Call the Midwife 【呼叫助產士】 Jennifer Worth

　【呼叫助產士】是一部關於生死與人生的動人戲劇，五零年代的背景也讓充滿懷舊心情。整部劇是改編自真人真事，1935年出生在英國的Jennifer Worth當過秘書，後來轉作護士及助產士，她退休後成為音樂家，並著手將自己的經驗寫成書，她的回憶錄成為暢銷書，她之後又另外再出版了兩本相關書籍， 本本暢銷，很可惜在【呼叫助產士】開拍前幾天，Jennifer Worth因病去世，無緣看到自己的故事登上螢光幕。　【呼叫助產士】在英國播出引起了收視熱潮，媒體誇獎本劇有笑有淚，俱備收視票房最佳要素。

 Wikipedia

Jennifer Worth RN RM (25 September 1935 – 31 May 2011) was a British nurse and musician. She wrote a best-selling trilogy of memoirs about her work as a midwife practising in the poverty-stricken East End of London in the 1950s: Call The Midwife, Shadows of the Workhouse andFarewell to The East End.

[edit]Biography

Worth, born Jennifer Lee in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, was raised in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. After leaving school at the age of 15^[1] she learned shorthand and typing^[2] and became the secretary to the head of Dr Challoner's Grammar School. She then trained as a nurse at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Reading, and moved to London to receive training to become a midwife.^[1]

Lee was hired as a staff nurse at the London Hospital in Whitechapel in the early 1950s. With the Sisters of St John the Divine, an Anglicancommunity of nuns, she worked to aid the poor.^[1] She was then a ward sister at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in Bloomsbury, and later at the Marie Curie Hospital in Hampstead.^[3]

She married the artist Philip Worth in 1963, and they had two daughters.^[2] Worth retired from nursing in 1973 to pursue her musical interests. In 1974, she was appointed a licentiate of the London College of Music, where she taught piano and singing. She obtained a fellowship in 1984. She performed as a soloist and with choirs throughout Britain and Europe. She later began writing, and her first volume of memoirs, Call the Midwife, was published in 2002. The book became a bestseller when it was reissued in 2007. Shadows of the Workhouse (2005; reissued 2008) andFarewell to the East End (2009) also became bestsellers.^[1] The trilogy sold almost a million copies in the UK alone.^[3] In a fourth volume of memoirs In the Midst of Life, published in 2010, Worth reflects on her later experiences caring for the terminally ill.^[4]

Worth was highly critical of Mike Leigh's 2004 film Vera Drake, for depicting the consequences of illegal abortions unrealistically. She argued that the method shown in the movie, far from being fairly quick and painless, was in fact almost invariably fatal to the mother.^[5]

Worth died on 31 May 2011, having been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus earlier in the year.^[6] A television series, Call the Midwife, based on her books, began broadcasting on BBC One on 15 January 2012.^[7]

[edit]Publications

• Eczema and Food Allergy: The Hidden Cause? (1997)
• Call the Midwife (2002)
• Shadows of the Workhouse (2005)
• Farewell to the East End (2009)
• In the Midst of Life (2010)

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Jennifer Worth
obituary

Nurse and author of an acclaimed memoir of 1950s East End life

• The Guardian, Wednesday 6 July 2011 18.49 BST

Jennifer Worth in 2002. Her Call the Midwife trilogy stands as a major historical document. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

Jennifer 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.

licentiate

音節

li • cen • ti • ate

発音

laisénʃiət

licentiateの変化形

licentiates (複数形)

[名]

1 （医学・法律の免許を有する）開業有資格者.

2 ((英))上級修士：修士号取得後, 1-2年大学院で学んだ者に与えられる；例えばPh.L.(Licentiate in Philosophy).

3 （ヨーロッパの大学の）修士.

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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Jennifer Worth

An interview

"Midwifery is as old a profession as prostitution. In fact, I'm not sure which came first," proclaims Jennifer Worth unexpectedly. It's a typically down-to-earth comment from the author of Call The Midwife, by turns a humorous, moving and shocking account of her life as a

midwife in the East End of London 50 years ago.

