'Call the Midwife' Recap: Season 14 Episode 3

Call the Midwife is available to stream for a limited time. Recap the previous and following episodes and other seasons.
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A crumbling housing estate has two new residents, and both are under the care of the Nonnatus House nurses. Joyce first visits Nerys Williams, who has three young children and was recently widowed. She and her family contracted impetigo from a stay at a homeless shelter, and her baby is suffering from rashes because she is struggling to keep his nappies clean. She doesn’t have any friends or family who can help her out.

Adding to her troubles, the old man who lives beneath her complains about any noise from her children. He’s Joyce’s other patient, Alf Cottered. He used to live across the borough but was moved into this estate while in the hospital for prostate surgery. He’s cantankerous and suspicious of Joyce because she’s Black. She’s there to check on his catheter, but he also asks her to fix some things around his apartment and pick up some items for him since he can’t walk well. She can’t help him with the first but agrees to the second task.

When Joyce stops by Fred’s store, Fred guesses that she’s shopping for Cottered – he had a regular order. Fred offers to visit Cottered in his new home, and Joyce suggests that he bring some tools to help around the apartment. When Joyce brings Cottered his requested items, he accuses her of theft – but she has his change for him. She encourages him to treat Nerys and her family with a bit of kindness rather than bang on the ceiling at any noise. He thinks Nerys leaves the kids alone; he has a low view of her, too, in part because she’s not white.

But he was right that Nerys has been leaving her children, as Joyce discovers when she finds Nerys rushing back into the estate. Nerys took a job making breakfast for factory workers because it’s only a couple hours in the early morning, but circumstances conspired against her that day, causing her to return late to her crying children. Joyce warns her that she could lose her children if Social Services found out, but says she won’t report Nerys.

Social Services also become involved with the Lasleys, who are having their first baby. Don owns his own business selling vending machines and makes enough to buy modern conveniences such as a freezer, which his wife Norma has filled with weeks of meals for after the birth – she’s been reading and preparing endlessly for her baby.

But the daughter is born with spina bifida. As she is rushed to the hospital for an operation, Norma packs up to leave the maternity clinic. She and Don – he especially reluctantly – have decided that they cannot give the baby what she needs and so will give her up for adoption. The midwives are distraught, but contact Social Services. But the government agency doesn’t want to take the baby because the Lasleys are well-off and well-positioned to take care of their daughter, and Social Services already struggles to help all the babies of poor families.

But the Lasleys, particularly Norma, are firm in their decision. Norma wants to try to have more children and get on with that. She donates all the things she bought for her daughter to the midwives.

So the clinic takes in the baby after her successful operation and temporarily names her June, after the month in which she was born. Rosalind goes to the government to register June’s birth, while all the midwives take part in caring for her. Since no other path reveals itself, they send June to the Nonnatus mother house orphanage. Norma gives Sister Veronica a note for June to read when she’s older, while Rosalind buys a stuffed rabbit for the girl to have at the orphanage.

Fred arrives to visit Cottered right as Dr. Turner is removing his catheter. Fred fixes Cottered’s curtain rod but not his water heater, leaving that to the landlord. When Joyce returns a final time to check on Cottered after the removal, he reluctantly thanks her and even seems a bit sad to lose a regular visitor. When he hears noise from the Williams children, he doesn’t bang on the ceiling.

And then a defective water heater causes an explosion that blows out some of the windows of the estate. Joyce is outside when it happens, and Fred is nearby to tell everyone to clear the area – it’s probably a gas explosion, so it’s not safe to go inside. Nerys appears and screams that her children are still inside.

Fred goes in and finds them with Cottered, who went to protect them after the explosion. Cottered tells Fred to take them to safety, then collapses. He’s brought out on a stretcher by emergency workers, who have just arrived. Fred tells Nerys not to thank him but Cottered for saving her children.

She explains to Joyce that she tried to quit her factory job so that she wouldn’t have to leave her children, but they said it was too short of notice and they wouldn’t pay her if she did, so she kept going back. Joyce blames herself for the children’s danger: she should have reported Nerys, but saw something of her own upbringing in the family. However, a silver lining of the explosion is that Nerys receives a new, cleaner lodging – and a child welfare officer helps arrange a nursery and searches work that will fit that schedule.

Cottered is released from the hospital safe and visits Fred at the store. Joyce is there, too, and Cottered buys her a treat.

Since there was no serious injury from the explosion, there will not be an official inquiry into the neglect that caused it, to the fury of the midwives. It’s just another instance of how necessary they are to the people and neighborhood they serve – a privilege that they are now fighting to keep.

The board of health dislikes that the Nonnatans are religious in this modern world and want to pull funding from them on that basis. But Trixie, acting as a secular representative of the midwives, argues their case, stunning the board of health with her research. The nuns swear a vow of poverty, so if the midwives were all secular, their service would cost twice as much – and the board of health wouldn’t be able to afford them, thus failing in its mission to provide medical care to all of Poplar. The board agrees to continue funding Nonnatus House.