Page 23 - Life of Gertrude Bell

SOCIETY AND OXFORD II
Charles Dickens was a regular caller at the Olliffcs’ home when
he was in France and he found special delight in the company of
the young Florence, begging her father to allow her to attend his
play-readings when she was between seven and ten years old. It
was on Sir Joseph’s orders that the novelist and his family were
sent back to England when the ‘Boulogne sore-throat’ struck in
1856; and it was to Lady Olliffe that Dickens divulged his youthful
love of Maria Beadnell, Dora of David Copperfield. Florence was
multi-lingual and was reared on the Paris Opdra and the Theatre
frangais. Her real passion, though, was music and she wanted to
study at the Royal College in London as a child but her parents
would not hear of it, and so she settled for writing as a pastime,
though even that art had to be practised in some secrecy. She
reacted to the constraints of her time by making a friend of
Coquelin, who produced one of her plays anonymously, and by
becoming one of the leading lights of the realist school of drama
which, in later years, centred on Ibsen and Shaw. She had endless
patience with children, for whom she wrote a string of one-act
plays in English, French and German, and she had decided views
on their upbringing. She believed that ‘urbanity should be per­
sistently taught and practised in the home’. Good manners were
her yardstick in judging people, and it was said of her that she
belonged to a generation which held that ‘people might not talk
about their health or their means’. She upheld the principle
religiously as she held court at the Yorkshire home of the Bells,
almost always dressed in black, and always at the centre of a
scene which was warm in its domesticity and scintillating in its
companionship.
Florence Bell’s sister Mary was married to Frank Lascelles,
then a secretary at the embassy in Washington, and she and Hugh
spent their honeymoon with them in America. When they arrived
back at Red Barns she began to take a close interest in the educa­
tional progress of her ‘affectionate little friend’. By the age of
eleven Gertrude was reading Green’s History before breakfast
and devouring books with immense enthusiasm. Her bubbling
enjoyment of holidays with her favourite aunts—Katie at High-
field, where Horace remained her constant companion, and her
father’s sister Florence, now Mrs Walter Johnson, in Inverness-
shire—still flowed from her letters, but now there was more of
books and history. ‘I have finished my days of Bruce. On Thursday
Ivor and I took off our shoes and stockings and padeled up a