by Anne Hart
And now here was the man himself. Really a most impossible person – the wrong clothes, button boots, an incredible moustache! Not his, Meredith Blake’s, kind of fellow at all. Didn’t look as though he’d ever hunted or shot – or even played a decent game.
Though Poirot was very fond of the English upper classes, and happily ate at their tables and solved their crimes, he remained his own man. Here he is in The Hollow, donning his officious dark clothes and grey Homburg hat for Sunday luncheon in the country:
He knew well enough the kind of clothes that were worn in the country on a Sunday in England, but he did not choose to conform to English ideas. He preferred his own standards of urban smartness. He was not an English country gentleman and he would not dress like an English country gentleman.
On occasions this detachment saved him from pitfalls. In ‘Double Clue’, for example, observing the agonies of toadying Mr Hardman who refused to believe that his jewels had been stolen by either a countess, a grande dame or a millionaire, Poirot remarked to Hastings: ‘He has one law for the titled, and another law for the plain, this Mr Hardman. Me, I have not yet been ennobled, so I am on the side of the plain.’
‘Hercule Poirot does not hunt down tramps,’ he declared in one drawing-room case and, in another, a ‘small, ironic voice’ in his inner ear chanted, ‘Look among the respectable people—’. Poirot’s looking among the respectable people for over fifty years is wonderful entertainment and a small slice of social history. He was fond, for example, of invoking the metaphor of the old school tie to explain the English. ‘Miss Lawson,’ he remarked to Hastings in Dumb Witness of a hired companion suspected of eavesdropping, ‘she is not an old school tie, mon cher.’ ‘Now Monsieur Fanthorp,’ he said in Death on the Nile:
‘I perceive that you wear the same tie that my friend Hastings wears.’
Jim Fanthorp looked down at his neckwear with some bewilderment.
‘It’s an O.E. tie,’ he said.
‘Exactly. You must understand that, though I am a foreigner, I know something of the English point of view. I know, for instance, that there are “things which are done” and “things which are not done”.’
The English, in Poirot’s experience, did not accept bribes, respond readily to direct questions, display their emotions, believe that anyone not born a lady or gentleman could ever become one, or properly understand geography beyond their own island. In Dumb Witness he spoke of ‘your insular prejudice against the Argentines, the Portuguese and the Greeks’.
Prior to the Second World War there were many casual remarks about Jews. ‘A tinge of Jewish blood is not a bad thing,’ said Mary Cavendish briskly in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. ‘It leavens … the stolid stupidity of the ordinary Englishman.’
Poirot enjoyed explaining the English. ‘What,’ asked Dr Constantine, a Greek, ‘does a pukka sahib mean?’ as Colonel Arbuthnot exited in Murder on the Orient Express with the words: ‘About Miss Debenham … you can take it from me that she’s all right. She’s a pukka sahib.’ ‘It means,’ explained Poirot kindly, ‘that Miss Debenham’s father and brothers were at the same kind of school as Colonel Arbuthnot was.’
‘Ah, she is very, very English,’ he said, mimicking the ‘drawling, well-bred tones’ of the Honourable Venetia Kerr in Death in the Clouds to the delight of Jane Grey, a hairdresser:
‘She is the kind that any shopkeeper on the Riviera will give credit to – they are very discerning, our shopkeepers. Her clothes are very well cut, but rather like a man’s. She walks about as though she owns the earth; she is not conceited about it; she is just an Englishwoman. She knows which department of England different people come from. It is true; I have heard ones like her in Egypt. “What? The Etceteras are here? The Yorkshire Etceteras? Oh, the Shropshire Etceteras.”’
Of those not of the ‘Etceteras’ but still solidly British Poirot particularly approved. In Five Little Pigs, interviewing a shrewd old governess, he reflected:
Miss Williams’ life had been interesting to her – she was still interested in people and events. She had that enormous mental and moral advantage of a strict Victorian upbringing … she had done her duty in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call her, and that assurance encased her in an armour impregnable to the slings and darts of envy, discontent and regret.
