The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  ‘But four days would have remedied this,’ Herbert continued in his brisk way. ‘Meanwhile, fresh stores are arriving daily. And thirty more surgeons, though the medical officers with the army stand already at one for every ninety-five men. Which is nearly double what we have ever had before.’

  He ended the rapid catalogue of self-justification with, ‘But there is a great deficiency – female nurses. As you must see, it is impossible to carry a staff of female nurses with the army in the field. But at Scutari, no military reason exists against their introduction. I have already received numbers of offers of ladies to go out.’

  ‘But these are ladies who have no conception of what a hospital is.’

  ‘Exactly. They would either recoil from the work, or be entirely useless, or what is worse entirely in the way.’

  ‘Mr Herbert, Lady Maria Forster has sent me £200 to organize a small private expedition of five nurses. I have already seen Dr Andrew Smith of the Army Medical Department who would authorize us to go – if we feed and lodge ourselves there, and be no expense whatever to the country.’

  ‘My dear Miss Nightingale!’ he said ardently. ‘There is but one person in England I know who would be capable of organizing and superintending such a scheme. I have several times been on the point of asking you hypothetically if you would. But we need forty nurses, not five,’ he continued. ‘Our new idea must be pushed on an impressive scale.’

  ‘Forty? Then the selection will be difficult.’

  ‘Of course the difficulty will be great,’ he said candidly. ‘Finding women equal to a task, after all, full of horrors. And requiring, besides knowledge and goodwill, immense energy and courage. The task of ruling them and introducing system among them will be great. And not least will be the difficulty of making the whole work smoothly with the medical and military authorities out there.’ The footman with champagne stood impassive and unnoticed. ‘I do not say one word to press you. But…your personal qualities, your knowledge and power of administration, and among greater things your rank and position in society, give you advantages in such work which no other person possesses.’

  Miss Nightingale stood calmly, hands as usual clasped before her. Miss Bancroft was at my side. ‘I chafe from three restraints.’

  ‘Tell them,’ he demanded.

  ‘My Ladies’ Committee at Harley Street –’

  ‘Mrs Herbert has already released you,’ he told her impatiently.

  ‘And Mr Herbert –’ She smiled, ‘Would he give me advice, letters of recommendation? The medical staff at Scutari will be more frightened than amused at being bombarded by a parcel of women. You must say of me, “This is not a lady, but a real hospital nurse.”’

  ‘Miss Nightingale, deriving authority from the Government, your position would secure the respect and consideration of everyone. Especially in a service where official rank carries so much weight. This would secure to you every attention and comfort on your way there, and when you are there, together with complete submission to your orders. I know these things are a matter of indifference to you,’ he ended flatteringly, ‘except so far as they may further the great objects you have in view. But they are of every importance to those who have a right to take an interest in your personal position and comfort.’

  Miss Nightingale nodded contentedly. I wondered if he had noticed in his eagerness her extraction from him of precise assurances about her position in the world of war. As I grew to know Miss Nightingale better, I recognized this characteristic of clear-headedness and caution, her sharp eye which could see a detail like an ant upon a landscape, combined with long sight for complications and consequences, and an ability for getting what she wanted out of human beings as stealthily as a pickpocket.

  ‘What is your third impediment?’

  ‘I must have the consent of my parents.’

  He looked startled. ‘But the request proceeds from the Government. Who represent the nation.’

  She inclined her head graciously. ‘Thus shall I put it to them. Are there stores you would advise us to take out? Dr Smith says that nothing is needed.’

  ‘You may rely on Dr Smith’s assurance about everything to do with Scutari. As Director-General of the Army Medical Department, he is responsible only to myself.’

  I began sidling towards the door. I should miss my supper – silver dishes pebbled with scarlet lobsters, great golden raised pies caught my eye – but I had my tale and I must bear it at once to the steam-presses. The Penny Pioneer would publish a special edition for Sunday morning. Mr Horncastle would be delighted, and express it in sovereigns.

  Miss Nightingale’s voice lassoed me. I turned.

