The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  The door was opened instantly by the maid, fourteen years old and just out of the orphanage, blue eyes too big for her face, strawlike hair consumed by a mob cap, floor-sweeping black bombazine trailing apron strings from a child’s waist. I called her Little Nell, having a lifelong horror for the incessant infant creations of Charles Dickens.

  ‘Is Miss Harriet at home?’ Bobbing respectfully, the girl denied it, and lawks-a-daisied as I pushed masterfully past her. ‘Miss Harriet cannot spare herself the pleasure of receiving me, just because she has not completed her toilette by four in the afternoon, through reason of not rising till after luncheon. I’ll amuse myself at the piano in the parlour. She adores my playing.’

  As I expected, Harriet was already descending the narrow stairs to the tiny hallway with its green-and-gold wallpaper and bamboo hatstand, beautiful in her delight and disarray. The maid vanished like the shadow of a bird.

  ‘You mustn’t stay, not a second,’ she greeted me breathlessly.

  ‘Why not? Old Lard Tub won’t come this hour of the afternoon. He’s too busy piling up sovereigns in Mincing Lane.’

  ‘Mr Larderton has become most irregular in his habits of late.’

  ‘I can always jump out of the back window, and don my clothes on the way to Kensington Gore.’

  ‘You must appreciate my position.’ Her voice was desperate, her clutch of me fierce.

  ‘But I appreciate it perfectly. Old Lard Tub paying for your house, your victuals, this lovely pink tulle frock –’ I crushed a handful in my fist. ‘Is more than a convenience. He is an utter necessity for a man like myself, who has his fortune still to make.’

  ‘But if Mr Larderton did find you here, I should be ruined! Don’t you see, Tristram? Out in the street, without a rag or crust to call my own.’

  ‘How much more exciting. A mere husband could do nothing more drastic than box your ears.’

  She laughed, we were already in her bedroom, with its forget-me-not wallpaper, its view across a tiny conservatory of fluted ironwork and engraved glass upon a back lawn with croquet hoops. I wondered whether Mr Larderton found time to play.

  Miss Harriet Catchpole was as lithe as a sapling, golden haired, milk skinned, grey eyed, budding bosomed, an enchantress as valuable to a young man low in money and social position as the fairy princess to the toad. She was the daughter of the steward to a nobleman’s estate, with a quickness and mimickry which gave her the speech and manners of her betters, and a realistic appreciation of her value to society given her by the nobleman’s three sons. She was dancing at the newly opened Canterbury Music Hall in Lambeth when she caught the eye of Mr Larderton, a spice merchant, infinitely rich. I had met her the previous month detached from her protector in a crowd, as I watched by way of business Mr Gully’s Andover win the Derby.

  My fingernails were tugging at her stay-lace. ‘Who tied this? Lard Tub?’

  ‘The maid.’

  I laughed. ‘There’s many a husband mystified by finding a bow at night where he’d tied a knot in the morning.’

  ‘You’re drunk,’ she said disconcertingly.

  ‘What nonsense. I had to share a bottle or two with an ill-mannered bully in the Reform Club, that’s all.’

  ‘The Reform Club?’ Like many easily aroused women, Harriet was easily distracted. The Reform Club was inaccessible even to Mr Larderton. ‘What were they saying about the war? Weren’t they pleased that the siege of Silistria was raised?’

  ‘If they were, they gave no evidence of it.’

  I was impatient. ‘Don’t give me a baby,’ she murmured. She always did, like a magic spell. Perhaps it was. For casual lovers of the last century, there was nothing else.

  Now that I own the Penny Pioneer – rechristened the Daily Pioneer – now that I am a Liberal peer and a past Minister of State, now that I am seventy-eight (four years younger than Gladstone when he was still Prime Minister, as I repeatedly tell my editors), I mischievously contemplate publishing my diaries of the 1850s in next week’s paper. After H G Wells’ Ann Veronica last year, surely frankness is all.

  They would reopen no scars upon those I have loved and wounded – my first wife had been dead thirty years. But how the councils of colleges and hospitals where I sit, how the House of Lords, the very Cabinet itself, would blush like lobsters dropped into boiling water. The circulation would rocket. Among the British public, who have a sound sense of relative values, I should be more popular than George Robey. It would anyway make a pleasing diversion from the Kaiser and the other problems of the twentieth century.

