The conversation turning, as, round English fires, it often does, on the
peculiarities of an old nurse of the family, I was struck again by the
tenderness and kindness, shot through with humour, that are always
evoked by this particular retrospective mood. I would even say that
people are at their best when they are remembering their nurses. To
recall one's parents is often to touch chords that vibrate too
disturbingly; but these foster parents, chosen usually with such strange
carelessness but developing often into true guardian angels, with good
influences persisting through life--when, in reminiscent vein, we set
them up, one against the other, can call from the speakers qualities
that they normally may conspicuously lack. Quite dull people can become
interesting and whimsical as their thoughts wander back through the
years to the day when old Martha or old Jane, or whoever it was, moulded
them and scolded them and broke the laws of grammar. Quite hard people
can then melt a little. Quite stern people can smile.
And quite funny people can become intensely funny, as I have melancholy
reason to know, for, listening to these new anecdotes, I recalled the
last occasion on which the fruitful theme of a Nanna's oddities had been
developed; when the speaker was that fascinating athlete and gentleman,
E. B., a gallant officer with a gift of mimicry as notable as his sense
of fun and his depth of feeling, who, chiefly for the amusement of two
children, but equally--or even more--to the delight of us older ones,
not only gave us certain of his old nurse's favourite sayings, in her
own voice, but reconstructed her features as he did so. All good mimicry
astonishes and entertains me, and this was especially good, for it
triumphed over the disabilities of a captain's uniform. Something very
curious and pretty, and, through all our laughter, affecting, in the
spectacle of this tall, commanding soldier painting with little loving
comic touches the portrait of the old Malapropian lady with her heart of
gold. That was a few short months ago, and to-day E. B. lies in a French
grave.
Malapropisms and old nurses are, of course, inseparable. Indeed, they
formed again the basis of our talk the other evening, each of us having
a new example to give, all drawn from memories of childhood. Wonderful
how these quaint phrases stick--due, I suppose, to the fact that the
child does not hear too much to confuse it, and when in this tenacious
stage notices the sharp differences between the conversation of the
literate, as encountered in the dining-room and drawing-room, and the
much more amusing illiteracy below stairs. It will be a bad day for
England when education is so prevalent that nursemaids have it too. Much
less interesting will the backward look then become.
How far forward we have moved in general social decency one realizes
after listening to such conversations as I have hinted at, where respect
and affection dominate, and then turning to some of the children's books
of a century ago--the kind of book in which the parents are always
right and made in God's image, and the children full of faults. In one
of these I found recently a story of a little girl who, being rude and
wilful with her maid, was rebuked by her kind and wise mamma in some
such phrase as, "Although it has pleased the Almighty to set you and
Sarah in such different positions, you have no right to be unjust to
her."
Reflecting upon how great a change has come upon the relation of
employers and employed, and how much greater a change is in store, it
seems to me that one of the good human kinds of book that does not at
present exist, and ought to be made, would bring together between two
covers some of the best servants in history, public and private, and
possibly in literature too. Nurses first, because the nurse is so much
more important a factor in family life, and because, to my mind, she has
never had honour enough. I doubt if enough honour could be paid to her,
but the attempt has not been sufficiently made. And to-day, of course,
the very word as I am using it has only a secondary meaning. By "nurse"
to-day we mean first a cool, smiling woman, with a white cap and
possibly a red cross, ministering to the wounded and the sick. We have
to think twice in order to evoke the guardian angel of our childhood,
the mother's right hand, and often so much more real than the mother
herself. I would lay special emphasis on the nurse who, beginning as a
young retainer, develops into a friend and to the end of her days moves
on parallel lines with the family, even if she is not still of it. These
old nurses, the nurses of whom the older we grow the more tenderly and
gratefully we think--will no one give them a book of praise? I should
love to read it. And there should not be any lack of material--with
Stevenson's Alison Cunningham by no means last on the list.
But if on examination the material proved too scanty, then the other
devoted servants might come in too, such as Sir Walter Scott's Tom
Purdie, who should have a proud place, and that wonderful gardener of
the great Dumas, whose devotion extended to confederacy.
Without Dumas' gardener, indeed, no book in honour of the fidelity of
man to man could be complete. For just think of it! The only approach to
the house of the divine Alexandre being by way of a wooden bridge, this
immortal tender of flowers and vegetables so arranged the planks that
any undesired caller bearing a writ or long-overdue account would fall,
all naturally and probably through his own confused carelessness, into
the river; and, on being pulled out and restored to happy life, would
not only abandon the horrid purpose of his visit, but, gratitude
prompting, be generous enough to go at least part of the way towards
paying the gardener's wages, which otherwise that resourceful benefactor
might never obtain.
On a place in the volume for this exemplary character, I insist. But, as
I say, nurses first.