  ‘Mr Darling, I know perfectly well that you have overheard all passing between Mr Herbert and myself, and that you are about to leave sans mot dire to write it all down for your newspaper. But I need your help.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ demanded Herbert, looking as though I were the sweep’s boy just appeared down the chimney.

  ‘The gentleman who wrote the article about the cholera, which I admired and felt to be spirited and brave,’ said Miss Nightingale generously.

  ‘Cholera? What paper?’

  ‘The Penny Pioneer,’ she told him.

  This caused Herbert to look at me as though I were the sweep’s boy with spotty evidence of infective disease.

  ‘Pen an advertisement tonight for forty nurses, ready to embark for Scutari,’ Miss Nightingale directed. ‘Where should they report?’

  ‘My house, No. 49 Belgrave Square. Any time of day,’ said Herbert, addressing her, not myself.

  ‘All shades of religious opinion may apply. Say that they are to work together in a common brotherhood of love to God and man,’ Miss Nightingale continued in a business-like way. ‘As for describing the work itself…well, they must know already what it entails and demands, any that do not, I shan’t have them. Place it in the editorial matter, Mr Darling. Then there will be no charge incurred.’

  ‘When can you leave?’ Herbert asked her.

  ‘Saturday.’

  ‘Next Saturday?’ he asked, amazed.

  ‘Why not? A longer delay would only increase our importance here and diminish our usefulness there.’

  ‘How shall you go?’

  ‘To Paris, then take the steamer from Marseilles.’

  ‘If you obtain your recruits,’ he warned.

  ‘And if I obtain my parents’ permission.’ She turned to me. ‘Mr Darling, kindly be at Waterloo Station by four o’clock on Monday afternoon. I shall be leaving to visit my parents in Hampshire, and the journey will be my first chance of putting certain plans to you.’

  ‘But, Miss Nightingale! I have engagements in Town –’

  ‘Oh, you need not stay in Hampshire. There is another train almost immediately back to London. Mr Herbert, will you take me on to see Mrs Herbert now in Belgrave Square? There are a thousand things to settle before morning. Miss Bancroft, kindly accompany us.’

  They left me in the middle of the room, without another word, I had learned that a person once used by Miss Nightingale was discarded until again necessary to be taken in hand, like a golfer with his clubs.

  8

  ‘So I went to Kaiserwerth to learn the prax. You know of Kaiserwerth, Mr Darling?’

  ‘Is it not on the Rhine? Near Cologne?’

  ‘Yes, it is an institute founded by Pastor Theodor Fliedner – a good and vigorous man. It is part asylum, school, teachers’ college, penitentiary and hospital of a hundred beds. All conducted, of course, on the most advanced principles. I was four months there. Three years ago, while my dear mama and sister were taking the waters at Carlsbad. At Kaiserwerth, we were deaconesses. We wore blue print dresses and little white caps, we rose at five in the morning and worked till seven at night, with three breaks for gruel and broth. In the evening, we sat together in the great hall for Bible classes.’

  She gave the impression of not enjoying it very much.

  ‘The scenery was very fin
e. In its way. That broad mass of water, you know, flowing like the slow, calm, earnest, meditative German character. Pastor Fliedner’s solemn and reverential teaching of the sad events of hospital life was something I have never heard in England.’

  Miss Nightingale stared outside, as though searching for that metaphysical river flowing through an English countryside grey with twilight and drizzle, half obscured by the soot running with the rain down our carriage window. I sat opposite, comfortable on the buttoned horsehair of an empty first-class carriage, at Miss Nightingale’s expense. She had provided the rugs, comforters, mittens, Punch, sandwiches – organizing a journey to Romsey Junction was trivial to one marshalling forty unknown and even unimaginable women for Scutari. Miss Bancroft had disappointingly been left in Harley Street.

  ‘The nursing there was nil, the hygiene horrible. But it was the only training I had. A good nurse must be well trained. Do you know, I saw a poor woman die before my eyes in the village this summer, because there was none but fools to sit up with her. They poisoned her, as much as if they had given her arsenic. I saw an operation in Kaiserwerth. An amputation. But I dared not mention it to my dear sister, who would see no more in my interest in it than the pleasure dirty boys have, playing in the puddles about a butcher’s shop. You will know, Mr Darling,’ she confessed, ‘because all London knows it, that my dear mother and sister, though loving and entertaining the highest ambitions for me socially, are obstinate and resentful over my chosen work. Which they do not understand, and treat as if I had come home from committing a crime.’

