The Private Life of Florence Nightingale Page 24

  A month later, the Nightingale Training School was founded. It would be opened with fifteen probationer nurses in the new St Thomas’ beside the Thames, under the paragon Mrs Wardroper. Miss Nightingale drew up the rules. The probationers had to be sober, honest, truthful, trustworthy, punctual, quiet and orderly, cleanly and neat, and to become skilful in dressing blisters, applying leeches, administering enemas and managing trusses. They would learn only a little medicine, which would otherwise make them intolerable in the hospital from airing their knowledge, or miserable from not using it. They would keep a daily diary, read by Miss Nightingale every month. Nurses would venture into London only in pairs, as they did into Scutari. And as at Scutari, flirtation meant the sack. The course took a year, for which they would get £10. They would all be ladies doing a maid-of-all-work’s job. Miss Nightingale had squashed Mary Stanley’s ‘Lady System’ flat. That was her accomplishment in nursing, so simple that it needed a genius to do it.

  I was busy with the Fund, to which I noticed the medical profession’s contribution stood as low as Miss Nightingale’s opinion of doctors. As I passed most of my life in Fleet Street, and Florence all of hers in the Burlington, I did not see her again until Christmas 1861. Clough had then been dead a month, Sidney Herbert four.

  My wife was alone in the sitting-room downstairs. She was in her old lace-trimmed black dress. She greeted me smilingly. ‘Why exactly have you come to see Miss Nightingale?’ she asked pleasantly. Our marriage could have been made of dreams.

  ‘Because I have an urgent message from the Secretary at War in Washington. He wants Miss Nightingale to take charge of the hospitals which serve the Northern States’ armies. Will she rise from her couch and repeat for President Lincoln in Virginia what she accomplished for Mr Herbert in Turkey?’

  ‘Miss Nightingale is too ill to travel.’

  I noticed Jane was busy at the table with a silver spoon and a saucer, rolling a tiny pellet of grey putty. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  She gave the mischievous smile which often met me in the hotel during our summer of secret meetings. ‘Opium.’

  ‘Indeed? Does Florence smoke it in a pipe like a Limehouse Chinaman?’

  ‘I slip it under the skin of her thigh with a little silver knife. It is a curious little new-fangled op which some doctors try. It relieves her.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘She has backache, which I massage without effect. She likes opium, though she complains that it does not improve the vivacity or serenity of her intellect. By which I think she means it lets her forget herself for a while.’

  ‘Like an old nurse’s gin-bottle?’

  ‘In a way,’ said Jane gently. ‘But Miss Nightingale has already been asked for advice from America, by Miss Dorothea Dix, Superintendent of Nurses at Washington. I sent our annotated report of the Royal Commission. Miss Nightingale is horrified at the news of suffering among the wounded.’

  ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘I think so. We are moving soon. This hotel is becoming quite unsuitable for Miss Nightingale. They never open the windows or shut the seats of the water-closets, and the cistern upstairs burst with a bang and flooded us. Miss Nightingale suffered a severe chill. We have acquired a house in South Street, nearer the Park.’

  ‘Do you need money?’

  ‘Miss Nightingale does, for her causes. Otherwise, it is not an important commodity with us. Are you going to marry your lady in Berkeley Square?’

  ‘Yes, once the lawyers have done their job. I need a wife. I am standing for Parliament.’

  ‘I look forward to reading your speeches in the newspapers.’

  The bell rang.

  Upstairs there were even more cats.

  I started about the American war, but Florence interrupted, ‘Didn’t Jane tell you about Canada? Oh, she is as stupid a girl as ever. After the Trent affair –’ The Northern States had taken Confederate prisoners from a British ship. ‘We are reinforcing the Canadian garrison. Lord de Grey at the War Office consulted me personally on the sanitary arrangements, the defects and dangers to be feared, the name of a suitable Principal Medical Officer. I have a thousand details to master, the distances which might be covered by sledges, the relative weights and warming capacity of blankets and buffalo robes…the War Office still does not define with sufficient precision the manner in which meat is to get from the Commissariat into the soldier’s kettle, or clothing from the army medical general store on to the soldier’s back. I have told Lord de Grey that he must define all this, or they will again have men shirking their responsibility. The Government will do everything I say, because they are terrified of the national indignation if they lost another army as they did in the Crimea.’

