A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott

On her first night in her new room, a long narrow studio overlooking a courtyard with a pump, she observed her opposite neighbour across the yard. ‘He was a young bearded Frenchman, animated and rather good-looking, and despite the beard I thought he might be an amusing neighbour.’ He seemed to be giving a party; there were a lot of people, a lot of late-night toing and froing. In fact he was doing a moonlight flit. She was rather disappointed.

The next occupant of the opposite studio hanged himself: she saw his dark figure through the window, fixing something to the ceiling. The afternoon before he died she had had her first conversation with him, and she tormented herself with feelings of guilt. ‘He could have been planning these ultimate measures while I stood beside him unawares. How dreadful were these unawarenesses! It is impossible to take on the responsibility of intimacy with everyone who stretches out a hand… I found it difficult to believe that my sympathy had been so dormant. I was well, healthy and happy. How unspeakably grim.’ Quite soon she moved again.

Her new studio had a flat roof; she rigged up a mackintosh awning and slept out, rain or shine, pulling the mackintosh this way or that according to which way the rain was blowing in. It was in this studio that she entertained Rodin to lunch.

She had taken to visiting the great sculptor in his studio on Saturdays; though he had no official students at that stage he liked her and allowed her presence. The lessons she learnt from him were simple and essential, and she followed them all her life: to love the great masters, to have absolute faith in nature, and to work relentlessly. He wrote, and she followed: ‘All life surges from a centre, expands from within outwards. The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!’

I would walk with him round his studio, he would open small drawers, such as one is used to finding birds’ eggs in, and show dozens and dozens of exquisitely modelled little hands or feet, tiny things of a delicious delicacy to compare with the grand rough Penseur or his Bourgeois de Calais. He would pick them up tenderly one by one and then turn them about and lay them back. Sometimes he would unwrap from its damp cloth, generally an old shirt, his latest work and, spreading out his hands in uncritical ecstasy, exclaim ‘Est ce beau, ça? Est ce beau?’ [Is it lovely, that? Is it lovely?] Sometimes he would call a model to pose for him, and taking pencil and water draw, never taking his eyes off the model, never looking at all at his paper. Sometimes he signed one and wrote my name on the back and gave it to me.

Rodin asked if he could come and have lunch in her studio. She improvised a lunch table from a couple of boxes, fried some eggs, provided ‘some lovely coloured pomegranates’ and hoped he would not be too hungry. ‘Brave peasant that he was, he would eat bread and cheese.’ He did, but he also ate a pomegranate. ‘Suddenly I became aware that he appeared to be eating the pomegranate hard pips and all. Anxiously I watched. No pips appeared. I was deeply concerned, but much too shy to comment. Long after lunch I saw in a looking glass the old man hastily approach my open window and rid himself of the million seeds. But for his beard he could never have kept up for half an hour such good manners!’

On another occasion when he was to visit she was distracted by a neighbouring student threatening suicide: she rushed off to help dissuade him, squashing the clay statuette she had been working on as she went, and by the time she got back Rodin had been and gone.

She kept very quiet about her friendship with him, learnt from him and treasured his compliments to her work. One of her most valued possessions was the first letter in which he addressed her as Cher collègue (Dear Colleague) rather than Chère élève (Dear Pupil). He called her ‘un petit morceau grec d’un chef d’oeuvre’ (a little Greek fragment of a masterpiece), ‘and I would look at my stalwart arms and legs and not feel at all fragmentary. But I looked for the days when I was allowed to lunch with him at Meudon and watch him work. Those were days not wasted.’ She had no desire, however, for the kind of mentor with which many female artists found themselves lumbered. And Rodin was notoriously amorous. Gwen John had gone to Paris to escape the influence of her brother Augustus and had ended up with Rodin, who rendered her (in her own words) ‘un petit morceau de souffrance et de désir’ (a little fragment of suffering and desire); Camille Claudel’s reputation both personal and professional was inextricably tangled up with him. Marie Laurencin had a similar problem with the writer Apollinaire. Kathleen remained independent. Many years later some people assumed she must have ‘more than studied’ with Rodin; it would have infuriated her had she known.

