Chummy And Mummy Return To The Field Of Battle

As an expert watcher of TV (no big deal), I think I tend to be pretty good at picking up on cues that writers plant for...me to pick up on, which is why I have been a little concerned about Chummy's journey this season on Call The Midwife. I was thrilled, as I'm sure we all were, when circumstances conspired to steer Chummy back toward midwifery even though it's 1959 and she's married and a mother and such things Weren't Done. And I was dismayed when I felt like I was detecting hints that Chummy and Peter might be headed for a crisis -- just tiny moments of shortness with one another, or instances when handing off Young Sir's care between them seemed stressful and fraught. Since the show is based on real people and events, I thought that maybe even a renegade like Chummy finally had to bow to some conventions and change up her work/life balance. I never guessed that her season-ending story would be a showdown with her mother, but I'm fascinated (and relieved) that it has.

One consequence of our having seldom seen Lady Browne is, for me, that when she appeared in the latest episode, I was kind of expecting her to be somewhat less objectionable than she actually totally is. I guess I forgot that Chummy became the warm, generous, open-hearted person she is not because that's the way she was raised, but in reaction to the way she was raised. The first ten second of Chummy's time with her mother makes it very clear why Chummy hasn't really been too bothered by the distance between them. Chummy is so nervous that she upsets a sugar bowl, and Lady Browne -- instead of expressing gratitude that Chummy has arranged for them to meet at the sort of elegant spot where Chummy normally has no cause to go; or noticing that Chummy is in her best outfit; or, like, touching her? at all? no hug, but not even a handshake? when they haven't seen each other in at least a year, if not more? -- sniffs, "I see that grace does not grow exponentially with age." Translation: "You have been a disappointment to me your whole life, right up to this very moment."

Things don't really get better from there. Lady Browne has moved back to London permanently, because she's tired of being lonely: though she's extremely British in the way she describes the situation, it seems as though "Pa" is fucking around on her and has been for a while. Also, Lady Browne is broke. Also, she spurns the invitation to have dinner Chez Noakes even though that would be THE VERY FIRST TIME SHE'D MEET HER GRANDSON: "An evening of jellied eels? I think not." Oh, jellied eels aren't your thing? Then why don't you eat shit.

Fortunately for Lady Browne, Chummy is a better person than I am, by like fifteen orders of magnitude. Even though the season premiere showed us that fancy cookery isn't really her thing, she knocks herself out meticulously covering some kind of fish thing with cucumber-slice "scales" even though she doesn't know for sure that Lady Browne is even coming because I guess this bitch's fancy manners don't extend to KEEPING YOUR HOSTESS UP TO DATE ON YOUR PLANS. And when Lady Browne does deign to appear, she's full of more slights. Asked what she thinks of Freddie -- whom she regards, in his playpen, from a safe distance and without having removed her gloves (not that she's touching him any more than she did Chummy) -- she comments, "I find infant charms somewhat exaggerated." Fine, so do we all, but at least most of us can be arsed to fake it for the infants' parents' sakes, and usually that's not such a hardship for INFANTS' GRANDPARENTS.

Worse still, even though Lady Browne's marriage has just collapsed, this bitch sees fit to find fault with her daughter's. When Peter figures out that playtime with Gran isn't happening, he matter-of-factly takes Freddie upstairs to bed. "Really, Camilla!" gasps Lady Browne when he's barely out of earshot. "A man doesn't come home to be a nursemaid to his child!" Hey, um, maybe deal with the beam in your own eye, YOU ROTTEN OLD BAG.

Through it all, Chummy is in an impossible position: embarrassed by Peter's attempts to get along with Lady Browne as he would any other human, and embarrassed by her mother's inability to be gracious about anything. Obviously this visit is no fun for anyone, but all of the Noakeses are trying to make the best of it, while Lady Browne can't stop making them feel small. When Chummy -- having spoken to her father, so she knows he's totally cut Lady Browne off financially, which is why she's had to sell her diamond watch to get by -- eagerly offers to let Lady Browne stay with them, and even to give up her and Peter's own room until Lady Browne can make a more permanent arrangement, it's clear from Peter's look at Chummy that this isn't a scheme she'd discussed with him, but he is polite enough to join Chummy in her invitation. Only the supposed Lady is ill-bred enough to take this kindness as an insult. When she assents -- because, remember, THIS BITCH IS BROKE -- and Chummy says that even though she and Peter usually get up early, they'll try to be quiet to let her sleep IN THEIR ROOM, Lady Browne replies, "You always were a stomper." IS "THANK YOU" A PHRASE THIS BITCH HAS EVER EVEN GODDAMN HEARD?!

What finally brings matters to a head is the question of Freddie's education. Lady Browne sets the trap of asking Peter whether he and Chummy have started making arrangements for Freddie's schooling, to which Peter haltingly responds that, as she must know, they can't afford a private education for him. This makes Lady Browne set down her newspaper and start cranking up to a big speech about "the limitations [her] daughter has set for herself with this marriage--" which Peter interrupts by saying, "I love them." "One cannot survive on love," she spits. "One cannot survive without it," says Chummy, entering the room having overheard this exchange. Chummy has put up with a lot of horseshit the past few days, but when it comes to the question of whether Freddie belongs among the "cold and distant people" who would hypothetically rear him at boarding school or at home with his affectionate parents, Chummy cannot relent. She'll make some allowances for her mother -- and what her mother represents -- but finally Lady Browne has pushed her advantage too far, and Chummy must remind her that while she knows what Lady Browne's expectations are, they belong to a world that Chummy affirmatively rejected. She's having a different kind of life and marriage than the ones Lady Browne either chose or, more likely, went along with -- the biggest difference being that Chummy is actually happy.

As far as I'm concerned, this would have been a fine way to end things -- with Chummy kindly but firmly expressing why Lady Browne can no longer use the Noakes house as a crash pad, and Lady Browne belatedly understanding where she has been at fault and offering some physical affection to Freddie, finally. But then she has to puke up some bile and get rushed to the hospital to get a diagnosis of malignant tumours all over her abdomen, liver, and other organs, too far gone to be operable. She's been in terrible pain and never let on, which seems, for Peter and Chummy, to excuse her shittiness. Except, if Chummy never had any inkling until Lady Browne's collapse that the way she was acting was out of the ordinary, to me that just means that Lady Browne has been suffering her whole life of terminal bitchiness which has only now found its way to her digestive system. I assume this is leading to a deathbed reconciliation between Chummy and Lady Browne, and I'll probably cry, because it's what this show makes me do. And I'm not going to sit here and say that people shouldn't try to make peace before even their most unpleasant relatives leave this world....

...buuuuuuuut I also think that the Chummy who proudly explained why the local grammar school will be the right place for Freddie and proudly got the cat knickknack out from its hiding place among the other not-posh-enough items of home décor is the Chummy we know, and the Chummy Lady Browne deserved to meet. I'm not so naïve as to think someone with Lady Browne's background would ever really be able to "only connect" her current marital discord with the choices she made -- or didn't -- and contrast those with Chummy's smaller but happier life. But if that conversation, where she got probably about as close as she ever could to getting it, were her last contact with the daughter and grandson she treated so shabbily -- if she finally had to live with the knowledge of how she turned Chummy into a reluctant frenemy -- I would have felt that justice had been served.