The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  I was unpacking my box in our mess-room just before luncheon one morning in mid-December, with Newbolt and Handshear enthusiastically helping me draw the potted partridges, tea, coffee, chocolate, candied fruits, beef essence and French brandy from their straw nest. Our picture-covered door flew open for Horace Wiley. He was usually a man closely self-controlled in emotions and speech. Now his eye was wild, his pale New Englander’s cheeks as scarlet as a British guardsman’s coat.

  ‘Look at this, you fellows.’ He threw a document among the tins and earthenware jars on the table. ‘From Dr John Hall. Hippocrates of the British army.’

  The American’s indignant finger quivered at a printed memorandum from the Inspector-General, distant in Balaclava.

  The Use of Chloroform, I read. Medical officers to be cautious in the use of chloroform. This is not to be used in patients with severe shock from wounds, as few of such cases will survive its employment. Public opinion is admittedly against this course, but public opinion is founded on mistaken philanthropy. However barbarous it may appear, the smart of the knife is a powerful stimulant, and it is much better to hear a man bawl lustily, than to see him sink silently into his grave.

  ‘Bawl lustily! The smart of the knife!’ Wiley said furiously. ‘Mistaken philanthropy! I learned the art of chloroforming from the hands of Dr William Thomas Morton – greatest benefactor of his age – and I will not see any man go under the knife without it.’

  ‘Oh, you’d never get a new idea into Hall’s head without a trepan,’ said Newbolt, pulling the cork of my cognac.

  ‘I don’t have to obey his orders,’ Wiley consoled himself.

  ‘You don’t, and we can’t. Hall’s orders are incapable of fulfilment, because they depend on medical equipment which exists only in his imagination, and a medical system which exists in nobody’s.’

  ‘Enlist Miss Nightingale’s support for chloroform, Horace.’ Handshear stuck out a tin mug for brandy. ‘She can do anything. The hospital’s buzzing from end to end about “Nightingale Power”. The Bird’s taken a fancy to you, too.’

  ‘To me!’ Wiley looked alarmed. ‘A London society lady?’

  ‘Yes, because you’re an American. Not one of the stiff-rumped British officers.’

  A slow, pleased smile stirred his face. ‘That’s strange. I sort of felt I’d made a hit with her. We had a long talk about Boston.’

  ‘Follow it up,’ Handshear suggested. ‘Talk to her about Chicago, New York, Cincinnati, San Francisco. You’re lucky, the United States is an extensive place.’

  Wiley searched for a glass of my brandy. ‘Do you really suppose she’s taken a shine to me?’

  ‘Write her a letter and find out,’ Newbolt suggested.

  ‘But what should I say?’ asked Wiley despairingly.

  ‘I’ll hold your pen,’ I offered.

  He seemed eager to oblige. A space was cleared, he sat down with paper, a Perry’s patent Birmingham pen and the brandy bottle. He read aloud with Puritanical solemnity the note I had concocted.

  Dear Miss Nightingale,

  These short weeks that you have graced our hospital, and softened our lives, have won you the admiration of every medical officer, save a few sour old curmudgeons. Your masterful will, your everlasting good sense, award you rightful dominion over the minds of men.

  But there is one whose feelings have quickened beyond reverence towards a lady of such creditable character and refreshing personal characteristics. I beg leave, my dear Miss Nightingale, to correspond with you, as I believe we may draw solace from each other, in the hard exile which we both suffer at Scutari. I also offer the compliments of the season.

  ‘Its point could not be missed by the shyest virgin of Miss Frances Buss’ North London seminary,’ declared Handshear.

  ‘Women are as susceptible to flattery as to the chlorosis,’ Newbolt added.

  ‘And Miss Nightingale is a woman like any other,’ I said. ‘As were Cleopatra or Good Queen Bess.’

  ‘A mighty fine billet doux,’ said Wiley with satisfaction. ‘Can’t say I remember writing one in my life before.’

  He signed it with a flourish, rapidly folded it and applied a wafer, and accepted my offer of delivery after luncheon.

