This seems to have led me a long way from Egypt. One thing does so lead to another; but why shouldn’t it? That winter in Egypt, I now see, solved a great many problems in our life. My mother, faced with the difficulty of having to provide social life for a young daughter, with next to no money to do it on, discovered a solution, I overcame my awkwardness. In the language of my time, ‘I knew how to behave’. Our way of life now is so different that it seems almost impossible to explain.
The trouble is that girls today know nothing of the art of flirtation. Flirtation, as I have said, was an art carefully cultivated by girls of my generation. We knew the rules back to front. It was true that in France no young girl was ever left alone with a young man, but in England that was certainly not so. You went for a walk with a man, you went out riding with a man–but you did not go to a dance alone with a young man: either your mother sat there, or some other bored dowager, or appearances were satisfied by a young married woman being in your party. But having kept the rules, and having danced with a young man, you then strolled out in the moonlight or wandered into the conservatory, and charming têtes à têtes could take place without decorum being abandoned in the eyes of the world.
Managing your programme was a difficult art, and one that I was not particularly good at. Say you start off at a party: A, B, C are three girls, D, E, F are three young men. You must at least dance with each of those young men twice–probably, you will go to supper with one of them, unless he or you particularly wish to avoid that. The rest of the programme is open for you to arrange to your satisfaction. There are plenty of young men lined up there, and at once some of them–the ones you don’t particularly want to see–approach you. Then the tricky bit begins. You try to prevent them seeing that your programme is as yet not filled up at all, and say doubtfully that you could manage number fourteen. The difficulty is to strike the right balance. The young men you do want to dance with are here somewhere, but if they are late coming up your programme may be already filled. On the other hand, if you tell enough lies to the first young men you will be left with gaps in your programme, and they may not be filled by the right young men. Then you will have to sit out some dances and be a wallflower. Oh, the agony when the young man you have secretly been waiting for suddenly appears, having been looking wildly for you in all the wrong places! You have to tell him sadly, ‘I have only got the second extra and number ten.’
‘Oh, surely you can do better than that?’ he pleads.
You look at your programme, and consider. Cutting dances is not a nice act. It is disapproved of, not only by hostesses and mothers, but also by young men themselves. They sometimes take revenge by cutting dances themselves in return. Perhaps in looking down your programme you see the name of some young man who has behaved badly to you, who has come up late, who has talked more to another girl at supper than to you. If so, you sacrifice him properly. Just occasionally, in desperation, you sacrifice a young man because he dances so abominably that it is really agony for your feet. But that I hardly ever liked to do, because I was tender-hearted, and it seemed unkind to treat so badly a poor young man who was almost certain to be treated badly by everyone else. The whole thing was really as intricate as the steps of a dance. In some ways it was great fun, but in others rather nerve-racking. At any rate one’s manners did improve with practice.
Going to Egypt was a great help to me. I don’t think anything else would have removed my natural gaucherie so soon. It was certainly a wonderful three months for a girl. I got to know at least twenty or thirty young men reasonably well. I went to, I suppose, between fifty and sixty dances; but I was too young and enjoying myself far too much to fall in love with anybody, which was lucky. I did cast languishing eyes on a handful of bronzed middle-aged colonels, but most of these were already attached to attractive married women–the wives of other men–and had no interest in young and insipid girls. I was somewhat plagued by a young Austrian count of excessive solemnity, who paid me serious attention. Avoid him as much as I could, he always sought me out and engaged me for a waltz. The waltz, as I have said, is the one dance I dislike, and the count’s waltzing was of the most superior kind–that is, it consisted very largely of reversing at top speed, which rendered me so giddy that I was always afraid I would fall down. Reversing had been considered by Miss Hickey’s dancing-class as not quite nice, so I had not had sufficient practice in it.
