I have just been reading Sir David Hare’s memoir, The Blue Touch Paper. One of our best known modern playwrights, his book is rather overstuffed with details of the jostling for fame and fortune among the personalities behind the scenes of British theatre during the last 40-odd years. I say “overstuffed” because, by their nature such details are transient; not of much interest to those outside the milieu of Left-wing, political drama during these decades.
Hare is a man of his time, accepting unquestioningly all the assumptions of the age: having flirted with evangelical Christianity as a teenager, he later rejects this “stupid ideology”; of Margaret Thatcher, he writes that there are “a thousand reasons to oppose our most self-regarding prime minister”; the bomb and over-population are “existential threats, far more important than any others”; “From the start, feminism would inform my writing.”
For Hare, as for the makers of the much-publicised new film on the suffragette movement, it is self-evident that the battle of feminism is one of the great victories of the last century. Preventing women from having the vote or equal pay is an obvious injustice; but this is different from the ideology of strident feminism that informs the outlook of Hare and his socialist and atheist friends. What would he make of the life of a truly great heroine of the last century, Edith Cavell, the anniversary of whose death was celebrated yesterday? Her life, so full of tragic drama at the end, is a worthy subject for the theatre – but as a single woman whose nursing work was a vocation to be taken with the utmost seriousness, as well as for her devout Christian faith, she would hardly be approved by feminist writers and enthusiasts.
Yet she is a worthy role model for women and her courage and nobility will live on long after the feminist movement will have played itself out. It is worth noting that Cavell was visiting her widowed mother in Norwich when the First World War was declared. She could have stayed safely at home. Instead, she returned to Brussels where she was running a school for nurses, without hesitation: they would be needed to care for the wounded soldiers; to ignore their plight was “out of the question”.
Ignoring the dangers of her position and the risks she would incur, Cavell nursed Allied soldiers and helped them escape to Holland. For this she was charged by the Germans with espionage and treason and condemned to a firing squad at dawn on October 12 1915. She had not worn her nurses’ uniform during her trial so as not to risk incriminating her fellow nurses; if she had, it might have moved her judges to mitigate her sentence.
From her prison cell she asked for her copy of her favourite book of devotions, The Imitation of Christ, and read aloud the hymn, Abide with Me, with the Anglican chaplain in Brussels. She told him, “Standing as I do in view of God and Eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough.” She wrote final letters to her mother and to her staff. Brushing aside talk of heroism she wrote to them, “Think of me as a nurse”. In a personal message to them, uncharacteristic for this woman of duty and reserve, she added “I have loved you all much more than you can ever know.”
Cavell went to her death with great dignity, having carefully chosen her clothes the night before: a blue skirt, her best white blouse and a black straw hat secured by a tortoiseshell pin. The photo of her being driven to her place of execution is still very moving; her head held high and her gaze facing unflinchingly ahead. The soldier who bandaged her eyes later reported that they were filled with tears.
The sense of outrage and condemnation following her execution was spontaneous and widespread; somehow this act of barbarism towards a woman and a civilian transcended politics.
Cavell exemplified all the qualities then associated with the ideal of womanhood, but rather less fashionable today: steadfastness, compassion, dignity and modesty. Those who want to highlight the history of the suffragette movement should not forget this woman who eschewed the political fight for a greater cause. Indeed, she is a worthy subject for a film or a play.
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