The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  ‘I have no objection to papa reading all morning,’ said Parthe sharply.

  ‘Oh, it’s all right for you, who go on with your drawing. For me, who has no such cover, the thing is boring to desperation.’

  ‘Caleb, another egg for Miss Parthenope,’ WEN said mildly to the raw-handed butler in the doorway. ‘So I have tormented my daughters? Well, the devil is either my Unitarian enthusiasm for the intellectual education of women, or my dislike of nothing in the world more than lack of occupation.’

  ‘Lack of occupation!’ exclaimed Florence. She could be as severe on her parents as upon everyone else. ‘When I see you eating your breakfast every morning, Papa, as though the destinies of a nation depended on your getting done, I think you would be better employed as superintendent of a factory with at least 300 hands.’

  Fanny joined the attack on the poor man. ‘You could stand for Parliament again.’

  ‘After twenty years?’ WEN was then sixty-one, Fanny sixty-seven. She was to die at ninety-two, he at eighty, hurrying upstairs for a forgotten watch during another breakfast. ‘I failed to win Andover only because I failed to bribe sufficient voters. The election was perfectly repugnant to me. I am still a Whig. I still hate the Tories, who became mighty only by beer, brandy and money. But I am too old to seek new causes for my old cudgel.’

  ‘You mean, too righteous,’ said Fanny.

  ‘You mean, too indolent,’ said Florence.

  I observed to them that it was a pleasant morning.

  Florence turned to me sharply. ‘Very pleasant, Mr Darling. On my walk before breakfast, the voice of the birds was like the very angels calling me with their songs. The fleecy clouds looked like the white walls of Heaven. But when I looked at our rows of windows, do you know what I thought? How I should turn the place into a hospital, and how I should put the beds.’

  ‘I had such ambitions for both my daughters,’ Fanny complained tragically. ‘Particularly you, Flo. You have such gifts as an artist, such beautiful letters you write, such charm you bring to everyone! How can you disappoint me by immuring yourself in a hospital in Turkey? I never understood how you tolerated even London out of the season, with absolutely nobody there.’

  ‘I am determined to study nursing, to devote my life to that profession,’ Florence replied obstinately, ‘and there is nowhere in the world more valuable to practise it at the moment than Scutari. Do you think it such a dreadful thing? I think it is a very good thing.’

  ‘Nurse! How I hate that oft-repeated name,’ objected Fanny. ‘What a picture it brings to the mind! A woman sodden with gin, lascivious and lurid-tongued, as familiar with degrading sights and seeds as the very Devil with fire and brimstone. You know full well there are physically revolting parts of a hospital which no gentlewoman should see.’

  I unwisely sought Florence’s rescue by murmuring that a nurse offered the qualities of devotion and obedience. All I earned from Miss Nightingale was, ‘That definition would do just as well for a porter, Mr Darling. It might even do for a horse. It seems a common idea among men, and even among women, that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, or incapacity in other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse.’

  ‘Flo, you know how I adore and admire you, but you do take such strange paths to fulfil yourself,’ complained Parthe.

  Florence spread her large hands on the cloth. ‘It disgusts you, does it? That these soft fingers born to embroidery, to flowers, to those of their dancing partners, should be soiled with vomit and excreta?’

  Mother and sister paled at the words. I was completely forgotten. No fight is so intensely absorbing as seeks to spill the same blood. I continued with my kidneys, which were excellent. I wondered if I should be back in London with the tremendous news that Miss Nightingale was shirking Scutari.

  ‘If only you had accepted Mr Monkton Milnes,’ said Fanny in a painful voice. ‘He was so devoted to you, Flo.’

  ‘He asked only once,’ said Florence. ‘You know how I wanted to find him lodging to give me another opportunity. I was miserable.’

  ‘You were miserable because he became engaged to Annabel Crewe six weeks later,’ said Parthe. ‘Oh, Flo! You know how mama and I only desire your happiness. I am plainer than you, Flo. I am not so clever. I know that you despise me, that you try to dominate me –’

  ‘Speaking as a country magistrate –’ The women stopped, and stared at WEN. ‘I am naturally concerned with administration of the county’s hospitals and asylums.’ He dipped a sliver of buttered bread into his boiled egg. ‘I can understand Flo’s interest in these institutions, which are so full of human misery, which can be so easily increased with unthinking adminstration or meddling.’ He gave an incredulous smile, as though a thought had just struck him. ‘Flo is rather masterful. Despotism is not the English way of governing things, you know. But I am proud of Flo’s success in Harley Street,’ her father ended, sounding deeply ashamed of it.

