Gertrude Bell (5 page)

Given a constant succession of ponies, the children virtually grew up on horseback. Gertrude's fearless exploits often led, inevitably, to Maurice's coming home covered in bruises from trying to follow his sister's lead. Among her contemporaries, she became known as the most courageous of riders, and her letters to aunts and cousins were full of boasts about her prowess. “My poney behaved like a brute, kicking all the time. If she does that with mother, I am afraid mother will come strait off,” she wrote to her cousin Horace.

Hacking about, galloping along the beach, or out hunting, girls rode side-saddle in the appropriate habit, consisting of a black jacket and buttoned apron skirt over breeches. “Yesterday I rode like a circus boy,” wrote Gertrude, meaning that she had that day ridden astride. The Bell children would trot along the sands under the supervision of the stableboy, the nurse, or the governess. If accompanied by the anxious Miss Klug, once out of sight of the house Gertrude would kick her pony into action and gallop off into the distance, leaving the governess to run hopelessly after her, calling her name. After taking the children for a beach walk one day, Miss Klug returned alone and burst into Florence's literary reverie in floods of tears. When she had told them to come back to the house for tea, she reported, they had run away and hidden among
the fishing boats, from which she had been trying to chivvy them for an exhausting and fruitless thirty minutes.

Domineering and wilful, Gertrude was always demanding attention and expecting her father to spend his every domestic moment entertaining her. Hugh, preoccupied at the works, was often at home for only one day a week. Florence, naturally, wanted some time alone with her husband, and her Victorian insistence on domestic order and routine, though hardly onerous, was bound to interfere with the children's freedom. Gertrude found that she could not be sure of bending the will of her stepmother as she could her father's. The child's way of counter-manding Florence's dictates was to wait until her father came home, and then try to cajole him to her defence.

It was not long before Florence's own children were born—Hugo in 1878, Elsa in 1879, and Molly two years later. A two-storey wing was added at Red Barns, with bedrooms, bathroom, and schoolroom, as well as a stable block. Already an intrepid tree climber, Gertrude thought scaffolding a brilliant addition to the house. Once, when she used it as a climbing frame, Florence, spotting her from a window, came dashing into the garden and ordered her to come down at once. Gertrude chose not to hear, and so Florence ran for Hugh and sent him up after her. She returned to the house to watch from the window and was horrified to see her husband climbing a ladder to the upper floor to join his daughter—with a small child under each arm.

Hugh was a wonderful father and not too fastidious about the children hurting themselves. As Elsa was to remember late in life, he would accompany them on Sunday scrambles among the sandhills and “suddenly crook his walking stick round our ankles so that we should fall off the top of a precipice.” She remembered him “running along the hard sand with a child in each hand, and then clapping us together in front.” To Gertrude's questions he would provide ample answers to which she would attend closely. In this she was different from her siblings. If any of them should idly muse, “I wonder what makes the tide come up” or “What is bi-metallism?” they would immediately shout, “Don't tell me!” Hugh would laugh and say, “You naughty children!”

Life had gradually got better for Hugh, and there came a moment when he realized that he had a happy home again, that it had been no mistake to ask Florence to marry him. A revealing letter of Florence's to
Molly tells of the occasion early in her life at Red Barns when she and Hugh reached the turning point.

I remember as if it were yesterday the coming at Redcar, when we were about your ages—when your father could have got in [to Parliament] with almost a walkover at Middlesbrough and was frantically anxious to do it and go in for politics, for you know how much he cares and always has cared. That was all his head was in. His father (this is a very private letter!!) was against it and quite without sympathy in it—as always he was, and trade wasn't good, and we walked up and down the gravel path talking it over and finally decided to give it all up and do nothing but Middlesbrough. You know how he then threw himself into that. But it was . . . a lifelong renunciation and a lifelong regret and we knew it was at the time. And then he felt afterwards what it would have been to him if he had to do it alone—and what a joy it was to care so much and be so close to each other. What a huge difference it makes in the whole aspect of life to be married—that there is some one who cares as much for the thing that happens to one as one does oneself!

