Gertrude Bell (6 page)

Florence told Gertrude and Maurice of her earliest acquaintance with Charles Dickens, whose daughter Kitty Perugine had been one of her first companions. Dickens was an intimate of her parents, Sir Joseph and Lady Olliffe, as was his contemporary Thackeray. Dickens often visited them in Paris. Once, when he was about to give a reading at the British Embassy in support of a charitable fund started by her father, Florence remembered Dickens entering the salon and asking, “And where is Miss Florence going to sit?” “Florence is not going,” said Lady Olliffe firmly. “She is too young.” “Very well then,” he replied cheerfully, “I shan't go either.” In the event, Florence sat in the front row and wept copiously at the melancholy death of Paul Dombey. Dickens wrote in a subsequent letter: “Florence at the reading tremendously excited.”

Florence's educational ideas were advanced for her day and much influenced by her admiration for progressive new European theories. Long after her own children had grown up, in 1911 she went to Rome to study the work of the educational reformer Maria Montessori. Her preference, where a governess could be afforded, was for schooling girls at home.
This was the education she chose for her own girls, Elsa and Molly. Molly wrote later:

My mother's idea of the equipment required for her two daughters was that we should be turned out as good wives and mothers and be able to take our part in the social life of our kind. We must speak French and German perfectly, and be on friendly if not intimate terms with Italian. We must be able to play the piano and sing a bit, we must learn to dance well and know how to make small talk. The more serious side of education did not take any part in the plans my mother made for us. Science, mathematics, political economy, Greek and Latin—there was no need for any of these.

No girl they knew was trained for any profession, nor did “girls of our class” go to school. That this worked well enough for the two sisters in their day is evident in the impression they gave of being delightful company. Less formidable than Gertrude, but with her erect bearing and good clothes sense, they became an attractive and entertaining couple, and much in demand. Virginia Stephen, later Virginia Woolf, mentioned them in a discursive letter about her first May Ball at Cambridge: “It was the Trinity ball . . . Boo was there, and Alice Pollock and the Hugh Bells (If you know them—MAP calls them ‘the most brilliant girl conversationalists in London'—and Thoby [her brother] was much attracted by them and them by him).”

Florence subscribed to the then common medical theory that girls become overstrained if subjected to too much mental exertion. For adolescent girls in particular, education was supposed to be a serious health risk. As late as 1895, when Gertrude was twenty-seven, a Dr. James Burnett, author of
Delicate, Backward, Puny and Stunted Children
, informed the world that a girl at puberty would always fall behind her brothers in academic achievement because of her “disordered pelvic life,” and assured readers that “Not one exception to this have I ever seen.” A book by Elizabeth Missing Sewell,
Principles of Education, Drawn from Nature and Revelation
, had stated that a girl should always be guarded from study, for “if she is allowed to run the risks, which, to the boy, are a matter of indifference, she will probably develop some disease, which, if not fatal, will, at any rate, be an injury to her for life.” Florence saw to it that all of the Bell girls had as active a life as their
brothers, but was beginning to realize that when it came to education, her formula would not do for every girl. As she put it, “There are a thousand of us who can walk along a level road and get to the end of it successfully, for one who can swim a river or scale a cliff which stands in the way.” Gertrude, she now speculated, was this exception.

When Maurice went to boarding school, the fifteen-year-old Gertrude missed him far more than she had expected. Her half-sisters and half-brother were much younger, and life became rather empty. She had long outstripped poor Miss Klug, who was constantly offended at the flat contradictions and dismissive behaviour of her troublesome charge. All her life Gertrude had trouble confining herself to armchairs, and could now be found at all times of day sprawled on the carpet flicking impatiently through a book, or thrashing away at knitting she had begun but would never finish. She would stalk about the house with a scowl on her face, airing her recently acquired views, arguing with anyone who would take issue with her and getting in the way of the maids. Invited to go and amuse herself in the garden, she invented a game called “rackets,” something like squash, which could be played on her own by smashing a ball as hard as she could against the coach-house doors. The constant banging and the cries of fury when she missed must have been a great irritation to Florence, perhaps trying to concentrate on some children's story or treatise on the nursery. Despite her father's remonstrations, Gertrude made a point of throwing her dog into the pond every day because “he does hate it so much.”

Florence, with three younger children to cope with, was at her wits' end to know how to occupy the teenager. She was not the only member of the family sooner or later to find Gertrude difficult. Molly Bell wrote: “Gertrude is being rather thorny & I shall have to have another scene with her soon—she contradicts everything Mother says, and goes out of her way to be disobliging and snubby.” It was not hard for Florence to come to the decision that Gertrude was a special case and that a fifteen-year-old so confident, so able and thirsty for knowledge, ought to be stretched.

Florence had made the best of beginnings with her stepdaughter, and her influence on Gertrude would be permanent. That influence would not always turn her in the direction that her stepmother wished, but in the things that mattered, however far she ventured, Gertrude
would all her life follow Florence's lead. She always followed the conventions and observances of her upbringing. She would always be devoted to her family, and however far her life would take her from home, she never distanced herself from their interests or thought them less important than her own.

Now, breathless with excitement, Gertrude was told that she was going to be sent to school in London.

*
It was Thomas Cubitt who rebuilt Osborne Castle on the Isle of Wight for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

My darling, dearest Mother,

I do so hate being here . . . if only you were in town. I couldn't be more desolate than I am now. Every day I want you more . . .

Will you please get me Gray's Elegy, also two brush-and-comb bags and a nightgown case. And a german book called Deutches Lesebuch by Carl Oltrogge.