  ‘You’ve always been thicker with Flo,’ Parthe said resentfully, ‘because she’s quicker witted than me.’

  ‘And less possessive, and less jealous,’ Florence supplemented.

  ‘Flo!’ exclaimed Fanny. ‘You’ll make your sister ill again. She’ll have to go to bed for a week, just like the time when you walked out of the house for Harley Street.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve discussed my career with Parthe a thousand times. If she wishes to preserve her health, she should stop interfering in her sister’s affairs and stay here at Embley with her books and country occupations.’ She was angry, but as politicians are, calculating the best means of using it for her own way. ‘I do not intend dangling about my mother’s drawing-room all my life as an eternal fille à marier. You must think of me as a son, Mama. And a vagabond son at that. I am sorry if you are both jealous of my ambitions.’

  ‘Ambitions, ambitions!’ Parthe was sobbing, choking, pouring out her words. ‘You have little or none of what is called charity or philanthropy, only ambition. You want to go East because you would like to regenerate the world with a grand coup de main, or some fine institute, and take the credit. You have a circle of admirers who take everything you do or say as Gospel, but I certainly do not believe in the wisdom of all you say simply because you say it.’ She snatched impulsively at her wrist. ‘I’m even wearing your bracelets – you shall have them back. There!’

  She hurled them across the table, flying past Florence’s neck and rattling against the skirting. I went on sipping my coffee. I always maintained that breakfast was not a social meal.

  ‘It’s only the intellectual part which interests you, not the manual,’ Parthe continued wildly. ‘Don’t you understand yourself? You have no esprit de conduite in the practical sense. Oh, I know when you’ve nursed me while I’ve been ill, everything which intellect and kind attention could do was done. But you are a shocking nurse. Shocking!’ she shouted. ‘You’ve nothing but an insatiable curiosity in getting into a variety of minds, and an insatiable longing to inguence them. And once you’ve got inside, they generally cease to have the slightest interest to you.’

  ‘It seems that I cannot open my mouth here without vexing you beyond toleration,’ said Florence quietly.

  ‘Yes. You are the only murderer of my happiness.’

  ‘I am a murderer only because I will not be satisfied with the life which satisfies you. You lie when you say you desire my happiness. You never think of it. My life here is but suicide. To get through every day here, to talk through every day here, leaves not a night that I lie down on my bed wishing that I may leave it no more.’

  ‘We are ducks,’ exclaimed Fanny tearfully, ‘who have hatched a wild swan.’

  Parthe gave a cry. ‘I feel faint.’

  ‘Quick!’ cried Fanny, ‘the sal volatile.’

  WEN rose, with his Times. ‘I am retiring to the library.’ He often did at Embley. Sometimes he contemplated the books. Others, he just contemplated. The family revolved in a solar system beyond which only Florence directed an a
stronomical telescope. They were carelessly arrogant, unthinkingly conceited, inescapably snobbish, and all four a little mad. They enjoyed their fights. These provided a catharsis more refreshing than senna-pods, and occupied the dull days in the country.

  Florence rose too, staring through the window, hands clasped in her usual way, lips moving either in prayer or calculating the number of sheets she would be taking to Scutari. She would go to the war, whatever the family said. No one could withstand the steel of her determination, with its edge of invective heated in her coals of rage. Fanny was slumped in her chair, sniffing vigorously from a dark bottle. Parthe was in tears, scarlet face against the cloth, beating the table with her fist. Caleb the Hampshire butler came in, noticed the bracelets on the floor, gathered them up, and stepping across to their wearer said cheerfully, ‘Here’s your egg, Miss Parthenope, and cook says it’s straight out of the hen.’

  9

  Florence Nightingale became a national heroine in an afternoon.

