Page 281 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

faisal’s kingdom *55
propaganda machine and the annual reports which summarised
events with unfailing regularity and authority and implanted the
famous initials GLB indelibly on the minds of those few ministers
and officials of Whitehall who did not already know her. She still
worked for long hours in the Victorian Colonial-style High
Commission on the right bank of the Tigris with its six rooms up
and down facing the river and shuttered windows, its wrought-
iron gates and balconies and handsomely laid-out gardens, and at
her cottage home. She was described, in situ as it were, by Vita
Sackville-West who went to Baghdad early in 1926 with her
husband Harold Nicolson and wrote of the journey in Passenger
to Tehran.
Baghdad ... is a dusty jumble of mean buildings connected by
atrocious streets, quagmires of mud in rainy weather, and in dry
weather a series of pits and holes over which an English farmer
might well hesitate to drive a wagon. I confess that I was
startled by the roads of Baghdad, especially after we had turned
out of the main street... Then a door in a blank wall... a
broadly smiling servant, a rush of dogs, a vista of a garden-
path edged with carnations in pots, a little verandah and a litde
low house at the end of the path, an English voice—Gertrude
Bell. I had known her first in Constantinople, where she had
arrived straight out of the desert, with all the evening dresses
and cutlery and napery that she insisted on taking with her on
her wanderings; and then in England; but here she was in her
right place ... would I like to see her museum, wouldn’t I?
Did I know she was Director of Antiquities in Iraq? wasn’t
that a joke? and would I like to come to tea with the king? ...
I limped after her as she led me down the path, talking all the
time, now in English to me, now in Arabic to the eager
servants. She had the gift of making everyone feel suddenly
eager ... Then she was back in her chair, pouring out informa­
tion : the state of Iraq, the excavations of Ur, the need for a
decent museum, what new books had come out? and what was
happening in England? The doctors had told her that she
ought not to go through another summer in Baghdad, but what
should she do in England? ...
While Miss Sackville-West was on her travels she received a letter
from Virginia Woolf who knew Gertrude well from bygone days
in London, one of those skittish, opinionated letters in which