  The Sisters’ Tower was now being called the Tower of Babel. Every day it was full of Turks and Greeks, French and Italian officers’ servants, chattering in their own languages as they jostled among the orderlies, soldiers, officers and civilians. Everyone knew the worth of waiting to see Miss Nightingale, whose nuns and nurses could supply anything from an india-rubber bed to a pot of shoe-blacking. She foraged every morning from Poor Old Ward’s stores, Major Sillery and Dr Menzies aghast about the findings of some future Board of Survey on so dreadful an irregularity. But the army could not court-martial a woman. Miss Nightingale enjoyed having grand motives to break petty rules. She had initiative and she delighted in exerting it, as much as she luxuriated in self-conscious self-sacrifice. At Scutari she queened it, her power absolute.

  ‘Nursing is the least of the functions into which Miss Nightingale has been forced,’ said Miss Bancroft, taking my sealed letter. She indicated the crowded kitchen. ‘She is Barrack Mistress rather than Hospital Matron, or perhaps she is Chief Washerwoman.’

  The beds and blankets at Scutari had never been washed, at best sluiced with cold water, which never killed the lice. Miss Nightingale had persuaded Captain Gordon and his engineers to fix coppers and boilers in an outhouse. Characteristically, she killed two foul birds with one stone. Half the soldiers’ wives in the basement were separated from the bottle with paid laundrywork, the rest issued with 200 scrubbing-brushes and set on the floors.

  ‘You might say of Miss Nightingale’s work at Scutari much as General Bosquet said of Lord Cardigan’s at Balaclava – C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guérison.’

  ‘Puns are the wit of the witless,’ she said severely, making a poor one. ‘Miss Nightingale has a new task for you, Mr Darling. She wishes you to make a proper record of the deaths and burials.’

  I objected this was a most unChristmasy request.

  ‘At present, three separate registers are kept.’ She ticked her fingers, as she had listed her patients in the hall at Harley Street. ‘First, the Adjutant’s daily headroll of soldiers’ burials, on which Miss Nightingale presumes no one is entered who is not buried, though it is possible that some are buried and not entered. Second, the Medical Officers’ Return, of which Miss Nightingale is certain that hundreds of men were buried who never appeared on it. Third, a return made in the Orderly Room, which is only remarkable in giving a totally different account of the deaths from either of the others.’

  I promised to resolve this posthumous muddle.

  ‘Miss Nightingale also desires you to make arrangements for postmortem examinations by the doctors in the dead-house, which Dr Menzies has agreed to. Miss Nightingale believes that the doctors unwittingly kill hundreds of men through their lack.’

  I took away these sombre instructions in search of Harriet. I had seen her little since the night we arrived. I had certainly no chance of making love to her. Though such opportunities clearly existed in the hospital, because ten babes a month were born among the women in the basement.

  I found her in the corner of a corridor lined with patients on palliasses, boiling up a bowl of tea on one of the portable stoves which Miss Nightingale had freed from the custody of Poor Old Ward. ‘You know that Dr Hall has issued an order forbidding cooking in the wards,’ I warned her.

  ‘Poo to Dr Hall. When a man cries for a hot drink, I give him one. Dr Hall would sooner see twenty men die from neglect than the smallest infringement of military discipline.’

  ‘In London,’ I told her admiringly, ‘I never imagined you had such spirit.’

  ‘In London I was selfish. Here perhaps I am more so. I have discovered a woman’s true pleasure is only caring for someone else.’

  ‘Nor did I imagine that you would abide Miss Nighting
ale’s regulations – if not Dr Hall’s orders.’

  ‘“All nurses will be required to rise early, to be punctual at meals,”’ she quoted, startling in her mimicry of Miss Nightingale’s voice. ‘“It having been found that some of the nurses have believed they were to be on equality with the ladies or sisters, it is necessary they should understand that they will remain in exactly the same relative position as that in which they were in England.”’

  I contributed, ‘“Any nurse found intoxicated will at once be discharged, and her pay will immediately cease.”’

  ‘“Each nurse must engage not to receive presents of any kind from any patients, rich or poor.”’ Harriet giggled and looked round like the Ottoman lady with her yashmak in Constantinople. By a thread round her neck she pulled under her ugly grey dress a man’s heavy gold ring set with three diamonds. ‘“Nurses are never to wear flowers in their bonnet-caps, or ribbons.” Does this signify?’

  ‘Who gave you that?’ I asked severely.