  She had not changed. ‘My other reason for calling today was the expression of double condolences.’

  ‘Oh! I am so distressed at the death of Mr Clough, that I cannot open a newspaper for fear of seeing his name. He was a man of rare mind and temper, who helped me immensely by his sound judgement and constant sympathy.’

  ‘You once said he did the work of a cabhorse. But he was a racehorse harnessed to a coal truck. If that did not kill him, it hastened his end.’

  ‘Now you are accusing me, like his family,’ she said petulantly. ‘You do not think of my feelings. Hardly a man remains – that I can call a man – of all those I have worked with these five years. I survive them all. I did not mean to.’

  ‘And Lord Herbert –’ He had been ennobled seven months before dying. ‘When he was examined by the doctors after death, he was found to have terrible kidney disease. You attributed to infirmity of will what was due to infirmity of body. Even when he struggled to the War Office under your whiplash, blinded with headache, fainting, surviving only on gulps of brandy. You told him not to judge too hardly of himself from the doctors’ opinion – with which you disagreed – that you cannot absolutely mend a damaged organ.’

  ‘Sometimes, I said sometimes. Why, I know a very active intellectual man with the same albuminous symptoms as Herbert, who by sleeping in the country gave himself fifteen years of good life, and may have fifteen more ahead. Sidney Herbert suffered from thorough London ill-health, with poverty of blood. which deposits albumen.’

  ‘You refuse to believe in kidney disease. You refuse to believe in germs, when every scientific doctor in the world can see them like houseflies. Your little learning is a danger to the public.’

  She looked at me angrily. ‘It is impossible, for an old nurse like me, to see a man every day without knowing him off by heart. Of Sidney Herbert’s constitution I could speak with confidence.’

  ‘You did, but also with misjudgement and I think self-deceit.’ I took a paper from my pocket. ‘I have been consoling Lady Herbert, who passed me her husband’s notes of your last conversations. “There is no evidence that disease is getting the upper hand with you,”’ I quoted. ‘“Let me see your prescriptions. At least I can give you an opinion upon them. You need not take them. I do hope you won’t have any vain ideas that you can be spared the War Office. There is no one else to take your place there. You know that as well as everybody else. You cannot be the only person who does not know that you are necessary to the reorganizing of the War Office. One fight more, the best and the last.” You were like Lord Raglan, throwing troops dying of cholera against the Russian ramparts on the Alma.’

  ‘God should never have let him die,’ she cried. ‘God should have set aside a few trifling physical laws to save him. Do you think I cannot see death when it is written on a man’s face? Me, of all women! But for him to give up the War Office was like myself feebly packing my portmanteaux in the middle of that terrible winter in Scutari and going home. I understood him better than Liz Herbert, whose claim upon him compared to mine was as tenant to landlord.’

  She was bolt upright on the couch, eyes ablaze, voice wild. ‘The thing wanted in England to raise women, to raise men too, are those friendships without love between men and women, and if between
married men and married women all the better. I think a woman who cares for a man because of his convictions, and who ceases to care for him if he alters those convictions, is worthy of the highest reverence. Women in love with men without any reason at all, and ready to leave their highest occupations for love, are to me utterly wearisome, wearisome as a juggler’s trick, table-turning, spirit-rapping. How happy widows are! Because people don’t write them harassing letters in the first week of their widowhood, and yet I know of no widow more desolate than I… Poor Flo! Poor Flo! I shall mount three widows’ caps on my head, yes, three, one for Sidney Herbert, one for Arthur Clough, and one for the loss of sympathy from you, the only man I have opened my heart to. O, I am pains, pains, pains all over, I must have my dose –’ She reached for the bell handle, working it violently.

