Autobiography and memoirObituaryJennifer Worth obituary
Nurse and author of an acclaimed memoir of 1950s East End lifeJennifer Worth, who has died of cancer aged 75, was the author of the Call the Midwife trilogy, based on her experiences as a nurse in the East End of London in the 1950s. The first volume, Call the Midwife, was originally published in 2002. Reissued in 2007 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, it became a bestseller, as did the subsequent volumes Shadows of the Workhouse (2005; reissued 2008) and Farewell to the East End (2009). A strong personality, Jennifer was dynamic and determined, and her lively imagination is apparent in the books.
After her retirement from nursing, with the East End she had known long gone, she decided to put her reminiscences down in writing, so as to preserve the old ways of life, the people and the poverty. "So many of those great characters have stayed with me," she said on the publication of Call the Midwife. "Most people in London at that time didn't know the East End - they pushed it aside. There was no law, no lighting, bedbugs and fleas. It was a hidden place, not written about at all." Filming is about to begin on a BBC television series based on Jennifer's books, scripted by Heidi Thomas, which is due for broadcast in 2012.
Born Jennifer Lee in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex (while her parents were on holiday), she grew up in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, left Belle Vue school aged 14 and became secretary to the head of Dr Challoner's grammar school. However, she found that this was not sufficiently expressive of her temperament, so decided to become a nurse instead. She trained at the Royal Berkshire hospital in Reading, then moved to London for further training as a midwife.
In the early 1950s she became a staff nurse at the London hospital in Whitechapel, east London. There she lived with an Anglican community of nuns, the Sisters of St John the Divine, who worked among the poor and who inspired her lifelong dedication to the Christian faith.
Her subsequent nursing jobs were at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital in Bloomsbury, and finally at the Marie Curie hospital in Hampstead. Jennifer married Philip Worth in 1963 and their two daughters, Suzannah and Juliette, were born. Having decided to embark on a musical career, Jennifer gave up nursing in 1973. She studied the piano and singing intensively, becoming a licentiate of the London College of Music in 1974, and was awarded a fellowship 10 years later. She taught and performed solo and in choirs throughout the UK and Europe. When she felt these musical talents ebbing, she turned to writing.
Jennifer never allowed the challenges of life to defeat her. Some years ago, she suffered from a painful bout of eczema and asthma. She undertook a regime of swimming and bicycling, as well as home cures, and detailed some of her ideas in Eczema and Food Allergy: The Hidden Cause? (1997).
She met her last illness with courage. Jennifer was determined to put into practice the ideas that she wrote about in her last book, In the Midst of Life (2010) – namely, the absolute dignity of the dying person, whose wish for a natural end should be respected. Jennifer had a very happy family life, the deep peace of a life well lived, and a death committed to God.
She is survived by her beloved husband Philip, their daughters, and three grandchildren, Dan, Lydia and Eleanor.
David Kynaston writes: Four years ago, surveying the publisher's hype before reading Jennifer Worth's Call the Midwife – "appeals to the huge market for nostalgia ... misery memoir meets a fascinating slice of social history" – I confidently anticipated a dollop of self-indulgent, sentimental tosh. I could not have been more wrong.
Wrong not least in literary terms, for Worth's powers of description, authenticity of detail and richness of characterisation evoke from the start an unforgettable milieu – Poplar and the London docklands of the mid to late 1950s – to which I and clearly many thousands of other readers willingly and completely surrendered.
At the centre of her account (both here and in Shadows of the Workhouse and Farewell to the East End) is the warmly but shrewdly depicted convent of the Midwives of St Raymund Nonnatus, her pseudonym for the order of Anglican nuns she nursed with, devoted to bringing safer childbirth to the poor at a time when home births were still overwhelmingly the norm, while the circumstances and backstories of the pregnant women themselves are often heartstopping. Worth is not a believer at the outset, but things begin to stir as a result of what she witnesses, and at one level her books are the record of a spiritual journey.
Yet in all probability it will be as a major historical document that her trilogy enjoys its most enduring reputation. By the late 1950s slum clearance and comprehensive redevelopment were starting to transform large parts (including Poplar) of the East End, far more effectively than the Luftwaffe had ever managed; and by the end of the 1960s they were almost wholly unrecognisable from the intimate, squalid, overcrowded, intensely human environment that had sprung up during the 19th century and then stayed largely unchanged.
In particular, quite apart from her shocking evocation of the poverty, Worth gives a wonderfully convincing portrait of the working class that inhabited that environment: infinite, tiny gradations of status within it; "rough indifference" in public between husbands and wives, but in private often domestic violence; frequent pub brawls and street fights, even knifings, yet an underlying decency that meant no old people lived in fear of being mugged; and an almost complete lack of interest in life beyond the East End, even beyond the next street, so that "other people's business was the primary topic of conversation – for most it was the only interest, the only amusement or diversion".
Worth saw it all clearly, level-headedly and without illusion. We are fortunate she was there to capture with such compassion a world that – for good or ill – we have irrevocably lost.
Jennifer Louise Worth, nurse and writer, born 25 September 1935; died 31 May 2011
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