And he was no doubt pleased with Dr Sheppard’s description of his old friend Roger Ackroyd:
Of course, Ackroyd is not really a country squire. He is an immensely successful manufacturer of (I think) wagon wheels. He is a man of nearly fifty years of age, rubicund of face and genial of manner. He is hand and glove with the vicar, subscribes liberally to parish funds (though rumour has it that he is extremely mean in personal expenditure), encourages cricket matches, Lads’ Clubs, and Disabled Soldiers’ Institutes. He is, in fact, the life and soul of our peaceful village of King’s Abbot.
Poirot never could appreciate the English mania for the country life (‘the country,’ reminisced Rosamund Darnley in Evil Under the Sun: ‘a big shabby house – horses, dogs – walks in the rain – wood fires – apples in the orchard – lack of money – old tweeds – evening dresses that went on from year to year – a neglected garden – with Michaelmas daisies coming out like great banners in the Autumn …’). He was far more interested in what went on inside English houses – in the Misses Tripps’ cottage in Dumb Witness, for instance, a cottage ‘so extremely old-world and picturesque that it looked as though it might collapse any minute’:
The interior was very rich in old oak beams – there was a big open fireplace and such very small windows that it was difficult to see clearly. All the furniture was of pseudo-simplicity – ye olde oake for ye cottage dweller – there was a good deal of fruit in wooden bowls and large numbers of photographs.
Or in an elegant bed-sitting-room encountered in ‘Murder in the Mews’:
The walls were silver and the ceiling emerald green. There were curtains of a modernistic pattern in silver and green. There was a divan covered with a shimmering emerald green silk quilt and numbers of gold and silver cushions. There was a tall antique walnut bureau, a walnut tallboy and several modern chairs of gleaming chromium. On a low glass table there was a big ashtray full of cigarette stubs.
Or in a friend’s house in Three Act Tragedy:
Mr Satterthwaite’s house was on Chelsea Embankment. It was a large house and contained many beautiful works of art. There were pictures, sculpture, Chinese porcelain, prehistoric pottery, ivories, miniatures and much genuine Chippendale and Hepplewhite furniture. It had an atmosphere about it of mellowness and understanding.
Until the 1940s there hovered in the background of these houses an unobtrusive multitude, the servants. As a crucial barometer in Poirot’s English world they deserve more than a passing glance. The number in each household varied, of course, depending on the owners’ incomes. At the Misses Tripps’ ‘A child of fourteen or thereabouts opened the door and with difficulty squeezed herself against the walls sufficiently to allow us to pass inside’; while in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, at Gorston Hall, Superintendent Sugden reported:
‘There are eight servants in the house, six of them are women and of those six, five have been here for four years and more. Then there’s the butler and the footman. The butler has been here for close on forty years – bit of a record that, I should say. The footman’s local, son of the gardener and brought up here … The only other person is Mr Lee’s valet attendant. He’s comparatively new …’
In murder cases much could be learned from the Servant’s Hall – but only if its inhabitants would co-operate. ‘The domestics had withdrawn tactfully,’ wrote Hastings in Peril at End House, but often they withdrew in possession of the very facts and opinions Poirot wanted to know. Extracting these demanded his most persuasive wiles, for many of the servants he encountered – particularly those at the top of the pecking order – were, if anything, more class-conscious than their employers. In After the Fun
eral Lanscombe the butler was ‘courteous but distant’. He clearly ‘regarded this upstart foreigner as the materialization of the Writing on the Wall. This was What We are Coming to!’ In Mrs McGinty’s Dead ‘An imperturbable manservant opened the door and was loath to admit Hercule Poirot. In his view Hercule Poirot was the kind of caller who is left outside. He clearly suspected that Hercule Poirot had come to sell something.’ In Sad Cypress the initial responses of Mrs Bishop, the housekeeper, ‘were frosty and she eyed him with disfavour and suspicion.’
In a number of cases Poirot never did win over the servants and had to tack his way cautiously around them, but more often they capitulated. A cook-housekeeper in ‘Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds’ is a good example:
Mrs Hill was inclined to be stiff and suspicious at first, but the charming geniality of this strange-looking foreigner would have had its effect on a stone. Mrs Amelia Hill began to unbend.
