Memories are like Mulligatawny Soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.

August 24, 2024 – P. G. Wodehouse

Florence Nightingale’s name always reminded me of field hospitals stuffed full of beds containing badly injured troops, and nurses not only trying to save their lives but also coping with attendant cholera and dysentery. Britain’s most famous nurse was called Florence because she was born there, in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Her father William’s surname was not Nightingale: it was Shore. He changed it on inheriting Peter Nightingale’s stately pile in Hampshire together with acquiring that family’s coat of arms. Peter was William’s wife’s uncle. I knew nothing of these armorial shenanigans as a teenage historian, but I did know something of the dreaded cholera etc by a rather strange route which did not include O-level history.

My mother was a great believer in patent pharmaceutical remedies for childhood ailments. We were given Fennings’ Cooling Powders (ugh!) Indian Brandee (ugh!) Gripe Water and Dr J. Collis-Browne’s Chlorodyne. The latter contained laudanum, chloroform and cannabis in the 19th century. Later it became simply a liquid opioid (taken in a little warm water) and very useful for digestive emergencies.

Mother thought it would warm our stomachs on cold winter mornings and had not read the contents’ label. In my youth it was a quite powerful substance before the morphine was subsequently very much reduced.

I liked Chlorodyne and Gripe Water. Indeed, I owe to the latter my later fondness for Kümmel (they taste very similar). Chlorodyne had a medicinal information leaflet, not the alarming modern side-effects one, but containing much more interesting quotations from soldiers and doctors in the Crimean War as to how Chlorodyne pulled the patients through. Neither cholera nor dysentery were endemic in the English cathedral city in which I resided, but I decided (or the opioid did) that it was better to be safe than sorry and at the first twinge of anything I took from my pocket a bottle of the stuff and had a nip. Sadly, a recommendation I gave for it to an over-zealous doctor closed that little avenue.

Maybe it was those memories, wispily drifting inside the archive section of my brain that made me accept a sudden invitation recently to sit in a Nightingale Court as a Recorder. I had always avoided them as they seemed to be out on some geographical limb, but this particular one was very central and convenient for me. I went with some trepidation and a sheet of instructions. The charming court staff showed me into a retiring room in which you could have entertained 30 people very comfortably, ensured my coffee, milk and biscuits were all there and that the air-conditioning was at the right level before Hari, the senior clerk, told me that they wanted it to be as like the regular courts as possible. ‘Thankfully, you are failing miserably,’ I told him. He looked puzzled. ‘And go on failing, just the same way,’ I added, laughing.

The layout of the courtroom, immediately adjacent to my room, was COVID compliant (reminding me of its beginnings) but as I sat down to start the trial, I noticed that there was no dock. ‘Oh dear!’ I thought. ‘Whatever will I do?’ All those years of telling juries that the dock was not prejudicial, just the normal little house for the accused and adding a patronising swipe at the Americans who ‘do it a different way as I expect you have seen on the TV’ and here was the defendant, rather smartly dressed in fact, sitting behind counsel. The world didn’t actually come to an end at that moment. There were no scenes of riot and disorder, and, although I appreciate that all cases were defendants on bail, I began to wonder why this was not the default position for all criminal trials except those where there was a definite risk of trouble. The American courts seem to manage it.

Too soon it was all over: those easy trips to Chambers at 4.30pm, nice little bistros for lunch, not having to get up at the crack of dawn and travel in a sardine can to some far-flung location. Yet, there was another memory seeking to surface. The one of how all the nice things I have ever enjoyed in life tended to get snatched away from me just as I had arrived to enjoy them. I think it’s called progress. No sooner had the thought entered my head than Hari glided in. ‘Cheerio, your Honour. We won’t meet here again, sadly. They’re closing us down next week.’