The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  As Florence talked of her younger self, she began to sound and look like a girl, the childishness which sometimes comes upon the dying. I realized with a shock that I had been chosen for her death-bed confession. I wondered if I should break off, and have Jane Bancroft send for the chaplain.

  ‘I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction, and that I would find in a man. I have a passionate nature which requires satisfaction, and that I never would. I can hardly find satisfaction for any of my natures…’

  She was breathing quickly, her eyes were shut. I told her that I understood my mission, that I must leave her to sleep.

  ‘We must all take Sappho’s leap, one way or another, before we attain to her repose,’ she said faintly. ‘Some take it to death, some to marriage, and some to a new life, even in this world. But no more childish things, no more love, no more marriage…’

  She turned her head, feverish eyes suddenly looking at me searchingly. ‘My experience of women is almost as large as Europe. And it is so intimate, too. I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian Bauerinnen. No Roman Catholic supérieure has ever had the charge of women of the most different creeds that I have had. No woman has excited passions among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me. My doctrines have taken no hold among women.’

  ‘Have they not?’ I protested comfortingly. I had read Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin and Diderot’s La Religieuse. ‘When you recover, as the doctors assure us –’

  ‘The doctors being wrong is surely a usual experience?’

  ‘You must not feel condemned to loneliness, as a woman loved only by women.’

  ‘Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long. They are incapable of giving any in return.’

  I told her gently, ‘Men don’t think that.’

  ‘Men think it all but playful sport between two beings of amusing inferiority to themselves. It makes me mad.’

  The room was gloomy. Through the open door it was already raining hard. I cursed having to get wet, riding back to the harbour. But it would repay Miss Bancroft’s petulance with a good soaking outside. I looked back to the bed, and Miss Nightingale had dropped abruptly into sleep. I tiptoed to the door, eager to get the acrid stink from my nostrils. There was the noise of horses. A loud voice demanded, ‘Which hut’s Miss Nightingale’s?’

  ‘Hist, hist! Don’t make such a horrible noise as that, my man.’ I found Miss Bancroft making quietening signs with both hands to a pair on horseback, wrapped in guttapercha cloaks already running wet. One jumped from his horse, pushing her aside. ‘What do you want?’ she asked, frightened. They could have been Russians, come to kidnap a prize hostage. ‘Pray, who are you?’

  ‘Oh, only a soldier. But I must see her. I have come a long way. She knows me very well. My name is Raglan.’

  I recognized him. Square-jawed, toothless, wrinkled, sad eyed, hawk nosed, grizzled grey, pale, tired, sixty-six. He hated pomp and processions. He wore his rank with the modesty of the civilian frock-coat and muslin-wrapped straw hat which he adopted out of battle. He was shy, and so thought arrogant. His left arm carried a telescope mounted on a rifle-stock. His right had been cut off at Waterloo, when he had called after the surgeon, ‘Hey, bring my arm back. There’s a ring my wife gave me on the finger.’ Had his own endurance been less, his Crimean army would have had less to endure.

  He strode past me, leaning against the doorway with legs crossed.

  ‘Oh, Lord Raglan!’ Miss Nightingale had woken with the commotion. ‘I have a very bad fever, it will be dangerous for you to come near me.’

  ‘I have no fear of fever or anything else.’

  I stood with Miss Bancroft and his aide-de-camp, in the rain and in silence. After a few minutes Lord Raglan came out. He said to us, ‘I hope that Miss Nightingale will soon be able to continue her charitable and invaluable exertions, so highly appreciated be everyone, as well as by myself.’

  Miss Bancroft curtsied as though in a drawing-room, and begged to apologize.

  ‘No, no, not at all, my dear lady. And who’s the boy?’ Thomas, coat collar up, had walked from the harbour.

  ‘I am Miss Nightingale’s man, your honour. I heard the Russians are to attack this way.’ There was a shave in Balaclava. ‘I have come to guard my sick mistress, and I am ready to die in her defence.’

  The Commander-in-Chief laughed, patted the boy’s head, mounted and was off. Exactly a month later Lord Raglan was dead, of the cholera.

