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Tower of London . . . all full of murders and tortures.”
    When Florence was mysteriously “unwell”—in other words, pregnant—Gertrude and Maurice were sent off to stay with large groups of cousins, to a gentler southern seaside or to Scotland, where they picnicked and learnt to climb rocks and to fish.
    My dear Mamy,
    We are having such fun here. Yesterday we caught an alive eel. Every morning we go to the rocks in our wading suits, our game is to jump off the rocks into the pool, we call it taking headers, it is such fun. Give my love to Papa.
    From your loving child, Gertrude
    Her favourite companion was Horace Marshall, her first cousin and the son of her mother Mary Shield’s sister, Mrs. Thomas Marshall. Then there were the Lascelles boys and their sister Florence, called after her stepmother, some years younger than Gertrude but always one of her favourite friends. Gertrude used her pocket money to buy birds’ eggs for her collection, competing with Horace—“5 Jackdaws, 2 Golden Crested Wrens, l Greenfinch, 2 Brown Linnet,” she wrote in her diary—or to buy as many pet animals or birds as Florence would allow. In the garden shed lived the pet raven, Jumbo, to be kept for ever out of the way of the excitable cat they called “the Shah.” When, in the course of time, these died, Gertrude would assuage her grief by laying on lavish funerals, complete with cortège of family and staff, cardboard coffins, crosses, and flowers.
    Beyond the Red Barns garden and the railway track was a large enclosed private park (now turned into a public garden) in which the children could ride their ponies and play on their own, almost within view of the house. Laid out around a pond were pathways through the trees where they could ride, or walk on stilts, until the gong rang out for midday “dinner,” or “teatime” (their last meal before bed). Sometimes on a Sunday, Hugh would take the two oldest children out into the country around Redcar or along the beach, all of them on horseback, with a picnic tea packed by Florence. Gertrude would lay out the sandwiches on a checked blanket, and play hostess to Hugh and Maurice.
    For rainy days, Gertrude and Maurice had invented a game of hide-and-seek called “Housemaids,” a game that she would remember and that would come to have a very different significance for her in the desert, many years later. Beginning in the cellar, where the children could stand upright but the adults had to bend their heads, the object was to run silently along the many corridors and up the narrow, twisting stairs that led up to the maids’ bedrooms, without being seen by the servants. If you were spotted, you screamed and went back, to begin again.Or you might begin from behind the water tank in the attic, which could be reached up a short ladder fixed to the wall, then scuttle down to the laundry and the housekeeper’s room in the quiet semi-basement. Lined with cupboards painted cream, its William Morris wallpaper depicted singing blackbirds perched on a trellis wreathed in leaves and fruit against a dark-blue sky. A trace of it still remains today.
    Gertrude was lucky to have a stepmother with Florence’s sweet nature. A harsher regime could have dented her stepdaughter’s confidence, or more likely turned her into the rebel she somehow never became. Florence’s younger daughter, Molly, later Lady Trevelyan, wrote of her mother: “I cannot remember her speak in a harsh way to us, nor shout at us for wrong-doing. She was gentle and forbearing, full of tenderness to all children, unselfish and sympathetic to a degree that went far beyond any other person I have ever known . . . The security of her presence was an unfailing standby.”
    Florence was also great fun. The children had turned the garden shed into a playhouse and named it the Wigwam. They had a rubber stamp with the name on it, and would deliver