  I cannot walk today among the lavender beds of our Elizabethan garden without a look in my eye which mystifies my present wife. Harriet’s sheets, crisp out of the press, always smelt of lavender. She and I lay that afternoon staring at the whitewashed ceiling, sweaty, entwined, innocently replete like a pair of children gorged with cake. A wakening thunderstorm growled. The curtain-lace was so heavy, the little room was in twilight. I turned my glance to the ill-glazed, gingery, china monkey with a detachable head on the mantelpiece, which regularly amazed me with its ugliness. There was no portrait, no trace in the house, of my involuntary host. He existed only in the jealousy of my imagination, as white, fat, mannerless and lustful.

  ‘Come to the new Crystal Palace tomorrow, out on Sydenham Hill,’ I invited.

  ‘Pooh.’ Harriet wrinkled her nose, ‘What a peculiar invitation to extend at this particular moment.’

  I extended it because I had free tickets from the firm who resited the Great Exhibition from Hyde Park, who wanted a puff in the papers. And because Harriet was not a diverting conversationalist in any but the language of love.

  ‘But it’s a magnificent sight,’ I told her forcefully, recalling the firm’s circular. It had been opened the previous week by the Queen, with the Hundredth Psalm, the Hallelujah Chorus and 40,000 Londoners. ‘The vaulted roof is tremendous – greater in area than St Paul’s in London or St Peter’s in Rome, or both combined, I can’t for the moment remember. And the basement!’ I waved my naked arm. ‘A labyrinth of steam-pipes and boilers, never before seen to man. The gardens! Filled with fountains, waterfalls, lakes and grottoes, they throw Versailles into insignificance. Or so they say. Educational, too. Geological strata and plaster casts of extinct animals.’

  ‘I do not think that I should care to be seen in Sydenham observing mammoths.’

  There was a flash of lightning, the rain started falling in leaden drops. I risked spoiling my best clothes. The gathering possibility of Mr Larderton’s arrival was the certainty of my own departure. She never let me stay the night.

  ‘I must go home. I’ll find an omnibus in the Brompton Road.’

  ‘I often dream, lovey, of living in your place, just the two of us,’ said Harriet.

  ‘I don’t think you would reside very happily in a room above the stables at Paddington Basin, which is full of stinks from the towpath horses of the Grand Union Canal, full of shrieks from the trains at Paddington terminus, raided by rats and comfortably settled by bedbugs.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem right, when you mix with the finest in the land.’

  ‘I mix with them as an urchin. Who must be petted, lest he scream out some truth which everybody knows but nobody mentions.’

  ‘But you like it.’

  ‘I hate it. My occupation disgusts me. I can at least be sure it will end, when my readers grow tired of me. For it to continue, until replaced by the infirmities and disillusionments of age, is a fate infinitely worse.’

  She was not interested. ‘Lovey, give me a present.’

  ‘Why should I? Old Lard Tub gives you everything.’

  ‘Not a shilling for myself,’ she said resentfully. ‘You know that, love. It’s his game. Just to keep me here.’

  ‘But I don’t want you to escape, no more than he does.’

  ‘Please, lovey…just a little present,’ she implored.

  Naked, cross-legged on the bed, hand cupped, childlike, she was irresistible
. From the pocket of my canary waistcoat I handed her the three sovereigns for which I had sold myself to Wakley-Barlow. I had redeemed myself from both of them by the harshest of judgements, the verdict of a man’s own vices.

  3

  I had the mental picture of Miss Nightingale. Vinegary, governessy, churchy, self-important, gloriously self-satisfied, falling upon the poor to sermonize them, scold them and scrub them, that a committee of noble ladies, peering with pious disgust over her shoulder, might salve their conscience about the next five guineas for a box at the opera, or fifty for a new gown or 500 for a new necklace. My childhood had been largely motherless and often penniless, and left me much exposed to Miss Nightingales.

  The Establishment for Gentlewomen during Illness I found at No. 1 Harley Street, a modern, stone-faced, five-storey house on the corner. It was a morning towards the end of July. I had needed time to effect my introduction, and I had been busy during high season working flashing stones from London’s social dirt.

