, yes, I should think we could. A fortnight is enough time to pack things up here. For how long?’

To the telephone: ‘Yes, we could go. For how long?’

‘Three months. Six, perhaps. Not really sure.’

‘That’s all right. Send us details, flight tickets, etc., and we’ll go.’

Cynthia – quiet, sensitive, depressive – led a life of high romance and breathtaking adventure in her old age that few of us would have dared contemplate, still less had the courage to carry out.

Some people have described my first book Call the Midwife as a spiritual journey, and they are correct – it is. I owe to the Sisters more than I could possibly repay. Probably they do not know how great is my debt. The words ‘if God really does exist, then that must have implications for the whole of life’ could not be dismissed. Sister Julienne and I spent many hours discussing these subjects, and the influence of her goodness has shaped my development. We corresponded, and I visited her all through my life, and I took my own children with me to the Mother House; we stayed in the caravan in the grounds of the convent.

I remained very close to her and always sought her prayers and wisdom at any difficult point in my life. She always guided me well. In 1991 Sister Julienne developed a brain tumour, and for the last three months of her life I visited her every Friday. It was an enriching experience, even though, or perhaps because, she was deteriorating week by week. Time was short, and getting shorter, in which to convey, if not in words, then in silent empathy, my love and gratitude. On the last Friday she was deeply unconscious, and it was obvious that her life was drawing to its end. She died two days later on Sunday morning – a beautiful day in June at the hour when her Sisters were saying Lauds, the first monastic office to greet the dawn.

It was a singular honour to be invited to attend her funeral at the Mother House. The service was the Requiem Mass for the dead as ordained by the Book of Common Prayer. The funeral of a nun is very quiet and reverent. Her Sisters do not mourn and grieve; they are more likely to express joy that a life given in the service of God is fulfilled. For them death is not an enemy. Death is seen as a friend.

At the end of the service, while plainsong was being chanted, one of the Sisters took up a pile of folded garments that had been lying on the altar throughout. The Reverend Mother came towards her with hands outstretched, palms facing upwards. The Sister placed the garments on the hands of the Reverend Mother, who turned and walked slowly towards the coffin. She placed the small burden on the centre of the coffin and turned and bowed to the altar. It was the folded habit, surmounted by the gold cross and rosary that Sister Julienne had worn all her professed life, and they went with her to her grave in the Sisters’ cemetery in the convent garden.

Rest eternal, rest in peace, beloved Sister Julienne.

Sister Evangelina died some years ago. At her own request she was buried in Poplar, and not in the Sisters’ cemetery at the convent. She had always been one of the people, and that is how she wished to be remembered.

Novice Ruth took her final vows and practised her calling for about twenty years. But in the mid-1970s she encountered a spiritual crisis, which in religious language is called ‘the black night of the soul’. It is a most terrible experience, probably more shattering than the worst kind of divorce. It is well known and documented in monastic literature, and is a spiritual phenomenon to be dreaded, yet in some ways welcomed, as it is a testing of the soul and suffering can lead to an enriched spiritual experience. Sister Ruth was tormented for years with no respite and eventually renounced her life vows and left the order.

Sister Bernadette, an inspired midwife from whom I learned all the practical skills of the profession, also left the Order but for a very different reason. She worked faithfully all through the 1960s and ’70s as a midwife. In the 1980s, when the HIV virus infected the Western world and when medical and nursing staff were vulnerable to being infected, she nursed AIDS patients at a time when the mortality rate was close on 100 per cent. Throughout the 1980s there had been debate in the Church of England about the ordination of women, and in 1993 the General Synod voted that women could be admitted to the priesthood. Sister Bernadette could not take this. Deep religious conviction based on theology and history told her that it was wrong. She was in her seventies and crippled with arthritis, but she had the courage of her convictions to leave the Anglican Church. This meant that she would have to leave the Sisters with whom she had shared her life. She was accepted into a Roman Catholic order, where she lived the strict life of a solitary contemplative, devoting her time to prayer and meditation.

Ambition is a double-edged sword. One side will cut through stagnation and lead to a new life; without ambition, mankind would still be living in caves. But the other side can be destructive, leading to feelings of loss and regret. I was ambitious, and my sights were set high. I was planning to be a hospital matron or at the very least a sister tutor, and I would have to climb the ladder of the nursing hierarchy. A district nurse and midwife was only a lower rung on that ladder. I did not really want to leave the Sisters, but I knew that, if I stayed with them, I would stagnate. I loved the Sisters and their devotional life, and I loved the fun and freedom of district work in the docklands, but to continue would have rendered me unsuitable for the discipline of hospital work, which was very strict indeed in those days. I left the Sisters in 1959 to become a staff midwife at the London Hospital, Mile End Road, where I enjoyed seeing more of Cockney characters. But it took a long time to settle down to the rigours and discipline of hospital routine. Eventually the move paid off, and after a couple of years I obtained my first junior sister’s post at the famous women’s hospital, the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson in the Euston Road (now sadly closed). Later I became night sister there, which in those days meant being in overall charge of the hospital throughout the night. Then I became ward sister of the Marie Curie Hospital in Hampstead.

I was climbing the ladder, as anticipated. But then I met a certain young man, and ideas of becoming a hospital matron seemed rather irrelevant. We have been happily married for about forty-five years at the time of writing. After our children were born I gave up full-time nursing, but continued part-time.

In 1973, after a twenty-year nursing and midwifery career, I left nursing altogether. All my life I had been a frustrated musician, and with intensive study, supported by my husband, I achieved a Licenciate of the London College of Music and later a Fellowship and started twenty-five years of music teaching.