The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  ‘But of poor resources.’

  ‘So you make a living through every man possessing an unknown vice, even a man who parades his wickedness. And every woman a secret more shocking than those which she whispers to her friends to appear more fascinating. Well, perhaps it is salutary. Now I must continue with the unending labour of my correspondence.’

  She was already at her desk, metal nib in pewter inkstand. Miss Nightingale took much care with her letters. I have several hundred of them for posthumous publication. She drafted them first in a notebook, bestowing a telling phrase on many correspondents instead of wasting it on merely one, slicing up a good paragraph and buttering many pages with it. The unhurried days of conscientious, stylish, self-revealing correspondence have unhappily reached their brutal end in these busy ones, when men fly the Channel and motor everywhere, when there are 10,000 typewriter girls to click out the thoughts of London. I have also the manuscript of her novel, Cassandra. Like many other young women, she wrote it to relieve her mental turmoil. Like many other young women, she never finished it.

  ‘Miss Bancroft will see you out,’ said Miss Nightingale, not looking up.

  I left the bare room crushed under the juggernaut of her personality. My humiliation was increased by noticing the delightful Miss Bancroft staring at Miss Nightingale with a look of adoration at her cleverness in defusing a dangerous young scoundrel. It was a look which held for me later much vexation and misery. Then it fired me with a suppressed desire, as she walked close beside me downstairs, to seize her, declare myself crazed with her, and that we must fly instantly to Paris, or Broadstairs, being more in reach of my purse, leaving Miss Nightingale to her deathbeds.

  ‘The penny omnibus passes the corner,’ she said, shutting the black front door and leaving me to retreat and remuster my routed thoughts.

  4

  ‘Are you aware of an individual called Darwin?’ asked my uncle Humphry, Bishop of Chelsea.

  ‘Of course I’m aware of an individual called Darwin,’ replied my elder uncle, Sir Peregrine Darling, Bart. Though lowly placed, I was highly connected. ‘He’s a Fellow of the Royal Society, like I am and like his father before him. He’s a biologist. A retiring sort, not in good health. Once sailed round the world, and wrote a book about it.’

  ‘He is masquerading as a country gentleman at Down, among the hop-poles of Kent, while concocting heresies to disprove the book of Genesis.’

  ‘Now, the trouble with chloroform,’ continued Sir Peregrine, deafened to the conversation of others by his own views, stamping impatiently for expression, ‘is its having ruined the art of surgery. Seven or eight years ago, when you had to fill ’em with rum and hold ’em down, the surgeon had to look sharp about his business. Bob Liston at the North London could relieve a man of his leg, wide awake, as quickly as a Seven Dials’ pickpocket his watch, and near as painlessly. Made his students time his performance, like a prizefighter. Vain but deuced clever. Sorry he’s gone. Aortic aneurism.’

  ‘But is not chloroform the greatest of mankind’s benefits?’ I had been diverting myself watching Chelsea Reach, on a darkening mid-August evening busy with a hundred craft, each different from the rest. ‘For which we should nightly bless our American cousins on our knees?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything about mankind,’ replied Sir Peregrine shortly. He was white-haired, crimson-faced, spring-heeled, a Berkshire squire who had taken to surgery in youth as naturally as to hunting, shooting and fishing, which he held to demand the same qualities of dexterity and judgement. He seemed to find operating the best sport available to a gentleman in Belgravia. ‘I said that chloroform had taken the skill out of surgery. Any fumble-fingered dresser can turn himself into a surgeon, now he’s got all day to scratch about the patient. Make his fortune at it, too.’

  ‘Let us get back to Mr Darwin.’ The bishop dabbed his full lower lip with a shiny napkin. We sat at a long black table in the long dark dining-room of his square, damp palace by Chelsea Physic Garden. It was a mausoleum for appetites. The meat was always tough, the potatoes overboiled and the butler’s nose ran. It was a meal eaten once a year, to settle family business. Sir Peregrine was a childless widower, the bishop a bachelor, we were the only Darlings left. ‘The world was created in 4004 BC, at 9 a.m. on Sunday, October 23,’ he said firmly. ‘That was calculated in the last century by Archbishop Ussher and the vice-chancellor of Cambridge. The fact is printed in many editions of the Bible, and is incontestable.’

