A caring nurse caught in the crossfire
If only Jacintha Saldanha could have gone home. After that awful night shift, when the nurse put two prank callers pretending to be the Queen and the Prince of Wales through to the Duchess of Cambridge’s ward, she should have gone straight back to her family and had a therapeutic weep at the kitchen table.
“I’ve done the most terrible thing,” she could have said to her husband, Ben Barboza. A solid, dependable accountant, he would have reassured his wife it wasn’t her fault. The hospital would understand. Besides, there were far worse things than being duped by a pair of Aussie prats. Jacintha’s two teenage children would have been getting ready for school. Their beloved faces would have reminded her that it wasn’t the end of the world. We make mistakes and life goes on.
It is immensely sad to know it was the end of 46-year-old Jacintha’s world. She could not go home. For a nurse, even one working in a select private hospital like the King Edward VII, affording somewhere to live in central London is out of the question. Thousands of the capital’s best nurses hail from India and the Philippines. This caring diaspora of skilled women often live hundreds, even thousands of miles away from their families. Jacintha’s husband and children were in Bristol. So she went back to the nurses’ block in Marylebone and was horribly alone with what George Eliot called “the tingle of a remembered shame.”
We know the Sydney radio station 2DayFM, whose hosts Michael Christian and Mel Greig made the hoax call, claims it telephoned the hospital five times to obtain permission to broadcast the material, as required by the Australian media’s code of practice. (The hospital denies this.) Receiving no reply, it went ahead anyway. On social media, Jacintha’s response to the DJs and their woeful royal impersonations spread like fire.
I thought the hoax was cringe-making and grossly unfair. What I heard was a courteous, rather weary foreign nurse in the small hours of the morning, doing her best to be helpful. Bangalore-born and a devout Catholic, Jacintha didn’t come from a culture that assumes mocking the reigning monarch is the norm. Pranks have their place. From Shakespeare’s cross-gartered Malvolio to Sacha Baron-Cohen’s mustachioed Borat, writers have gulled the vain, the deluded and the merely daft.
However, Jacintha did not see the funny side of an honest mistake being held up for ridicule around the world. How soon before the media identified the nurse who blundered and breached the ailing Kate’s privacy? The hospital insists it offered her its “full support,” but what did that consist of? She must have felt so desperately alone.
“There is an argument that there is only one cause of suicide, and that is isolation,” says Dr. Max Pemberton, a Telegraph columnist who works in mental health. He quotes French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s groundbreaking Suicide, published in 1897: “In every case, there is this empty isolation.”
Pemberton says: “The individual feels separation from the rest of society — that isolation can be cultural, linguistic, social or geographical. Mrs. Saldanha was separated off from the hospital because she felt she had failed them, and from her family, who were far away. The kinship mechanism, which would normally fall into place, just wasn’t there.”
So great was Jacintha’s isolation it seems, she didn’t even contact her family to tell them what had happened, and share her distress. “If we’re all leading lives of quiet desperation, there are some of us who are much quieter than others,” says Pemberton.
Jacintha left three suicide notes. One for her devastated family, and a second in which she reportedly criticizes hospital staff. A third gave details of the funeral she wished to have in India. Who can blame that caring nurse for wanting to be buried at home, far from hoaxers who take for granted a thick skin and bouncy resilience?
I hope her grieving children will know one day what a marvellous mother they had. Jacintha’s brother, Naveen, said she had plans to start a nursing centre in India and was “a proper and righteous person” who would have been devastated after unwittingly putting through the hoax call. “She would have felt much shame,” he said.
Shame and righteousness? Such words are not in the vocabulary of Aussie hoax callers, nor of the world that found Jacintha’s naivete and credulousness amusing. But that world is less good than she was.