The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  ‘You are one of Miss Nightingale’s household, Mr Clough?’

  ‘Being of use to this inspired lady gives the only purpose to my existence. I lost my faith you know.’

  ‘I am extremely sorry, sir,’ I said, as though it were his umbrella on the Great Western Railway.

  ‘The Oxford Movement was to blame. I became greatly vexed by the vortex of philosophism and discussion about religion. I should have taken Holy Orders, then I could have held my fellowship, my toga tutoria, at Oriel. But I was too scrupulous, too sensitive. Instead, I went into the hard world, a wilderness with small hope of manna, quails or water from the rock, where I found a place at the Education Office.’

  I consoled him, ‘Your name was mentioned at Rugby only with reverence.’

  ‘Yes, I did well at Rugby. I kept goal, too, you know. But at Balliol I missed my First. I missed my First.’ His voice could have escaped from Lot’s wife as she felt her limbs undergoing salination.

  The bell gave an insistent little ring.

  ‘I must fly, I must catch the post,’ he said nervously. ‘I hope you will find Miss Nightingale passably well today. How terrible if her efforts in Scutari killed her! Say not the struggle naught availeth, the labour and the wounds are vain.’

  He had the indefensible habit of quoting his own poetry – though perhaps, like many poets I have known, he simply gave the impression of doing so.

  Sutherland opened the door. He saw me into the sick-room, bowed, and left us alone.

  21

  It was dark, heavy damask curtains drawn against the fog, the fire a dull glow, the gas in a single globe turned low. It was a bedroom, but the bedstead was pushed in the corner, and there were extra tables covered with books and papers. A small table had an inkpot, and a chair hurriedly pushed aside, where I suppose Sutherland sat writhing industriously to her dictation.

  In the middle of the room was a black horsehair sofa, packed with pillows and covered with shawls, under which lay Miss Nightingale. I could see in the dim light that she wore her black, lace-trimmed dress and white cap. I put down my hat, and at once picked a volume from a low table beside her, squinting at the title Little Dorrit. ‘I see you have Mr Dickens’ latest.’

  ‘Dickens! What did he write about the war? One little story about seven travellers at Chatham. Something to amuse children at Christmas. He never bothered to write, even to think, of the filth, disease and death at Scutari. Because Charles Dickens is a sentimental humbug. All his characters who die either deserve to, or appear to enjoy it. Had he come out East, he would have shocked the world more than you or Mr Russell. But he preferred to stay at home, where the warm fires and the money are. I’ve no time to read it, I’m alternately too ill and too busy. What did Dr Sutherland say of me?’

  ‘That sometimes you were near death, at others as fit as a flea.’

  ‘Dr Sutherland has an incurable looseness of thought. Did he compare me to the Queen of the Amazons? He does to everybody. He is infuriatingly flippant. He is also untidy, forgetful and unpunctual, and far more preoccupied with his own health than the best of doctors with the health of his patients. He feigns deafness, to annoy me. He is a man born without a soul, like Undine.’

  ‘But a useful disciple.’

  ‘Dr Sutherland is an extremely able sanitary expert,’ she said more generously. ‘I’m only a humbug. I know nothing about sanitary matters except what I have learned from him.’

  ‘And Mr Clough is a handy postboy.’

  ‘Mr Clough does the work of a cab horse. And he is incurably lazy.’

  ‘You always despise the people who are useful to you. The more so, the more unselfish their attentions.’

  ‘Did I despise you?’

  ‘No, because I am the urchin who might laugh at you. Which you would find appalling. May I sit down, Florence?’

  She motioned impatiently to a chair. ‘You don’t seem to believe that I am ill.’

  ‘I think you are suffering from lack of occupation.’

  There was a knock. The waiters brought our tea, which relieved me because the gas could be turned up. She was fatter, and pale from living indoors. I noticed how her hair had recovered from its crop in the Castle Hospital above Balaclava. ‘I still have your pendant,’ I said, as they had infused the tea and left us.

  She smiled. ‘Keep it.’ The atmosphere was more cheerful, or perhaps it was the bright light. ‘I often see Madame Mohl these days.’

  ‘What happened to Miss Bancroft?’

  ‘Oh, she’s out shopping. She is here with me in London.’

