Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End by Jennifer Worth

Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End by Jennifer Worth --- 321 pages

This is the final installment of the real life story, published in 2009, that inspired the BBC/PBS series "Call the Midwife."

Jennifer Lee was hired as a staff nurse at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, in London's East End, in the early 1950s. With the Sisters of St. John the Divine, an Anglican community of nuns, she worked among the poor of London's docklands during the social upheavals of the post war years.

In the final volume of her memoirs, Worth focuses on the last years of the old East End, as the government finally began, with agonizing slowness, to raze the old tenements and commercial buildings destroyed or damaged during the Blitz. While the clearance and redevelopment was necessary, it was carried out in a bureaucratic manner that resulted in the massive dislocation of thousands of families and the obliteration of entire communities.  The old Docklands had been the hub of cargo shipping into and out of London for centuries and the primary source of jobs for the unskilled laborers of the East End. But machines replaced manpower on the docks, while perishables and lightweight cargo switched to air transport, and the jobs disappeared.

Worth ends her memoir with the closure of "Nonnatus House" after 99 years of service to the people of the East End. The sisters exchanged midwifery for new missions, caring for drug addicts, opening homeless shelters, helping immigrant women, and nursing AIDS patients. She satisfies our need to know "what happened after" for each of the sisters and nurses, from the charming but erratic Sister Monica Joan to gentle Cynthia.

Worth has a wonderful knack for bringing people to life and revealing the immense vitality of the Cockney community and a way of life now vanished. Her first book, Call the Midwife, was published in 2002,  followed by Shadows of the Workhouse in 2005, and Farewell to the East End in 2009. All three books became bestsellers in Great Britain. Jennifer Worth died after a brief illness in 2011. The BBC began broadcasting the series "Call the Midwife," based on her memoirs, in January 2012. The series was rebroadcast on PBS in America later that same year. Responding to popular and critical acclaim, a second series followed in 2013.