Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  How well I remember Mr Miller! His likeness – at least I thought so, to King Edward! . . . In a feudal and impressive way he used to stroll on to the ground. I can see it all now as I lay on the slightly rising ground near the scoreboard with the fine red, white and black flag flying from its crest . . .13

  Agatha would have remembered this too. She often accompanied Frederick to the cricket: ‘I was extremely proud of being allowed to help my father with the scoring and took it very seriously.’ She also learned mathematics with him, which she loved (‘I think there’s something heavenly about numbers,’ says a character in The Moving Finger), and these lessons were about as close as she came to formal education. Having sent Madge to the school in Brighton that would later become Roedean (Monty was at Harrow), Clara had the idea that Agatha should not go to school and should not learn to read until she was eight. So much for that: by the age of four Agatha had taught herself. ‘I’m afraid Miss Agatha can read, ma’am,’ Nursie explained apologetically to Clara.

  There is no telling why Clara came up with this theory. Her decisions could seem arbitrary, although more often than not they were proved right, as when she bought Ashfield or when, in later years, she warned Agatha against marrying her first husband, Archie. She knew human nature, which made her wise. Yet she was also said to have the inexplicable instinct of a ‘sensitive’ (as a child she dreamed that Primsted Farm had burned down; soon afterwards it did) and this sometimes made her silly. It was an absurd whim to try to stop an intelligent child reading, particularly in a house like Ashfield, which was crammed with books. Among Frederick’s bills are several for ‘Andrew Iredale, Bookseller of Fleet Street’, from whom he bought – among much else – forty-seven volumes of the Cornhill Magazine for four pounds (still in the library at Greenway), the complete works of George Eliot for five pounds and ‘French classics’ at twelve shillings apiece. It was unthinkable that Agatha would remain shut out of that world. Such was her determination that she worked out the words of a children’s book called The Angel of Love by Mrs L. T. Meade (‘vulgar’, according to Clara), which had been read to her so often that she could match sounds to pages. From then on she read anything and everything: Mrs Molesworth, Edith Nesbit,14 Frances Hodgson Burnett, Old Testament stories, Great Events of History, her beloved Dickens and, later, the Balzacs and Zolas that served – in Clara’s view – as wordly education (although the young Agatha was too innocent to see real life in literature; to her, books were their own reality). It has been said that Agatha never fully mastered spelling or grammar because of her unorthodox introduction to words, but this is an exaggeration. Letters do show her getting the odd word wrong – ‘phenomenen’, ‘incomoded’, ‘meglamania’ – but her detective fiction shows her as something of a stickler for good usage: ‘“It’s me,” said Miss Marple, for once ungrammatical.’15

  In fact Agatha learned some grammar at a ladylike establishment in Torquay run by a Miss Guyer, which she attended two days a week from the age of about thirteen. The decision not to send her to fulltime school was quite normal, although it was odd that she had no governess. Perhaps Clara, who knew full well the extent of Agatha’s daughterly devotion, preferred to keep it all to herself. Perhaps her attempt to stop Agatha reading was a means of control. Or perhaps she simply wanted to try something different from what had been done with her elder daughter; it was unusual that Madge should have gone away to school and, when it was suggested that she was Girton material, Frederick put his gentlemanly foot down. (‘She’s got Girton written all over her’ is an insult delivered in Mary Westmacott’s The Burden.) Agatha, by contrast, received outside tuition only in music. Her father and Madge taught her to write and her mother flashed through the more interesting episodes in history. Aside from that, she was on her own.

  It was probably the making of her. Agatha was one of those auto-didacts who go on learning and reading all their lives and whose minds, therefore, develop in the way most suitable to them. As an adult she had an avowed respect for ‘academic’ brains: her second husband, Max Mallowan, was an Oxford-educated archaeologist with a knowledge of the classics, and she admired him and his friends for that. Nevertheless she had an innate confidence in her own, less orthodox thought-paths. Her collection of short stories The Labours of Hercules recasts the twelve myths in what she would, smilingly, have called ‘low-brow’ form, as stories for her own ‘Hercule’ Poirot to solve: the Nemean Lion, for instance, is a kidnapped Pekinese lapdog. Meanwhile Poirot puts an irreverent, clear-eyed spin upon Greek mythology.

  ‘Take this Hercules – this hero! Hero, indeed! What was he but a large muscular creature of low intelligence and criminal tendencies! . . . The whole classical pattern shocked him. These gods and goddesses – they seemed to have as many different aliases as a modern criminal. Indeed, they seemed to be definitely criminal types. Drink, debauchery, incest, rape, loot, homicide and chicanery – enough to keep a jude d’instruction constantly busy. No decent family life. No order, no method.

  These were not the definitive opinions of Agatha herself, but she would have been happy to entertain them. Having never been ‘taught’, she had no hang-ups about learning.

  So her mind ran free and, because it was a good mind, it began the process of creative absorption: the worlds of Ashfield; of Torquay; of family, servants, social ritual; of the mysteries that lay beyond, like the stealthy blue of the sea in the distance.

  As a child she was protected by structure and certainty. She lived in what W. H. Auden described as the perfect ending place for detective fiction: ‘the state of grace in which the aesthetic and the ethical are as one’.16 Goodness was all around, in the love of her parents and of God, whom she took very seriously, so seriously that she feared for the soul of a father who played croquet in the garden on Sundays. And the running of her home was so efficient and seemly that it acquired a kind of morality. Servants, she was honest enough always to acknowledge, made a state of grace easier to attain.