  I was surprised. ‘In the hotel?’

  ‘I keep her because she does everything I tell her with the meekness of a nun and the thoroughness of a Prussian.’

  I poured the tea. I said, ‘I do not care to see your experience rusting like the abandoned weapons outside Sebastopol.’

  ‘I arrived back at Lea Hurst eager to write, speak, do whatever might be asked of me. The War Office gave me plenty of tinsel and plenty of praise, which I do not want, and did not give me the real business of soldiers’ welfare, which I did.’

  ‘As I warned you plainly in Scutari.’

  She disregarded this. ‘Lord Panmure, “The Bison –”’ It was one of her many unaffectionate nicknames. He had a huge head of bristly tufts, which he moved slowly from side to side, as if he pawed the prairies, ‘was in Scotland shooting grouse. Mr Herbert was in Ireland fishing for salmon.’ She seemed to wonder how they dared. ‘Herbert wrote to me simply, Ni lire, ni écrire, ni réfléchir – the prescription of some mad doctor in Carlsbad. He thought that I was overwrought. I had nothing to do in Derbyshire except settle the nurses’ wages, answer begging letters and turn down invitations to garden parties.’

  Teacup in one hand, I reached for the piles of manuscript in Sutherland’s handwriting beside the inkpot. The top sheet read, Notes Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army.

  ‘If the War Office refused you work, you gave it to yourself. This would make almost a thousand pages of print. How long did it take?’

  ‘Six months.’

  ‘Write articles for Candour,’ I suggested. ‘I could use so trenchant a contributor. Your letters have vigour and incisiveness, which cut like the blades of scissors through commonplace literary embroidery. And I pay well. You need money, I expect? Five hundred a year is not a fortune.’

  ‘Oh, money,’ she said contemptuously. ‘I disregard it. Though mama sends me my share of the hotel bill every week, so I must retrench. But I want to act, not to write.’

  ‘You will not start to act until you start to forget the Crimea.’

  ‘How can I forget?’ she asked angrily. ‘The trenches cold and damp, the starved and frozen camp, the deficient rations, the stores which might have served the great army of dead lying unused! I cannot sleep at night without thinking of those I could not save. Oh, my poor men! I am a bad mother to come home and leave you in your Crimean graves.’ She paused. ‘Seventy-three per cent in eight regiments in six months died from disease alone,’ she added with characteristic descent to pragmatism. ‘Who thinks of that now?’

  ‘You were at the war for 632 days, which is not long from a lifetime. We must use them as a battery for your vital electricity, and skilfully produce sparks to your advantage. But first we must galvanize the people. They may forget the war, but never the Lady with a Lamp.’

  She was sitting up straight, sipping her tea. I saw no trace of illness on her. It could have been one of her grumpier afternoons in Scutari. ‘The people…yes, it was the artisans of Sheffield who sent me knives and forks, not the master cutlers. It was 1800 workmen of Newcastle who sent me an address, not the Duke. You know that women are mistaken for me in the street? Folk crowd to touch their shawls or stroke their arms?’ I nodded, ‘Rouse them if you can, and wish to. But what for? I have the Nightingale Fund already.’

  ‘That can stay where it is for the moment, earning very nice compound interest
at £1,426 per annum. I want to force on the Government a Royal Commission.’

  ‘About Scutari?’

  ‘No. On the whole condition of the Army Medical Department. Barracks, hospitals, doctors, orderlies, supplies, transport, all must be inspected. The mistakes of the past must be chopped into faggots and publicly set ablaze, to raise a mighty head of steam for the engines of reform.’

  She was straighter, eyes gleaming. ‘Exactly! The bad health of the British army in peace is hardly less appalling than before Sebastopol – when those who fell by disease were above seven times those who fell by the enemy.’

  Her voice took the old enthusiasm of a complaint against Dr Hall or Major Sillery. ‘The only way to prevent those disasters in war is to maintain efficient general hospitals in peace. The army are picked lives, Tristram. But do you realize that the army dies during peace at twice the rate of the general population? In the parish of St Pancras, the civilians die annually at the rate of 2.2 per thousand. The Life Guards in St Pancras Barracks at 10.4 per thousand,’ she quoted readily. ‘Among a thousand ladies and gentlemen of Knightsbridge, 3.3 die a year. Of the soldiers in Knightsbridge Barracks, 17.5. Our soldiers simply enlist for death in barracks. Neglect kills 1,500 good men every year, as surely as if the War Office lined them up on Salisbury Plain and had them shot.’

