Worth goes on to note that, while the nuns closed their midwifery and nursing practice, “they removed to the Mother House, to await God’s calling for work… [and] left quietly and with no fuss. Perhaps only the local clergy and a handful of older people were aware they had gone.”

Despite this, though, the nuns began working to help the city of London’s community in countless other ways, including “drug abuse, shelter for the homeless, working with the deaf, helping Asian women integrate into British life, and in the 1980s they started working with AIDS patients.”

“They continue to do these and other tasks into the new millennium,” she finishes.

Is season 13 the final season of Call The Midwife?

Heidi Thomas has said that the show could run through until the 1970s – which, when you consider the fact that season 13 will focus on 1969 – isn’t all that far away.

“The order of nuns on whom the Nonnatus nuns are based stay in the East End until the 1970s, but I think more importantly than that single historic fact is that of women’s lives and the lives of the working classes as well, because increasingly over the years we’ve written about them, which I think also brings in a fresh dynamic which is always changing,” she tells Radio Times.

“There are so many stories to tell, medically, socially, even emotionally, and I think we could keep on going. The proviso I would give is that at the moment we’re only commissioned for series 12, which we’re halfway through filming, and series 13, which we will make next year.”

Call The Midwife season 12 episode 5 recap: is it really the beginning of the end for Nonnatus House?