On a special train taking guests to a picnic to celebrate Rodin’s birthday Kathleen noticed a young woman talking ‘exceedingly bad and ugly French’. She was most upset when she realised that it was the great and revolutionary modern dancer Isadora Duncan. Only days before she and Hofbauer had seen Isadora perform and had wept aloud at the beauty of it. ‘The dancer had seemed the most remote, the most intangible expression of ultimate beauty. And here she was sitting in a crowded railway carriage talking the most Barbaric French.’ Kathleen closed her ears and looked out of the window to deny that her ‘vision glorious had been made flesh’. Later, at the picnic, someone played the fiddle and Isadora danced in her petticoat and bare feet. Kathleen was ‘blinded with joy’; Rodin was ‘enchanted’; ‘everyone was enchanted, save the few inevitable detrimentalists who seem to creep in almost everywhere.’ If there was one thing Kathleen could not abide, it was a detrimentalist. Then ‘Rodin took Isadora’s and my hands in one of his and said “My children, you two artists should understand each other.” And so began a long-lasting relationship of the most unusual order.’

FOUR Babies Are Being Born (#ulink_6d37f64f-a7ee-531d-9255-85805b2b4932)

1902–1905

‘AS AN ARTIST I thought of the dancer as a resplendent deity,’ Kathleen wrote, ‘as a human being I thought of her as a disgracefully naughty child. As an artist I exulted in her; as a tiresome child I could not abandon her.’ In 1902 Isadora was twenty-four, and well on her way to becoming ‘a household name in St Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Munich, Copenhagen, and Stockholm’, as Martin Shaw described her a couple of years later. She hadn’t yet had a duel fought over whether her free, unfettered modern form of dancing was better than the classical ballet, but she soon would have.

The friendship between Isadora and Kathleen was based on idealism, but though their ideals of independence, love, joy and art were similar, they had very different ways of manifesting them. In the beginning this did not matter. They both believed that inherited money limited a child’s freedom; that marriage limited a woman’s freedom; that adventure was the root of true wealth; that art and babies were the greatest achievements. Neither could understand why, in Isadora’s words, ‘if one wanted to do a thing, one should not do it’. In the end their different ways of treating these ideals drew them apart. Kathleen grew up; Isadora didn’t.

Even those who wanted to dislike Isadora’s dancing found it difficult. Some, because she had bare legs and loose tunics, wanted it to be lewd, and came away having to admit that these bare legs were the most innocent. Kathleen’s brother Rosslyn was very impressed by the fact that she ‘could dance in her petticoat without it seeming improper’. Some, because she was American, wanted it to be naive and pretentious, and came away admitting that it might be genius. Kathleen had no such problems. She wanted it to be art, and it was art, and for love of the dance she loved the dancer, and travelled with her across Europe. Hers was one hand held out from which Kathleen did not turn away.

‘Come with me to Brussels,’ said she, and I went. ‘Come with me to the Hague.’ At each place and many more she gave her grand performance. The greatest conductors led the finest orchestras for her; the houses were crowded out. At Liège one night the audience stood up in their seats and waved their hats and roared. I sat quietly on my seat, disposing of my preposterous tears, before going round to see that my dancer had her fruit and milk, and a shawl over her whilst she cooled off, before facing the wild enthusiasts who surged around the stage door and yelled their delight.

We got up early, ran in the park that was near, and did a few gymnastics. Whatever happened later, and terrible things did happen, at that epoch the dancer was a healthy, simple-living, hard-working artist, neither beautiful nor intelligent apart from her one great gift for expression. She was open handed, sweet tempered, pliable, and easy going. ‘Oh, what’s the difference?’ she would say if I, who hated to see her put upon, wanted to stand out against over charges etc. ‘What’s the difference?’

Kathleen mothered her, and she needed it. At that stage Isadora was more or less keeping her family (mother and three siblings—her father had not been in evidence for years) financially; later she would keep her lover and her dancing school too, all on the money made from performing. She had a wild, romantic imagination and a saleable talent, but she was not practical. When the ‘terrible things’ started to happen, it was to Kathleen that Isadora turned.