  ‘That’s the copy I want,’ I told her with equal warmth. ‘Candour will work up a public outcry. There are plenty of Conservative MPs to shout with the wind blowing into a Liberal Government’s faces.’

  She looked doubtful. ‘Yes, but I must find a mouthpiece. I am greatly detested by officials. I need a man, one high enough in the world to work the question of reform, someone who could talk to ministers and commissioners which I cannot. But I should have to tell him everything to say, of course,’ she added.

  ‘Mr Herbert.’

  ‘He is no longer interested in me.’

  ‘I can make him be.’

  The door burst open. It was Fanny and Parthe, with three or four hotel servants carrying shopping and sheaves of winter’s costly flowers. They talked immediately about London in January, which they found as dull as a funeral.

  ‘Poor Flo! Don’t you see a change in her, Mr Darling?’ asked Parthe, enthusiastically poking chrysanthemums into a crystal vase.

  ‘You’re so much better in the warm here, Flo dearest,’ said her mother, with the same energy undoing the ribbons of a hatbox. ‘That fog! How Parthe and I managed to brave it, I can’t imagine! We had to have two ragged boys running ahead of the coach, it was so thick.’

  ‘I hope Miss Nightingale will brave it tomorrow. I should like her to see my offices in Fleet Street.’ I had to get her away from them, from the cloying Sutherland and creeping Clough. I had a plan, but unless conceived in secret, it would be stillborn.

  Fanny looked at Florence, aghast. ‘But we shall need the coach all tomorrow. Parthe and I have a dozen visits to return.’

  ‘Then I shall take a hackney coach,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you must not sit in a draughty, jolting cab in your state,’ objected Parthe.

  ‘It would be more comfortable than the baggage cart in which I spent my second visit to the Crimea, after being thrown from my mule. Well, I shall use an omnibus.’

  ‘Flo! You cannot be seen in an omnibus,’ cried her mother. ‘Even out of the season.’

  ‘I shall walk.’

  ‘Florence, dearest –’ Her mother’s voice ran creamily, with compassion. ‘Why stay here in horrid, foggy London? Why not go back to Embley?’ She sighed deeply. ‘We are both of us so tired, looking after you up here. You must get away from all this writing, all these visitors, all the people you will keep round you. You must rest –’

  The fuse touched the gunpowder. ‘Rest!’ Florence screamed the word. ‘I am lying here like my dead owl, without my head, without my claws, and you both peck at me. It is de rigueur, d’obligation, like saying something into one’s hat when one goes into church, to say to me all that has been said to me a hundred times a day during the last six months. It is an obbligato on the violin, and the twelve violins all practise it together, like the clocks striking twelve at night all over London, till I say like Xavier de Maistre, Assez, je le sais, je ne le sais que trop. I am not a penitent, Mama, but you are like the RC confessor, who says what is de rigueur.’

  ‘Parthe and myself are victims of our self-devotion to you,’ cried Fanny, equally hysterically.

  ‘Oh, you lead a very amusing life,’ Florence threw back. ‘This is a scene worthy of Molière, two people in tolerable and even perfect health, who lie on the sofa all day and persuade themselves of their exhaustion by another who is dying of overwork.’

  Florence was bolt upright on the sofa, arm rigid with accusation. Suddenly, it was at her own throat, her mouth open, her eyes turned up. ‘My heart!’ she cried. She fell back, limp, panting like a dog in the sun. ‘A palpitation…you have made me talk myself into a palpitation…’

  The room exploded with panic. Sal volatile, water, brandy, pillows and towels were flying everywhere. Fanny cried that she was killing her loving daughter, or that her daughter was killing her loving mother, I was not clear. Parthe threw open the window, admitting much disagreeable fog, gasped, choked and howled terribly. Sutherland appeared, urgently professional, and started slapping Florence hard on both wrists. Clough occupied the doorway, clasped his hands and uttered elegantly poetic expressions of distress. I reached for my hat and withdrew.

