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dictates was to wait until her father came home, and then try to cajole him to her defence.
    It was not long before Florence’s own children were born—Hugo in 1878, Elsa in 1879, and Molly two years later. A two-storey wing was added at Red Barns, with bedrooms, bathroom, and schoolroom, as well as a stable block. Already an intrepid tree climber, Gertrude thought scaffolding a brilliant addition to the house. Once, when she used it as a climbing frame, Florence, spotting her from a window, came dashing into the garden and ordered her to come down at once. Gertrude chose not to hear, and so Florence ran for Hugh and sent him up after her. She returned to the house to watch from the window and was horrified to see her husband climbing a ladder to the upper floor to join his daughter—with a small child under each arm.
    Hugh was a wonderful father and not too fastidious about the children hurting themselves. As Elsa was to remember late in life, he would accompany them on Sunday scrambles among the sandhills and “suddenly crook his walking stick round our ankles so that we should fall off the top of a precipice.” She remembered him “running along the hard sand with a child in each hand, and then clapping us together in front.” To Gertrude’s questions he would provide ample answers to which she would attend closely. In this she was different from her siblings. If any of them should idly muse, “I wonder what makes the tide come up” or “What is bi-metallism?” they would immediately shout, “Don’t tell me!” Hugh would laugh and say, “You naughty children!”
    Life had gradually got better for Hugh, and there came a moment when he realized that he had a happy home again, that it had been no mistake to ask Florence to marry him. A revealing letter of Florence’s toMolly tells of the occasion early in her life at Red Barns when she and Hugh reached the turning point.
    I remember as if it were yesterday the coming at Redcar, when we were about your ages—when your father could have got in [to Parliament] with almost a walkover at Middlesbrough and was frantically anxious to do it and go in for politics, for you know how much he cares and always has cared. That was all his head was in. His father (this is a very private letter!!) was against it and quite without sympathy in it—as always he was, and trade wasn’t good, and we walked up and down the gravel path talking it over and finally decided to give it all up and do nothing but Middlesbrough. You know how he then threw himself into that. But it was . . . a lifelong renunciation and a lifelong regret and we knew it was at the time. And then he felt afterwards what it would have been to him if he had to do it alone—and what a joy it was to care so much and be so close to each other. What a huge difference it makes in the whole aspect of life to be married—that there is some one who cares as much for the thing that happens to one as one does oneself!
    As far as Gertrude was concerned, life at Red Barns was perfect, and she too came to realize that Florence’s arrival had only improved their family life. The children were outdoors all summer, and had their own garden plots. Gertrude was finding that she loved flowers and had a natural skill with plants. In an early diary entry, in careful italic script, she writes: “We now have out some yellow crocus and primroses snodrops and primroses.”
    Spelling, music—of which Florence was so fond—and cooking were three fields in which she had no interest and therefore did not excel, in spite of her stepmother’s efforts. On the other hand, Gertrude’s nose was never out of a book. She would read anything she could get hold of:
The Days of Bruce
by Aguilar was a favourite, as was Green’s
History of the English People
, which she perused every day before breakfast. “I am reading a very nice book called The