Carabas

I'm someone playing cards with three other guys, and one of them mentions the (some surname beginning with T) manuscript. It's this anonymous collection of old medical notes. A few copies have been made of it, but it was never published, so it's very rare. I tell them a bit about that manuscript - I love having the chance to do so, I enjoy sharing stories from the past a great deal.

During the war, it was an open secret that T. was seeing a certain woman. He always used a nickname when he mentioned her to others, but everyone knew. (As I'm saying this, I'm seeing an image of myself playing cards with T. in the past, much like the scene with these men now, both of us in uniform; and then an image of that woman walking down a street.) And she'd often go to his room to make use of his typewriter. (I'm seeing a typewriter that doesn't actually make sense for this time period.) For whatever reason, when he left to return to England those notes she'd been working on were mixed in with his typewriter and his other things. He didn't make it back to England of course, and when his things were eventually recovered, that anonymous manuscript was naturally associated with him. But the identity of the author of the T. manuscript is Florence Nightingale.

This doesn't get the reaction from the other card players that I'd been hoping for - I get some odd looks but mostly they just seem bored. They change the subject, talking about pharmaceuticals. I'm disappointed - I'm reasonably certain Florence is still a household name, recent enough and well-known enough that I'd thought they would find this interesting, even though they were all born well after her death. It's always an isolating feeling when this happens - no one much cares about old dramas. But at least they only see it as the eccentricity of a history buff, and I don't have to worry about them seeing me as a threat.