  I told her, ‘You are more jealous than Othello, more intolerant than Cassius, more resentful than Lady Macbeth and more cruel than Regan.’

  She was silent. A moment passed. Her voice came wearily, ‘How can you say such things to the woman who found the British soldier a brute, and left him – for all his faults – a noble creature?’

  ‘Because like every British general in the past, and doubtless in the future, you drew public esteem from his nobility, which he cannot express in fine words and great schemes, but only by dying.’

  ‘Tristram, sometimes you muddle me,’ she said sorrowfully. ‘Though sometimes I am frighteningly muddled by myself.’

  I left. I never went back.

  Now Miss Nightingale is dead. On Saturday, August 13 1910, at her little red brick house in South Street, Mayfair, of heart failure, in her afternoon sleep, at ninety. She tyrannized important men for half a century with the fearsome power of her impending death. Her couch was attended beseechingly by generals and viceroys, physicians and politicians, sanitarians and ecclesiastics, the propagandist apostate Manning, the amorous don Jowett. She reformed the drains of India, but never the War Office. That would need the hand of Sidney Herbert in his supernatural condition. She found nursing a trade and left it an art. I suppose Soyer did the same for English cooking.

  She ended fat and moon-faced, petting, weeping over, sentimentalizing the young girls sent up to her from St Thomas’. With the delicacy of timing rather than taste with which the British Government distributes such twinkling lustres, in late 1907 Campbell-Bannerman sent Sir Douglas Dawson from Downing Street to South Street with the Order of Merit. ‘Too kind, too kind,’ Miss Nightingale said. She was the first, the only, woman to have it, a woman half-blind, half-mad and half-dead. The Kaiser was visiting his cousin Edward, and remembering Kaiserwerth sent a bouquet.

  The release of Miss Nightingale’s soul from her body releases the diaries of my years with her, their pages as yellow and loose as old teeth, from their locked desk in the library of my country house. The diaries themselves are far more interesting than this memoir which I have written from them over the past eighteen months. They give the names, the occasions, the details of her loves among many noble and princely ladies, and among many ignoble and plebeian ones. As I may prove as deaf to the call of Heaven as she, I am depositing them beyond intrusive British eyes in the library of Harvard University, to which my wife and myself will be crossing with our friends the Astors next month, on the maiden voyage of the much-trumpeted Titanic.

  Postscript

  The massive eighteenth-century Selimiye Barracks still stands four-turreted against the Bosphorus on the Asian shore of modern Istanbul. Now Headquarters of the Turkish 1st Army, the corridors where a British one died on the floor are rubber-tiled, warm, spotless and smelling of soldiers’ lunch. Beyond the officers’ library, two rooms are preserved in the Sisters’ Tower, one above the other, 15 feet square, filled with Victorian furniture, their deep windows overlooking the Bosphorus and Sea of Marmara. From here, Florence Nightingale nursed, fed, clothed and buried her Crimean children, and quit them for immortality.

  Scutari has become Üsküdar, a suburb with a busy ferry pier and the grandiose terminus of the Kaiser’s Baghdad Railway. White, red-roofed middle-class villas overwhelm its cypress-striped slopes, dominated by the only bridge joining Europe to Asia. The domes of the Covered Bazaar in the Old City, where Miss Nightingale bought soldiers’ lives with The Times’ fund, canopy little shops selling carpets and antique tchibouques to tourists. The domes of mosques and delicate fingers of minarets burst through the same tangle of alleys, which have suffered only the flea-bites of World War I air-raids.

  Turkish society has been Western for over fifty years. The muezzin’s call to prayer is still heard, electronically amplified. The araba which transported the wounded, slightly sprung, delivers ewe cheeses and cases of raki. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe’s glorious reception room has become the British Council library. The Gold Horn is polluted.

