The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  ‘By jove! You sound like Miss Nightingale.’

  ‘Oh, I expect I do. She’s a boa-constrictor, who leaves indelible marks even on lucky victims who escape the coils. A boa-constrictor who can hypnotize men with fright, knows precisely when to nip them in the neck, then swallows them whole. I have discerned the outlines of many distinguished doctors, soldiers and politicians in her interior. As there is comfortable capacity for many more, I intend to throw her the square meal of a Royal Sanitary Commission on the army.’

  ‘With which Candour will be identified, and have all the confidential information?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll see what hints I can drop. I believe that Sir James Clark’s figure has shown in Miss Nightingale’s stomach for some time.’

  Miss Nightingale’s audience with the Queen had been plotted between us at the Candour office in Fleet Street. She insisted it must be her last attempt to grasp the trailing reins of public affairs. If my plan failed, she would go back to Embley House and write books. Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truth among the Artisans of England was already started. She would rectify philosophical affairs rather than sanitary ones. The Church was misinterpreting God’s word to artisans, though she was beginning to wonder if God’s words themselves were sometimes ill-chosen. She had written to Mr John Stuart Mill about it, and Mr Mill had replied most kindly.

  Many men make great heroes of themselves in action and bigger fools of themselves on the deceptive battlefields of ideas. I assumed that Miss Nightingale was inspired to unblock the world’s theological drains because God was to her a mighty sanitary engineer, with the commonsense to advise directly into her ear. Her likeness should be our battle flag. But she refused a sitting. She had already turned her back on a forest of academicians’ brushes. ‘I do not wish to be remembered when I am gone,’ she told me. To which there was no answer.

  I had no qualms of Miss Nightingale’s feebleness precluding the journey to Windsor. I did not need call at the Burlington Hotel until it had been accomplished. ‘From the very day of receiving Her Majesty’s command,’ Sutherland greeted me excitedly, ‘Miss Nightingale’s health improved rapidly. She said she could have walked with springy step all the way from Balaclava up to Sebastopol. Now alas, she is a little poorly, and unable to take a turn in the Park these fine afternoons.’ His voice grew hushed, as everyone’s at the Burlington exchanging the latest on Miss Nightingale’s health, like secret passwords. ‘But she mends by degrees.’

  ‘In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,’ said Clough, ‘but westward, look, the land is bright.’ Two sharp tinkles of the handbell rang behind the inner door. ‘My signal!’ He hurried from the room.

  ‘I simply didn’t hear it.’ Sutherland shook his head, finger in ear. A double desk had been installed, the two men sitting opposite like clerks in the anteroom of a great banker. ‘This deafness! Miss Nightingale finds it so annoying that she threatens to send Mr Clough to the instrument-makers for an ear-trumpet. It is nervous deafness, from the strain of work. I sent my wife from Highgate to corroborate my point, but Miss Nightingale didn’t see it.’

  He glanced at the inner door. ‘She can be so dreadfully demanding. Last week, late at night, a message to me at Highgate, come at once – teeming rain – I arrived in a temper, a terrible scene, poor Miss Nightingale fainted, indeed had a fit.’ He sighed. ‘Miss Bancroft and I had to sit up all night with her. Can you imagine my sorrow, my distress, at almost causing her death? She makes me work on Sundays. I see so little of my wife. When she is angry with me, she passes me little notes from her room. Look –’

  He thrust at me from his pocket torn scraps of writing-paper, the edges of newspapers. This débris of contention was scribbled, Where is the Tulloch Commission Report? Where is the Sanitary Minute? Why did you write me a lie this morning? Must you linger so long over lunch? No I will not be friends.

  ‘She compares herself to her dead owl, but I assure you, her little beak is of the sharpest.’ He looked self-conscious, but confession is compulsive. ‘Other times, she calls me her “sick baby”.’ He sighed more deeply. ‘She is a wonderful woman, who could do what men could not, and who would dare suffering knowingly where men would shirk it. Did you know, I gave up £1,500 a year from the Government to be with Miss Nightingale? That was part-time, too.’

  I tried to cheer him. ‘You’re as lucky as an Ottoman. You have two wives.’

  ‘Miss Nightingale is not one of my wives. I am better described as one of hers,’ he responded sadly.