The count would then say that he would like the pleasure of a little conversation with my mother. This was, I suppose, his way of showing that his attentions were honourable. Of course, I had to take him to my mother, who was sitting against the wall, enduring the penance of the evening–for to her it certainly was a penance. The count sat down beside her and entertained her very solemnly for, I should think, at least twenty minutes. Afterwards, when we got home, my mother said to me crossly. ‘What on earth induced you to bring over that little Austrian to talk to me? I couldn’t get rid of him.’ I assured her that I couldn’t help it, that he had insisted. ‘Oh well, you must try and do better, Agatha,’ said my mother. ‘I can’t have young men being brought up to talk to me. They only do it to be polite, and to make a good impression.’ I said he was a dreadful man. ‘He is nice-looking, well-bred, and a good dancer,’ said my mother, ‘but I must say that I found him a complete bore.’
Most of my friends were young subalterns, and our friendships were absorbing but non-serious. I watched them playing polo, goaded them if they had not done well or applauded if they had, and they showed off before me to the best of their ability. I found it rather more difficult to talk to the slightly older men. A great many names are forgotten by this time, but there was a Captain Hibberd who used to dance with me fairly often. It was quite a surprise to me when my mother said nonchalantly on the boat when we were sailing back from Cairo to Venice: ‘You know Captain Hibberd wanted to marry you, I suppose?’
‘What?’ I said, startled. ‘He never proposed to me or said anything.’ ‘No, he said it to me,’ answered mother.
‘To you?’ I said in astonishment.
‘Yes. He said he was very much in love with you, and did I think you were too young? Perhaps he ought not to speak of it to you, he said.’ ‘And what did you say?’ I demanded.
‘I told him I was quite sure you were not in love with him, and that it was no good his going on with the idea,’ she said.
‘Oh mother!’ I exclaimed indignantly. ‘You didn’t!’
Mother looked at me in great surprise. ‘Do you mean to say you did like him?’ she demanded. ‘Would you have considered marrying him?’
‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to marry him at all, and I’m not in love with him, but I really do think, mother, that you might let me have my own proposals.’
Mother looked rather startled; then she admitted handsomely that she had been wrong. ‘It’s quite a long time, you see, since I was a girl myself,’ she said. ‘But I do see your point of view. Yes, one does like to have one’s own proposals.’
I was annoyed about it for some time. I wanted to know what it felt like to be proposed to. Captain Hibberd was good-looking, not boring, danced well, was well off–it was a pity that I could not consider marrying him. I suppose, as is so often the case, that if you are not attracted to a young man, but he is attracted to you, he is at once put out of court by the fact that men, when they are in love, invariably manage to look like a somewhat sick sheep. If a girl is attracted to such a man she feels flattered by this appearance, and does not hold it against him; if she has no interest she dismisses him from her mind. This is one of the great injustices of life. Women, when they fall in love, look ten times as good-looking as normally: their eyes sparkle, their cheeks are bright, their hair takes a special glow; their conversation becomes much wittier and more brilliant. Other men, who have never noticed them before, then start to take a second look.
That was my first, highly unsatisfactory proposal of marriage. My second came from a young man six foot five
high. I had liked him very much, and we had been good friends. He did not think of approaching me through my mother, I am glad to say. He had more sense than that. He managed to get home on the same boat as I did, sailing from Alexandria to Venice. I felt sorry that I was not fonder of him. We continued to write letters to one another for a short time; but then he was posted to India, I think. If I had met him when I was a little older I might perhaps have cared for him.
While I am on the subject of proposals, I wonder if men were specially given to proposing in my young days. I cannot help feeling that some of the proposals I and my friends had were entirely unrealistic. I have a suspicion that if I had accepted the offers they would have been dismayed. I once tackled a young naval lieutenant on this point. We had been walking home from a party in Torquay when he suddenly blurted out his proposal of marriage. I thanked him and said no, and added, ‘And I don’t believe you really want to, either.’
‘Oh I do, I do.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘We have only known each other about ten days, and I don’t see why you want to get married so young in any case. You know it would be very bad for your career.’
