He said yes, and hoped she would not mind answering some questions. She said, “Of course not, if you pay for my time on the way out.”
He asked her if all her patients paid her in that voluntary way. She said, “Yes. They are poor people, or children. How can I judge what they are able to pay me without hurting themselves?”
He asked if she always gave money to hungry beggars. She said, “No. I give them soup.”
He asked if her veterinary work had not reduced her number of human patients. She said, “Undoubtedly. The human animal is prone to silly prejudices.”
He asked if she preferred dogs to human beings. She said, “No, I am not that kind of sentimentalist. I will always feel tenderness toward my own silly prejudiced species. But nowadays folk with sick animals shun me less than sick humans.”
He asked if there was anything in her life she sincerely regretted. She said, “The Great War.”
He told her she had misunderstood him — he meant, did she regret something for which she felt personally responsible? She said, “Yes. The Great War.”
He asked what she thought about de Valera’s Irish republic, the short length of young women’s skirts, Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats (a popular song of the time) and Trotsky’s expulsion from the Russian Communist Party. She said, “Nothing. I no longer read newspapers.”
He asked if she had a message to give to British youth. She smiled brightly and said that for five pounds she would give him a very quick little answer summing up all she thought good in life, but she wanted the money first. He gave her five pounds. From a pile at her elbow she handed over a little hardbound copy of A Loving Economy, bade him good-bye and ushered him out.
That article is the only record of Victoria McCandless between 1925 and 1941, apart from her name and address in Kelly’s street directory.
The Second World War revived for a while both the industrial and intellectual life on Clydeside. Glasgow was the main transit port between Britain and the U.S.A. The bombing of south Britain inclined many to the northern industrial capital. The painter J. D. Fergusson returned here with his wife, Margaret Morris. They had known Dr. Victoria in her younger days, and Margaret Morris rented an upper floor of 18 Park Circus as a rehearsal space for her Celtic Ballet Company. Until 1945 the house became one of several unofficial little arts centres flourishing on or near Sauchiehall Street. The painters Robert Colquhoun, Stanley Spencer and Jankel Adler briefly lodged in it or visited it. So did the poets Hamish Henderson, Sidney Graham and Christopher Murray Grieve, better known as Hugh MacDiarmid. In his autobiography The Company I’ve Kept (published in 1966 by Hutchinson & Co.) MacDiarmid says:
I seem to have been the only one there who knew that the queer old landlady lurking in the basement was the one female Scottish healer — apart from Long Mairi of the Glens — whose name could have been proudly inscribed beside Madame Curie, Elizabeth Blackwell and Sophia Jex-Blake. Perhaps her pets’ hospital frightened away the lily-livered, but her Scotch broth was excellent, and ladled freely out with a lavish hand.
He reviles:
our cowardly Scottish medical establishment which could easily have given her a university lectureship in gynaecology, but was scared out of its wits by the English gutter press led by that analphabetic hoodlum, Beaverbrook.
This last statement is perfectly true, but would have been more persuasive if expressed more politely. We must be grateful to MacDiarmid, however, for quoting in full a letter she wrote shortly before her death. A lesser man would have suppressed it, as it said things he certainly did not like. Though undated it was obviously written soon after the 1945 general election.
Dear Chris,
So at last, for the first time this century, we have a Labour government with an overall working majority! I will start reading the newspapers again. Britain is suddenly an exciting country. The anti-trade-union laws of 1927 are being repealed and it seems we WILL get social welfare and national health care for all, and Fuel and Power and Transport and Iron and Steel WILL become Public Property! As Public as broadcasting, telephones, tap-water and the air we breathe! And we WILL jettison that millstone round our necks, the British Empire! Do you not feel a little happier, Chris? I feel a lot happier. We are setting the world a finer example than the Soviet Union ever did. I feel that everything between 1914 and the present day has been proved a hideous detour, a swerving from the good path of social progress whose last fixed point was the Lloyd George budget which abolished poor-houses by the old-age pension, and started breaking up the enormous estates by death duties. It seems John Maclean was wrong. A workers’ co-operative nation will be created from London, without an independent Scotland showing the way.
I know (you thrawn old Devil) that you will not believe a word of this, and think I have a heart “too easily made glad”. I know you are even now reaching for your pen to describe for me all the obviously vicious worms gnawing at the roots of Blooming Britain. Leave that pen alone! I am going to die happy.
If you have read my publications (but has anyone alive ever done that?) if you have read A Loving Economy (which should be read as a poem, just as your worst poems should be read as treatises) if you have skimmed through even a paragraph of my poor neglected little magnum opus you will know I am unusually acquaint with my inner workings. No wonder! I was introduced to them by a genius. A cerebral haemorrhage will release me from this mortal coil in early December. I am winding down the little clinic which was launched so bravely and richly fifty-six years ago. Easily done! My patients now are some children’s pets and two elderly hypochondriacs who feel slightly happier after talking breathlessly to me for an hour about things only Sigmund Freud could understand. I have found homes for all my dogs except Archie, the Newfoundland. He has a home waiting for him, but will not be led off to it until the friend who calls on me after breakfast (Nell Todd, a courageous Sapphist who defies the Glasgow police in male attire) uses the basement key I have given her, and finds me out. Completely. I would have preferred a warm steady man at the last, but there has only been one in my life, and he died thirty-five years ago. Not that I disliked the fly-by-nights — some of them were great fun. But steady heat is what I need now, and my Archie will provide it.
If you insult me by offering to provide it I will never speak to you again. My love to Valda.
Sincerely,
Victoria McCandless.
Dr. Victoria McCandless was found dead of a cerebral stroke on 3rd December 1946. Reckoning from the birth of her brain in the Humane Society mortuary on Glasgow Green, 18th February 1880, she was exactly sixty-six years, forty weeks and four days old. Reckoning from the birth of her body in a Manchester slum in 1854, she was ninety-two.
The Necropolis of Glasgow where the three principal characters of this book are interred in the Baxter Mausoleum — the Romanesque rotunda on the far right.
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GLASGOW GREEN, 1880. The circle surrounds the spot where Lady Victoria Blessington drowned herself: also the bridge from which she leapt; the wharf where Geddes saw her drown; the Humane Society House where Godwin Baxter examined her corpse.