Page 55 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

family matters 4i

‘Everything seems to run into a mad luxuriance - even the
architecture, which is all twisted columns and twisted arches, and
twisted elaboration and designs, and everywhere tiny marble
courts with fountains in them, roped over with banks of roses.
But it’s very beautiful to see. I could wish man were not so vile!
Aunt L. is the very most wearisome woman the Almighty ever
invented.’ She sat with her cousins Lilian and Clara after dinner,
looking down over the town and beyond to the lights of the
harbour, ‘with the sweet smell of roses everywhere and the
garden full of nightingales
The journey home was described in a flurry of letters to her
stepmother, capturing in short graphic passages the people, the
sights and sounds and incidents. Her alarm at the thought of
having to tip the servants. Chillon: ‘ ... the whole place full of
memories of those wonderful people at the beginning of the
century. Shelley’s name is cut on one of the pillars —more
interesting than fifty holy prisoners!’ The funicular train ride to
Glion where she had cakes for breakfast and went into the
meadows: ‘They were lovely those meadows ... full—full of
flowers. Whole hillsides were white as if snow had fallen on
them-white with the big single narcissus. I never saw anything
so beautiful.’ There was the meeting in Switzerland with old
uncle Tom Bell, Grandfather Lowthian’s only surviving brother,
‘a gentle old thing with blue eyes like Grandpapa’s. He collects
butterflies’. And a vivid account of her attempt to mend Lord
Granville’s tricycle in Potsdam from which she was rescued by the
footmen of the British Embassy. Her stay with Maurice at Weimar
produced the comment: ‘He is an odd creature, Maurice, full of
perception.’ She arrived back in England to find that her step­
mother was the secretive cause of one of the sensations of the
London theatre in late Victorian times. Florence’s closest friend
and the most frequent of all the visitors to her London and
Redcar homes was the actress Elizabeth Robins whose current
stage attachment was to the Independent Theatre founded by
J. T. Grein in London’s Strand. She had often tried to persuade
Florence to write a play for the company but without success
until she produced a Swedish short story of Strindbergian stark­
ness. Florence was so moved by the plot that she straight away
sat down and wrote the play, transferring the characters and
situations to the industrial north of England. Miss Robins
rushed to London with the work and read it to Grein. ‘I shall