  ‘It makes the Creation sound like a railway timetable,’ objected Sir Peregrine. ‘I’ve heard it disputed by the most respectable theologians after dinner. Sometimes so hotly that I fear for a taproom brawl. Mr Darwin won’t make Canterbury Cathedral fall down.’

  ‘But Mr Darwin is a man of science.’ Uncle Humphry was sleek-haired, square jawed, peevish and unsmiling, as though resentful of the world’s continued sinfulness despite his specific instructions to the contrary. Out and about, he wore an intimidating shovel hat, and indulged his pride with a spanking coach and pair, his arms glittering in gold on the black panels, like a nobleman’s. ‘The mob will listen to him. The mob believe that science is all-powerful, because it gives them steamships and gas lighting.’

  ‘So the Church is afraid of Mr Darwin, because miracles are no longer the job of saints but of engineers?’

  ‘Fear is unknown to the Church,’ said uncle Humphry contemptuously. I was struggling to cut a piece of gristle. ‘But Mr Darwin can do much mischief. The Church’s authority rests on man’s awareness of his own divinity. Once men suspect that they are not created in God’s image, but are animals in hats and trousers, it will inevitably diminish. Once the authority of the Church goes –’ He shook a finger at us. ‘That of the State will follow, as surely as the crew will mutiny once the captain has fallen overboard and the mate cannot tell them what lies beyond the horizon.’

  ‘Well, what are you going to do? Burn him at Smithfield? Or blackball him for the Athenaeum?’

  ‘I’d like you to visit him.’

  ‘I will certainly not play inquisitor to another Fellow of the Royal Society. Besides, I am far too busy, and the journey’s damnably awkward.’

  The bishop’s sallow face coloured. He was getting into a temper, or as he would put it, a state of high moral indignation. ‘Mr Darwin has assented to give me a glimpse of his arguments, that my good friend the Bishop of Oxford –’

  Sir Peregrine snorted. ‘Soapy Sam Wilberforce.’

  ‘Might prepare some reply. I had arranged for my chaplain to go –’ The bishop looked uncomfortable. ‘But he was seized with a fear that he might have to inspect baboons in a state of dissection. He is a tender-hearted young man, and suffers from a delicate stomach.’

  ‘I’ll go, sir.’ Uncle Humphry looked as though interrupted in the pulpit by a choirboy. ‘You will not forget, sir, my facility for writing. My Virgilian verses.’ Unlike Sir Peregrine, he was ignorant of my exact occupation. ‘For a few guineas –’

  ‘Guineas!’ cried the bishop.

  ‘Capital idea,’ said uncle Peregrine. ‘He won’t be frightened by a dead baboon.’

  I left the bishop’s palace after dinner in uncle Peregrine’s coach. Night had fallen, the weather had turned dry, the cobbles stank of dung and refuse. We turned away from the river past Chelsea Cathedral, built by Henry VIII’s Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, to be his own resting place – but as often mars such comfortable anticipations, Sir Thomas ended with his body buried in the Tower and his head on a spike at London Bridge.

  ‘Well! What’s the latest tittle-tattle in society?’ my uncle asked at once.

  ‘Little, sir, except that the round hat is the thing. Absolutely every lady in Town must wear the new bare-faced look.’

  ‘And what did you make of Miss Nightingale?’

  ‘She was most severe on me.’

  ‘I’ve never met her. Only know her father, at the club. She has an owl. She calls it Athena, because she found it in the Parthenon while
jaunting about Greece.’ He added thoughtfully, ‘Only a very strange woman would make a pet of an owl. She gives her father a lot of trouble, you know. I gather the whole Nightingale female establishment is far too excitable. Comes from giving birth in Italy, no doubt,’ he ended obscurely. He suddenly thrust his head through the open carriage window. ‘A scent! The cholera,’ he explained. ‘It often comes this time of the year, when the mercury’s high and the water’s low. I’ve a nose for it. Likely to be a sharp epidemic before it goes to ground, I fancy.’ He sat back on the cushions, the springs creaking as we turned into the King’s Road. ‘Your uncle Humphry’s wine is not fit to be offered Christians. Unless with the intention of turning them into abstemious Mahommedans.’

