QUALITY OF CARE

At the Endsleigh Palace Hotel Hospital in 1918, the injured C S Lewis was able to enjoy a more homely atmosphere and level of comfort.  We’re told each floor had a “still room” where “ladies” served tea and coffee in the morning and afternoon, on white china plates, with toast ready on toast racks [1]  Again, a novelist’s imagination can visualise all sort of conversations going on surreptitiously over the tea and toast!  Some of these “ladies” may well have been “Ladies” with a capital “L’ as many members of the aristocracy did this sort of war work, like Dorothy L Sayers’ fictional Lady Mary Wimsey [2].

But Lewis’ treatment included massage [3], so  I assume this was by male orderlies, but he doesn’t say.

One of the most striking things when reading articles in the British Journal of Nursing (BJN) for this period, edited by Mrs Bedford Fenwick, is the suffragette and militant tone of much of the writing.  The nurses are on the move, organising demonstrations and marches, arguing in public, doing committee work, and confronting ineptitude in high places –  they want their rightful place!  They want proper professional recognition, not just being patronised by non-medical men with titles, and the female contributors in general want to work for future peace.  They refuse to be limited to what had been called “a Woman’s Sphere”, especially as the  current needs of men were so great.

A poem published in the BJN in 1915 illustrates this well:

“They talk about a woman’s sphere

As though it had a limit;

There’s not a place in earth or heaven,

There’s not a task to mankind given,

There’s not a blessing or a woe,

There’s not a whispered yes or no,

There’s not a life, or death, or birth,

That has a feather’s weight of worth,

Without a woman in it.”

And throughout the British Journal of Nursing there are constant reminders – in reports of talks by church leaders and in the Editorial comments – that nurses need to remember that they are doing the work of Christ the Healer, to which indeed many of the nurses testify in their letters and feedback from the hospital frontlines.  As John Storrs, the Dean of Rochester, is quoted at the time as saying in an article for nurses: “Learn to love Him, and you will not fail to throw your heart into all that you do in His name and for Him”, adding that “The splendid “nerve” of the trained nurse has been one of the glories of the war.” [4]  

But, as always, these more uplifting passages in the British Journal of Nursing are interspersed with news items and advice of more down-to-earth and sobering information, such as teaching on Venereal Disease, and how to help a man who’s cut his own throat.

HOSPITAL SURROUNDINGS

Of course it was important for those who could walk well enough to get some exercise.  Lewis certainly did.  Nearby were beautiful squares of greenery surrounded by iron railings, like Gordon Square Gardens. These resemble mini-parks, which still contain loungers and walkers escaping their work or just resting today.  

Fortunately for us, we can turn to 2nd Lieutenant Cyril Edwards’ photograph album again for a 1917 photo of the gardens as Lewis would have known them, to see that they looked almost exactly the same as today.

Lewis writes to his father on 12 June 1918 to thank him for a new brown suit and collars and ties.  He can now get out of bed and indeed has even been out a few times [6]. It feels wonderful just to have pockets without buttons and to wear a different tie everyday.  But his own valise with his kit and books from the Front has not yet arrived.

However, his first trip out of the hospital almost ended in disaster, when a lorry (driven by “some woman”) crashed into the back of his cab.  Fortunately no one was hurt, but it did make Lewis wonder about what “the fates” had in store for him, as if he wasn’t going to be allowed to be at peace [7].

It is astonishing to think that if Lewis could have travelled back in time only thirteen years he could have bumped into another future Literary Great in Gordon Square Gardens, one who would also begin a Thursday evening meeting for like-minded people to discuss their work and surrounding culture, just as Lewis was to begin the Thursday evening Inklings in Oxford.  How would Lewis have got on with the twenty two year old Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) who had moved into number 46 Gordon Square in 1904, beginning her Thursday get-togethers in 1905 with her brother Thoby and his Cambridge friends?

If Lewis had been lingering on the grass or learning to walk again along the paths of the gardens then, he could have bumped into Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, W B Yeats (one of Lewis’ poetic heroes) or E M Forster as they descended on number 46 for tea and buns and literary exaltation.  Virginia was to live in several of the local squares – Fitzroy, Brunswick, Tavistock (where she and Leonard ran the Hogarth Press for fifteen years).  The Woolfs then stayed in Mecklenburgh Square until it was bombed in 1940 (and where Dorothy L Sayers was to live in the 1921, and make it the home of her character,  the writer Harriet Vane).

