I'm usually behind the curve when it comes to knowing anything about the latest trending wildly popular series. Rarely do I sit down to watch anything on a screen.
Maybe that will explain why I'm only on Season 1 of the excellent series "Call the Midwife," circa 1950s in poverty-stricken East London. You'll have to dig deep to recall the Christmas special from 2012, a story about an unwed teen abandoning her newborn on the convent steps. But it's the scenes around another character — the widow Mrs. Jenkins — that bestows my unexpected gift.
Years earlier, newly widowed with five children to feed, Mrs. Jenkins had made the excruciating decision of turning herself and her brood over to the "care" of one of England's notorious workhouses. All of her children died there, malnourished and mistreated. "They didn't thrive," she told Jenny Lee, the midwife/nurse sent to care for her in abominable living conditions.