  18

  The war got off to a fresh start. The French had already replaced General Canrobert, of the twirled moustaches and curly imperial, for General Pélissier, fat, bull-necked, rude, up from the ranks. Lieutenant-General James Simpson, aged sixty-three, last in action at Quatre Bras, was given command of the British army, and hated the task as much as he hated his French allies. Raglan’s death was a surprise to everyone. It was a surprise to him. ‘I shall soon be all right,’ he had told his aide-de-camp, from his green-curtained camp-bed.

  ‘Alas, sir, I fear not,’ was the discouraging reply. ‘The doctors have a very bad opinion of you, sir, and have desired me to tell you, and ask if you would like the chaplain sent for.’

  ‘They are quite mistaken. They are making a mistake altogether. Yesterday I was very bad, but now I am easy and comfortable. I do assure you that they will find they are mistaken.’

  The man who had sent the Light Brigade to charge the wrong way could not even direct his own soul to Heaven.

  ‘Not a very great general,’ Miss Nightingale recollected, ‘but a very good man.’

  It was now mid-August, and we had been back in Scutari over a month. Our journey had been dramatic, as everything involving Monsieur Soyer. Miss Nightingale was brought down from the Genoese Heights, by eight soldiers on a stretcher and taken aboard the Jura, sailing within the hour with 400 horses and 500 troops. The ship stank. Soyer complained to the captain. The captain told him shortly that his ship always stank in port, it would blow away at sea. Miss Nightingale fainted. Soyer insisted on her moving to the Baraguay d’Hilliers alongside. That night, Soyer turned his intimacy with the aristocracy to use, and cadged us berths on a visiting lord’s steam yacht.

  After sailing, we learned that the Jura was bound not for Scutari, but directly for England. It was Hall’s plot. Crimean fever having failed to free him from this turbulent nurse, he had slyly passed sentence of banishment.

  Miss Nightingale sat outside the chaplain’s house at Scutari, where she was still convalescing. Her hair had grown into fair boyish curls, she was gaunt, in her usual black dress. Across the Bosphorus, Constantinople burnt in the setting sun. There was a terrier barking about, sent by Sidney Herbert, but she was not interested in animals, whose deaths were unremarkable.

  Catching the fever was Miss Nightingale’s most valuable accomplishment in the Crimean peninsula. Howard Russell was stranded in Constantinople, unable to prise a passage from the surly military. Every evening, I telegraphed home news of her condition. The Crimean was the first war on the wire. It was invaluable, if unreliable – Lord Panmure’s immediate recommendation on becoming Secretary for War, that the Commander-in-Chief might advantageously employ his Lordship’s favourite nephew Dowbiggin, became condensed to ‘Look at Dowb’ and an army catchphrase.

  I deliberately made my readers hold their breath. My wire that Miss Nightingale was out of danger had almost the impact at home of the news from Trafalgar. I was still twenty-two, and had lived out the unfulfilled dream of so many old Fleetstreeters, commanding the headlines of the world.

  Miss Nightingale sat at the head of British public opinion as surely as Joan of Arc led the Dauphin’s armies. Everyone at home with a pen seemingly started writing about her. The Spectator, Punch, the vapid, evaporating poets of the universities offered their verses. There were songs – The Shadow on the Pillow, or Angels with Sweet Approving Smiles. Another had a chorus ending,


  So forward, my lads, may your hearts never fail,

  You are cheer’d by the presence of a sweet Nightingale.

  From the printers of Seven Dials came, The Only and Unabridged Edition of the Life of Miss Nightingale, Detailing her Christian Heroic Deeds in the Land of Tumult and Death, winning the Prayers of the Soldier, the Widow and the Orphan. Price One Penny. Her likeness appeared in woodcuts, in the watermark of writing-paper, on greengrocers’ bags, in appalling vivid pottery. Streets, children, waltzes were stuck for ever with her name, at a race meeting Florence Nightingale beat Barbarity and a field of nine. Someone hugged himself with the discovery of her anagram, Flit on, cheering angel. She was idolized in wax at Madame Tussaud’s, a distinction lost to me but shared by Disraeli and the rogue Charlie Peace.