  I banged the knocker, and drew a beautifully engraved card from a delicate silver case, both essential tools of my trade. I started back, card jutting from fingertips like a jib-sail. The door was opened by a lady, slender and graceful, jet hair parted in the middle and curtaining a face of the reposeful beauty which the quattrocento lavished on its Madonnas. Her dress was startlingly plain, black cotton with lace collar and cuffs. Could this be Miss Nightingale? But she was my own age.

  ‘Mr Darling? How kind of you to call. Sir Peregrine wrote from St George’s Hospital.’ My uncle was a surgeon there. ‘I am Miss Bancroft, Miss Nightingale’s secretary.’ Her voice was quiet. For a young man of such lively imagination towards women, it threw a silken net of intimacy over us. ‘Miss Nightingale will receive you in a few minutes. She is busy this moment at a deathbed.’

  This chill greeting matched the hall, its bare boards polished like brown ice, its only furniture a hatstand without any hats. It reeked of washerwoman’s soap and limewater. I felt the house and myself took an instant dislike to each other.

  ‘I shall tell you about the nursing home. You have a pencil and paper? Good. Miss Nightingale takes notes of all conversations, and expects others to do likewise. You will want to know the number of patients in the house,’ Miss Bancroft decided, ticking her fingers. ‘Ten, of whom two are operation patients, three refractory skin diseases, two linger with consumption, two await their departure from this world and one is hysterical.’ So ghoulish a catalogue uttered so calmly by so delicate a young woman, was an experience novel, shocking and exciting.

  ‘Miss Nightingale does not approve of hysterical patients.’ She folded long-fingered hands across her midriff. ‘Miss Nightingale says that a hospital must house the seriously ill, or it becomes a mere lodgings, where the nervous are made more nervous, the foolish grow more foolish, the idle and selfish more selfish and idle. If no higher interest exists, illness becomes a woman’s amusement and luxury. Miss Nightingale says that if she has nothing to occupy her except her meals and her mucous membranes, a woman’s sole object will be to breakfast in bed and be pitied. We have guinea patients and half-guinea patients.’

  Mucous membranes! No girl had ever conversed with me more intimately in a drawing-room than on chilblains.

  ‘The Ladies’ Committee take Miss Nightingale’s opinion on any subject extremely seriously, particularly since she reduced the daily expenditure for each patient from one-and-tenpence to a shilling,’ said Miss Bancroft. Then her hands fluttered, her hazel eyes glittered, she became a delightfully animated Madonna. On the dark-stained stairs I saw a tall, upright, sharpnosed female in a frock like the secretary’s, her waist looped with a chatelaine, a close fitting lace cap on brown hair parted in the middle and drawn into coiled plaits hiding her ears. She had a long neck, an oval face, grey eyes, excellent teeth and a delicate skin not lined too spitefully by her thirty-four years. She had no bosom, a deficiency I always thought in a woman like a bed without a pillow.

  ‘I know all about Mr Wakley-Barlow,’ Miss Nightingale greeted me pleasantly. ‘I heard from Mrs Sidney Herbert, the wife of our Secretary at War, who is a member of my Ladies’ Committee. You should know better, Mr Darling, than to share secrets with a man who drinks more than six bottles of claret a day.’

  I stood like a delivery-boy caught stealing the cake by the housekeeper. The twin cowards of my eyes turned from Miss Nightingale to Miss Bancroft, but my glance ricochetted off.

  ‘Please tell Mr Wakley-Barlow that I dismissed his contractor because the man sent me a bottle labelled “Spirits of Nitre” which contained ether. Had I not smelt it, I should certainly have administered it, and have faced an inquest.’ Miss Nightingale sounded no more concerned than a hostess describing the social disasters of an unsuccessful dinner party. ‘He also furnished the flue of a gas stove which came down the second time of using it. Had I not caught it, a patient would have been certainly killed by it. We were almost suffocated by gas,’ she ended calmly, ‘which went off in a series of partial explosions. One of the workmen sent to repair it got drunk, and fought the foreman.’

  ‘I fear Miss Nightingale, that I have no alternative but to leave instantly.’

  ‘Do you? Well, you have troubled to make the journey, you might as well see the house. Has Miss Bancroft told you about my novel bells?’

  ‘Bells?’ I noticed that the way Miss Bancroft stood with hands clasped before her was exactly the attitude of her mistress. ‘I don’t think we spoke about bells.’