  ‘Perhaps it is bottled specially for the Church, sir? It seems to make a man soberer the more he drinks of it.’

  ‘Of course, he’s frightened that his flock will turn into mules, if Mr Darwin conjures away Heaven and Hell in an afternoon. Who’s going to give a fig then for canonicals and tithes? Once people don’t have the choice of life eternal or eternal fire and brimstone, but don’t go anywhere particular once they’re dead? Not that I favour any doctrine which encourages public indiscipline,’ he said, as though that were an affliction like the cholera. ‘Look at the Reform Act. It snatched government from responsible hands and thrust it into those of Tom, Dick and Harry, who have little stake in the country and less concern for its destinies. By the by, Mr Darwin lives at the bottom of a cart-track, he’s a chronic invalid with ten children, seven surviving. Trying to prove his own theories, I suppose.’

  The journey to Down was damnably awkward. In 1854 the railway companies had not spun their net across London to turn the descendants of Bob Cratchit into the forebears of Mr Pooter. Breeched and booted, I took the Brighton Company’s line to Norwood, and hired a hack for ten miles on the white, ridged, powdery roads of the North Downs. The swallows and vivid butterflies were swooping and hovering over the hedgerows, the fat fields of Kent held lines of men scything the harvest, a thin finger from a cottage chimney announced a woman’s concern with dinner. The village of Down had a church, a few clean flint cottages and the Queen’s Head, where I restored myself at mid-afternoon with brandy-and-water. I asked for Mr Darwin’s house. The landlord told me jocularly to follow the homing pigeons. The Fellow of the Royal Society was an enthusiastic fancier.

  The house looked as though four had been chopped and cemented together by a drunken mason. A piano played vigorously from one window, a voice sang lustily a different tune from another, the front door breathed the ammonical miasma of small children. They scurried before me like mice, sucking their thumbs at me round doorways, grinning at me across the banisters like gargoyles. The big downstairs study had a long central table with sealed jars of biological specimens, labelled plants in pots and scientific instruments. Papers were everywhere, even surrounding the chimney-piece in clipped bundles, like bunches of honeysuckle round an arbour.

  Mr Darwin came in. Or reeled in, complaining of a disabling headache. He was forty-five, tall and bald, a round face and stubby nose set off by a ring of brown hair, thick whiskers and heavy eyebrows, resembling a pink china mask to which the packing materials adhered. He dressed as a farmer after a good harvest.

  ‘For ten years I have not known for one day the health of ordinary men,’ he said immediately. ‘Thus I have become a Kentish hog. The noise, the movement, the eternal complications of London were too much for me. I took the fever, you know, when I was in South America with the Beagle. Please sit down.’

  I took a chair well away from him, fearing it was catching. Though I later discovered that Mr Darwin suffered from nothing more contagious than disordered nerves.

  He asked if I had read Lyell’s Principles of Geology. I apologized for being a classicist. ‘That book taught me how the present could be interpreted from the past, in animals and man as in rocks.’ He reached for the table, holding up a speck in a chemist’s vial filled with spirit. ‘Take this creature, barely visible to the eye, a slug from the seaweed of the Falkland Islands. It has its place in the natural order of things. Though finding it could alone take two or three years, if my health permits it.’

  He replaced the vial delicately. ‘Pray tell the bishop, Mr Darling, that I stepped aboard the Beagle in 1831 with my belief unshaken that every word of the Bible was strictly and literally true. That belief remained unshaken when I stepped ashore at Falmouth five years later. Doubt crept over me slowly. Its spark was struck – though I did not glimpse it – in the Galapagos Islands. You know of the Galapagos Islands, Mr Darling?’

  ‘I am as big a geographical dunce as Homer, sir.’ I had notebook open on knee.

  ‘They are on the Equator. Off Ecuador. We reached there from that confounded country, Tierra del Fuego. I was instructed by the finches.’

  ‘Finches?’

  I grasped from him that each of the Galapagos Islands had its variety of finch, which had adapted itself to local conditions. ‘Any finch which did not adapt would be eliminated in favour of those which did.’ He held his aching head. ‘My theory is of natural selection, or survival of the fittest. A moment’s thought must tell you, Mr Darling, that many more individuals are born than could possibly survive. In any species, including man. To exist is therefore to struggle.’

