Page 83 - Life of Gertrude Bell

COURAGE AND DETERMINATION 7i
off balance for long by those events over which she had no
control, was undecided what to do. In January she was at Rcdcar
looking after her father who was still recuperating from his long-
drawn-out rheumatic illness of the previous year. Her stepmother
persuaded her to pay a flying visit to London in early February,
however, for the Queen’s funeral and she described the procession
in a letter to Chirol:

We had scats in Piccadilly, just opposite Dover Street, and
we got there soon after eight. By nine all the entrances into
Piccadilly were blocked, and lots of people never got to their
seat at all... About ten Lord Roberts appeared and rode up
and down past us, much cheered. Soon after eleven the troops
began moving past — the Colonials very gallant, the new Irish
Guards with their green cockades. Leveson-Gower was among
!
the blue-jackets; and among the Field Artillery I was charmed !
to see Laurence Godman [her cousin], looking delightful with
his bearskin crushed down on to his lovely little face ... Then
we saw the cream-coloured ponies coming down the great
silent street, and it was almost impossible to believe that Queen
Victoria was not alive behind them, the living centre of it, as
she had been before ... Then the crowd of Kings, and Kings
to be, King Edward very dignified, the Emperor a little
behind him, very white and evidently much moved ...

The rest of that year until late summer was spent at Redcar and,
occasionally, at Rounton where grandfather Lowthian, now old
and ailing, was still in residence. So quickly had the youthful
years passed that she now regarded her own father, as children
will, as a lovably eccentric old man, tiiough he was only fifty-
seven. In August she wrote to her stepmother who was then in
London: ‘Father came in at four and announced that he wanted
to bicycle ... Dear old tiling.’ A few days later she departed for
Switzerland again.

On Wednesday August 21st she met up with her guides Ulrich
and Heinrich Fuhrer in the Bernese Oberland, and she was
obviously in a happy frame of mind for she had rare words of
praise for a woman acquaintance, Lily Grant Duff, who was
staying at the same hotel. ‘Lily looked very pretty in her big hat
and mountain clothes,’ she told her father.
Among the mountains and the climbers, her pleasure was