Reprehensible Nostalgia

Snobbishly, it feels slightly embarrassing to admit to enjoying something as popular as the BBC drama Call The Midwife, but I and Ms Formerly Aldgate have indeed rather delighted in catching up with the series over the last year since discovering it. There are those who react very unfavourably to its saccharine approach to the 1950s and depictions of 'posh people being nice', but then the caring professions were full of posh people being nice, and watching an hour of human beings struggling to be as good as they can be is a healthy change from serial killers, of which, in reality, there are rather fewer about than television might have us believe.

I feel a particular connection with the events because of my albeit short stay in Poplar while I was at theological college. Although the real convent which Jennifer Worth's midwifery memoirs were based on is the Community of St John the Divine in Whitechapel, most of the action is still set in Poplar, somewhat to the south and east, where I did my placement in 2002. The parish of Poplar, in common with most of the rest of the East End, was a great centre of Anglo-Catholicism, once upon a time comprising nine churches and a staff of twelve curates (or was it twelve churches and nine curates?) as well as the Rector, not counting all the lay workers and Sisters of various religious orders. In the 1950s the then Rector of Poplar, Fr Eastaugh, who later become Bishop of Hereford, came to Swanvale Halt at our incumbent's invitation to lead a Mission. That whole world, of course, is now long-gone, thanks to wartime depredation, depopulation, immigration and economic change; of all those Poplar churches only two survive, one of which (St Nicholas, Blackwall Steps) has now been moved to an entirely different location. Only the original parish church, Georgian All Saints, maintains a tenuous link with the culture the TV series shows.

The aspect of Call The Midwife which impresses itself most on me is its generous depiction of Christian faith and life. The more quotidian and twee features of an Anglican parish in the 1950s, from cub scout troupes to nativity plays, one might expect to be gently ridiculed, but aren't, and are in any case balanced by the gentle intensity of the experience of the nuns and the laypeople who interact with them. When the Sisters sing Compline it's suspiciously professional (no ropey notes or coughing), but I recognise the chant tones with a sense of gratitude, and the way faith and life interpenetrate is shown seriously and realistically, almost as though Christianity might be something sensible people could adhere to and find it shaping their lives and helping them in both challenging and joyful times. So far as popular culture is concerned, it so very rarely is.