  She had been talking as vivaciously since we had first puffed away from the Thames among the clean little villas of New Wandsworth. I never claimed I stood close to Miss Nightingale’s heart. That would have been an exaggeration for any man, like a traveller feeling himself close to Pharaoh’s tomb on the rugged outside of the massive pyramid. She spoke to me more freely than others because I was a professional listener who lived on intimacies. Or perhaps she was afraid of me, as society feared their urchin. Miss Nightingale knew from the start that I saw her secret. She had an intelligence which bit and a wit that stung, but the Pharaoh’s tomb was empty. She was an impressive monument who had no heart.

  ‘My family do not understand how women can suffer intensely from unused nervous energy, which makes them feel, every night when they go to bed, as if they were going mad.’

  ‘But a nurse,’ I objected, ‘has no more social standing than a chambermaid who must every morning empty her master’s slop bucket.’

  ‘Hospital nurses are much abused. They have their faults, but most are due to want of proper treatment. They are lectured by committees, preached at by chaplains, scowled on by treasurers and stewards, scolded by matrons, sworn at by surgeons, bullied by students, grumbled at and abused by patients, insulted if old and ill-favoured, talked flippantly to if middle-aged and good humoured, tempted and seduced if young and well looking. They are what any woman might be under these circumstances.’

  ‘So Sarah Gamp is as much a caricature as Mr Pecksniff?’

  ‘Dickens! That incorrigible sentimentalist!’

  ‘How I agree! He wells tears in the eyes of tradesmen’s wives, like raw onions.’

  There was a bond between us.

  ‘Listen, Mr Darling. Salisbury Infirmary has been seeking “young, strong, respectable women who would be taught to look after sick people”, since the end of the last century. Though when I intended to nurse there, it occasioned a vast consumption of sal volatile in my family. Admittedly, the poor are unsavoury to handle. Admittedly, I might have found myself touching men. Admittedly, there are those things heard about the surgeons and the nurses.’ The brakes began to screech for Basingstoke. ‘But the poor must go somewhere, having no homes to be sick in, amid the familiar attentions of their families, like the rest of us. Well, Mr Darling, our journey will be over before we reach our business. Will you come to Scutari?’

  Such unexpected, such unbelievable an offer left me unable to speak. We began clanking into the station. Luckily, the normal shouting, slamming, whistling and waving of our stop at Basingstoke made no reply immediately necessary. I sat staring unseeingly through the window. Miss Nightingale sat frowning over Punch. When the London and South Western resumed their responsibilities towards us, Miss Nightingale explained her need for some deft pen to help with her correspondence, her reports, questions from the newspapers and dispatches to them.

  ‘And you are indeed a clever little devil,’ she informed me amiably. ‘Besides, a man will counterbalance an expedition weighted with femininity. You would be my secretary, to work with Miss Bancroft.’

  An attractive prospect. But I objected, ‘I am not the military type.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘I should soon be forgotten by the salons of Mayfair.’

  ‘Is not that your very wish? Come, Mr Darling. Yours is better metal than need glitter in the light of ballroom chandeliers.’

  I should exchange the unknown dangers of campaigning for those experienced of Wakley-Barlow’s fury. I should stop Miss Bancroft coming home wed to a Cavalry officer with gorgeous mustachios and irresistible japanned boots. I would have regular dispatches commissioned by Mr Horncastle, for good fees. But all would be massively overshadowed by William Howard Russell of The Times. I begged time for thought.

  ‘Till Saturday. If you like, join us unannounced at London Bridge Station.’

  We arrived at Romsey Junction. I expected the yellow lamps of my return express already appearing through the mist. But disaster! A landslip in the Southampton cutting, blocking the up line. There was no train till morning.

  ‘You shall stay the night in Embley Park,’ Miss Nightingale decided. I could use dear papa’s shaving things.

