The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  We walked in silence down half a flight of stairs.

  ‘The things you know about me and Miss Nightingale,’ she said, eyes on the treads. ‘They were childish things. Any girl of my age would have done the same under her domination.’ She gave me a flick of the head upstairs. ‘They are the affairs you may see in any seminary or convent, and which nobody thinks about. Only Miss Nightingale strains to raise it to the passions of Daphnis and Chloe. You know how everything she touches instantly becomes the most important matter in the world’s progress? And at Scutari, of course, we were all on top of each other, the Barracks was so grim and there was nowhere to escape. It was a forcing house for those sort of relations, just as the tendrils of flowers meet in a hot-house. There were plenty more than Miss Nightingale and myself among the nurses, believe me.’

  We reached the hall, occupied by a family of six, all red-faced, tweeded, furred, just arrived from Yorkshire, scattering the staff with a fusillade of complaints behind fortifications of stout leather portmanteaux.

  ‘Would you leave, Miss Nightingale?’

  ‘Where for? The nurse is still either a slut or a nun.’

  ‘Haven’t you a home? Your father’s a farmer, isn’t he?’

  ‘A poor one and an ill-tempered one. I could not feel dutiful towards my parents. Like Miss Nightingale, I escaped from them to this work. Unlike her, I have not the character to return and face them.’

  ‘You would give me great pleasure by taking supper with some friends tomorrow.’

  She smiled. ‘Innocence is one of the most irritating things to be accused of. The supper would materialize, but not the friends.’

  ‘After Scutari, a chaperone seems an extravagant luxury. Well, a box at the opera?’

  ‘Much more acceptable. How fortunate for me that you enjoy the opera.’

  ‘I can’t stand it, but we shall go.’

  The Bison called once again at the Burlington Hotel. He bore the official Draft of Instructions to the Commissioners. Miss Nightingale was graciously pleased to alter it before its forwarding to the Queen. The Commission sat on Tuesday, May 8 1857. Three days passed. It was overwhelmed in the newspapers, and about to lose its guilding genius.

  The electric telegraph brought news of the Indian uprising in Meerut. England was shocked, outraged, bewildered, angry and sorrowful, as though the inmates of a ragged school, saved from the gutter and from themselves, clothed, civilized and given pocket-money, had without the slightest reason turned upon their philanthropic betters and cut their throats.

  Lady Canning had now risen from Postmistress-General to Mrs Viceroy. At once, Miss Nightingale telegraphed an offer to go at twenty-four hours’ notice, were there anything in her ‘line of business’. An encore by popular demand would have pleased her as much as it pleased Miss Jenny Lind, but the mountain of work for the Royal Commission would have become a melting iceberg.

  While we waited for a reply, Miss Nightingale began to see the mutiny as a stroke of luck, in directing public attention again towards the army. I saw it as justification of my unheeded cautions. Candour was right. I had warned that I heard in a splintering corner of the Empire the creaking fragility of the whole structure. Candour was right again, half a century later, when another corner was shot to bits by the rifles of a few Boer farmers. If we find ourselves cowering behind it from the Kaiser’s Krupps’ howitzers, it will not be for equally grave warnings equally flippantly disregarded.

  To everyone’s relief Lady Canning declined. There was a plenitude of natives for use.

  We advanced only to another crisis. Miss Nightingale refused to appear before the Commission and give evidence. This seemed to me an anticlimax as ludicrous as burning Joan of Arc with damp faggots.

  ‘It would only make bad blood, my bringing up past delinquencies,’ she told me in the Burlington.

  ‘Can’t you go along and say something?’

  ‘What on? An indifferent matter like hospital construction? Leaving untouched the great matters which have affected our sick more than any mere architecture could do? That would be unconscientious of me.’

  ‘But the absence of your name from the list of witnesses will diminish the weight of the final Report, and will give rise to unfounded rumours,’ I counselled her impatiently. ‘It will be said that you made suggestions about the Crimea, the responsibility for which you were reluctant to incur in public.’

  ‘It would be treachery to the memory of the dead,’ she said flatly.

  I suggested a compromise. She agreed to give written answers to written questions. The arrangement was anyway superfluous because she saw every witness herself and told him what to say. Their testimony was often printed in Candour before they uttered it.