Though she loved travelling about with her friend, Kathleen did not wish to become ‘vicariously engulfed in dancing’. Back in Paris she worked hard at her own talent, but Isadora’s life touched upon hers in more ways than one. Among Isadora’s disciples was a pair of German Jewish brothers with whom Kathleen was rather impressed, as they seemed very literary. The younger, aged about twenty-eight, ‘hung himself round with mysteries’ and wanted to involve her in a ‘grand scheme he had’ for shipping revolvers to Russia hidden behind false bottoms in petrol cans. Writing in 1932, married to a cabinet minister (her second husband, Edward Hilton Young, later Lord Kennet), Kathleen claimed ignorance:

I thought this great fun and most exciting. I had no notion of the purpose of the firearms, nor why they should be sent thus. One day when the young man came round to my studio with a couple of suitcases full of I knew not what, saying that the police were going to search his rooms, I very gaily said, ‘Rather, leave them here. Stuff them out of sight somewhere.’ Later these young men introduced me to a middle-aged Englishman who, they told me, shared my enthusiasm for the Greek dramatists and philosophers. He was a prim little man, always neatly and conventionally dressed, but he seemed even poorer than me and I therefore took to making an evening meal at home and letting him share it, in return for which hospitality he would read the Greeks aloud to me. I knew little, indeed nothing, about him, so I was not in the least ruffled to hear that a bomb had been thrown at the King of Spain in a Paris street and that the Englishman had been arrested as the maker of this murderous bomb. All my standards of right and wrong had suffered such an upheaval since I left England that this seemed no queerer than many other things. Perhaps this sort of thing was quite usual, like having lots of mistresses and yet being quite nice. Perhaps it was only a matter of getting used to it. Still it was rather a ruffling affair to get a letter from the courts of justice to ask me to appear at the trial, as I was understood to be one of the accused’s few friends in Paris. The trial lasted several days. I crept off each morning, returning in the evening. I dared tell no one what I was up to. I was terrified that my name would get into an English paper, and I imagined aunts and uncles toying with the word anarchist. I hadn’t the foggiest notion what the word meant. But it made me feel uncomfortable.

This sounds to modern ears almost unbearably naive, but Kathleen was not political, not a newspaper reader. Her world was apart from such things, and she was dangerously cavalier about it all. ‘I was young enough not to have discerned the difference between knowledge and wisdom,’ she admitted later, ‘and nearly got myself into very hot water.’ As it was, all she had to do was stand up in court and say yes, she knew the accused, that he visited her studio and read Sophocles. Laughter in court. Did he ever talk about the King of England? Oh dear no. What did he talk about? Socrates. More laughter in court, and it was all over.

Her other adventure with the mysterious German Jew was a trip to the hotel where Oscar Wilde had died. Kathleen had read some Wilde, and found it ‘very amusing’. She still didn’t know what it was that he had done. Rosslyn had known Wilde’s lover Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, at Oxford (he had once appeared on the football pitch wearing a wreath of flowers and patent leather shoes) and had met Oscar Wilde, but he had not enlightened his little sister. Nigel Playfair told a story of how in 1894, when Kathleen had been visiting Rosslyn at Oxford, a clergyman had been hideously embarrassed when she, aged sixteen, had asked whom Holman Hunt had married. ‘My dear fellow,’ said the clergyman later, out of her earshot, ‘I could hardly tell a young lady that Holman Hunt had married his deceased wife’s sister!’ ‘Deceased wife’s sister’ became a joke term among them for something unmentionable. Times had changed and she was in very different company, but homosexuality still dared not speak its name.

The German talked about Wilde with awed voice as about a prophet or a martyr. I, amiable and acquiescent, said I would love to come down with him to the little place, where he was acquainted with the hotelkeeper. After a few preliminary civilities we were shown a rough wooden box full of books with a coat and waistcoat on the top of it. These were Oscar Wilde’s. In the coat pocket was a hypodermic syringe and a used handkerchief. Underneath were several signed photographs, and about fifty books, many of them signed by their authors. The hotelkeeper said, if the English lady would like the contents of the box she was welcome. I hesitated, and then went through it and took a selection of half a dozen of the most interesting. Would I not like the syringe? No thank you! It would be better to throw that away.