  But she was really the heroine of the humble. Though the Crimean officers were as brave as the men, after duty they had a change of clothes, a bed, food hot and sent out from home, a servant. They were sick seldom compared with their soldiers, to whose sufferings they were indifferent not through inhumanity, but through tradition. Soldiers diseased or drunk were soldiers unfit for action, and beneath the interest of their commander. Their families were the unconsidered trifles of the Queen’s subjects. They loved Florence Nightingale, and Fleet Street puffed the fire of their adoration with its usual opportunistic compassion.

  The Queen sent a nice letter, and a diamond brooch saying Blessed are the Merciful, designed by the Prince Consort.

  ‘Look at this, Tristram,’ said Miss Nightingale that evening in Scutari. She handed me a cutting from The Times a month or so old. ‘I missed it through being ill. As you may be sure, it fell into the wrong hands. Dr Sutherland has just received it in a letter.’

  With Miss Nightingale and the terrier, sitting on a wooden chair outside the house, was the man who would follow me at her side. Mr Roebuck’s bringing down the Government had produced in Scutari the Roebuck Sanitary Commission, which consisted of two Liverpool sanitary inspectors and Dr John Sutherland. He was forty or so, slight, frailly handsome, with thick dark hair and moustache, wearing a high collar, black trousers and waistcoat and with a long jacket of gaudy tweed check, a shiny-peaked military cap like that I was quickly shamed to abandon. He was a doctor from Edinburgh, for seven years a government inspector at the Board of Health. He had gone straight to Balaclava, missing us there by a few days, and been in Scutari a week.

  ‘I read the cutting, startled to find Newbolt’s name. He had sent in his papers and returned to London, in exasperated disgust at the muddle which, after a year, stood like uncleared bramble in the path of his work. Many officers, medical or combatant, reacted as bitterly, and never understood why they were cut in their clubs as cowards.

  The item was headed, Blunders at Scutari. A Surgeon’s Strictures. Newbolt had celebrated civilian status by lecturing to the Marylebone Medical Society, attacking the Army and its senior doctors, praising as forcefully Miss Nightingale and her nurses.

  ‘How will Lord Panmure read that in the War Office?’ Miss Nightingale asked. ‘He’ll conclude I sent Dr Newbolt home to fight my battles against the Army Medical Department. That battle is what I exercised such self-restraint, such tact, to avoid, since I first refused to let a nurse into the wards here unless requested by the doctors.’

  ‘And this is what the wrong hands wrote of it,’ said Sutherland in his quiet Scots voice.

  He passed me the covering letter. It was from Hall, in the Crimea.

  Dear Dr Sutherland,

  When one reads such twaddling nonsense about Miss Nightingale putting a hospital containing 4,000 patients in order in a couple of days with The Times’ fund, one cannot suppress a feeling of contempt for the man who indulges in such exaggerations, and pity for the ignorant multitude who are deluded by them.

  ‘Dear me,’ I murmured. I had met Hall in Balaclava, once. He was short and pigeon-chested, with low, straight eyebrows, a quiff, a white imperial and a look of petulance. I had spoken of Miss Nightingale’s illness, and he asked heartily if she would be concealing her cropped head with a woman’s wig or a soldier’s helmet.

  Miss Nightingale simply does not know what to do with her boasted Free Gifts. Like those she sent to the Russian hospital by mistake, and the wine and arrowroot thrust on the French after it had been refused. They are simply a matter of absurdity on the part of the kind-hearted well-intentioned contributors, and a piece of silly ambitious vanity on her part to have the European reputation of being the guardian angel of the sick and wounded.

  I recalled her sister’s angry words across the Embley breakfast-table. Were Parthe and Hall bedfellows in spite, or insight?

  Sister Bridgeman, a very superior and conscientious person, has positively refused to acknowledge Miss Nightingale’s authority, and I cannot blame her after what is past, and she will go home, taking the only real nurses we ever had. Thus the Government loses the free service of these estimable women, and the soldiers the benefit of their administration, to gratify Miss Nightingale.

  I was told, when I declined to interfere, that right or wrong, Miss Nightingale’s friends were powerful enough to carry her through. My reply was, ‘So much the greater pity.’

  I have the honour to remain, sir,

  Your obedient servant,

  John Hall, MD.

  ‘A fossil of pure Old Red Sandstone,’ Miss Nightingale said disparagingly, as I handed the letter back to Sutherland.