The book is being hailed as doing for Ms Worth's profession what James Herriot did for vets, a compliment that leaves her glowing. "I read this article in the Midwives Journal in 1998, which pointed out that there was virtually nothing about midwives in literature - a couple of mentions in Chekhov, but virtually nothing else, and none of it treated midwives as people," she explains. "The last line in the article said, what we need is someone like James Herriot." It was an irresistible challenge, and the feisty former midwife immediately put pen to paper.

The result is a book journalist and commentator Matthew Parris says made him cry in a train carriage. Rogues, scoundrels, saintly nuns and jovial gels populate the pages. But most vivid of all are the mothers Jennifer helped.

These are women like Molly, beaten and degraded by her thug of a husband, struggling to bring up three children in a dirt-poor house; Mrs Jenkins, an aged pauper driven half mad by the death of her children in the poor house years earlier; Concita, mother of 25 children, whose maternal instinct prevents a terrible tragedy; and tragic 14-year-old Mary, forced into prostitution after she runs away from her abusive family.

Jennifer still feels huge affection and admiration for these women all these years later. "They worked so hard," she says with feeling. "I think they were heroines. There was a woman with syphilis: I ended up thinking God this woman is a heroine. She lived in squalid circumstances, looking after all those kids, with a husband in and out of prison, and yet she

always cheerful. I thought she was an old slag at first, but I soon changed my mind." The words "old slag" sound odd in Jennifer's clipped English, but there is no mistaking the admiration behind her words.

Admiration also comes across in Jennifer's descriptions of the nuns who taught her midwifery at Nonnatus House, the fictional name given her East End training hospital.

The nuns are not the sanctified, ethereal creatures of religious hagiography, nor are they the monstrous creatures, bitter and repressed, often depicted in modern fiction and memoirs. Sister Monica Joan, Sister Evangelina and the sage Sister Julienne are defined by their vulnerabilities and human faults as much by their very real godliness. Sister Monica is a muttering mystic with a nose for fresh cakes and a waspish wit. Sister Evangelina seems humourless, but is compassionate, can fart on demand and is deeply loved by the locals. Father Joseph Williamson has devoted his life to helping prostitutes escape the sordid world of the streets, and does so with Christ-like forbearance.

The nuns had a powerful influence on the young Jennifer, and in its quiet way, the book documents her spiritual journey. "They were holy people. You have to be in contact with pure goodness before you can see what true religion is," she says. Recalling Sister Julienne with affection, she adds: "She was my guide and mentor all through my life until she died in 1986."

Jennifer kept in touch with many of the nurses she trained with, including her best friend Cynthia (who died recently) and the wonderful Camilla Fortescue-Cholmeley-Browne, better known as Chummy.

As game as a hockey mistress, Chummy, undimmed by the jibes of local children or personal failure, is the personification of a type of woman sadly missed. "Yes, yes, I agree," says Jennifer. "Chummy comes into the third book in the trilogy. She turns out to be a real heroine." The second book, Shadow of the Workhouse, will bring to life the terrible situations of people post-War left scarred by the appalling workhouses (though they closed in 1935, they left a horrific legacy).

Men appear in more than walk-on roles in the book. The saddest is Jimmy, on whom the young Jennifer had a crush. Full of life and mischief, he is central to the kind of stories your gran likes to shock you with in case you forget she was once a bright young thing too.Years later Jennifer saw Jimmy, who had been forced to give up his apprenticeship as an architect after getting a girl 'in trouble' . He looked cowed, walking behind a battleaxe of a wife, as she barked orders. His spirit was broken. It is one of the most poignant scenes in the book.

How did Jennifer feel summoning these ghosts from her past? "I loved writing it, because they all came back to me so vividly. I could hear the Cockney voices," Jennifer admits. Friends helped her clarify details, and she also used local archives to research the broader background to the book.

The voices were welcome for more than one reason: she loves the Cockney dialect, so much so that there is an appendix about it. "When I first wrote the book I wrote as best I could in but a couple of people I know said, you can't write like this, as it is like another language. It is another language. Children had to learn a second language when they went to school, but I love it."

As a memorial to a bygone age and reminder of how much better the lives of women are in the 21st century, Call The Midwife is an evocative read. It is also a book stuffed full of compassion and humour, and though Jennifer would rail against a return to the old days, she is happy to remind readers about the value of community - especially that army of women who make our lives better. Does she feel she has achieved her goal of putting midwives on the literary map? "Yes, I think I have, most definitely," she says smiling.