  ‘A soldier.’

  I was angry with her. ‘Which one?’

  ‘Shan’t tell.’

  The ring was slightly familiar. ‘Harriet!’ I exclaimed. ‘Not Major Sillery!’

  ‘Well, he was no more clumsy than Mr Larderton.’

  ‘Oh Harriet!’ I complained sorrowfully. ‘How could you?’

  ‘Listen, lovey,’ She patted my chin. ‘How do you suppose he keeps in such a sweet temper towards Miss Nightingale? It’s a miracle. She provokes him worse than a fishwife. He can’t send us all packing, but he can ask to pack up himself. Then who would Dr Hall send us? Some regular martinet. That’s as sure as the Devil’s in London, See what a service I’m doing everyone?’

  I could say nothing. I had to accept such high motives. Though I suspected that she was more concerned in replenishing her capital before returning home.

  The next morning, I was breakfasting off a shilling loaf, cold pork with mixed pickles and a tin bowl of tea, when Handshear came into the mess hurriedly.

  ‘Confound these patients. They always die at the most inconvenient hours,’ he complained. ‘I’m ravenous.’ He cut himself a thick slice of pork. ‘Darling, the Bird is cawing for you. She came along to watch my patient croak, an event which usually puts her in a good humour. Isn’t she a petticoated Valkyrie? If I were a patient and saw her approaching with her gentle smile, I’d die of fright. But her feathers are ruffled this morning, it seems.’

  ‘For any reasons?’

  ‘Wiley’s love letter, my boy. The Bird recognized your style, obviously. It must be as distinctive as Wordsworth’s.’

  With the feeling of approaching the Levée’s room at Rugby for a flogging, I went up to Miss Nightingale’s cubby-hole office. It was now protected from the noisy kitchen by a heavy curtain. She sat at her plain table, Miss Bancroft standing beside her. Handshear had been right. Two scarlet florins on her cheeks marked the price of her anger.

  ‘Mr Darling, I am resigning.’

  I looked at Miss Bancroft. Her eyes were two vials of anxiety and fright. I should be first with the news to the world. A splendid chance to make my fortune.

  ‘My object here is unobtainable, if the nurses will not accept the discipline which maintains us as a body amid our privations.’

  I thought of Harriet’s dalliance with Major Sillery. But Miss Nightingale threw across the table a cutting from The Times. They had printed a letter which Sister Wheeler, one of the nuns, sent home to her family. She was a nurse who thought that patients should be fattened like geese, always carping against Miss Nightingale’s cunning care to give nothing without the doctor’s written order. Sister Wheeler was emotional. She had written excitably of callous doctors and bungled surgery, and managed to make the wards appear filthier, bloodier and more mortal than the ones we struggled with.

  ‘That foolish woman has shattered the twin keystones of my arch here,’ said Miss Nightingale bitterly. ‘The complete obedience of myself to the doctors, and the complete obedience of my nurses to me.’

  ‘Oh, The Times only printed it as a stick to beat Lord Aberdeen. They’re hot after him, for his general conduct of the war.’

  ‘Miss Bancroft, Sister Wheeler must go to Kouali,’ Miss Nightingale ordered. A hospital has just been opened in the Turkish cavalry barracks, five miles north up the coast. ‘Pray remind her that I have already been forced to send six nurses home for levity. And this very morning, six more came declaring they wished to be married, followed by six sergeants and corporals asserting their claim to the brides.’

  She glared, as though it were my fault. ‘Last night came Mrs Lawfield. “I came out, ma’am, prepared to submit to everything, to be put upon in every way.”’ Miss Nightingale imitated her mincing voice. ‘“But there are some things, ma’am, one can’t submit to. There is the caps, ma’am, that suits one face, and some that suits another. And if I’d known, ma’am, about the caps, great as was my desire to come out to nurse at Scutari, I wouldn’t have come, ma’am.” Caps and bonnets! More trivial than the fleas which jump all over us. Even the scarf, the cloth which the soldiers respect, which saves them from molestation, they call “frightful”. My nurses are a hard team to drive. Finally, there is this.’

  A letter followed The Times’ cutting. ‘Forty-seven more nurses are arriving by the Egypt steamer tomorrow, if you please. Under the superintendence of Miss Mary Stanley –’

  Miss Bancroft gasped. ‘But she’s your friend!’

