Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell Read Free Book Online Page B

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.

Two
EDUCATION

    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 factthat 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