Call the Midwife (2002) is a memoir by Jennifer Worth (née Lee), an Englishwoman who served as a midwife in the Cockney East End of London in the 1950s. It’s hardly an obscure source. The book and its two sequels have sold more than a million copies, and a BBC series based on the book is that station’s most popular show in the 21st century.
It’s well worth reading. It’s a fascinating look at a now-vanished world, and, perhaps more relevantly to Dissident Right readers, a sober case study in how and why communities vanish.
I confess I almost gave up on the book. It contains a number of graphic accounts of labor and childbirth, including explicit descriptions of ladies’ private parts during those processes. But then again, what do you expect a book about midwifery to discuss? Mrs. Worth mastered her discipline, a very important one, and wins the reader’s respect for it.
“Mary” (probably a pseudonym), having been raped by a stepfather in Ireland, flees penniless to London, where the very first person to be kind to her is one “Zakir.” That also is probably a pseudonym, but the Muslim name Zakir is not chosen accidentally: Worth makes it clear from events that he is from a Muslim community.
Zakir’s treatment of the hungry, homeless, scared “Mary” is a grotesque sham of Western-style courtly love:
“I felt so terribly alone [said “Mary” to author Worth], more alone than I had ever felt before.”
“He was the first person who had spoken to me since the lorry [= truck] driver [who took her to London]. It was so nice just to hear someone say something to me…Then he said, ‘Do you want something to eat, then?’ and I said: ‘I’ll say I do.’ He looked down at me and smiled, such a lovely smile. His teeth were gleaming white, and his eyes were kind. He had beautiful eyes, a dark black-brown colour. I loved his eyes the moment I looked into them. He said, ‘Come on, let’s get some of their nice filled rolls. I’m hungry too. Then we’ll go and sit by the Cuts [i.e., by the Limehouse Cut Canal in London] and eat them.’”
She [“Mary,” as described by Worth] felt overwhelmed by this kind, handsome youth who seemed to like her. “He talked all the time, and laughed, and threw bits of bread to the sparrows and pigeons, and called them ‘my friends’. I thought someone who is friends with the birds must be very nice.”
“He told me he was a buyer for his uncle, who had a nice café in Cable Street and who sold the best food in London. We had such a lovely meal sitting there on the towpath in the sunshine. The rolls were delicious, the apple pies were delicious, and the chocolate cake was out of this world.”
“He didn’t say anything. For a long while he just stroked my cheek and my hair. Then he said: ‘Poor little Mary. What are we going to do with you? I can’t leave you here by the Cuts all night. I feel responsible for you now. I think you had better come back with me to my uncle’s place. It’s a nice café. My uncle is very kind. We can have a good meal and then we can plan your future.’”
“Zakir put his coat around my shoulders, because it was getting chilly, and he carried my bag. He put his arm round me, and led me through the crowds of men leaving the docks. He escorted me over the road like a real gentleman, and I can tell you I felt like the greatest lady in London by the side of such a handsome young man.”
“I thought he must be so clever and educated to speak a foreign language.”
“My uncle’s café is just up there,” [said Zakir]. “It’s the best and the busiest one in the street. We can have a meal together, just you and me. Won’t that be fun? My uncle also owns the whole building and he lets out rooms, so I’m sure he would find one for you. That way you won’t have to sleep by the Cuts any more. Perhaps he could find a job for you in the café, washing up, or peeling the vegetables. Or he could put you in charge of the coffee machine. Would you like to work the coffee machine?”
Mary was enchanted. Working the coffee machine in a busy London café was about the height of her dreams. She clung to Zakir in gratitude and adoration, and he squeezed her hand. “Every thing’s going to be all right for you from now on,” he said. “I’ve got that feeling.”
Mary was too overcome to speak. She loved him with all her heart. They entered the café.
In fact the “uncle” is not literally Zakir’s uncle, but the boss of a brothel in the East End. This brothel is the “café” at which Zakir had promised “Mary” a job. And when Zakir called himself a “buyer” for his uncle’s café, it was in fact a disgusting and sardonic euphemism for his role as spotter-and-seducer for the rape gang (he later expands the term to “meat buyer.”)
On “Mary’s” very first visit, she is forced to drink until she’s drunk. Then she watches as an obese white woman does a strip tease, which finishes when she produces ping-pong balls out of her vagina as part of the “show.” Then she lies on a table while the customers at the “café” line up, pay money, and one by one have sex with her.
Mrs. Worth’s account — remember, a non-fiction memoir — shows a number of things.
First, it reveals the shocking sociopathy in the Muslim community’s treatment of women. It is clear that this not an isolated case, but in fact a common method by which Muslim grooming gangs target vulnerable women.
Second, it shows that the Muslim rape-and-prostitution culture was not something that developed recently, or gradually gathered over time before reaching a critical mass, but that it was in fact massive and immediate, taking root as soon as the Muslims arrived in numbers in the 1950s.
Does this would-be feel-good bestseller contain the earliest documented case of the Muslim rape-and-prostitution culture? Using simple arithmetic, we see how far back that culture goes. Recent articles in the Daily Mirror and other outlets in 2018 express shock that this has been going on for “forty years.” [Britain’s Worst Abuse Scandal, By Jemma Buckley, Daily Mail, March 12, 2018] But of course, the 1950s were sixty, now almost seventy, years ago.
Thirdly, we are therefore also shown the persistence of the rape culture. It’s now three generations on from the 1950s, but Muslim “grooming” is exactly the same today. It is evidently deeply fixed in their culture: it was brought over from their home nation, and it has not been eradicated by extended, multi-generational contact with English norms.