  The summer was as stifling as three years before. I became a regular caller at the Burlington. Sidney Herbert was there every morning, iller and iller, to take his orders for the day. Fanny and Parthe came up to do the season. Miss Bancroft seemed to enjoy the excitement. Clough went out for the india-rubbers and postage stamps. With terrible coyness, Sutherland called the hotel ‘The Little War Office’, Miss Nightingale ‘The Commander-in-Chief’, the indifferent meals served by indifferent waiters, ‘our mess’. ‘She is one of the most gifted creatures God ever made,’ he told me in the anteroom. Then the bell tinkled beyond the inner door, and one of God’s creatures had to jump like a flea for another.

  In August, the weather was heavier, the streets stank. The season was over, Fanny and Parthe bored. One afternoon I found Miss Nightingale alone with Miss Bancroft, the windows again shut, the curtains drawn, the gas low.

  ‘I am dying,’ groaned Miss Nightingale from the couch. ‘I cannot breathe, I cannot sleep, I cannot eat, I have lived all week on nothing but tea.’

  ‘Then I must get Miss Harriet Martineau to post your obituary notice up to the minute for Candour.’

  ‘You think I am une malade imaginaire?’ she accused me indignantly. ‘Dr Sutherland is convinced that I have congestion of the spine, brought on by incessant worry and overwork, and that leads straight to paralysis.’

  ‘Dr Sutherlend is a drain-doctor.’

  ‘You have caught the unpleasant disease of flippancy from him.’

  I pulled back the curtains. I had become powerful in the Burlington Hotel. With the newspapers preoccupied over the siege of Lucknow, Candour kept the Royal Commission before the public. Languid on her pillows, Miss Nightingale held a hand over her eyes. ‘There is one service you can do a dying woman. My association with my children makes me wish to be buried in the Crimea.’ I glanced at Jane Bancroft, but she was expressionless on her stool, hands folded in lap.

  ‘It amounts to what I never should have expected to feel – a superstition.’ Her voice was low as a moan. ‘For they are not there. But for every one of my twenty thousand children, I have expended more motherly feeling and action than my mother has expended on me in thirty-seven years.’ She dropped her hand. ‘It is for you, Tristram, to employ the deep grief of the public to see that, is done. I hope you will spread no chivalrous ideas of what is “due” to my “memory”. The Government will insist on the Abbey.’

  ‘Particularly if the Royal Commission’s report fills them with shame.’

  Her death-bed was disturbed by the appearance of Sutherland, brisk and smiling. His eye fell instinctively on a pill-box in the middle of his table, which he picked up, rattled, and opened.

  ‘Tell me what those pills are,’ Miss Nightingale ordered faintly. ‘One of the maids here, attending the world’s greatest authority on nursing, takes quack remedies.’

  ‘The nearer to Rome, the less the religion,’ he replied lightly. ‘The Commission today made its most important and beneficial decision.’

  ‘What was that?’ she asked feebly.

  ‘We shall adjourn for two months from August 8.’

  Miss Nightingale sat bolt upright, raised like Lazarus by the miraculous touch of fury. ‘Why? The Commission must take its report the moment Parliament
reassembles. Otherwise, it will be shovelled aside by a dozen willing hands, as impedimenting the train of legislation.’

  ‘I should work on, all summer,’ said Sutherland, deflated. ‘But alas my will is stronger than my legs –’

  ‘Lord Panmure wants to go north to shoot grouse, and Mr Herbert wants to go to Ireland to catch fish,’ Florence said, as though accusing them of unspeakable crimes.

  ‘Mr Herbert is ill,’ Sutherland told her more forcibly.

  ‘His neuralgia is fancy, all fancy. Doesn’t he inhale that prescription I gave him, cotton soaked with chloroform and camphor?’

  ‘It makes him sick. He has violent headaches, and the most crippling feelings of lassitude. I really feel there is something wrong with the poor man, though I cannot put my finger on it,’ Sutherland confessed. He looked even more guilty. ‘This morning, Mr Herbert felt so ill that he had to go home to Belgrave Square, to bed.’

