East end girls    1. Farewell to the East End   2. by Jennifer
Worth, read by Anne Reade   3. Find this on the Guardian
bookshop  By the sound of it, this really is the last of Worth's
popular memoirs about working as a district midwife in the bomb-
damaged East End of London after the second world war. If you're
squeamish about childbirth, better steer clear. I asked a friend
whose earth-mother wife had insisted on their first child being
born at home in his presence, what it had been like. He thought
for a bit and said he'd never eat summer pudding again. There
are, if anything, even more graphic technicolor descriptions of
dedicated young midwives delivering babies on bare mattresses in
Worth's latest, but she knows how to tell a good story. Like the
one about Chummy, née Camilla Fortescue-Cholmeley-Browne,
climbing the swaying rope ladder of a huge Swedish cargo ship
one stormy night in the West India Docks to deliver a baby to
cheery, blonde, 35 stone Kirsty, who thought she had a tummy
ache. Kirsty, the