  ‘Friend? I have no friends, it seems,’ Miss Nightingale told her bleakly. ‘Mr Herbert has consigned the party directly to Dr Hall.’ She paused, to let the horror permeate through us. ‘I was to have sole charge of all the nurses here. Mr Herbert has sacrificed me. He has sacrificed his own written word. I am resigning.’

  ‘Miss Nightingale,’ Miss Bancroft implored, ‘When we are tired and strained, we see enemies and feel stabs when both are phantoms.’

  ‘Enemies? Among all the men here, is there one really anxious for the good of these hospitals?’ she exclaimed. ‘Is there one who is not an insincere animal at the bottom, who is not always thinking of getting on the winning side of all our necessary arguments? I am the only one who really cares for the patients. I sacrificed my own judgement and went out with forty females, well knowing that half that number would be more efficient and less trouble, and experience has justified my foreboding. I shall stay at my post only until I have provided in some measure for these poor wanderers,’ she ended piteously, ‘though how to house them, feed them, place them, care for them is not to be imagined.’

  I was glad to be dismissed. The room was too small to contain such powerful emotions.

  ‘But Mary Stanley!’ exclaimed Miss Bancroft outside. ‘The Bishop of Norwich’s daughter, you know. Miss Nightingale and she spent a winter together in Rome. They absolutely adored one another.’

  ‘Miss Nightingale is piqued like any woman with her nose out of joint.’

  Miss Bancroft smiled. ‘Perhaps it is wholesome for us to be reminded that Flo is still a mortal, which we were beginning to doubt,’ she said with deep satisfaction.

  15

  The following afternoon brought a letter from my uncle Humphry. It must have arrived in Scutari by the same mail as Sidney Herbert’s to Miss Nightingale, with news of her spurned reinforcements. But the baffling circuitousness of our administration could delay letters within the hospital longer than their ten days from London.

  Dear Nephew, the bishop wrote.

  War has broken out in England. It started in The Times, with the customary furious letters signed ‘Anti-Puseyite’ and ‘Bible Reader’. It spread to the ‘religious’ press, with all its emotional stridency (which I distrust intensely) and is now spluttering in many pulpits. Miss Nightingale has been accused of going to the East with no purpose save spreading Puseyism among British soldiers – though others accuse her equally of Unitarianism and Supralapsarianism.

  Congregations are being warned against raising money for sick
soldiers which will pass through Popish hands. The fault is Miss Nightingale’s own. As I indicated before your departure, Miss Nightingale sailed with too many Romanists and High Anglicans (Mr Sidney Herbert is of course a Puseyite).

  I now learn from a canon of Canterbury, Dr Stanley, that his sister, Miss Mary Stanley, has already left with a party of nurses which includes fifteen nuns. This will raise the proportion of Romanists at Scutari, and the cry of ‘No Popery!’ from our more fanatical newspapers and vicarages.

  I happen to know that Miss Stanley is about to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, if not already secretly within. I also know that behind Miss Stanley is our former Archdeacon of Chichester, now turned Papist, the persevering propagandist Dr Manning. The nation’s anger so blazes over Scutari, he wishes to use the heat to boil his own porridge. He is a man whose deficiencies of principle are balanced by his excrescences of ambition.

  I confide in you because Miss Nightingale’s name is on every lip in the land, and I beseech her to beware, or at least be aware, of these Popish plots. At best, Miss Nightingale should pack all Romanish and Puseyite nurses home forthwith. At worst, she must utterly forbid proselytizing by the nuns among the soldiers. I charge you with the solemn duty of making this clear to Miss Nightingale.

  Send by an early post an accurate account of your sectarian difficulties in Scutari. I pray that you are conducting yourself as a Christian gentleman. Your uncle Peregrine never leaves me in doubt of the opportunities offered by hospitals for sinfulness.

  I did not see why I should play my uncle’s missionary. I had read the letter while walking the length of the hospital to the Sisters’ Tower. I discovered the kitchen silent and tidied, the heavy curtain drawn aside, Miss Bancroft with Miss Nightingale, who sat at her table, sharp nose elevated in indignation.