  I hated the country. It was far too quiet for sleep, when an owl shrieks like a steam-whistle and you can almost hear the worms turn. Gloomy and sullen I sat in the trap, whipped along inky, wet lanes by the groom. I relished one night among dull strangers less than an indefinite number among the wounded at Scutari. There would be nothing to do except whist, and nothing to talk about except partridges, rents and trout,

  Worse, I was superfluous in a house boiling with excitement over Miss Nightingale’s new prospects. I stood in their drawing-room amid the kissing, clutching and sobbing, as unnoticed as a footman at a banquet. This gave a chance to observe my conscripted hosts.

  Father Nightingale – ‘WEN’ – was much as etched in the Reform Club by the powerful acid of Wakley-Barlow, who I made an urgent mental note not to mention as a mutual acquaintance. WEN was abnormally tall, skinny, bearded, with a tendency to lean against walls and furniture rather than angle himself into the chairs of normal humans. He was dressed in skirted frock coat, high collar and black stock, more like the county magistrate he had become than the country gentleman his wife wished him to be.

  Mother Nightingale – Fanny – still showed the strong-featured beauty of the vivacious, extravagant, well-connected Miss Smith of Mayfair, before she had exchanged an indulgent father for a lazy and easy-going husband. Her clear complexion, her full lower lip, she had given to her daughters. Sister Nightingale – Parthe – bore a strong resemblance to Florence, though her nose was less sharp, her mouth smaller, her face fatter, her manner livelier. She wore her brown hair braided, and her dark eyes reflected frequent impatience at a remark or a characteristic.

  There was a cold supper. I was clearly a mysterious species, regarded as Mr Darwin his Galapagos finches. They were itching for a family conference. I considerately pleaded utter exhaustion, and took my candle in the steps of the butler, a young Hampshire man, red-faced and raw handed, his fair hair cut as roughly as a soldier’s, who for a small coin brought to my bedroom fireside an evening’s supply of brandy and hot water.

  I read a pile of Blackwood’s till sleepy. Next morning, I wondered how the family conference had gone. Entering the dining-room for breakfast, I sensed immediately.

  The four sat round t
he table in aggressive silence. WEN was reading The Times. Fanny was busy with the spirit lamp of the silver kettle. Parthe in yellow silk was solemnly decapitating an egg. Miss Nightingale wore a brown silk dress with a gold cross in a mother-of-pearl ring round her neck, and staring straight ahead. Their greeting was surprised. They had clearly overlooked my existence.

  I helped myself silently at the sideboard to bacon, chop and devilled kidney. The drizzle had been blown into a bright morning. Through leaded and mullioned windows I glimpsed part of the brick and stone house, which had three storeys, sixteen gables and thirty chimneys, and had been modernized by WEN from Elizabethan to Georgian. He was an enthusiastic architect, a friend of Sir Joshua Jebb, who designed the new model prison at Pentonville. But he grew bored with his plans, as with everything else, before the scaffolding was up. For thirty years, Embley’s acres of oaks and beeches, thickets of laurels and rhododendrons, reposeful grassland, screened pathways, seclusive terraces and sensuous flowerbeds had insulated the Nightingales from the world.

  I sat without speaking. WEN suddenly started reading from his Times.

  ‘“In this war the Russians have hitherto exhibited a great inferiority in their conduct to that which they displayed in their campaigns from 1807 to 1812, when they fought the battles of Eylau and Borodino against Napoleon,”’ he declaimed tonelessly. ‘“The position of Alma must have been much stronger than that of Borodino, yet how much more stoutly the latter was defended than the former. Their having allowed the allies to land without molestation is inconceivable –” Parthe, you are not listening.’

  ‘I have a bad egg, Papa.’

  ‘Reasonable competition for the war, I suppose.’ He had a detached, gentle way with the exasperations of his family.

  ‘To be read aloud to is the most miserable exercise of the human intellect,’ the other Miss Nightingale burst out. It was plain all three females were in a raging temper. ‘It is like lying on one’s back with one’s hands tied, and having liquid poured down one’s throat. Worse than that, because suffocation would immediately ensue, and put a stop to the operation. But no suffocation stops the other.’