Call for the tissues, it’s Mother’s Day agony on Midwife
SHE was beloved by viewers for her no-nonsense attitude and traditional values.
So when Sister Evangelina was killed off in Call The Midwife’s series finale last night, many fans wept just as much as the characters.
The formidable nun, played by Pam Ferris, died peacefully in her armchair after suffering a stroke. Here, our critic gives his verdict. LIFE goes on. If three words can sum up any prime-time TV series, these are the essence of Call The Midwife, the only drama that treats death not as a crime or a mystery, but as an ordinary part of existence.
The redoubtable Sister Evangelina (Pam Ferris) died suddenly, but not so unexpectedly, in her favourite chair with a blanket over her knees, as the current series concluded.
We knew she hadn’t quite been feeling herself, following a minor stroke, because her scoldings and tongue-lashings had been tempered with the occasional sweet smile. For example, she was even forgiving when Sister Monica Joan scoffed the last of the chocolate cake.
But however much Call The Midwife’s eight million regular viewers might have sensed it coming, her death was still a surprise. Caretaker Fred found her where she’d dozed off the night before, after helping to deliver a baby to an immigrant family in an East End slum. Sister Evangelina had bathed the newborn, and rubbed soap i nto the cracks between the floorboards to keep the fleas out.
It’s that blend of kindness and no-nonsense, sleeves-up spirit that makes the series so engaging. Set in London’s poorest streets in 1961, it is sometimes sentimental but its characters never are.
The sisters of Nonnatus House, bound by their vow of poverty, would be repelled by today’s cult of celebrity. It seemed ironic that so many Poplar locals turned out to give Sister Evangelina the kind of send-off that now accompanies the funerals of reality TV stars and gangsters, such as Big Brother’s Jade Goody and Ronnie Biggs.
The nun’s body was laid out in an open casket, so that the friends and neighbours could shuffle past and touch her hand as they said a prayer. Then the coffin was loaded into a glass hearse, drawn by two black horses with plumed headdresses, and driven through streets lined with mourners.
The undertaker had provided everything for free: when he’d been born two months premature, he said, Sister Evangelina was the midwife who saved him and his mother. ‘We East End people see her as one of our own,’ he said. And over five years, the character played by Pam Ferris – previously best-known as Ma Larkin in The Darling Buds Of May – has won viewers’ hearts, too. It was fitting that she should leave the series in the natural, normal way that most people leave the world.
Television, which, ironically, so relishes murder, has always been afraid of death. To die without drama as Sister Evangelina did, simply slipping away in her sleep, is a very rare thing on TV – almost taboo. After a lifetime’s work among the poor, Sister Evangelina knew all too well that death is not something that can be solved. It is just some- thing that happens – an ending that, for all but the deceased, comes right in the middle of everything.
While the crotchety old nun was being laid out by her friends, elsewhere in the parish a young couple were getting married. The bride wore the white gown that had once been Sister Evangelina’s, when she took her convent vows.
The wedding guests were dancing the conga, and doing the twist with Chubby Checker. Not everyone felt like partying, of course: old Fred felt quite dejected, till the vicar brought him a cup of sugary tea, the East End’s panacea for all ills.
Lesbian Patsy and alcoholic Trixie – the most louche of Nonnatus House’s residents – shared a cheroot on the stairs. But Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) had a little laugh, and a little cry, at memories of her friend. That’s how grief is, when a loved one dies of natural causes. It doesn’t have to be an overwhelming emotion.
But today, we’re too often scared of acknowledging that death, though a deep sadness, isn’t always a tragedy. Life goes on.