56. FREED FROM THE LADY WITH THE CLAMP.

6th Report Received From Donald Campbell

I decided to return a month later in 1844 to Florence in my Bluebird-Proteus CN7 and make a very quick exit if necessary.

I found her in the village where she had borrowed the whippet. She was walking the main street at night with just her lamp for company.

‘Away with you,’ she said with a wave of her clean white gloved hands. ‘You’ve brought enough trouble to these good people as well as to myself.’ She purposefully extinguished her lamp so as to veil our encounter in darkness.

It emerged that The News of the World reporters had descended upon sleepy Hampshire and written a bombshell of an article on the deluded villagers and their observations of fire-farting dragons that travel at breakneck speed on land and water and exist on a diet of lean dogs that they chase but don’t consume. The slant of the story centred on the assumption that the villagers had been hallucinating on woodland fungi.

The Government intervened by quarantining the area to stop this hysteria spreading to adjacent villages until the malaise had passed. Nightingale felt it incumbent upon her to nurse the afflicted until the restrictions were lifted as she felt responsible for their predicament having roped them in.

‘The wheel-clamping is on hold for a while, I assume?’ I ventured.

‘Hush! she replied, looking carefully about her. ‘I cannot pursue vehicle clamping at all from this juncture onwards. I’ve been ordered by the authorities, at the conclusion of this vigil, never to mention or allude to it ever again. If I were to take up wheel-clamping that would provide an allusion to the state of quarantine prevalent here at present, where everyone is ensnared. I shall have to adopt nursing as my calling and insist that when I visit the Lutherans at Kaiserswerth that that is my introduction to treating the sick and deprived and not this.’

I was then sent on my way without ceremony before the lady relit her lamp and resumed her rounds.

Florence Nightingale would now, thanks to the efforts of Team Bluebird, make her name treating wounded British soldiers in the Crimean War. Victims of the Ruskies. But really, I had set her on the path with her good old lamp a decade earlier, treating the Rustics!

Mission successful. Over.

REPORT ENDS

Excerpts from the writings of Florence Nightingale that have only just appeared that evidently make reference to Donald Campbell:

‘Rather ten times die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore.’ Cassandra (1852) * A reference to Campbell’s death at Lake Coniston on January 4, 1967 and his contempt for his watching knockers.

‘It was an affair of the most critical importance to accomplish the journey in the least possible space of time.’ Letter to Hilary Bonham Carter (1845). * Pretty obvious where her drive for speed emanated from.

‘Walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind,’ Cassandra (1852). *Nightingale makes allusion here to the impressive Bluebird machines and the bad luck Campbell had with the weather.

‘For do we ever utilize this heroism? Look how it lives upon itself and perished for lack of food.’ Cassandra (1852). *A clever reference to Campbell’s second fatal run at Lake Coniston having chosen not to refuel, as was the norm, after the first run.

The windowless house in Chepstow which helped fuel the alarm about Nightingale’s deviation has been restored to its previous state with windows without the intervention of any double glazing firms.