  We were interrupted by Mrs Emma Darwin – he had married his elder cousin – marshalling the servants with tea, muffins, seed-cake, sandwiches, boiled eggs in knitted cosies. The Kentish hog had a full trough.

  ‘So it follows,’ he picked up his argument, muffin in one hand, head in the other, ‘that any animal varying from the rest of its species, in any manner, however so slight, but profitable to itself must have an advantage. It must have a better chance of surviving. You see?’

  I nodded. ‘It is much the same, sir, surviving in London society.’

  He looked at me blankly. ‘In short, the species continues through the preservation of differences in each individual which are favourable, and the destruction of those which are injurious. We survive because we are selected to do so, by the balance of Nature.’

  So we sat across a Kentish fireside quietly demolishing Genesis after two and a half millennia, over seed-cake. In my callowness, I did not know I faced a genius, one of the handfuls of humans who could disturb the world in its sleep. Scientific theories were rising and bursting in London at the time like the bubbles in hot porridge. Another afternoon that August, I interviewed another savant, but more red-blooded. He had been tried for high treason in Cologne, acquitted but expelled from Prussia, as quickly ejected from France and received within our compassionate coasts, to be regarded with the same comfortable terror as the ladies of England saw Garibaldi in 1864. The visit had an effect on my career indirect but immediate.

  I called for the Penny Pioneer upon Mr Karl Marx in his poky upstairs rooms at No. 16 Dean Street, Soho. They reeked of coffee and cigars, and in my mind of gunpowder, burning and blood. He was a revolutionary whose scratching pen at night caused wounds from workmen’s knives in the morning. A Jew, slight, square headed, delicate fingers, with a cascade of beard, he dressed as respectably as a senior clerk in the City. He existed on political articles for the New York Daily Tribune. Now his books are hard to find, his political neck broken by the failure of his International Working Men’s Association, his political notion that labour is the source of all wealth discredited by our prosperity won by adventurous financiers. He is safely buried like an Englishman in Highgate Cemetery.

  I was shown out afterwards by a maid-of-all-work in a crumpled dress and dragging stockings. A blazing day had reached a sultry twilight. A familiar voice shouted at me from Dean Street.

  ‘You, sir! Stay where you are. You thief and cheat. Angus! Draw ’em up,’ Wakley-Barlow ordered from his carriage window to his coachman on the box.

  5

  I thought instantly of flight, as quickly rejected it as undignified. With my back against the blistered green paint of
Mr Karl Marx’s front door, Wakley-Barlow approached pointing his cane like a rapier. I raised my hat. ‘Good evening, sir. I trust I see you well?’

  ‘In better health than you shall be in a minute or two, if you don’t return my three sovereigns.’

  ‘I fear they are long spent, sir. As you will readily understand, from your earlier philosophizing on my miserable station in life.’

  He demanded furiously, ‘Why have you not done some lampoon on Miss Nightingale?’

  ‘Literary work of my quality cannot be produced overnight. Childe Harold, which you mentioned at our last meeting, took Lord Byron almost ten years.’

  His face was a foot away, his belly pressed the single button on my swallow-tailed coat. ‘I should have known! You’re a damned cowardly scoundrel like your father, and a faithless money-grubber like your whore of a mother.’

  ‘Would not your language be a little exaggerated for a Parliamentarian, sir?’ I inquired mildly. I had decided my action, which was to be exciting, against my nature and unique in my whole life.

  ‘It’s what you deserve,’ he roared at me.

  ‘And that, sir,’ I said, punching him simultaneously in stomach and face, ‘is what you do.’

  Wakley-Barlow fell into the filth, crying, ‘Angus!’ His coachman had already thrown the reins to a boy, who was regarding the incident with screeching amusement. He jumped from the box with his whip. The notion of flight reappeared in my mind, in a far more favourable light.

  I ran into Soho Square, remembering with panic that at Rugby I came last in the Crick. Angus was large, young and red-faced, crying in broad Scots, ‘Stop thief !’, which luckily in Soho had no more effect than a shout of ‘Fire!’ in Hell. I dodged into Frith Street. I slipped on something rotten, and ran headlong into a lady, to whom I breathlessly made apologies.

  ‘Mr Darling – !’

  ‘Miss Bancroft – !’