  Clough reappeared, with a shopping-basket. ‘Calf’s-foot jelly,’ he murmured anxiously. ‘Where might I find calf’s-foot jelly?’

  ‘Messrs Crosse and Blackwell of Soho Square,’ I told him.

  He thanked me with deep relief. ‘And pens, indelible pencils, blotting-paper, tagged tapes…’ He left, head shaking at the complexities of the quailless wilderness.

  The bell rang loudly. ‘That’s you,’ said Sutherland.

  There was rearrangement of the hospital which Miss Nightingale was creating for herself in the hotel. Fanny and Parthe were dislodged to the floor below, where they could arrange flowers until overcome with exhaustion without criticism. The bed had been removed, the heavy curtains were open to a bright winter’s day. Miss Nightingale lay with her pillows and shawls on the couch, Miss Bancroft sat on a stool beside her. I supposed Miss Nightingale knew about the opera. I was curious whether she resented it. But we had more serious conversation to exchange. I tossed my hat on a table and sat down, flipping coat-tails over thighs. ‘And how was it?’

  ‘The Queen and Prince Albert’s whole thoughts were on things of importance. The fine folk about them were occupied with trifles. The Queen is a remarkably conscientious person, but so mistrustful of herself.’

  ‘And the Bison?’

  ‘Miss Nightingale has tamed him,’ smiled Jane Bancroft.

  ‘Oh, his mane is absolutely silky, and a loving sadness pervades his whole being. His eye for detail is as useless as a shortsighted man for Rembrandt’s brushwork, his sense of system is that of a sluttish housemaid, he is excited only by three items, all north of the Border – grouse, salmon and the Church of Scotland. But he has one supreme attribute. He is bullyable.’

  The door flew open. There was no knock. Miss Nightingale looked aghast. ‘Mr Herbert!’ cried Sutherland.

  I had seen the key in Liz Herbert. I suspected that she sniffed pungent memories of Caroline Norton. The Peace of Paris had divorced Miss Nightingale from her husband, now he must rest well away from her, in their country house at Wilton in Wiltshire, fishing and shooting to his heart’s content.

  I suspected also that Liz Herbert was horribly insecure. I could myself readily envisage Sidney Herbert bursting the bonds of matrimony, becoming a denizen of the Burlington Hotel like Sutherland and Arthur Clough. I called upon her at Belgrave Square, on some excuse about the Nightingale Fund, and flew this black kite in a delicate breeze.

  Miss Nightingale could do much more for the country, I insisted, and Mr Herbert could do a little more for Miss Nightingale. Was not persuading him so Mrs Herbert’s duty to husband and nation? Would not Mrs Herbert shine in the golden light when Mr Herbert relit Miss Nightingale’s lamp? And surely he must he growing terribly weary of trout and pheasant? She agreed. Once I had Mr Herbert in Miss Nightingale’s presence, the tail of the boa-constrictor would shortly be round his ankle.

  ‘My dear Miss Nightingale, I am shocked to see you again laid low.’ He was as impeccably dressed and as impeccably handsome as ever, though smouldering fever glowed through his cheeks as a winter fire through a darkening cottage window. The three of us were shortly alone. ‘Lord Panmure told me you were so full of vigour at Windsor.’ He laid hat and gloves amid the papers on Sutherland’s table. ‘He was much surprised, you know. He expected some vain and fierce virago, some scolding tyrant. Instead, he found a petticoated philosopher.’

  ‘The Bison is a reforming animal,
if not an organizing one. You know that the Treasury, the Horse Guards, the War Office and the Medical Department are like a rickety, clumsy machine, with a pin loose here and a tooth broken there, and a makeshift somewhere else. The force of Hercules may be exhausted in needless friction before they all move together. But I know you are only lukewarm to reform, Mr Herbert,’ she chided him. ‘You pensioned me off with £40,000 and forgot me.’

  ‘But Miss Nightingale! I needed a rest,’ he excused himself.

  ‘Rest!’ The word sounded like de Quincey’s laudanum.