  ‘Bed? Idling! He ought to be ashamed of himself. His only disease is in the mind of Mrs Herbert. He is essential to me. He is a man of the quickest and most accurate perception, his very manner vital in engaging the most sulky and recalcitrant of witnesses. He is my mouthpiece, without him I can do nothing. And here I work double tides, labouring day after day until I am almost fainting. Well, I had just as soon wear out in two months as two years. The Commission will not adjourn.’

  ‘You can’t adjourn with Sir John Hall about to give evidence,’ I objected. ‘That will be like Lucifer summoned for judgement in Heaven, with Miss Nightingale sitting, if not on God’s right hand, just without the blaze of His glory passing Him instructive little notes.’

  ‘I do not want the old man badgered in his examination,’ she said startlingly. ‘Oh, I have the proofs of his incredible apathy by heart, back to his fatal letter to Dr Andrew Smith in 1854, the month before my arrival at Scutari, when he expressed his satisfaction that the whole hospital establishment “was now put on a very creditable footing”.’

  I said, ‘I did not imagine that mercy droppeth as the gentle rain from thunderclouds.’

  ‘My own belief is that Hall is a much cleverer fellow than everyone takes him for.’ She seemed to overlook being interrupted in the act of dying. ‘We want to make the best out of him for our case. He was much afraid of the Commission at first, but now thinks it is taking a good turn. He should not be put too much on the defensive, but allowed to slip quietly into the current of reform. I am turning the quality of mercy to practical effect – had I not at Scutari, I could have done nothing but wept. Though if he proves obdurate, he must of course be put in a corner,’ she added forthrightly. He was to die peacefully ten years later, thirty miles from her birthplace.

  Soon we were alone.

  ‘You are killing Sidney Herbert.’

  She glared at me. ‘What an absurd charge. Though admittedly, he would gladly kill himself for me. Look at him – a statesman, past middle age, absorbed in politics for a quarter of a century, through sympathy towards me remodels his whole life and policy. That is what I call real sympathy.’ She hesitated. ‘But no woman has ever altered one hour of her existence for me, even those with a passion for me. Women have no sympathy. All these women have influenced me, more than I have them. Parthe always told me, as a reproach, that I was “more like a man”. Indeed, it was true.’

  ‘Hasn’t Miss Bancroft remodelled her existence for you?’

  ‘Miss Bancroft has no appris à apprendre, which I attribute to want of sympathy.’ She drew her shawl round her shoulders, sitting up against the pillows. ‘Like my own family, her want of the commonest knowledge of contemporary history makes her quite useless as a secretary. She doesn’t know the names of the Cabinet ministers. She doesn’t know the offices at the Horse Guards. She doesn’t know who of the men of today are dead, and who are alive. She doesn’t know which of the churches has bishops and which do not. Now, I’m sure when I went to the Crimea I didn’t know a colonel from a corporal. But there are such things as Army Lists and Almanacs. Yet I never knew a woman who, out of sympathy for me, would consult one. Sidney Herbert and I are together exactly like two men. Of him, I can truly say, O Jonathan, my brother Jonathan, my love for thee is very great – passing the love of women.’

  She smiled. ‘People often say to me, you don’t know what a wife and a mother feels. No, I say, I don’t, and I’m very glad I don’t. And they don’t know what I feel. I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and I think it very pretty to say so. I wish I could tell the truth from my own experiences. It makes me mad when people talk about “Women’s Right”, when the world won’t even open its eyes on our right to love one another. Ezekiel went running about naked “for a sign”. I can’t run about naked, because it is not the custom of the country. You are wasting my time as usual, Tristram, by inviting my confessions. I have work pressing upon my feeble chest like la peine forte et dure.’

  She reached for the pile of papers which Jane Bancroft had left on her stool. ‘I have the momentous affairs of Robert Robinson in my hands.’ I frowned, puzzled. ‘Thomas the drummer boy,’ she reminded me. ‘I am sending him at my own expense to school, and he is going to agricultural college. A reasonable reward for one prepared to defend me single-handed from the Russians on the Genoese Heights. Please give this other document to Miss Bancroft, to be kept carefully. Sutherland would probably lose it. It’s stolen goods. To besiege the Army Medical Department, no Lancaster gun could be more formidable. But I cannot fire it.’

