IN HER newly-purchased blue suit and cap, Dot Compton peers through the slightly opened door. A little boy is pushing bread into his mouth and leaning on the door post.

“Is Mrs Watts in, please?” Dot tentatively asks before a young woman shouts “Mam, there’s the Welfare here again.”

Ushered past the door through the dark interior, Dot is allowed into their home – and into their lives.

This was 1958 and Dot was to spend more than five years entering similar doors in some of Birmingham’s most deprived neighbourhoods.

A newly-qualified health visitor, she was part of a team based at the Lancaster Street Child Health Clinic responsible for more than 1,000 families packed in to a small area of streets in Aston.

In some ways Dot Compton is fictional. She is the lead character in a book Bread, Jam and a Borrowed Pram written by Dot May Dunn. But she is also very closely based on Dot’s own experiences and the families she met in the area around the Victoria Road, Park Lane, Clifton Road and Upper Thomas Street area where she worked in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At the time she was Dot Walker, but decided to change her name to Compton for the book.

Bread, Jam and a Borrowed Pram follows on her first memoires, Twelve Babies on a Bike, which recounted her time as a pupil midwife and went on to be a best-seller.