This adventure I innocently recounted to Hofbauer, who, to my amazement, detonated in violent rage. What right had the damned German Jew even to speak of Wilde to me, and to let me rummage about with his disgusting possessions, that, it seemed, was too much. Sales gens! (Disgusting man!)

Not unreasonably, Kathleen thought that her Rabelaisian painter, with all his mistresses, might be the person to clear up the mystery. ‘Oh, ne demandes pas ça h un français’ (Oh, don’t ask that of a Frenchman), he replied, with a ‘furious gesture’, and she was none the wiser.

Kathleen was to spend the rest of her time in Paris in the studio with the roof and the mackintosh, but that is not to say that she was always there. She had already acquired a taste for ‘vagabonding’: putting some hard-boiled eggs in a bag and going off for a long walk—preferably one lasting several weeks. Given the choice between sleeping indoors or out she would take out any time, and travel and adventure were next only to sculpting as her pleasures.

Late in 1903 a new adventure, a major one, opened to her. Noel Buxton, a young and fervent English politician (later a Labour MP and Lord Noel-Buxton), a friend of Rosslyn, visited her in Paris and made her feel that her existence there was something of a waste of time. He talked to her of the troubles in Macedonia.

In the first years of the twentieth century Macedonia was under Turkish rule, and armed bands known as Komitadjis had been supporting Bulgarian nationalist priests and teachers in Slav Macedonia. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, formed in 1896 for all Macedonians ‘regardless of sex, nationality or personal beliefs’ was loosely pro-Bulgarian and anti-Turkish. On the night of 2 August 1903, 750 of these rebels took over the small town of Krusevo, fighting under the skull and crossbones, the symbol of the uprising. When the Turkish garrison fled, the red flag was raised instead and Krusevo, population 15,000, was declared a socialist republic, the first in the Balkans. The republic lasted nine days: on 11 August 15,000 Turkish soldiers, plus the Bashi Bazouks (irregulars), moved in to put a stop to it. Despite deeds of heroism, the red flag gave way to the white.

The whole uprising was suppressed within three months, and a bitter vengeance taken: according to conservative Bulgarian figures, 9,830 houses in Macedonia were burned down and 60,953 people were left homeless. Whatever the true complexity of the political situation, to the West Turkey had put itself deeply in the wrong and the Bulgarians were innocent victims. And winter was drawing in.

Buxton told Kathleen of disease and starvation, torture and cold. He told ‘how the Turks were massacring the Bulgarians, how direly they were in need of help, how good was the organization in London to collect necessities for them but how there was nobody on the spot to see to the distribution of food, money and clothes.’ He told her that ‘the plight of the people there is unspeakable. Babies are being born, quite untended, that nobody wants, and quite unprovided for; terrible cases …’

Well, to Kathleen that was it. Babies, untended, unprovided for, unwanted? She would tend and provide for them. She wanted them. ‘My heart beating loudly against my chest, I said, “Couldn’t I go?” And so it came about that the very next day my work was again discarded, the key turned in the studio door, and off I went to England to see the austere lady who was looking for an assistant to undertake on-the-spot relief.’

Lady Thompson was ‘more than twice my age, and very sad’—her husband had dropped dead a year before. She engaged Kathleen ‘as if she were engaging a kitchen maid’, and on 4 December they were on their way to Salonica, Kathleen teaching herself Turkish and writing to Rosslyn: ‘Lady Thompson is fagged out… but I could face a massacring Turk with a cheerful rebuff.’