As far as Gertrude was concerned, life at Red Barns was perfect, and she too came to realize that Florence's arrival had only improved their family life. The children were outdoors all summer, and had their own garden plots. Gertrude was finding that she loved flowers and had a natural skill with plants. In an early diary entry, in careful italic script, she writes: “We now have out some yellow crocus and primroses snodrops and primroses.”

Spelling, music—of which Florence was so fond—and cooking were three fields in which she had no interest and therefore did not excel, in spite of her stepmother's efforts. On the other hand, Gertrude's nose was never out of a book. She would read anything she could get hold of:
The Days of Bruce
by Aguilar was a favourite, as was Green's
History of the English People
, which she perused every day before breakfast. “I am reading a very nice book called The Tower of London . . . all full of murders and tortures.”

When Florence was mysteriously “unwell”—in other words, pregnant—Gertrude and Maurice were sent off to stay with large groups of cousins, to a gentler southern seaside or to Scotland, where they picnicked and learnt to climb rocks and to fish.

My dear Mamy,

We are having such fun here. Yesterday we caught an alive eel. Every morning we go to the rocks in our wading suits, our game is to jump off the rocks into the pool, we call it taking headers, it is such fun. Give my love to Papa.

From your loving child, Gertrude

Her favourite companion was Horace Marshall, her first cousin and the son of her mother Mary Shield's sister, Mrs. Thomas Marshall. Then there were the Lascelles boys and their sister Florence, called after her stepmother, some years younger than Gertrude but always one of her favourite friends. Gertrude used her pocket money to buy birds' eggs for her collection, competing with Horace—“5 Jackdaws, 2 Golden Crested Wrens, l Greenfinch, 2 Brown Linnet,” she wrote in her diary—or to buy as many pet animals or birds as Florence would allow. In the garden shed lived the pet raven, Jumbo, to be kept for ever out of the way of the excitable cat they called “the Shah.” When, in the course of time, these died, Gertrude would assuage her grief by laying on lavish funerals, complete with cortège of family and staff, cardboard coffins, crosses, and flowers.

Beyond the Red Barns garden and the railway track was a large enclosed private park (now turned into a public garden) in which the children could ride their ponies and play on their own, almost within view of the house. Laid out around a pond were pathways through the trees where they could ride, or walk on stilts, until the gong rang out for midday “dinner,” or “teatime” (their last meal before bed). Sometimes on a Sunday, Hugh would take the two oldest children out into the country around Redcar or along the beach, all of them on horseback, with a picnic tea packed by Florence. Gertrude would lay out the sandwiches on a checked blanket, and play hostess to Hugh and Maurice.

For rainy days, Gertrude and Maurice had invented a game of hide-and-seek called “Housemaids,” a game that she would remember and that would come to have a very different significance for her in the desert, many years later. Beginning in the cellar, where the children could stand upright but the adults had to bend their heads, the object was to run silently along the many corridors and up the narrow, twisting stairs that led up to the maids' bedrooms, without being seen by the servants. If you were spotted, you screamed and went back, to begin again.
Or you might begin from behind the water tank in the attic, which could be reached up a short ladder fixed to the wall, then scuttle down to the laundry and the housekeeper's room in the quiet semi-basement. Lined with cupboards painted cream, its William Morris wallpaper depicted singing blackbirds perched on a trellis wreathed in leaves and fruit against a dark-blue sky. A trace of it still remains today.

Gertrude was lucky to have a stepmother with Florence's sweet nature. A harsher regime could have dented her stepdaughter's confidence, or more likely turned her into the rebel she somehow never became. Florence's younger daughter, Molly, later Lady Trevelyan, wrote of her mother: “I cannot remember her speak in a harsh way to us, nor shout at us for wrong-doing. She was gentle and forbearing, full of tenderness to all children, unselfish and sympathetic to a degree that went far beyond any other person I have ever known . . . The security of her presence was an unfailing standby.”