  First, it seemed that her journey into the rosy clouds of self-sacrifice would be cancelled as unceremoniously as an excursion train. Sebastopol had fallen. It was in all the newspapers the next Wednesday morning, led by columns of the Morning Chronicle and The Times headed with colossal type. It was a ‘shave’, as the soldiers called false tales, though one founded on national confidence. The month before, Palmerston and his Foreign Secretary the Earl of Clarendon were preoccupied deciding if the Crimea might be restored to Turkey after victory, or occupied with our ally Napoleon III. The month after, Clarendon was admitting no chance of winning until another spring the war which he had lightly started during the last one.

  On Thursday morning the Cabinet met. Without dissent they appointed Miss Nightingale ‘Superintendent of the Female Nursing Establishment of the English General Hospitals in Turkey’. It was an innovation as startling for Englishmen as finding themselves seventeen years before suddenly ruled by a Queen. Everybody in Town was talking excitedly and expectantly about Miss Nightingale. I had an appointment with her late that evening, at Sidney Herbert’s house in Belgrave Square.

  No. 49 stood on the corner of Grosvenor Crescent, across from my uncle Peregrine’s St George’s Hospital. It was huge, four-storied, its architecture untidy, as though the remnants of the elegant square had been stuck together by builders anxious to be off. There was an ostentatious glassed-in portico, a pretty little octagonal lobby, a hall with a massive staircase. The dining-room beyond had delicately embossed walls of Cambridge blue, windows round three sides, a handsome marble chimney-piece, an ugly central chandelier. I found Miss Nightingale at the head of the long dining-table, which was bare save for an open leather-bound ledger. She was in her lace-edged black, alone with Mrs Elizabeth Herbert, who was standing against a great gilded mirror, dark-haired, smooth skinned, deep bosomed, in coffee-coloured embroidered silk, serene, beautiful and pious. I had never before seen her. She was later to be my instrument for unlatching the door and releasing a stabled Miss Nightingale into the Elysian fields of her ultimate ambitions.

  ‘I thought you might be a candidate,’ said Miss Nightingale, as I was shown in.

  ‘Has there been a rush?’

  ‘There has not been a single one.’

  She introduced me to Mrs Herbert, who said gently, ‘The inducements are compelling enough. After all, the pay is double a London nurse’s. Twelve shillings a week is generous, rising to sixteen if she can behave herself for three months.’

  ‘And £1 if she manages to for a year,’ said Miss Nightingale, shutting the blank book.

  The terms were in all the newspapers. The nurse would be given uniform, but must provide her own underclothes, nightcaps and umbrella. Coloured ribbons were banned, and so was straying outside the hospital without three companions. She would get a pint of porter at dinner, at supper a glass of Marsala or an ounce of brandy. She might drink her own gin, in moderation. There was no moderation about intimacy with the troops, which was punishable instantly by sending home third class on salt pork and ship’s biscuit.

  ‘We have had to dispatch ladies hurriedly to caches of nurses all over London,’ Mrs Herbert explained with disappointment.

  ‘We have dug out five Roman Catholic sisters each from the convents of Bermondsey and Northwood, eight from Miss Sellon’s Home, which is Protestant, and six from St John’s House,’ Miss Nightingale enumerated.

  ‘Which is Tractarian,’ murmured Mrs Herbert.

  ‘That still leaves sixteen,’ said Miss Nightingale dourly. ‘The sisters are anyhow more fit for Heaven than a hospital. They will flit about like angels without hands, and soothe the patients’ souls while they leave their bodies dirty and neglected. They are eager for self-mortification. I am going to Scutari not to mortify my nurses, but to nurse my wounded.’

  One of the Herberts’ footmen entered with a letter on a salver.

  ‘I only apply one test to a nurse,’ she continued, opening the envelope. ‘Is she a good woman, and does she know her business? By “good” I do not mean religious or noble, which are not in themselves sufficient. I am glad to include Romanist sisters in my party because they are vowed, so I shall not risk losing them from marriage to the soldiers.’

  She was deeply religious because it was fashionable among well-born young women at the time, but she dealt with God exactly as she dealt with everyone else from the Cabinet to the supplier of the Harley Street flue pipe.

  The letter raised her spirits. ‘That’s pleasing.’ She handed it to Mrs Herbert. ‘It’s from my father, at his club. He came back to Town suddenly with Mr Darling and myself.’