  As I was leaving the hotel, Miss Bancroft came through the front door with a miasma of fog.

  ‘Well, Mr Darling! I wondered how long before we encountered one another. If we ever did.’ She smiled warmly under her bonnet. She seemed to have forgotten my assault upon her on the stairs of the Sisters’ Tower. ‘I’m glad we have met this moment. To see you lightens this dreadful day.’

  ‘To see you makes me forget it completely,’ I said with vapid politeness.

  ‘But you’re famous,’ she said accusingly, as those do who knew you when you were not. ‘Everyone in London who can read seems to be talking about Candour. And many who cannot, I think. The cabman was asking me what Candour said about Mr Gladstone and…oh, I could not tell him, of course.’ She put her hand to her mouth laughing. ‘Those ladies of the unfortunate class. In the streets!’

  She seemed livelier than I could remember, but perhaps it was the effect of escape from the vast dead-house of Scutari. ‘You must hurry upstairs. Miss Nightingale is having one of her attacks. Dr Sutherland is there.’

  ‘Oh, there’s no haste. Miss Nightingale always recovers in her own time.’

  There was a pause. We stood looking at each other. We both knew that if we parted with an unqualified farewell it would be final, separation for ever. If I wished to see her away from Miss Nightingale’s shadow it was my moment to decide. Had the lamps of a waiting hansom shown through the windows, I would have left. Instead, I said, ‘I have a small party to the opera on Saturday week. Would you care to join us? Miss Nightingale’s health obviously precludes her own invitation.’

  There was another silence, I suspected more formal than decisive. ‘Thank you, Mr Darling. I should like to, very much.’

  ‘It’s Cosi Fan Tutte. Will you please tell Mrs Nightingale that I shall be arranging a coach from the Lord Mayor’s own stables to fetch her daughter at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon?’

  22

  Threads of the web I spun from my editorial chair reached from the pot-houses of Seven Dials to the Palace. There was a young Lord – whose name I cannot give, as he shares my talent for longevity – who in the Royal Household exercised small functions and large ears. He sought my patronage because he wanted my help to win power and fortune from financial jugglery, for which his slyness and graspingness fitted him better than for life at Court.

  In February, I asked him, ‘Is the Queen still interested in Miss Nightingale? Nobody else is, who matters.’

  ‘Oh, frightfully. They were the
fondest of correspondents. “Dear Miss Nightingale,” he mimicked, “How warm my admiration for your services, which are fully equal to those of my dear and brave soldiers. No one takes a greater interest or feels more for their sufferings than their Queen, day and night she thinks of her beloved troops.” Oh, and I forgot. “So does the Prince.” You know the line.’

  ‘Could you manage Miss Nightingale an invitation to Windsor? Preferably when Panmure happens to be there?’

  We were eating cutlets in the Reform Club. Soyer had left Turkey after Miss Nightingale, returning to his every day business of creating feasts for noblemen. He had brought home triumphantly his purchase of the baggage cart which trundled her shakily round the Crimean battlefields. I had already suggested to the lord that lunchtime he might volunteer to me the offer of club membership – canvassing for election being strictly forbidden.

  ‘Windsor?’ He screwed up his full, bright pink lips under his silky fair moustache. ‘Yes, I should think so. Clark, the Queen’s physician, might make a useful go-between.’

  ‘I want to re-establish Miss Nightingale as a national heroine, which after all is her rightful position. The common people of the country would cheer themselves hoarse at her name, but officials and society, comfortably shut up in Whitehall and Mayfair, would not be disturbed in the slightest by the noise. If the Queen cheered with the people, they would be forced to open the windows.’

  ‘What’s your real game?’ he asked.

  ‘To use Miss Nightingale’s wasted talents as a big stick to beat Pam and his cabinet about India. Look what’s happening in Lucknow, Delhi, Meerut. The sepoys are furious at the War Office’s new cartridge, which is greased with the fat of the sacred cow and the abhorred pig. And they have to bite the ends off, to use them! What blockheadedness, what bungling! Just like the war. There’ll be an explosion in India, unless Panmure feels even faintly the warmth of their feelings. But they’re cold fish in the War Office. They never lost an hour’s sleep over an army ragged, shivering, hungry outside Sebastopol.’