In the world below stairs it was the butlers – the lofty Tredwells – who were the grands seigneurs. At the Angkatells, in The Hollow, the door was opened by the magnificent Gudgeon. Loyal, discreet and forgiving, Gudgeon was the perfect butler. It may be recalled that it was he who polished a murder weapon belonging to the family because ‘I fancied it might be dusty, sir’, so it will come as no surprise to learn how he dealt with Lady Angkatell’s fondness for reading News of the World. ‘We pretend,’ she said, ‘we get it for the servants, but Gudgeon is very understanding and never takes it out until after tea.’
In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas we are given an insight into a butler’s mind as Tressilian circles the dinner table, decanter in hand:
Mrs Alfred, he noted, had got on her new flowered black and white taffeta. A bold design, very striking, but she could carry it off, though many ladies couldn’t. The dress Mrs George had on was a model, he was pretty sure of that. Must have cost a pretty penny! He wondered how Mr George would like paying for it! Mr George didn’t like spending money – he never had. Mrs David now, a nice lady, but didn’t have any idea of how to dress. For her figure, plain black velvet would have been the best. Figured velvet, and crimson at that, was a bad choice. Miss Peela, now, it didn’t matter what she wore; with her figure and her hair she looked well in anything. A flimsy cheap little white gown it was, though … ‘Hock or claret?’ murmured Tressilian in a deferential whisper in Mrs George’s ear.
Very occasionally – and usually when murder was about – a butler’s mask might slip. Gudgeon himself uttered ‘an unbutlerlike noise’ when he glimpsed a body in the swimming pool, and in ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’, when Sir Gervase Chevenix-Gore was late for dinner for the first time in twenty years:
The notes of a gong sounded from the hall, then the butler opened the door and announced:
‘Dinner is served.’
And then, almost before the last word, ‘served,’ had been uttered, something very curious happened. The pontifical domestic figure became, just for one moment, a highly astonished human being …
As the years went by there were fewer and fewer butlers to whom Poirot could hand his coat, hat and walking stick. In the 1950s old Lanscombe, tottering around Enderby Hall, saw clearly the passing of a regime:
The third blind in the White Boudoir refused to go up as it should. It went up a little way and stuck. The springs were weak – that’s what it was – very old, these blinds were, like everything else in the house. And you couldn’t get these old things mended nowadays. Too old-fashioned, that’s what they’d say, shaking their heads in that silly superior way – as if the old things weren’t a great deal better than the new ones! He could tell them that! Gimcrack, half the new stuff was – came to pieces in your hand. The material wasn’t good, or the craftsmanship either. Oh yes, he could tell them.
Evolution was also at work in another part of Enderby Hall.
Looking into the kitchen with a word of admonition, Lanscombe was snapped at by Marjorie the cook. Marjorie was young, only twenty-seven, and was a constant irritation to Lanscombe as being so far removed from what his conception of a proper cook should be. She had no dignity and no proper appreciation of his, Lanscombe’s, position. She frequently called the house ‘a proper old mausoleum’ and complained of the immense area of the kitchen, scullery and larder saying that it was a ‘day’s walk to get round them all.’ … Janet, who stood by the kitchen table, refreshing herself with a cup of tea, was an elderly housemaid who, although enjoying frequent acid disputes with Lanscombe, was nevertheless usually in alliance with him against the younger generation as represented by Marjorie. The fourth person in the kitchen was Mrs Jacks who ‘came in’ to lend assistance where it was wanted …
A grander scene greeted Hercule Poirot when he visited the kitchen at Kings Lacy in ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’:1
There was a moment’s pause and then Mrs Ross came forward in a stately manner to meet him. She was a large woman, nobly built with all the dignity of a stage duchess. Two lean grey-haired women were beyond in the scullery washing up and a towhaired girl was moving to and fro between the scullery and the kitchen. But these were obviously mere myrmidons. Mrs Ross was the queen of the kitchen quarters.
The tow-haired girl glimpsed ‘moving to and fro between the scullery and the kitchen’ was Annie Bates. ‘There’s always hope when there’s a kitchen maid,’ said Inspector Grange in The Hollow:
‘Heaven help us when domestic staffs are so reduced that nobody keeps a kitchen maid any more … They’re so kept down and in their place by the cook and the upper servants that it’s only human nature to talk about what they know to someone who wants to hear it.’