‘Yes, well, of course, that’s true in a way.’
‘So it’s really an awfully silly thing to go and propose to a girl like that. You must admit that yourself. What made you do it?’
‘It just came over me,’ said the young man. ‘I looked at you and it just came over me.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t think you had better do it again to anyone. You must be more careful.’
We parted on kindly prosaic terms.
II
In describing my life I am struck by the way it sounds as though I and everybody else were extremely rich. Nowadays you certainly would have to be rich to do the same things, but in point of fact nearly all my friends came from homes of moderate income. Most of their parents did not have a carriage or horses, they certainly had not yet acquired the new automobile or motorcar. For that you did have to be rich.
Girls had usually not more than three evening dresses, and they had to last you for some years. Your hats you painted with a shilling bottle of hat paint every season. We walked to parties, tennis parties and garden parties, though for evening dances in the country we would of course hire a cab. In Torquay there were not many private dances except at Christmas or Easter. People tended to invite guests to stay and make up a party to go to the Regatta Ball in August, and usually some other local dance in one of the bigger houses. I went to a few dances in London during June and July–not many because we did not know many people in London. But one would go occasionally to subscription dances, as they were called, making up a party of six. None of this called for much expenditure.
Then there were the country house parties. I went, nervously the first time, to some friends in Warwickshire. They were great hunting people. Constance Ralston Patrick, the wife, did not hunt herself: she drove a pony carriage to all the meets and I drove with her. My mother had forbidden me strictly to accept a mount or ride. ‘You really don’t know very much about riding,’ she pointed out. ‘It would be fatal if you went and injured somebody’s valuable horse.’ However, nobody offered me a mount–perhaps it was as well.
My riding and hunting had been confined to Devonshire, which meant scrabbling over high banks rather like Irish hunting, in my case mounted on a horse from a livery stable which was used to fairly unskilful riders on its back. The horse certainly knew more than I did, and I was quite content to leave it to Crowdy, my usual mount, a rather dispirited strawberry roan, who managed to get himself successfully over the banks of Devon. Naturally, I rode sidesaddle–hardly any woman rode astride at that time. You feel wonderfully safe on a side-saddle, your legs clasped round pommels. The first time I ever tried to ride astride I felt more unsafe than I could have believed possible.
The Ralston Patricks were very kind to me. They called me ‘The Pinkling’ for some reason–I suppose because I so often had pink evening dresses. Robin used to tease The Pinkling a lot, and Constance used to give me matronly advice with a slight twinkle in her eye. They had a delightful small daughter, about three or four years old when I first went there, and I used to spend a good deal of time playing with her. Constance was a born match-maker, and I realise now that she produced during the course of my visits several nice and eligible men. I sometimes got a little unofficial riding too. I remember one day I had had a gallop round the fields with a couple of Robin’s friends. Since this had happened at a moment’s notice, and I had not even got into a riding-habit but was in an ordinary print frock, my hair was not up to the strain. I still wore, as all girls did, the postiche attachment. Riding back down the village street, my hair collapsed completely, and curls dropped off at intervals all the way. I had to go back on foot to pick them up. Unexpectedly this produced a rather pleasing reaction in my favour. Robin told me afterwards that one of the leading lights of the Warwickshire Hunt had said to him approvingly, ‘Nice girl you’ve got staying with you. I like the way she behaved when all that false hair fell off; didn’t mind a bit. Went back and picked it all up and roared with laughter. Good sport, she was!’ The things that made a good impression on people are really very odd.
Another of the delights of staying with the Ralston Patricks was that they had a motor car. I cannot tell you the excitement that this produced in 1909. It was Robin’s pet delight and treasure, and the fact that it was temperamental and broke down constantly made his passion for it all the greater. I remember one day we made an excursion to Banbury. Starting out was rather like equipping an expedition to the North Pole. We took large furry rugs, extra scarves to wrap round the head, baskets of provisions, and so on. Constance’s brother Bill, Robin and I made the expedition. We said a tender farewell to Constance; she kissed us all, urged us to be careful, and said she would have plenty of hot soup and home comforts waiting for us if we returned. Banbury, I may say, was about twenty-five miles from where they lived, but it was treated as though it was Land’s End.