Dec 12: Set off about daybreak with Mr. Hazkell, the American missionary, to Monastir. All the way from Uskub the line was guarded by poor miserable-looking soldiers in tents surrounded by mud and water, they had been there some eight or nine months. Trains are not to run at night, as frequent attempts are made to blow them up. The day before we crossed the frontier 2 Servians (sic) being searched in the customs were found to be stuffed with dynamite. There is much smallpox in various districts. Dined excellently in a corner of the bar room at the Hotel Constantinople, where quantities of Turks were smoking, playing billiards and backgammon, and drinking. A Mussulman, mark you, may not drink wine, but he may drink spirits, for that was not mentioned in the letter of the law, not then being known. Much nonsense is talked of the dirt of these places. The cabinet is truly not pleasant but in no way worse than the Paris studio ones, and the rooms are perfectly clean and fresh. Doubtless my opinion might undergo a change in the warmer weather.

One of their first duties on reaching Monastir was to call on Hussein Hilmi Pasha, the Inspector General: ‘He was supposed to be omnipotent in Macedonia, and he fondly believed the supposition,’ wrote Henry Nevinson, a journalist who had also been inspired by Noel Buxton. Nevinson rather fell for Hilmi Pasha.

His dark blue uniform was drawn tightly around his tall and graceful figure, his fez thrown rather back from his pale and weary face, relieved so effectively against the carpet of deep purples and crimsons that further darkened the wall behind. It is the face of a tired but unflinching eagle, worn with toil. On each side of the delicate eagle nose, the deep brown eyes looked into yours with a mournful but steady sincerity that would carry conviction of truth into the wildest tale of Arabian Nights. A grave charm hangs over his face, sometimes broken by a shadowy smile…

Kathleen was less impressed. They had been advised to call on Hilmi in the evening, it being Ramadan.

he would have broken his fast and regained his good humour. Therefore at 10pm we drove to his dwelling and were ushered along passages by countless flunkeys. The great man was sitting at his writing table … for a long and weary time we discussed trivialities in French. I thought we should never arrive at the point of our visit; the heat of the room was excessive [‘a genial warmth’, Nevinson called it] and tho’ he plied us with lemonade and tea I was scarcely able to control my impatience. Numerous servants were rung for, for various causes, each retiring backwards, never turning his back upon the Pasha.

When it came to talking business Hilmi told them that three or four thousand hamlets had already been rebuilt. He gave them permission to travel in a particularly dangerous district; he would organize a guard for them, with a French-speaking officer; he would send word ahead that they were coming and arrange for the hospitality of the local bey. ‘His affability and foresight were amazing, but in spite of it all I was in no way attracted to him. I in no way distrust his intelligence, but he inspires me with no confidence and very little interest,’ Kathleen wrote in her diary. Her reaction proved right. Hilmi was not ‘capable, just, and inspired with a benevolent zeal for reform’ as Nevinson had hoped. He was a bureaucrat, master of the gap between an order given and an order carried out. His specialty, as all the Macedonian relief workers were to find out, was allowing everybody everything they wanted—in theory. Nevinson, on further experience of him, reported how he would smile and say, ‘But all must be well, I gave the order!’ ‘Of all the incarnations of State that I have ever known in any land he was perhaps the most complete,’ Nevinson concluded.

Kathleen had not even started work yet, and she was riddled with impatience. In Monastir ‘The depot house is stocked with blankets, which makes me even more anxious to get to work, they seem to be wasting their warmth.’ As the winter set in women with hungry babies and men with gangrenous wounds were coming down from the mountains to which they had fled during the fighting. Their need was great, and so was the desire of the relief workers to get on with it.

Then arrived Henry Brailsford, agent of the Macedonia Relief Fund, and his wife Jane, a very fine couple by all accounts: ‘extraordinary mental energy … accurate mind … unfailing memory … sensitive and sympathetic temperament … unflagging industry,’ said Nevinson of Henry, and of Jane ‘… much the same qualities, beautified by the further touch of feminine delicacy and imagination; beautified also by Celtic blue-grey eyes, dark hair and a smile to soften the heart of any infidel.’ Kathleen too found Brailsford to have ‘enormous personal charm’, even though he changed plans at the last minute, and she thought Jane Brailsford extremely pretty. With the Brailsfords, Lady Thompson, a guard of Turkish cavalry and an officer (ostensibly to guide and protect them, but actually to report on them and hinder them if need be—Brailsford called them ‘spies in uniform’), in a party of twenty, Kathleen set 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.