  The bones of the Turkish cemetery beside the Barrack Hospital have been cleared for a children’s playground – a cheerful reassurance for mankind. Almost a mile away, among the British graves where no Harriet is buried, surrounded by the headstones of half a dozen surgeons lost to Crimean fever, a raised marble tomb is inscribed –

  Sacred to the Memory of

  LUCAS WARD ESQ

  Purveyor to the Forces

  who died at

  SCUTARI, JAN 1st 1855

  After Serving His Country 46 Years

  also

  To the Memory of

  JANE WARD

  Wife of the Above

  who died at the same place

  Jan 3rd 1855

  This Monument was Erected by the Members of

  his Department as a Tribute of Esteem and

  Respect for an Old and Faithful Public Officer.

  Exactly opposite, a towering memorial with Florence Nightingale’s name dominates for ever Poor Old Ward and all he lived and died for.

  ‘Doctor Series’ Titles

  (in order of first publication)

  These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels

  1. Doctor in the House 1952

  2. Doctor at Sea 1953

  3. Doctor at Large 1955

  4. Doctor in Love 1957

  5. Doctor and Son 1959

  6. Doctor in Clover 1960

  7. Doctor on Toast 1961

  8. Doctor in the Swim 1962

  9. Love and Sir Lancelot 1965

  10. The Summer of Sir Lancelot 1965

  11. Doctor on the Boil 1970

  12. Doctor on the Brain 1972

  13. Doctor in the Nude 1973

  14. Doctor on the Job 1976

  15. Doctor in the Nest 1979

  16. Doctor’s Daughters 1981

  17. Doctor on the Ball 1985

  18. Doctor in the Soup 1986

  Humorous Novels

  (in order of first publication)

  1. The Captain’s Table 1954

  2. Nuts in May 1964

  3. Good Neighbours 1976

  4. Happy Families 1978

  5. Dr. Gordon’s Casebook 1982

  6. Great Medical Disasters 1983

  7. Great Medical Mysteries 1984

  More Serious Works

  (in order of first publication)

  1. The Facemaker 1967

  2. Surgeon at Arms 1968

  2. The Invisible Victory 1977

  3. The Private Life of Florence Nightingale 1978

  2. The Private Life of Jack the Ripper 1980

  3. The Private Life of Dr. Crippen 1981

  Synopses

  Published by House of Stratus

  The Captain’s Table

  When William Ebbs is taken from a creaking cargo boat and made Captain of a luxury liner, he quickly discovers that the sea holds many perils…probably the most perilous being the first night dinner, closely followed by the dangers of finding a woman in his room. Then there is the embarrassing presence of the shipping company’s largest shareholder, a passenger over board and blackmail. The Captain’s Table is a tale of nautical misad
venture and mayhem packed with rib-tickling humour.

  ‘An original humorist with a sly wit and a quick eye for the ridiculous’ – Queen

  #xa0;

  Doctor and Son

  Recovering from the realisation that his honeymoon was not quite as he had anticipated, Simon Sparrow can at least look forward to a life of tranquillity and order as a respectable homeowner with a new wife. But that was before his old friend Dr Grimsdyke took to using their home as a place of refuge from his various misdemeanours…and especially from the incident with the actress which demanded immediate asylum. Surely one such houseguest was enough without the appearance of Simon’s godfather, the eminent Sir Lancelot Spratt. Chaos and mayhem in the Sparrow household can mean only one thing – more comic tales from Richard Gordon’s hilarious doctor series.

  ‘Further unflaggingly funny addition to Simon Sparrow’s medical saga’ – Daily Telegraph

  #xa0;

  Doctor at Large

  Dr Richard Gordon’s first job after qualifying takes him to St Swithan’s where he is enrolled as Junior Casualty House Surgeon. However, some rather unfortunate incidents with Mr Justice Hopwood, as well as one of his patients inexplicably coughing up nuts and bolts, mean that promotion passes him by – and goes instead to Bingham, his odious rival. After a series of disastrous interviews, Gordon cuts his losses and visits a medical employment agency. To his disappointment, all the best jobs have already been snapped up, but he could always turn to general practice…