  In the Athenaeum, so quiet, so impregnable, so womanless, between those chaste walls, picked sombrely in black and gold, among those slim white columns haunted with inspirational dryads, amid that conventional taciturnity, in that crucible of consequential thought, WEN could sit gloomily over his chop and claret deciding his attitude towards his younger daughter.

  ‘Mr Nightingale has settled £500 a year on me,’ Florence was in peril of looking smug. ‘And my dear mother and sister have telegraphed their congratulations. Instead of telling me that I suffer from nostalgie de la boue, they will soon be telling the whole country of its good fortune, that they encouraged me all my life to nose my way into hospitals. Look at the postscript,’ she said with amusement to Mrs Herbert. ‘“Better write to me at the Athenaeum so as not to excite inquiry.” I expect there are many men who are thankful that their club stands beyond the length of their wives’ paper-knife.’

  Mrs Herbert shortly left us. I showed Miss Nightingale the galley-proof of my article for next morning’s Penny Pioneer. It was the first by which I stamped her image on the malleable metal of the public mind.

  ‘Why do you begin, Who is Miss Nightingale?’

  ‘Because The Times always calls you Mrs Nightingale.’

  I read once more, over her shoulder, She is young, graceful, feminine, rich and popular, yet she has forsaken the palpable and heartfelt attractions of her home, the assemblies, lectures, concerts, exhibitions and all the entertainments for taste and intellect with which the London season abounds, to sit beside the sick and dying. Now, at the risk of her own life, and the pang of separation from her friends and family, at the certainty of encountering hardships, dangers, toils and the constantly renewing scene of human suffering, she is setting out for the horrors of war. Miss Nightingale shrank not. A sage few will no doubt condemn, sneer or pity an enthusiasm which will to them seem eccentric, or at best misplaced. But to the true heart of the country, not one of England’s proudest and purest daughters at this moment stands on so high a pinnacle as Florence Nightingale.

  ‘What do you think of it?’ I asked proudly.

  ‘Overblown.’ She handed back the proof. ‘Are you coming to Scutari, Mr Darling?’

  ‘Might I not be more use in London?’

  ‘No. But I will put no pressure on you to go. None was put on me,’ she said crushingly.

  I shortly left fo
r home. I walked, a hansom being expensive, the omnibuses infrequent and anyway the vehicles of most Londoners in those days were their feet. It was foggy, the gaslamps orange, horses materializing suddenly from empty darkness, some muffled men indicated by lanterns, others nothing but passing coughs. Hands in pockets, I strode by St George’s Hospital towards Hyde Park Corner. My heart turned colder than the night. I was being followed.

  I went faster. A cry came close behind me. I stopped, turned, prepared to struggle with an envoy of Wakley-Barlow come to slit my nose or my heart. It was Harriet.

  ‘Tristram! Oh, lovey! I am finished.’

  She fell upon me, grasped me tightly and started to cry.

  ‘How did you find me?’ I asked angrily.

  ‘They told me at your newspaper.’

  ‘Why are you out alone at this hour?’ I demanded in the same tone.

  ‘Because I’ve nowhere else to go,’ she told me miserably.

  ‘So Lard Tub’s chucked you?’ She was dressed for a summer afternoon, not an October night, in the same pink frock and a straw bonnet with pink ribbons. ‘Well, you can’t blame him, can you?’

  ‘Oh, lovey – !’ She looked up, cheeks streaming tears. The fog had turned our patch of pavement into a private apartment in which we could enjoy a tête-a-tête. ‘I’ve not a penny. Nothing! Naught but what I stand up in.’

  ‘You’re lying. What about my sovereigns? What about the sovereigns of all the others?’

  She gave a huge sob. ‘He found them. My savings, my little hoard, my independence.’

  I was curious. ‘Where?’

  ‘The monkey.’

  I laughed. ‘I wondered why you tolerated an object so ill-manneredly ugly.’

  ‘You must support me,’ she cried disconcertingly.

  ‘You’ve not a bellyful of marrow-pudding, have you?’ I asked in panic. ‘You’ve a fine variety of fathers to pick and choose from.’