  ‘I too have not been well, so I stayed down at Wilton. And my tenure of office as Secretary at War was not one to inspire a man who is beginning to find great exertions difficult…’ His voice fell away for a moment, but he resumed more vigorously, ‘The Queen was most impressed by the defects present, and the reforms needed, in our present military hospital system, which you put to her so modestly. The Queen has expressed a wish to the Duke of Cambridge, as Commander-in-Chief, that you hold an official position at the War Office.’ She sat up straight, in surprise at such regal flattery. So did I. ‘That would be impossible, I fear. But the very suggestion made it seem high time I paid you a visit, even unexpected.’

  ‘I am glad you chose today,’ she said briskly. ‘Mr Darling – those files. Mr Herbert, the Report of the Tulloch Commission on Supplies to the British army in the Crimea…’

  Never was a war sat upon so heavily by commissions. Never were so many facts unearthed for decent reburial in Blue Books.

  Miss Nightingale held it up. ‘This report was laid before Parliament a year ago, but everyone knew its contents perfectly well months earlier. It castigates Lord Lucan, Lord Cardigan and Dr Hall, all three of whom got decorated. Why?’

  ‘Lord Panmure disliked the report.’

  ‘Lord Panmure sent the Commission out. He may dislike the taste of his own medicine, but he still has to swallow it. Lord Panmure now orders a Board of Generals to sit at Chelsea Barracks, to give officers criticized in the report an opportunity of defending themselves. Why?’

  Because Lord Panmure would otherwise have the infuriating bother of acting on the report,’ Herbert told her cheerfully. ‘I know from experience that the War Office presents its Secretary of State with unending and complicated work, which Lord Panmure finds easy, through the simple process of never attempting to do it.’

  ‘The army put whitewash to better use on the barrack walls of Scutari. Next, the new military hospital, building at Netley –’

  ‘Is anything the matter with it?’ he asked, concerned.

  ‘The windows all face the wrong way, so the bad air will waft from one ward to another. It is nothing but one huge corridor, to serve row upon row of uncomfortable and ill-ventilated patients. Why?’

  ‘Because the design cuts a dash when seen from Southampton Water.’

  ‘It must be pulled down.’

  ‘But that would cost £70,000! Parliament would set upon your Bison like picadors. You know the realities of politics as well as I.’

  ‘It is impossible to scrutinize in too fine detail the building of a hospital. Kitchens, laundries, washhouses, the movement of hot food, soiled linen, sick people, all is interdependent. What books should there be in the recreation rooms? Who should carve the meat, and where? What colour for the walls? I prefer pale pink. It’s all in my book on the health of the British army. You had better take this and read it.’ She thrust a sheaf of papers at him. ‘It is my treatise on hospital sinks.’

  He accepted it, smiling. ‘Now, Miss Nightingale, I have something to tax you with. I have just come from Lord Panmure. Lord Panmure has just come from the Queen. A Royal Commission is to investigate every part of the Army Medical Department. You were right. The Bison is a reforming beast – or Her Majesty and yourself have goaded him to be. The Royal Warrant will be issued in the beginning of May, and the commission sit shortly afterwards. Your sex precludes you from being a commissioner, but your movements behind the scenes will be more important than the dramatics upon the public stage. That is another reality of politics which you know as well as I. So you have much work to do.’

  The coil of the boa-constrictor was already up to his calves. I did not know then that it would steadily squeeze him to death.

  23

  It was the last Friday afternoon in March 1857. It was my next call at the Burlington. As my coachman pulled up – I had succumbed to the dignity of my own carriage – the black-clothed, squat form of the Bison, silk hat pulled low over ox head, followed by a black-dressed secretary, was bowed reverently from the hotel with their cluster of scarlet dispatch boxes into the black official coach. I found the rooms upstairs ringing with jubilation.

  ‘The Bison was here three hours,’ exclaimed Miss Nightingale from her couch. ‘You see, Mr Darling, my lying here a sick woman demands that even Secretaries of State pay court to me, and not I to them. He could not shelve me for ever as a bothering woman, a “turbulent fellow” as he called me, sweetening me with his hampers of game, saying he could not write because of gout in his hands – gout is a very handy thing, he always has it in his hands when he is called upon to do anything. But I shall never let him alone until this thing is done.’

  This was a terrible curse on the poor Bison, I recognized.

  ‘Miss Nightingale nominated nearly all the royal commissioners she wanted,’ said Miss Bancroft, with Sutherland fluttering like a butterfly on a lovely day.

