Page 69 - Life of Gertrude Bell

JERUSALEM 57
letters did not always conceal the shadows of distant events. In
January she received news of the death of one of her best-loved
and most devoted aunts, Ada, who had looked after her following
her mother’s death when she was three years old, and who had
married an officer of the Yorkshire Regiment, Lt-Colonel Arthur
Fitzpatrick Godman. They lived near the Bells at Smeaton Manor
in Northallerton, and Gertrude had seen her in the agony of a
long-drawn-out illness. The Boer War, the first real test of
Britain’s imperial power and the capabilities of its generals since
the Crimea, was not going well; and Maurice was about to leave
for South Africa in command of the Volunteer Service Company
of the Yorkshire Regiment. Her letters show a constant concern.
Early in February 1900 came the announcement of General
Buller’s retreat, just as Maurice’s company set off, but news of
the relief of Ladysmith came as her brother was on the high seas
and so, for a while, Gertrude and the family were able to concen­
trate on less worrying matters. Elsa and Molly, her half-sisters,
were now grown young women, enlivening a social circle of
which Gertrude had already become a familiar member. It has
been said of them that they were archetypal ladies of ‘good
family’, impressive in appearance, utterly correct in behaviour
and with upright postures which even in Victorian England,
where all ladies of breeding sat and walked with a plumb-line
erectness, were remarkable. They seem to have had less of
Gertrude’s earnestness about them. Both were said by many
people who met them (and who were able to recall them in the
latter half of the twentiety century) to have been brilliant and
delightful conversationalists; an impression borne out by
Virginia Woolf who, as Miss Stephens, wrote to Emma Vaughan,
her ‘beloved Todelkrancz’, in June 1900: ‘Since I wrote ... we
have been to Cambridge for the May week and I have danced at
my first Ball. It was the Trinity ball, and the largest of all ...
Florence and Boo were there, and Alice Pollock and the Hugh
Bells (If you know them—MAP calls them “the most brilliant
girl conversationalists in London”—and Thoby was much
attracted by them and them by him) ... ’ Three years earlier the
girls had started a magazine called the Monthly Cousin which was
produced partly on a typewriter and partly by hand and to which
all members of the family and their friends were expected to
contribute. Gertrude sent her sisters some picturesque eastern
essays for editorial consideration.