  I glanced at the paper. ‘Mr Wakley-Barlow!’

  ‘A scoundrel, but he is a distant relative.’

  It was a report to Dr Andrew Smith, on Wakley-Barlow’s furnishing the Army Medical Department with medicines, dressings and comforts below standard, rotten, wrongly labelled, or simply charged for and never seen. ‘Up to his old Harley Street tricks?’

  ‘Dr Smith suppressed the report. He wished less to give Wakely-Barlow his deserts than expose his own officials’ incompetence.’

  ‘I should be happy to see Wakley-Barlow walking his way to salvation on a treadmill.’

  ‘Why? Because he sent you to me on a fool’s errand?’

  ‘Because he sent a man to me with a knife on an errand far from foolish.’

  ‘I’ve heard ugly tales of him.’ She reflected a few moments. ‘Would you not give your source of information?’

  ‘I should go on the treadmill myself first.’

  ‘Oh, very well. The dog shall have its bone.’

  I folded the paper and put it in my pocket. It would be at Bow Street in the morning.

  The Commission did not adjourn. The grouse and salmon were each spared an extra adversary until the beginning of September, when it finished its work. To the surprise and relief of the habitués of the Burlington, Miss Nightingale sucumbed to Sutherland’s advice to take the water cure at Malvern.

  ‘All her blood wants renewing,’ he explained to me in the anteroom when I called faire mes adieux. Clough was fussing with timetables, tickets, small change and luggage labels. ‘Miss Nightingale must have new blood, or she cannot work. And new blood can’t be made out of the tea on which she is living. At least, as far as I know.’ He twinkled.

  She was carried to Paddington Station in a litter borne by Crimean veterans, paraded like a deity. The streets were crammed, there was the reverent shedding of hats, as though she had succumbed to stale blood already. The stationmaster received her, the passengers forgot their trains, she involuntarily inspected a guard of honour of curious porters.

  Only Clough accompanied her on the Great Western. Sutherland went back to Highgate, to dig a pond in his garden. Sidney Herbert went back to Belgrave Square, struggling to write the Commission’s report. Jane Bancroft was left to tidy up the Burlington, to follow two days later with the luggage. The next morning, we were married by my uncle Humphry in a chapel of Chelsea Cathedral, by special licence. I decided
that it did not really matter whether she knew the names of the Cabinet ministers and the offices at Horse Guards.

  24

  Early on an icy Sunday morning in February 1860, my uncle Humphry went to preach at a new church in the swelling suburb of Sydenham, south of the Thames. At the top of steep Sydenham Hill, beneath the transparent vaults and towers and educative animals of the Crystal Palace, where I had once invited Harriet to pass an afternoon, one of his fine four horses slipped, his smartly-livened coachman lost the reins, the splendid, emblazoned carriage careered over fifty yards of slippery cobbles, tottered, crashed, splintered and stopped under the wheels of an omnibus. My uncle’s coachman jumped clear, but my uncle lay looking up to Heaven in the lap of a washerwoman, his neck broken.

  The funeral was on the Thursday. When we reached home in Berkeley Square, the afternoon mist was thickening into fog, the gaslamps pale, square suns. I told my coachman to wait.

  ‘You’re going out again?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Of course I am. The funeral’s something I must write up myself. Otherwise, it’ll hold no interest for anybody.’

  I had just bought the Penny Pioneer. I was under thirty, rich, and already infuriating the rest of Fleet Street with my artful miracles.

  We went up to the drawing-room, still in our funeral clothes. The curtains were drawn across the tall windows, the gas was bright, the fire leapt in welcome like an affectionate dog. I stood before the grate, coattails apart, ‘This’ll get rid of the chill of the graveside.’

  ‘Didn’t the will take an age to read?’ Jane was unpinning a black hat swaddled in a black veil.

  ‘You had to listen pretty carefully, to avoid missing my legacy of a pair of cuff-links.’

  ‘It’s strange, the three brothers each meeting an untimely death.’

  ‘Uncle Peregrine killed himself with his knife as sure as a Borgia pricked with his own poisoned ring. But the only accident about my father’s death was his picking the wrong horses. Well, you’re a baronet’s wife. How long before you get used to it?’