Florence was also great fun. The children had turned the garden shed into a playhouse and named it the Wigwam. They had a rubber stamp with the name on it, and would deliver stamped letters containing very formal tea or dinner invitations to their parents, the gardener, or the governess. Florence, emerging from the house in response to one of these invitations, in her very best evening gown and with diamonds in her hair, had found the children waiting to wheel her to the shed in a goat cart. On the way to the Wigwam they upset the cart onto the gravel but Florence, though scratched and dirtied, stayed on heroically through the afternoon programme, not only demonstrating her good nature but also providing a fine example of social poise.

Another invitation invited “Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Bell to tea on Saturday August 13, 1892, at 5 pm” and added “RSVP.” Florence, much teased by the children for her French accent, had accepted along similar lines. “To Monsieur and Mesdames de Viguevamme, Red Barns, Coatham, Redcar” she wrote, “The Marchioness de Sidesplitters will have much pleasure in dining this evening with Mr. Prinketty, Miss Fiddlesticks, and Miss Pizzicato at 7:30,” and—probably anxious not to sacrifice another evening dress—she had added: “She regrets that the unfortunate delicate state of her health will not permit her to wear on this occasion her Court dress and feathers or to powder her hair.”

Entertaining and tolerant as Florence could be, she was rigorous
about behaviour. She was forever writing essays with titles such as “The Minor Moralist” or “Si Jeunesse Voulait” (“If Only the Young Would . . .”). Her rules concerning good manners were not negotiable, whether she was ticking off a waiting coachman who had left his driving seat to shelter from the rain, or a child who had failed to greet guests correctly. Manners, she insisted, were as important for ourselves as for others. She might have been repeating a conversation with an older Gertrude when she wrote: “However valuable the intellectual wares you may have to offer, it is obvious that if your method of calling your fellow man's attention to them is to give him a slap in the face at the same time, you will probably not succeed in enlisting his kindly interest in your future achievements.”

The impatient Gertrude had some difficulty with all of this. To her, a conversation was about finding out something or telling someone something. She could not feel very interested, she may well have retorted, in her fellow man's assessment of her achievements. But there were times when Florence was entirely on Gertrude's wavelength, as in her deploring “the tendency displayed by many otherwise reasonable people to believe that their own race is of quite peculiar interest, their own family traits the most worthy of note, the school they have been to the only possible one, the quarter of London they live in the most agreeable, and their own house the best in it”; it was “an insidious peril to be striven against.” Half English and half Irish herself, she was sensitive to the kind of slur that commonly figured in
Punch
cartoons about the French, their habits, hygiene, food, and morals, all of which she knew in many cases to be superior to those of the British. This climate of receptiveness to other standards and ways of life was the best initiation to travel that Gertrude could have absorbed in her childhood. Later in life, she was to take it to its logical conclusion—and far further than Florence could ever have intended.

“Correct” as had been Florence's upbringing, the cosmopolitan society to which she had been exposed before her marriage to Hugh Bell had plunged her into an intellectual and artistic milieu that she would probably not have encountered if she had been brought up in England. Not until Edward VII came to the throne were actresses and artists and newly moneyed merchants routinely included in aristocratic circles, unless under the particular freedoms implied by patronage. Florence was to make
great friends with actors in the course of her life, in particular Coquelin, a star of the French theatre, Sybil Thorndike, and the American actress Elizabeth Robins. Florence met Robins, who introduced the plays of Ibsen to the English stage, soon after her own arrival in London. Despite the fact that Robins was an active member of the suffrage movement, with which Florence could never agree, they became intimates. Robins brought Florence's most famous play,
Alan's Wife
, to the West End in 1893, taking the lead in this tragedy of working-class life. She became one of the Bells' most frequent houseguests, adding much to the texture of the intellectual background in which Gertrude was to be raised. Liza, as they called her, would amuse the children by taking them into her bedroom and demonstrating a theatrical “pratfall,” flat onto her face on the carpet. Later, when Gertrude was older and after Florence had retired to bed, the two women would sit up late discussing the pros and cons of suffrage. Florence felt so strongly on this issue, and wrote so much in support of anti-suffrage, that she could not discuss it with Liza. Gertrude and Liza became lifelong correspondents, and the constant traveller was often to mention in the letters she wrote from her desert tents how much she missed their “fireside chats.”