Free The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times by Jennifer Worth

cleanliness or self-respect. It was said that there five thousand people living in the Canada Buildings.
    I found her mother Marjorie’s address in the Ontario Buildings, and knocked. A cheery voice called “Come on in luvvy”. The usual invitation of an East Ender, whoever you were. The door was unlocked, so I stepped straight into the main room. Marjorie turned round as I entered with a bright smile. The smile vanished as soon as she saw me and her hands dropped to her sides.
    “Oh no. No. Not again. You’ve come about our Moll, ’aven’t you?” She sat down on a chair, buried her face in her hands, and sobbed.
    I was embarrassed. I didn’t know what to do or say. Some people are good at dealing with the problems of others, but not me. In fact, the more emotional people get, the less I am able to cope. I put my bag on a chair and sat down beside her, saying nothing. It gave me the chance to look around the room.
    Having seen Molly’s squalor, I had expected to see her mother’s place in the same sort of condition, but nothing could have been more dissimilar. The room was clean and tidy, and smelt nice. Pretty curtains hung at clean windows. The mats were clean, well brushed and shaken. A kettle was bubbling on the gas stove. Marjorie was wearing a clean dress and pinafore, her hair was brushed and looked nice.
    The kettle gave me an idea, and as the sobs lessened I said, “How about making a nice cup of tea for us both? I’m parched.”
    She brightened up and said, with typical cockney courtesy, “Sorry nurse. Don’t mind me. I gets that worked up about Moll, I do.”
    She got up and made the tea. The activity helped her, and she sniffed away the tears. Over the next twenty minutes, it all came out, her hopes and her heartache.
    Molly was the last of five children. She had never known her father, who had been killed at Arnhem during the war. The whole family had been evacuated to Gloucestershire.
    Marjorie said, “I don’t know if that upset her, or what, but the others turned out all right, they did.”
    The family returned to London, and settled in Ontario Buildings. Molly seemed to adapt to the new surroundings and her new school, and was reported to be doing well.
    “She was that bright,” Marjorie said. “Always top o’ the class. She could’ve been a secitary an’ worked in an orfice up West, she could. Oh, it breaks my heart, it do, when I thinks on it.”
    She sniffed and pulled out her handkerchief. “She was about fourteen when she met that turd. His name’s Richard, an’ I calls ’im Richard the Turd.” She giggled at her little joke. “Then she was stopping out late, saying she was down the Youth Club, but I reckoned as how she was telling me lies, so I asks the Rector, an’ he tells me Moll wasn’t even a member. Then she was stoppin’ out all night. Oh, nurse, you can’t even know what that does to a mother.”
    Quiet sobs came from the neat little figure in the flowered apron.
    “Night after night I walked the streets, looking for ’er, but I never found ’er. ‘Course I never. She’d come home in the morning, an’ tell me a pack of lies, as though I was daft, an’ go off to school. When she was sixteen, she said she was going to marry her Dick. I reckoned as how she was pregnant anyhow, so I says, ‘That’s the best thing you can do, my luvvy.’”
    They married, and took two rooms in Baffin Buildings. From the start, Molly never did any housework. Marjorie went in and tried to show her daughter how to keep her rooms clean and tidy, but it was no use. The next time she went, the place was as dirty as ever.
    “I don’t know where she gets her lazy ways from,” Marjorie said.
    At first Dick and Molly seemed fairly happy, and although Dick did not appear to be in any regular job, Marjorie hoped for the best for her daughter. Their first baby was born, and Molly seemed happy, but quite soon, things began to get worse. Marjorie noticed bruises on her daughter’s neck