  ‘The Bison will have three army doctors,’ said Miss Nightingale. ‘Not fair! But like a sensible general in retreat, I named a military doctor who will do less harm than most others. The Bison was amazed at my condescension in naming another military doctor as secretary, so I concealed the fact of the man being a dangerous animal and obstinate innovator. I failed on one point. Unfairly. I wanted the Queen’s physician. It would be agreeable for the Queen to have him, and agreeable for us to have the Queen. I was so good to leave the Bison Dr Andrew Smith, the more so as I could not help it. Of course, Dr Smith will say, in equal parts lachrymose and threatening, “I do not understand why we are to inquire into all this.” Oh, I had a tough fight of it.’

  ‘Lord Panmure really does have such an inconveniently bad memory for names, facts, dates and numbers,’ complained Sutherland.

  ‘Convenient, you mean,’ Miss Nightingale told him. ‘Mine will serve us both, though I know too well what discipline means, to claim a better memory than my chief. He does not wish the world to suppose he takes suggestions from me – which crime indeed is very unjust to impute to the man.’

  ‘Miss Nightingale presented him with a list of seven points,’ continued Jane Bancroft excitedly, ticking them as usual on her fingers. ‘A scheme and financial estimate to be prepared for an Army Medical School –’

  ‘I won,’ said Miss Nightingale.

  ‘The Netley plans to be reported to myself privately,’ interrupted Sutherland delightedly.

  ‘I won.’

  ‘Commissariat to be put on different footing, as in India –’ said Miss Bancroft.

  ‘I lost.’

  ‘The camp at Aldershot to kill cattle, bake bread, build, drain, shoemake, tailor and generally do for themselves –’

  ‘Lord Panmure will consider,’ said Sutherland.

  ‘Which means he will do nothing,’ said Miss Nightingale.

  ‘Sir John Hall will not succeed Dr Andrew Smith as Director-General,’ imparted Sutherland, hugging himself.

  ‘I won!’

  ‘Colonel Tulloch to be knighted –’ said Miss Bancroft.

  ‘I lost. It would have wiped off some of the whitewash down at Chelsea.’

  ‘Statistics –’ began Miss Bancroft.

  ‘Vague promises. In the end, the Bison contradicted himself and everything. Thus I entertain the most sanguine expectations of success.’

  ‘And I sit on the commission as sanitary expert.’ Sutherland wriggled as though his undervest had caught fire.

  ‘Every one of th
ese names I have been obliged to carry by force of my will upon the Bison against his. Mr Herbert will be chairman, of course. I could do nothing without him. My only fear now is the Bison seeing this visit as a sop, and shelving the commission as soon as he dares.’

  ‘In that case, Candour will print your full Crimean experiences, with your suggestions for improvements. Publicity will get what you want in the long run. People won’t stand for their sons and brothers joining the army for the army itself to kill them.’

  ‘No one can feel the army as I do,’ said Miss Nightingale, with sudden ferocity. ‘These people who talk to me now have all fed their children on the fat of the land and dressed them in velvet and silk. I have had to see my children dressed in a dirty blanket and an old pair of regimental trousers, and to see them fed on raw salt meat, when we knew the stores were bursting with warm clothing. Living skeletons devoured by vermin, ulcerated, hopeless, speeehless, dying like Greeks as they wrapped their heads in their blankets and never spoke a word… Nine thousand of my children are lying, from causes which might have been presented, in their forgotten graves. I can never forget. Never.’

  I made my excuses and left. Miss Nightingale talking about the Crimea was becoming torturingly tedious.

  Miss Bancroft saw me downstairs.

  ‘Thank you for your letter. I am so pleased that you enjoyed the opera,’ I said.

  ‘I am very fond of music, but not very fond of society.’

  ‘Why should you be frightened of society? You have better looks and better manners than many society ladies, and much more intelligence.’

  ‘You think me intelligent?’ She was artlessly surprised, not flattered. ‘Miss Nightingale thinks I am foolish.’

  ‘As she thinks that of cabinet ministers, you should not feel downhearted. Did she know about our meeting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You won’t keep it from her long.’

  ‘Shan’t I?’ She gave a crafty smile. ‘It’s remarkable how the cleverest people will believe a good tale told by an idiot.’