It is interesting to note that Poirot, to reward Annie Bates for warning him of a possible danger, promised to send her a present from London. ‘What would you like?’ he asked. ‘A real posh slap-up vanity box,’ replied Annie. Poirot had clearly mellowed over the years, for in an earlier version of ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’, published thirty-seven years before, he gave Annie’s counterpart no choice of presents but told her:
‘When I return to London, I will send you an excellent book on le ménage, also the Lives of the Saints, and a work upon the economic position of women.’
Mrs Hill, Gudgeon, Tressilian, Annie Bates et al are but a sample of the cooks, housekeepers, butlers, valets, governesses, footmen, kitchen maids, parlourmaids, ladies’ maids, chauffeurs, gardeners, under-gardeners, aged faithfuls, daily helps and au pairs (though scarcely a nanny, oddly) that abounded in Poirot’s English world. One category, the paid companion, was made particularly memorable by Amy Carnaby, one of the most remarkable people Poirot ever met. The plight of these indigent respectable women who were, as it was observed in After the Funeral, ‘dependent for existence on the fears and whims of employers’, is described in several cases. In Dumb Witness, for example, Miss Emily Arundell had a reputation for treating a succession of companions ‘with great generosity’ one moment and bullying them ‘unmercifully’ the next, but with Miss Army Carnaby the worm turned.
Outwardly the most timid of women, in ‘The Nemean Lion’ Miss Carnaby single-handedly organized a number of her downtrodden colleagues into a protection racket for lapdogs and was well on her way to building up a modest retirement fund when Poirot caught up with her. As she explained:
‘Yes, it’s difficult for a gentleman to understand, I expect. But you see, I’m not a clever woman at all, and I’ve no training and I’m getting older – and I’m so terrified for the future. I’ve not been able to save anything … and as I get older and more incompetent there won’t be anyone who wants me.’
Poirot was impressed by Miss Carnaby’s words and in due course wrote her the following letter:
Dear Miss Carnaby,
Allow me to enclose a contribution to your very deserving fund before it is finally wound up.
Yours very truly,
Hercule Poirot.
When Miss Carnaby turned up again it was with ‘The most extraordinary ideas! For insta
nce, yesterday, a really most practical scheme for robbing a post office came into my head. I wasn’t thinking about it – it just came! And another very ingenious way for evading custom duties. I feel convinced – quite convinced – that it would work’. Poirot hastily recruited her as a legitimate undercover agent for the case of ‘The Flock of Geryon’.
With exceptions such as his friend Ariadne Oliver and his secretary Miss Lemon, women in Poirot’s milieu who had to earn their own living tended to have a difficult time. If one was in the Servants’ Hall there was at least the possibility of rising within that hierarchy, or if one was safely buttressed by the Establishment one could be as cheeky and adventuresome as one chose, but outside these spheres life could be precarious unless a husband came along or a rich relative died.
In wartime things could be different. During the First World War, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Cynthia Murdoch enjoyed immensely her work at a Red Cross Hospital and proudly showed Hastings through the dispensary. In the Second World War Lynn Marchmont served with distinction in North Africa and Sicily, but when it was over, in Taken at the Flood, she read sad advertisements in the daily newspapers:
‘Ex W.A.A.F. seeks post where initiative and drive will be appreciated.’ ‘Former WREN seeks post where organizing ability and authority are needed.’
‘“Oh! brave new world,” thought Lynn grimly … Her way ahead lay clear. Marriage to her Cousin Rowley Cloade.’
Women who entered the male domain of politics tended to be looked at askance. In Appointment with Death one of the party journeying to the Caves at Petra was a Member of Parliament:
Lady Westholme threw herself with vigour into political life, being especially active at Question time. Cartoons of her soon began to appear (always a sure sign of success). As a public figure she stood for the old-fashioned values of Family Life, welfare work amongst Women, and was an ardent supporter of the League of Nations. She had decided views on questions of Agriculture, Housing and Slum Clearance. She was much respected and almost universally disliked!