And so Gertrude packed her trunk and went up to London with Florence on a third-class ticket—having had it pointed out to her that she would do herself no good if she was seen to be richer than the other pupils. In term time, during the first year, she would live with Florence's mother, Lady Olliffe, in the imposing but still dingy premises of 95 Sloane Street. It was a staid house, relieved only by the visits of the reprehensible Tommy, Florence's brother, who when playing billiards with his young step-niece would routinely chalk his nose along with the cue. He was a tease skilled in goading little girls to fury, and with older girls a flirt whose intentions, as he once assured a straight-faced father, were “strictly dishonourable.” His “deaf and stupid” sister Bessie, who lived with their mother, once spotted him through the window flirting with a young lady on a bench in the garden. She opened the window and hurled a tennis ball at him. Narrowly missing the object of his affections it hit him squarely on the side of the head.

The choice of school for Gertrude had been made easier by the fact
that a former friend of Florence's, Camilla Croudace, had recently become the “Lady Resident” of Queen's College in Harley Street. Housed in an elegant Georgian four-storey, cream-painted block, it had been founded twenty years before Gertrude's birth by the educational reformer and Christian Socialist Frederick Denison Maurice. The birthplace of academic education and recognized qualifications for women, it had been granted the first royal charter for female education in 1853. It produced confident and self-assured young women capable of playing a valuable part in the nation's intellectual, business, and public life. Later the school would number the writer Katherine Mansfield amongst its alumnae, but in 1884, when Gertrude enrolled, many of its graduates were destined to be governesses.

While this school was the best thing that could have happened for Gertrude, her excitement was soon overtaken by homesickness. This, for a young woman who had scarcely left her home town except for holidays in the company of sisters, brothers, and cousins, was at first severe. Distance certainly made her heart grow fonder of her stepmother. She observed her classmates narrowly, and was soon writing to ask Florence to get her “some stays”—the stiff laced whalebone corsets that she had discovered the other girls were wearing under their tightly buckled belts.

The pupils were taken to concerts and picture galleries, churches and cathedrals. Gertrude was quickly developing opinions about all things, and stating them forcibly, not least in her letters home: “I
don't
like Rubens. I
don't
like him at all . . . The passage walls are papered with the most dreadful green paper you ever saw . . . How I do loathe and detest St. Paul's . . . there is not a single detail which is not hideous not to say repulsive.”

The young ladies were scrupulously chaperoned wherever they went, and Gertrude, longing to see more of the sights of the city, chafed at not being allowed to go about on her own. “I wish I could go to the National,” she told her parents. “But you see, there is no one to take me. If I were a boy I should go every week!”

At Queen's College no less than at Red Barns, strict adherence to the conventions of the day was not negotiable. Gertrude must accept it, explained Mrs. Croudace, as a condition of her increased freedom and independence. Florence responded to Gertrude's complaint only that she
wished the child would not use abbreviations such as “National” for National Gallery. A ruffled Gertrude replied angrily:

I waded through [your letter] which I consider a great act of self-discipline—but I avenged myself by burning [it] promptly . . . The next letter I write to you, when I am not too cross to bother myself with finding words, my adjectives shall be as numerous as Carlyle's own . . . Would you have me say when talking of the sovereign: The Queen of England, Scotland, Ireland, Empress of India, Defender of the Faith? My life is not long enough to give everything its full title.

Receiving this somewhat smart letter, Florence may well have sighed. Hugh would have found it hard to suppress a smile at his daughter's spirit and powers of argument.

These outbursts would soon be followed by contrite messages to her parents that she had made new resolutions, and hoped that Florence would find her a better and more obedient daughter in future.

It had probably never occurred to Gertrude before to wonder whether people liked her or not. Now she had to acknowledge that she was not very popular at the school, and in response began to betray what might be a reciprocal emotion, the start of a lifelong haughtiness and aversion to the company of “ordinary” women. Florence counselled her, as tactfully as she could, against her tendency to boastfulness, which brought another outburst. Her schoolmates, she said, were “uninteresting” and then, finding a more diplomatic way to express her discomfiture, added: “It's a very disagreeable process finding out that one is no better than the common run . . . I've gone through rather a hard course of it since I came to College and I don't like it at all.”

For the second year at Queen's College she became a boarder, and got on better with her peers. She was asked to stay for the weekend by a friend from Florence's youth, Thackeray's daughter Anne, Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, and by the widow of the historian whose books she had devoured before breakfast, Mrs. J. R. Green. But approaches from her new schoolfriends were heavily censored from Redcar. Invitations, she had to learn, were not to be accepted before Florence and Hugh had checked the suitability of the family through Mrs. Croudace. Three invitations, already accepted, had to be turned down as a result, which did
not help to make her better liked. It has been assumed that these families were “not good enough” for the Bells because they were not important enough. This is unlikely. The homes that Florence would not allow Gertrude to visit were those where alcohol was consumed, where house parties were the excuse for extramarital activities, where girls were not strictly chaperoned—in other words, homes belonging to the often dissolute aristocracy, circles that might even include that of the Prince of Wales.

In the classroom, Gertrude shone. She was welcomed as an exceptional student who would volunteer for a higher class whenever she found the work easy. In her first year, in a class of some forty girls, she had come first in English history, her favourite subject, with marks of 88 out of 88. She had come second in English grammar, third in geography, and fourth in French and ancient history. She had not done at all well in scripture. When the master had asked her why she had not done better when she was doing so well in all her other subjects, her response was robust: “I don't believe a
word
of it!” Hugh and Florence only occasionally attended church, and no one could ever convince Gertrude that there was a God. She began to call herself an atheist.