Had it been made, the television drama would have begun with a middle-aged Mary Seacole, the British-Jamaican woman who nurses hundreds of British soldiers during the Crimean war, introducing herself to staff at the British military hospital at Scutari, near Istanbul, in 1855. Among them is Florence Nightingale, who briskly asks Seacole what she wants. This, at least, is the way the late author Andrea Levy planned to start to tell the extraordinary life story of Seacole in a series that never happened.
Digital forensics work at the British Library now shows just how Levy, best known for her prizewinning book Small Island, wanted to turn the 1857 memoir of the famous wartime nurse into a compelling TV drama. Her revisions and edits of this 2012 screenplay, alongside other unpublished projects, have been recovered by archivists from defunct computer files.
