Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [84]
Whilst some nurses might be marvels of forbearance and selflessness on rare occasions they could be monsters. The great politician Lord Curzon left a chilling remembrance of his nanny, a Miss Paraman: ‘She persecuted and beat us in the most cruel way and established over us a system of terrorism so complete that not one of us ever mustered up the courage to walk upstairs and tell our father or mother.’ More alarmingly: ‘She spanked us with the sole of her slipper on the bare back, beat us with her brushes, tied us for long hours to chairs in uncomfortable positions with our hands holding a pole or blackboard behind our back.’49 The torture could take yet stranger forms: ‘She made me write a letter to the butler asking him to make a birch for me with which I was to be punished for lying, and requesting him to read it out in the servants’ hall.’50 This was the man later given the responsibility of running India as Viceroy.
Stories of the devotion and kindness of nurses and nannies were perhaps more common, with one of the most famous of the period deserving a mention here. Mrs Everest, the beloved nanny of Sir Winston Churchill, joined the family in 1874 within six weeks of his birth and remained with them, eventually becoming housekeeper, until her death in 1895, when Winston was twenty. For this lonely boy this calm, warm, loving character became his closest confidante and emotional ally.51 Until he was eight he slept in her room, and was fed, washed and changed by her. It was due to her devoted care that he survived pneumonia at the age of twelve. He was distraught when his parents abruptly ‘retired’ her without pay in 1893, writing to them in protest, and he later paid her doctor’s bills himself when he was at Sandhurst. In My Early Life, he described how, when he visited her when she was mortally ill with peritonitis, her chief concern was that he has wearing a wet jacket: ‘She had lived such an innocent and loving life of service to others and held such a simple faith that she had no fears at all, and did not seem to mind very much. She had been my dearest most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years that I had lived.’52
This degree of affection is sometimes demonstrated in memorials. In the Cecil graveyard at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, there are only three monuments to people who were not direct members of the family. Two were sisters who were nurse and wetnurse at Hatfield for thirty-six and twenty-nine years respectively; the other was Caroline Hodges, the children’s nurse, whose tombstone tells that she ‘lived in their house for 43 years, a loved and trusted friend’.53
A similar series of monuments to beloved, long-serving servants can be found at Highclere in Hampshire. One individual is poignantly remembered on a wall plaque and on a headstone in the churchyard: ‘Dedicated to the memory of Mary Morton who died on the 10th of April, 1869, in the Garden Lodge of Highclere Castle, having nearly completed her 96th year. 37 years of that time were spent in the Carnarvon family. This Memorial Tablet is erected by Henrietta Countess of Carnarvon and Lady Gwendolen Herbert, her first friend in the family and her last, to whom she was nurse.’54
In January 1820, the Irish novelist Maria Edgworth, who had so celebrated the roles of faithful steward and nurse in her fiction, recorded in her diary the death of the family nurse: ‘Poor Kitty Billamore breathed her last this morning at one o’clock. A more faithful, warm-hearted excellent creature never existed. How