  I was led to a panel on the first floor landing. It seemed that the valve of each bell stayed open until the patient was attended. This did not strike me of Samuel Morse’s telegraphic ingenuity. Miss Nightingale seemed proud of the arrangement, and I admired it heartily.

  ‘Small detail is of mountainous importance to the sick.’ The errant delivery boy was to be lectured by the housekeeper. ‘The horror of a nurse who rustles!’ A fat girl with a pink scrubbed look hurried past us with a faint swish of bombazine. ‘The irritating fidget of silk and crinoline! I wish that people who wear crinoline would see the indecency of their own dress as other people are obliged to. A respectable elderly woman stooping forward, invested in crinoline, exposes quite as much of her own person to a patient lying in the room as any opera dancer on the stage.’

  I could not stifle a laugh at this image. ‘I see you are well acquainted with the nether limbs of opera dancers, Mr Darling. Well, you may go home and write what libels you choose. They cannot impede the work God called me to. Did you know that God spoke to me on four occasions?’ she asked prosaically. ‘Calling me to His service. The first was on February 7 1837, at our home in Hampshire. I was sixteen. Why do you look surprised?’

  ‘Only because none of my acquaintance has been approached so directly. Even my other uncle, who is a bishop.’

  She did not appear offended. I was never over-impressed with Miss Nightingale’s voices. The word of God is often in the ear of young women who cocoon themselves in secret fantasies to escape from life’s frustrations. It is a phantom, as the lovelorn hear their dear one sigh with the wind in the trees, or the timid rapping of a skeleton from an unlatched door at midnight. I have an interest in human minds as a farmer in his chickens, because I scatter their feed every morning.

  ‘I rely on God greatly.’ Her sudden smile to Miss Bancroft had surprising tenderness. ‘But I must remember that God is not my private secretary. With His help, I have succeeded with my work here à merveille. I arrived to an empty building, the nursing home was moving from Chandos Street round the corner. Notice the food lift, Mr Darling. Look at the hot water supply. The weary linen darned and patched. The carpets and curtains recut. I killed the mice, turned furniture covers into dishcloths, made our own jam at tuppence a pot, ordered the groceries in bulk from Fortnum and Mason’s, reconstituted the diet, procured The Times and a library subscription from Mudie’s, and saved £150 a year by dismissing the house-surgeon,’ she ended proudly. ‘And I instilled some disci
pline. Only this morning, I changed one nurse because of her love of dirt and clumsiness, and another nurse because of her love of gin and intimidation.’

  After the Ladies’ Committee got wind of Miss Nightingale’s agitative talents, and had nervously debated whether gentlewomen might be nursed by a gentlewoman, she strode in like a captain boarding his first command, determined to have everything shipshape and Bristol fashion, and any of the crew daring to be indolent, insubordinate or inefficient promptly dumped ashore. She would have run with equal efficiency and alacrity a workhouse, asylum, orphanage, gaol and other places mankind ardently prefers to keep itself on the weather side of the door. On her daily and nightly rounds, later so familiar to me, Miss Nightingale heartened, commiserated, and organized, but the dirty work was done by the dirty nurses. She did not trouble to train the bad ones. It was easier to sack them, like the house-surgeon.

  ‘Our patients are of all denominations,’ she continued, conducting me into a first-floor room overlooking Harley Street. ‘My Committee allow them to be visited by their respective priests and muftis, provided I will receive the obnoxious animal at the door.’

  ‘Miss Nightingale believes schism to be the deceit of the Devil,’ added Miss Bancroft.

  ‘And I may give you a warning, Mr Darling?’ The room was furnished with a plain desk bearing a pewter inkstand, a table with neat piles of documents, a scrap of carpet and two chairs which discouraged a long visit. ‘I am afraid of no one. Though I find you quite harmless.’

  ‘I fear it is I who have made a formidable enemy.’

  ‘I hope not. I never make an enemy of any man. I am never sure when I might need him again for my own ends. De nos jours, nothing is achieved or achievable except by men. It is fortunate for the world they should be so open for manipulation by any woman who combines a little logic with a little insight into the masculine nature. And Mrs Herbert tells me that all London society is calling you a clever little devil. But why become a tattler? You are of good family.’