Other historians point out how London’s white “Cockneys” were hit hard by other factors, such as the shift from hand-loading of ships at the London docks to container shipping in Felixstowe on the East Coast. But Mrs. Worth, who worked in that community down at street level for a decade, and who has no right-wing program (more on that anon), quite innocently describes immigration as the central factor that destroyed the Cockney community:
Condemned houses, which were privately owned, could not be sold on the open market to responsible landlords, so they were bought up by unscrupulous profiteers of all nationalities, who let out single, derelict, rooms for fantastically low rents. The shops were bought up in the same way and turned into all night cafés, with their ‘street waitresses’. They were, in fact, brothels, making life hell for the decent people who had to live in the area, and bring their children up in the midst of it all.
In the 1950s, thousands of commonwealth immigrants poured into the country with no provision made for where they were going to live.
[There was] blatant widespread use of their streets, their alleys and closes, their shops and houses, as brothels…Life became sheer hell, and women were terrified to go out of doors, or to let their children out. The tough, resilient East Enders, who had lived through two world wars, lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s, survived the Blitz of the 1940s, and come up smiling, were to be crushed by the vice and prostitution that descended in their midst in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Try to imagine, if you can, living in a derelict building, renting two rooms on the second floor, with six children to bring up. And then try to imagine that there is a new landlord, and through threats, intimidation, fear, or genuine rehousing, one by one, all the families you have known since childhood have moved out. [Emphases added]
Interestingly, it becomes clear that Mrs. Worth, judging from the general gestalt of the book, would probably be considered, and would have considered herself, a “progressive” in contemporary terms. In a bit of virtue-signaling avant la lettre, for example, she seems to think that the appearance of mixed-race babies in the East End is simply the way of the future, a step forward, leaving behind the conservative old ways — et cetera.
And, unfortunately, it is perhaps her progressivism unhappily mixed with old-fashioned British gentility that leads her to grotesquely insufficient conclusions about “Mary” and “Zakir.” She notes that she, Jennifer Worth, was simply lucky to have met a nice man to marry (a white Englishman, played by a white actor in the TV series) whereas “Mary “was simply unlucky.
There are millions of good men — the vast majority, in fact. How was it that she, a sweet and pretty girl, had never met them? How had she come to this destitute state?
Would I [author Jennifer Worth] have been in Mary’s position, had it not been for love? My thoughts went, as they always did, to the man I loved. We had met when I was only fifteen. He could quite easily have used and abused me, but he didn’t, he respected me. He loved me to distraction, and wanted only my ultimate good. He had educated me, protected me, guided my teenage years. Had I met the wrong man at the age of fifteen, I reflected, I would probably be in the same position as Mary now.
No. It’s not a simple matter of luck. Of course it’s true, by some sort of grim social law, that abused women tend to end up again and again with abusive men, and that “Mary” might have been abused by white men in London all the same.
But it’s not luck that England chose (chose!) to import millions of people with an absolutely sociopathic attitude toward women from an alien culture totally incompatible with England’s own. It is not just bad luck that “Mary” was many times more likely to be abused because of the existence of that community in London.
Here is another of Mrs. Worth’s reflections on “Mary” and “Zakir”:
With the wisdom of my twenty-three years, I wondered if it was really possible that a girl of fourteen or fifteen could be so taken in by a smooth-talking scoundrel.
The term scoundrel is criminally insufficient for a case like this. Someone who destroys a young girl’s life, and spirit, through prostitution and gang rape is not a scoundrel: he is a sociopath. It is clear from the events of this book — as well as both previous and subsequent events well-documented by journalists and historians — that the Middle Eastern Muslim culture produces an unusually high proportion of sociopaths.
Brought into England, in this case, by “statesmen” elected to protect the people of England.
But Mrs. Worth does deserve great credit: her description of the facts of the case are absolutely unsparing. “In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” And Worth does remind one a little bit of Orwell: although she is Left-wing by dogma, she is Right-wing simply by virtue of fearlessly reporting empirical facts.
(I feel we need, for Sapir-Whorf purposes, a word for this phenomenon. I would propose “Orwellian,” but it seems that the term is already taken. "Left by dogma, right by honesty." That’s the best I can do.)
So what happened to “Mary”? After “Uncle at the café” forced a Scottish girl to have an abortion, and the girl soon died of infection, Mary — fifteen years old and eight months pregnant — stole five pounds from the gang and ran away.
After Mrs. Worth’s Catholic organization helped her deliver the baby, the baby was taken away from her (for its own good, the organization claimed) for adoption and “Mary” drifted back into prostitution. Several years later “Mary” was arrested for attempting to kidnap a baby and board a ship from Liverpool to Ireland. She was jailed for three years. That was the last that Mrs. Worth heard of her.
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Perhaps numbed by the statistical presentation of the scandals (“up to 1,000 girls” in Telford, for example), people don’t really understand the horror of what it’s really all about. This story brings home the horror, presenting most of the case from “Mary’s” point of view and in her own words. It’s talking about things that were happening in the 1950s, and that are happening in Britain right now today:
The girls are treated like dogs, but usually far, far worse. Dogs have to be bought or bred, and in consequence are usually well looked after. They are expensive assets, and the loss of a valuable dog is a serious matter. But girls on the game are utterly expendable. They do not have to be bought, like a dog or a slave, yet they live a life of slavery, subject to the will and the whims of their masters.
Where are the feminists?
When people ask, “Which city’s scandal will be exposed next?”, I exasperatedly say London — where a scandal has already happened that has been documented in a bestselling non-fiction book.
It appears in fact that East London may have been the ground zero of the phenomenon. This book tells us that grooming was immediate and rampant in the very first place in England densely populated by Muslims.
I know from personal experience that the East End is becoming a no-go area for white people, but is it also a no-go area for truth?
We need some Orwells to go take a closer look.
George Elwit is a published author in two languages, an Ivy League graduate, and VDARE.com reader from the beginning. This is not his real name.
