‘The abortion would be performed on the kitchen table in the woman’s flat,’ says Mrs Worth, a mother-of-two and a grandmother, who now lives in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, and is married to a retired schoolmaster-turned-painter.
We can sense in her walk a modest pride in her own purposefulness and efficiency.
In real life, the trauma suffered by the pregnant girl would be compounded if she then developed an infection or complication and had to be admitted to hospital.
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Most of these women would have been left infertile. You’d get a family with six children living in a two-room tenement flat. I think that was terribly sad.’ With his film, Mike Leigh has succeeded in reminding us of that terrible time for women, which no sensible person would ever wish to return to. Nor does Vera produce knitting needles, crochet hooks, a pickle spoon or any of the other assorted apparatus that was the staple of some of the illegal abortionists operating during that time. Clark's clipped and straightforward editing may be the primary reason that Vera (Imelda Staunton) lives with her husband, Stan (Phil Davis), and their two adult children, Sid (Daniel Mays) and Ethel (Alex Kelly), in a cramped flat in a dingy working-class neighborhood. The heroine of Mike Leigh's wonderfully subtle and relentlessly harrowing new film is a cheerful, compactly built middle-aged woman who spends her waking hours in perpetual motion. These are the only films among his 17 features and TV dramas in which Leigh focuses the narrative on a single character. ‘I will never forget her children, all aged under ten, being brought in to say goodbye to her. It was a very risky business, and no one would risk that “just to help out”. ‘It was also a very dangerous procedure, which could lead to infection and, in some cases, even death. ‘Social conditions were very different then,’ says Jennifer, 69.
from doctors and scientists. Until then, there were upwards of 250,000 illegal abortions a year.
‘And if water entered the bloodstream, an air embolus – bubbles in the blood – could occur and result in death.’ It was the poorer women who suffered the most.
Others took scalding hot baths and consumed vast quantities of gin. Once, we had a girl with total renal failure. ‘Basically, they were in it for the money. Many others died.
(Jim Broadbent's performance may dominate Topsy-Turvy but the film is about the creative collaboration of Gilbert and Sullivan.) Yet according to Jennifer Worth, who was a midwife in the Fifties and Sixties, before abortion was legalised in 1967, Vera Drake is a fanciful character who does not come close to portraying accurately the grim brutality and danger of what really happened in those days of back-street abortion. If abortionists were to be portrayed accurately, the audience might come away with a totally different opinion.
But the first psychiatrist I saw said I didn’t seem upset enough and refused to authorise an abortion. Answer Save. Abortionist Vera Drake finds her beliefs and practices clash with the mores of 1950s Britain--a conflict that leads to tragedy for her family. Among them was Deborah Ainger, now 62. Only when all this failed would they seek out the back-street abortionist – as portrayed by homely Vera Drake. (It has since been reduced to 24 weeks.)
There were also a lot of suicides by so- called “fallen women”. Staunton, who's working here with Leigh for the first time, is best known to American audiences as the voice of Bunty, the adorable hen, in At the end of what we might call the film's first act, Vera pays a visit to a nervous young woman, and although she hums a tune while putting the kettle on, we have a sinking feeling that the water she's heating is not for tea. She is also tipped for an Oscar. ‘I was profoundly shocked by that. ‘When I had just begun my career at a hospital in Reading, one woman, a 35-year- old mother-of-five, came in with a punctured uterus,’ recalls Mrs Worth. Seven hours later, the labour pains started and I went and sat on the loo. It didn’t work first time round, so they had to come over and do it again.