Improbable Women: Five Who Explored the Middle East

20. Accepting the Torch

212 20 Accepting the Torch On July 12, 1926, when Gertrude Bell was laid to rest in the harsh soil of Iraq, Freya Madeline Stark was in London studying Arabic in preparation for a career that would lead to Baghdad and far beyond. Her life would offer an odd parallel to Gertrude’s, with places and people in common. In many ways, Freya was the capstone of these improbable women. Her father, Robert Stark, was the son of the proprietor of a furniture rental business in Torquay on the south coast of Devon. Her mother, Flora Stark, Robert’s first cousin, was the daughter of an artist who had moved to Italy and married a German governess employed by a Roman family. Robert and Flora were married in 1878 and began a peripatetic life that set a pattern for Freya. Both parents were artists, and by the time that Freya arrived on the 31st of January 1893, they were living in a studio on the Rue Denfert Rochereau in Paris. During Freya’s first year “we spent ten days in the country near Paris, travelled to England (at four months), visited in Basingstoke and Torquay, and settled close to Dartmoor for the summer . . . visited in Paris, spent a first Christmas with the Genoa grandmother.”1 The wandering continued, and it is not too surprising that at almost four years “the joy of running away became conscious” and Freya set off down the road to Plymouth to find a ship and go to sea. A fortunate encounter with the postman diverted the journey as he examined her traveling kit of mackintosh, toothbrush, and one penny halfpenny, and suggested that this was not sufficient cash for such a journey—another long-term pattern for Freya—and that perhaps they should return home for more cash and Accepting the Torch • 213 a fresh start. Freya remembers “a warm pleasantness in the holding of his comfortable hand, and a tiresome amount of surprise shown by a group on the lawn” (37). This fascination with ships and the sea was a motif with Freya. In the girls’ bedroom at Ford Park, the last house owned by the family in Devonshire, her mother decorated the toy cupboards and bedsteads with whatever the little girls requested. Freya asked for sailing ships “so that I might look at them from my pillow and think of myself sailing far away; and I spent many early mornings before Fräulein called us, looking at the little white triangles doubling a cape round which I could not see” (51). Freya was a difficult child, or “naughty” as such a child was described in that era. Her behavior suffered also by comparison with that of her sister, Vera, one year younger, who was somewhat passive although almost as stubborn as Freya. Vera is reported to have sat in a chair for twelve hours rather than apologize for some transgression. Freya, on the other hand, when made to sit in a corner for tearing strips of wallpaper off the wall, saw no reason to stay and wandered away until her father sat and held her—comforting Freya with the thought that at least “they were both in the corner together” (38). On another occasion when her mother whipped her for trying to hit her with an umbrella, Freya “went round among her [mother’s] friends and discussed the matter, leaning up to the drawing-room chairs and murmuring, ‘My mama beats me’ in an irritating way” (38). The only source on her childhood years is the first volume of her autobiography Traveller’s Prelude in which she portrays her childhood as warm and affectionate, yet leaves the impression that her account is carefully edited. Robert and Flora’s marriage was troubled , and Robert’s absences eventually graduated to permanent separation and his emigration to Canada. She describes her mother as remote and notes her mother’s readiness to dump the girls on others while she devoted her care and attention to strangers. The picture that emerges is of the two children wandering alone or accompanied by a governess in pursuit of their adventures. When their father appears it is different. Walks are no longer solitary and his imagination and gentle hands guide their activities. They sleep out on mattresses 214 • Freya Madeline Stark under the trees, listen to stories about “trackless forests and Siberian wolves” (48), are bribed to walk alone...