But Virginia Woolf later wrote that Gordon Square had been the main HQ of the Bloomsbury Group and a place of great peace and restfulness for her.  Anyway, it’s perhaps a good thing that she and Lewis did not overlap in time whilst meandering under the trees, as their literary futures lay in very different directions.  But it is intriguing to know that another Bloomsbury Group member could have bumped into Lewis crossing the Gardens – the brilliant economist John Maynard Keynes,  was by then living at number 46 in the Square as a tenant of Clive and Vanessa Bell, and so did overlap with Lewis’ time in the hospital.

The BJN tells of various events that were put on for wounded soldiers from military hospitals in London, such as tea and entertainment at the Lyceum, and an exhibition of artificial limbs at Roehampton House Hospital (these were demonstrated by an ex-soldier who would show the efficiency of his own artificial leg).  That could so easily have been of interest to Lewis but fortunately his leg wound, though it hurt a lot, was his least serious.

But he was able to send good news to his friend Arthur Greeves back in Ireland on 17 June 1918.  Lewis had been able to go to the opera on the previous Friday evening, to hear Wagner’s The Valkyrie conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham at Drury Lane.  The thrill of it restored feelings that he hadn’t experienced in five years.  He was obviously feeling a lot physically stronger too as, when someone in the seat in front of him kept standing up in enthusiasm during the performance, Lewis pulled him down into his seat again by his coat tails!  He was also able to see Faust.  These were presumably with Mrs Moore, judging from his letters to his father and Arthur [8].  But even though he could now walk around and explore London, there were little incidents to remind him of his invalid status, and not just the pain in his leg.  Once in Piccadilly (visiting Hatchard’s, the famous bookshop?), the bandage above his knee fell round his ankle and he had to get a taxi back to the hospital [9]. 

LEAVING THE HOSPITAL

As I descended the former hospital floor by floor, there were very few original elements of the building’s interior decor left to record.  It was now all utilitarian minimalist corridors of offices or student facilities and therefore impossible to tell what it had once been like as either a hotel or a hospital.

The only unusual item that stood out was a section of a decorative iron railing which may have been from Lewis’ time there, as it looked pretty integral to the building.

After taking my photos, I thereforeI left the building feeling a bit disappointed that there wasn’t more that resonated with the World War One period, but exhilarated that I had penetrated a building that had once held my literary hero when he was also a war hero.

But this research did ultimately lead me to read the testimonies of so many other ‘Everymen’ and ‘Everywomen’ who struggled and suffered in this terrible War.  It was an honour to read the first-hand accounts of the sacrifice and triumphs of soldiers and nurses who fought for life side by side.  It helped me to see the experience of C S Lewis in his context and in a deeper way than from just his own self-effacing words.  I can understand more fully now how Lewis was able to find a ‘safe place’ in literature, to try to forget the horrors of what he had seen and felt, even if they did come back to haunt his dreams.  It made his subsequent achievements even more impressive as he, with others, was able to claw back and then enhance the civilisation that had seemed lost, with literary contributions of his own, and speak with renewed moral authority to his own scarred generation, and beyond.

But this is not the end of the story of 2nd Lieutenant Jack Lewis’ recovery from war.  He was to be sent next to continue his recuperation to a another Red Cross Military Hospital in the beautiful mansion called Ashton Court on the outskirts of Bristol, in the south west of England, nearer to Ireland and the sea.

Of course we all know that Lewis did indeed recover.  But perhaps, as a postscript, you will be pleased to know that 2nd Lieutenant Cyril Edwards, whose photo album we have been sharing along the way, that he too recovered, despite losing his foot due to a grenade.  He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for saving the lives of other men, and after the Endsleigh Palace Hotel hospital he was sent to a castle by the sea on the south west coast, where of course he continued to take pictures.  He recovered sufficiently to take over the family business in Bloomsbury after the War, marry his sweetheart, and live to be eighty five!

Here is a photo of his, of soldiers recovering in Gordon Square Gardens in 1917, just as Lewis would have done. Even in sepia, one can tell how little the green space has changed in over a hundred years.

The next place in our ‘pilgrimage’ to sites where Lewis recovered from war, therefore, will be Ashton Court in Bristol.

NOTES

1]  British Journal of Nursing (BJN), Vol 55, 17 July 1915, www.rcnarchive.rcn.org.uk.

2]  Advert in BJN, Vol 60, 18 May 1918, pvii.

3]  C S Lewis, Collected Letters, edited by Walter Hooper, Vol 1, p381.

4]  BJN, May 25, 1918, vol 70, p362.

5]  https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=2000-05-126-1  Out of Copyright.

6]  C S Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol 1, 12 June 1918, p379.

7]  Ibid.,p380.

8]  C S Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol 1, 20? June 1918, p386.

9]  Ibid., p387.