We proceeded seven miles quite happily, cautiously at about twenty-five miles an hour, but free from trouble. However, that was only the beginning. We did eventually get to Banbury, after changing a wheel and trying to find a garage somewhere, but garages were few and far between in those days. At last we got home, about seven o’clock in the evening, exhausted, frozen to the marrow, and frantically hungry, having finished all the provisions long before. I still think of it as one of the most adventurous days of my life! I had spent a great deal of it sitting on a bank by the roadside, in an icy wind, urging on Robin and Bill as, with the manual of instruction open beside them, they struggled with tyres, spare wheel, jacks, and various other pieces of mechanism of which they had had, up till then, no personal knowledge.
One day my mother and I went down to Sussex and lunched with the Barttelots. Lady Barttelot’s brother, Mr Ankatell, was also lunching, and he had an enormous and powerful automobile of the kind which in my memory seems to be about 100 feet long and hung with enormous tubes all over the outside. He was a keen motorist, and offered to drive us back to London. ‘No need to go by train–beastly things, trains. I’ll drive you back.’ I was in the seventh heaven. Lady Barttelot lent me one of the new motoring caps–a sort of flat thing halfway between a yachting cap and that worn by a German Officer of the Imperial staff,–which was tied down with motoring veils. We got into the monster, extra rugs were piled round us, and off we went like the wind. All cars were open at that time. To enjoy them one had to be pretty hardy. But then, of course, one was hardy in those days–practising the piano in rooms with no fires in the middle of winter inured you against icy winds.
Mr Ankatell did not contain himself to the twenty miles an hour that was the usual ‘safe’ speed–I believe we went forty or fifty m.p.h. through the roads of Sussex. At one moment he started up in the driving seat exclaiming: ‘Look back! Look back! Look back behind that hedge! Do you see that fellow hiding there? Ah, the wretch!
The villain! It’s a police trap. Yes, the villains, that’s what they do: hide behind a hedge and then come out and measure the time.’ From fifty we dropped to a crawl of ten miles an hour. Enormous chuckles from Mr Ankatell. ‘That dished him!’
I found Mr Ankatell a somewhat alarming man, but I loved his automobile. It was bright red–a frightening, exciting monster.
Later I went to stay with the Barttelots for Goodwood Races. I think that was the only country house visit that I did not enjoy. It was entirely a racing crowd staying there, and racing language and terms were incomprehensible to me. To me racing meant standing about for hours wearing an unmanageable flowery hat, pulling on six hat-pins with every gust of wind, wearing tight patent-leather shoes with high heels, in which my feet and ankles swelled horribly in the heat of the day. At intervals I had to pretend enormous enthusiasm as everyone shouted ‘They’re off!’ and stood on tiptoe to look at quadrupeds already out of sight.
One of the men asked me kindly if he should put something on for me. I looked terrified. Mr Ankatell’s sister, who was acting as hostess, at once ticked him off. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, ‘the girl is not to bet.’ Then she said kindly to me, ‘I tell you what. You shall have five shillings on whatever I back. Pay no attention to these others.’ When I discovered that they were betting £20 or £25 each time my hair practically stood on end! But hostesses were always kind to girls in money matters. They knew that few girls had any money to throw about. Even the rich ones, or the ones who came from rich homes, had only moderate dress allowances–£50 or £100 a year. So hostesses looked after the girls carefully. They were sometimes encouraged to play bridge, but if so someone always ‘carried them’, and was responsible for their debts if they lost. This kept them from feeling out of it, and at the same time ensured that they didn’t lose sums of money which they could not afford to lose.
Agahta Christie: An autobiography Page 22
