Gertrude Bell Read Online Free PDF Page B

and Maurice collected all the hats from the hall and threw them at their stepmother. Gertrude stopped only when one of Florence’s hats found its way into the fire. “Even as a child, Gertrude took a great interest in clothes,” one of the family told me.
    For most of her eight years, Gertrude had been used to bossing the servants and running rings around her governess. She bitterly resented discipline, and liked to goad people to distraction. Miss Ogle had departed in dudgeon, but Florence hoped for better from Miss Klug. This German lady stayed much longer, but Florence was periodically irked by having to placate the new governess over Gertrude’s misdeeds.
    The house where Mrs. Bell was establishing her new domain was a raw brick Arts and Crafts building, an early and rather confused Philip Webb experiment with the local vernacular. Webb had designed William Morris’s own Red House, and he copied many elements into this second commission, Red Barns. Morris had decorated the interior, and his charming botanical wallpapers were used throughout. The house was solid and small in comparison with the elegant homes of Florence’s youth, but it would expand as the family expanded. There was a porch giving onto Kirkleathan Street, which led to a large square of terraced Georgian houses around a bleak green. It was a short walk from Red Barns to Redcar’s long beach, stretching from Coatham southward to the Saltburn cliffs. Around its featureless crescent of sand, where the clinker-built fishing boats were beached at low tide, there were striped bathing huts in the summer, and donkeys for children’s rides. The countryside around was flat, and not especially pretty. But Florence had always thought that children should be brought up in the countryside, and there was no doubt that Gertrude and Maurice loved the place.
    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 amongthe 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