Holding Back the Rain
We’ve begun watching a BBC series on Netflix called Call the Midwife, which is a period series set in the East End of London in the 1950’s, the decade of my own birth. It is the story of a young nurse, Jenny, who goes to work in the early days of the British National Health Service. She has trained as a nurse and midwife, but is sent into the bowels of the most impoverished parts of post-war London where the living conditions are on the order of Dublin in Angela’s Ashes. It is a graphic depiction of what childbirth and the related issues looked like not so very long ago. It is based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, who served a life-changing tour of duty on the Cockney streets. She now narrates the series when necessary (actually voiced over by Vanessa Redgrave) with the lilting commentaries of a sad British matron who has seen way too much suffering to not remember it with compassion.
The characters are typically cast like most BBC specials with great diversity, ranging from the lovely and demure Jenny to the crazy old nun, Sister Monica Joan, to the awkward and XXL Nurse Chummy, who is the daughter of English nobility and yet wants to be with a local and kind constable. The hardships of life down in the gutters of the non-working welfare class are almost unimaginable given that this was the state of affairs in one of the worlds’ great cities a mere sixty years ago. It’s one thing to watch scenes of life in distant and long-ago lands that are gritty and primeval. It is entirely another thing to see women in primitive and unkempt surroundings giving birth to children that could be my schoolmates or siblings. I will admit that my travels to London in the late sixties through the early eighties left me thinking little of British hotels and even less of British restaurant/pub fare. If you weren’t partial to warm ale and stale meat pies, you had to wait for the Big Bang in the mid-eighties to see any improvements. But that all felt more charming and quaint than grotty and backward. The East End of Call the Midwife is all proper on one level, and all tragic on another.
One of the episodes ends with Vanessa Redgrave narrating that she found love and happiness amidst the squalor of the East End. There is something to be said for stripping away the veneer of wealth and beauty as a way of finding truth and the grandeur of humanity, especially in the process of creating life and the other simple pleasures of love and caring. The scenes alternate between the revolting worst aspects of the filth of the streets and the shining lights of the human spirit.
I am reminded of a college friend who recently took his own life rather than burden his family and the world with his terminally failing condition. He was a dentist who had come to school desperately wanting to be a physician. He was known by us to be OCD about cleanliness. He had the grades, but the desperation showed through and kept him from admission to any of the forty medical schools to which he applied. He chose dental school and attended on a Public Health Service scholarship that required an equal number of years of service in repayment.
His first posting was in South Boston, an area approximately equivalent to the East End of London. His patients were merchant mariners and their families. His moment of truth came while showing an older wife of one of the sailors how to floss her few remaining rotting teeth. When she pulled back, confused by the strange sensation, the floss snapped and projected a long-lodged piece of food from her molars onto my friend’s cheek. He understood that his future as a dentist hung in the balance as he wiped his cheek rather than run from the room screaming (which was his instinctive reaction).
He went on to start and run a dental clinic for the Public Health Service on the gritty side of the tracks in Stamford, Connecticut. Fairfield County is the Mayfair of New York Metro, but South Stamford shares many of the attributes of a modern-day East End. Many of us who knew my friend wondered about his ongoing choice of work venue as he was not the do-gooder sort and seemed too pristine in his manner to suffer the grit of the welfare clientele he served. But the years passed and he ran his clinic for his entire thirty-plus-year career.
When my friend met his end, it was more a shock to us than to his family, who seemed to understand his determination not to be a burden. At his memorial, we shared stories of his life and the most poignant comments came from the minority staff members who worked by his side over the years, serving their very own challenged community. Their strong emotions spoke volumes of the value of the life he lived, mostly unbeknownst to most of us with more prosperous careers and lifestyles. I cannot imagine his time on this earth could have been more productively spent had he been the most prominent physician to graduate from the finest medical school. He was the George Bailey of the dental profession.
The theme of Call the Midwife and the message of my friend’s life is simply that we are all on this earth to help hold back the rain for our fellow man. Some live in the East End. Some live in South Stamford. Some await salvation at the southern border. And some are our flawed and imperfect friends and family members that need help from time to time. Whether the circumstances are difficult and less than pretty is never the issue. The rain comes down and drenches us all sooner or later. Sooner or later we all need help of some sort or another holding back the rain. We all need to know that there are those that will look beyond the messiness of life and stay with us until the sun shines again.