A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott. Louisa Young

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СКАЧАТЬ off for Klissoura.

      ‘We set out … in a ramshackle carriage with three horses. Wonderful wild desert scenery, and a slight rather pleasant rain. After a long distance we began to rise and rise, and finally our horses could no more…’ For a while they walked, following a lamp as darkness overtook them. The cavalry, with whom they had left the carriage, could not follow. Brailsford went back to find them, taking the lamp. It was at least three miles to the village, and there were brigands in the neighbourhood, they all knew. Ankle deep in mud on a narrow, precipitous road, they lit cigarettes to frighten the wolves away. When the cavalry finally caught up, Kathleen was more than happy to ride: ‘astride a Turkish soldier’s saddle is quite a comfortable thing,’ she noted, despite ‘perilous precipices and streams, lit merely by a lantern, climbing over slippery rocks and boulders …’ She was even happier to arrive at the house of ‘a rich Wallachian’ (she doesn’t seem to have mentioned to him her descent from his former Grand Postleniks) where their boots were removed and their hands washed for them, and they were provided with a ‘wonderful completely Turkish room—half the floor covered with mattresses… we reclined by a roaring wood fire’.

      At dusk they had passed a burnt out village; the next morning they went to the monastery to which its refugees had fled. Some of the thirty-three families had returned to the village to try to rebuild it, but the Bashi Bazouks had swept down in the night and stolen the wood they had prepared for building. Kathleen admired their babies, ‘all swaddled, they felt like brown paper parcels when one took them’, and arranged for wool to be provided so that the women could knit socks and jerseys, which the relief workers would then buy and distribute.

      At Klissoura refugees were living two or three families to a room: ‘some were in excellent spirits, others wept and mourned, all were overjoyed to see us.’ They had thin mattresses, a blanket, a little maize or corn. Nothing else. Kathleen was much outraged at ‘a rascally doctor, a perfect brute who cheated hideously in distributing flour.’ Visiting villages, burnt-out or full of Komitadji, resulted in ‘considerable unpleasantness’ with their officer when Brailsford spoke to men who had been beaten to give up their arms. ‘I fear it may have sown an annoying seed, which may bear unpleasant fruits.’

      Thence to Kastoria, where two nuns from Salonica had set up a ‘primitive but good’ hospital. The English ladies’ accommodation was a thousand times better than Kathleen had expected, with a view over the beautiful lake, and their work began in earnest.

      Dec 21st: Today I saw an old woman with a very dreadful bleeding cancer on her left breast, but the majority are merely cases of starvation … One woman had died, another being in the worst plight [pregnant and unmarried—Kathleen always used this phrase] had gone mad with shame, and the doctor was undecided whether to kill the embryo with drugs or not. If the child is allowed to be born, the people will not allow it to live. The case is difficult but in this country his action would not be criminal. Another case was a little girl of ten, and many more, more or less horrible. Her grandmother locked one girl in a cellar to hide her from the soldiers, and there she went mad. Another was brought to the hospital, but sat looking out the window, crying. She wanted to go to her Turk.

      Rape and seduction by soldiers were rife, and as well the Turks levied a tax on Christian marriages; if the tax was not paid, droit de seigneur was claimed. Kathleen had not been old enough to hear the tales her mother was bred on in Athens of the basic evil of the Turk, but Rosslyn, now working in England to raise money for Macedonia, may well have remembered and passed some on. He certainly remembered their mother’s visit to her brother George in a field hospital at Scutari after the Crimean War, the horrors she saw there, and the letter she wrote to her grandfather, who had sent it to The Times. Its publication had helped to stir up public feeling just before Florence Nightingale started to put together her troupe of nurses (three of whom were trained by Fifi Skene).

      It was to Rosslyn that Kathleen wrote. Later he published her letters, along with his own from his trip to Macedonia in 1905.

      Today there are 30 patients, mostly starvation [she wrote]. Last night the wife of a village priest was brought in; her eyes were fixed and staring. Her husband and his brothers had been missing for a long while, and they thought them imprisoned in Kastoria, but lately their bodies were found in the mountains, cut in pieces, and she is going mad. She wouldn’t stay, and went off this morning.

      Kathleen did the accounts, listed requirements, distributed blankets, applied hot cups to congested chests, and held the hands of the dying. ‘Here I learnt a calmness and a lack of dread of death,’ she wrote later.

      In very few cases was the fearful death rattle I had read of. Almost always death came merely as a cessation, as a clock runs down. Only once did I falter. The dying patient was a boy of about 14, with large brown eyes like a raccoon and tousled black hair. He clung to my hand with a strength that made me hope that they were wrong in abandoning him, and that he might not be dying, at any rate not tonight. And he would open his eyes and say things to me, and I could not understand a word. And then, very suddenly, with his eyes still open, he stopped breathing. My religion, which had been waning and waning, went out with a spirt.

      At times she got depressed. ‘A miserable day. Not the weather, but uselessness, that horrid curse.’ She visited a hospital with six patients, men, women and children, one with smallpox, all in together on mattresses a metre long and having had no food or doctor for three days. Two days before Christmas they were told their hospital was to be shut down, and their doctor was not to visit the villages. A woman with pleurisy was sent away after travelling an hour and a half to get to the hospital.

      25th: Cheerful sort of Christmas, eh? Never mind. I had a letter, a great event. Gave out blankets, and went a tramp round the town, but feel very useless and stupid. On the hill to the back there are some fifteen corpses still lying, all horrid and dried, unburied.

      30th: Wednesday: Rode to Vernik. Hideous roads. Very poor and miserable. Even the children’s faces seem wrinkled with a chronic shiver. Women tell one their horrible tales, but one has heard them before. Little boys look starved, but one knows they are starved. Old old priests tell how they have been beaten, but others have been beaten. Our whole being is pity.

      Her worries she kept to her diary on the whole; but in one letter to Rosslyn she said how lonely it was to have no one to call her anything but ‘Miss Bruce’. Kathleen liked and respected Lady Thompson, and worried that she was miserable or sick, but as Brailsford wrote years later: ‘Lady Thompson was a stiff and conventional person, and she and Kathleen were temperamentally poles apart.’ One rare sunny morning Kathleen was brushing Lady Thompson’s long hair, and singing a comic song: ‘I cannot understand,’ said the austere lady, ‘how you can sing with so much sadness all around you.’

      Propriety was another problem. On one occasion Lady Thompson took Kathleen aside, when she had touched their Major’s knee after a long hard journey, saying, ‘Why, you’re absolutely drenched.’ ‘You are very young, my dear,’ said Lady Thompson, and explained that it was really a little indecent to touch a man’s knee. Later, when Kathleen had taken off her soaking hat during a rainy ride, that same man rode up beside her

      and with many apologies begged me to be so very kind as to forgive him but he had something very delicate to implore me (Oh dear oh dear, my austere lady must have been right; what is coming?). He hated being obliged to ask me, but would I mind, could I please, put on my hat. It appeared that I might ride astride, ride without a skirt, do almost anything, but to have the head uncovered was terribly shocking. With deepest and most serious apology I put on my soaking cap, and never again offended. Then I turned over in my mind the prejudices of the middle aged lady and the Turkish soldiers, and thought I had my work cut out for me: perhaps somehow, somewhere, there would come a time when it would be right to be simple, direct and innocent. But that time never came.

      Her escape was to СКАЧАТЬ