Sister Monica Joan took hers many decades before the period related here. The kind that is chosen by nuns who take their vows. It focuses on poverty of a different kind. The middle section is the most light-hearted. The book is divided into three distinct sections: The kind of poverty where 'the workhouse' became a reality or at least an ever-present threat. Many of those minds also bore other scars: the memories of real abject poverty. The work was carried out in an area that still bore the scars of war on the ground and in the minds of its inhabitants. It was in the course of this work in Poplar and the Isle of Dogs, work which was as much general District Nursing as it was midwifery, that she met and befriended the people whose stories she shares with us in this book.
Not a nun herself, she was one of a number of secular young nurses who worked with an order she has chosen to call the Sisters of St Raymond Nonnatus after the patron saint of midwives, obstetricians, pregnant women, childbirth & newborn babies. In the 1950s Jennifer Worth became a midwife attached to a convent in the East End. The system wasn't abolished until the 1930s and then only in name. What most of us don't realise is how long 'the Workhouse' survived. But it did have a ring of finality about it, a fate every bit as terminal as a revolution tumbrel. The very fact that we use those words carted off implies an inescapable fate.
Pictures of grimy people in 1800s unable to fend for themselves, ending up destitute and scared and carted off to the workhouse. What does that make you think of? Dickens probably. Evocative, heartbreaking, and a valid historical social record.
In Shadows she shares some of their life stories with us. Summary: Jennifer Worth worked as a midwife-cum-district-nurse in Poplar and the Isle of Dogs in the 1950s, working among people whose lives had always been hard.
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