  Hall had been resentful for months of the money lavished on her by The Times when he had none from the Government, insulted that it bought items lacking through his own incompetence, fearful for her passing directly to Sidney Herbert a confidential report about himself – which he had so often used to assassinate the careers of his own officers – angry at her insinuations of his negligence and perhaps guilty that they were true.

  ‘In London there was a shave – it was more than a shave,’ Sutherland revealed, ‘that Dr Hall is shortly to be Sir John Hall. He’s in line for a KCB.’

  Miss Nightingale snorted. ‘Knight of the Crimean Burial-grounds.’

  ‘Mr Darling, what’s your opinion of Miss Salisbury?’ Sutherland asked abruptly.

  Miss Salisbury was one of the nurses, put by Miss Nightingale in charge of the ‘Free Gifts’ which inflamed Hall’s correspondence. She was pretty, against the plain and coarse flattery of the others.

  ‘It’s all to do with those “Free Gifts”,’ Miss Nightingale sighed. They were parcels pouring from England for distribution among the troops. ‘Those frightful presentations! Dr Hall’s strictures are the least troubles they arouse. There is not a parish from which we have not received contributions, and not one worth its freight. The trouble of landing, unpacking, acknowledging! The English nobility must have emptied their wardrobes, and sent out bandages for the wounded in the shape of the finest cambric sheets and the most beautiful underclothing, with monograms beautifully worked. They give the rats a fine nest. The good that has been done here has been done by money,’ she said forthrightly. ‘Money to spend in Constantinople. And now this stupid Miss Salisbury – of course, it had to be Mary Stanley who took the kindness to bring it to my notice – Miss Salisbury wrote home accusing me of using the free gifts for my own gorgeous adornment. Her family passed the letter to Miss Stanley, who is quite certain there is no atom of truth in the charge.’ She stopped, weak and breathless. ‘I believe she’s a pilferer, trying to shift the blame.’

  I suggested, ‘Why not get Major Sillery to search her belongings?’

  Sutherland was against it. But Miss Nightingale showed the persevering malice which she could turn against women, but never men – even, two summers later, Dr Hall. I was charged to see Major Sillery.

  I wanted to leave Scutari. Wiley was packing up for Boston, Handshear itching to send in his papers and go home for a winter’s hunting. However happier the inmates’ lot, our shadows still fell on illness and death, who waited for us ourselves like patient coachmen outside the
door of our convivial mess-room. I saw it my duty to stay and serve Miss Nightingale, but I was tired of her pointless squabbles, peevish feuds, touchy resentments and trivial pets. I saw the world through a wider glass than anyone at Scutari – particularly Miss Nightingale, who since arrival had seen it through the wrong end of a sanitary telescope.

  About noon the following day, feminine shrieks rang from Major Sillery’s office on the landing above our mess. I ran up the flight of stairs, to find the Major red-faced, open-mouthed, and incapable of controlling events or his aspirates. Miss Salisbury lay on the tiled floor, clasping the ankles of the impassive Miss Nightingale.

  ‘This girl is a thief,’ she said to me unpityingly. ‘A thief from two people at once – the poor cottagers who themselves went cold, and the sick soldiers who would have blessed their warm clothing.’

  I recalled her remarks about the aggravating ‘Free Gifts’. I was to enjoy watching Tartuffe played by Miss Siddons.

  ‘Not only mittens, and that,’ complained Major Sillery with outrage. ‘But she ’ad wine, bottles of brandy, preserved sausage and six ’ole Stilton cheeses. And a couple of water-beds, sent by the Queen.’

  ‘Don’t put me in prison!’ screamed the girl. ‘Send me home. I’ll never do it again. Honest to God, never, never! I’m a decent woman, Miss. It was a moment of temptation, that anyone could fall for.’

  ‘Government stores!’ said Major Sillery more wrathfully. ‘That could be an ’anging matter, I’ll ’ave you know.’

  The prospect of the rope incited the poor child to wordless screaming. Miss Nightingale took no notice. ‘Mr Darling, pray do not write of this disgrace to the newspapers.’

  ‘As you like. But if you hang, or even gaol, Miss Salisbury, someone else will write of it. It is surely best to pack her off home and no more said? The rats would have gobbled six Stiltons much quicker than she.’