  Without Nursie, Jane the cook, and the various maids,17 Ashfield could not have had its atmosphere of ordered leisure. Jane in particular was immutable and magnificent. She cooked for parties of eight or more on a regular basis, showing no sign of agitation except ‘a slight flush’; Agatha would skip around her in the hope of a handful of raisins or a rock cake, crisp and steaming and straight from the oven: ‘Never since have I tasted rock cakes like Jane’s.’ Food was the anchor that held daily life in place. A midday Sunday lunch for the family would consist of ‘an enormous Sunday joint, usually cherry tart and cream, a vast piece of cheese, and finally dessert on the best Sunday dessert plates’. A menu of a dinner party for ten ‘began with a choice of thick or clear soup, then boiled turbot, or fillets of sole. After that came a sorbet. Saddle of mutton followed. Then, rather unexpectedly, Lobster Mayonnaise. Pouding Diplomatique and Charlotte Russe were the sweets and then dessert. All of this was produced by Jane, single-handed.’18 Agatha ate hugely, always, but remained very thin until her thirties.

  The servants were the architects of Ashfield. They wove the stuff of daily life for Agatha and they were, she says in her autobiography, its ‘most colourful part . . . One of the things I think I should miss most, if I were a child nowadays, would be the absence [sic] of servants.’ The modern world cannot begin to comprehend her attitude towards them, which was free of all guilt and doubt. ‘They “knew their place” as was said, but knowing their place meant not subservience but pride, the pride of the professional.’

  A good servant was a person of real standing. ‘I always wonder why people think it’s so humiliating to go “into service” and that it’s grand and independent to be in a shop. One puts up with far more insolence in a shop than . . . any decent domestic does,’ says Midge, a character in The Hollow, who is obliged to earn her living selling clothes. Agatha thought that she herself would make a good parlourmaid (being tall was an asset); at one point she considered doing so, when she was travelling the world with her husband Archie and mon
ey was very short.

  Bad servants, however, received no respect. When a parlourmaid could not do her job she was described as a mere mess of adenoids and dropped aitches. This de haut en bas attitude is one of the things that has caused Agatha Christie’s reputation to suffer in recent years. ‘Wonderful animal, the good servant,’ says a character in And Then There Were None with a casual, admiring contempt, and our liberal hearts flutter like nervous old ladies.

  But it was not quite that simple. For example the ‘frightened rabbit’ Gladys in A Pocket Full of Rye – apparently one of the worst examples of Agatha’s lazy snobbery – is actually at the heart of the story, crucial to the plot and treated with real compassion. ‘Life is cruel, I’m afraid,’ says Miss Marple. ‘One doesn’t really know what to do with the Gladyses. They enjoy going to the pictures and all that, but they’re always thinking of impossible things that can’t possibly happen to them. Perhaps that’s happiness of a kind. But they get disappointed . . .’

  This is wise and true and yet, because of the stereotype that Agatha herself has created, we dismiss it as condescension and Gladys along with it. As she would often do, Agatha has used the familiarity of the stereotype to subvert our expectations. It was one of the cleverest tricks she would play. It was, in fact, more than a trick: by such sudden means she revealed her insight, her lightly worn understanding of human nature.

  In A Pocket Full of Rye Miss Marple knows – it is stronger than a guess – the time of Gladys’s death because, had she still been alive, ‘she would certainly have taken the second [tea] tray into the drawingroom’. Thus an oblique tribute is paid to the importance of servants: to the structure they created in Agatha’s life, and in her detective fiction.

  All her life she was fascinated by the ordering of a home. In her 1957 book, 4.50 from Paddington, she created a character called Lucy Eyelesbarrow, an Oxford graduate who becomes a rich woman by turning herself into the ideal servant. ‘Lucy, with time on her hands, scrubbed the kitchen table which she had been longing to do . . . Then she cleaned the silver till it shone radiantly. She cooked lunch, cleared it away, washed it up . . . She had set out the tea things ready on a tray, with sandwiches and bread and butter covered with a damp napkin to keep them moist.’ It is a litany, a hymn to crisp and shining ritual, a fantasy in which the familiar becomes sublime.

  The loss of servants, post-war, changed the nature of Agatha’s world. Her books became less regulated – not necessarily a criticism – and there is a continual plangent refrain of how different things are now that there are ‘no servants . . . just a couple of women who come in’.19 The modern reaction to this can be imagined (there are plenty of servants today, but few people as honest as Agatha in their attitudes towards them). Again, though, her views are a little more complex, at any rate when she wants them to be. For example, The Hollow has a character named David Angkatell, a young man full of left-wing disgust for his privileged family; in an entrancingly succinct scene he spouts politics at Midge, telling her that she would understand the class struggle better if she were a worker.

  ‘I am a worker. That’s just why being comfortable is so attractive. Box beds, down pillows – early morning tea softly deposited by the bed – a porcelain bath with lashings of hot water – and delicious bath salts. The kind of easy-chair you really sink into . . .’

  Midge paused in her catalogue.

  ‘The workers’, said David, ‘should have all these things.’

  . . .‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ said Midge heartily.

  But the child Agatha was safe within order, and order delighted her. She loved the calm bustle of the kitchen and the starch in her muslin dresses almost as much as she loved to dream of the glistening river at the end of Ashfield’s garden, towards which she would ride on a white palfrey. Later she loved Lucy Eyelesbarrow, mundane and magical, waving her scrubbing brush like a wand as she turned a house into a place of regulated beauty. For all the wanderings of her imagination Agatha was fascinated, always, by the power of the ordinary.

  She grew up with ordinary female conversation in her ears and this, too, delighted her. She picked out phrases almost as if they were music, catching something of their meaning but loving far more the way they danced in her head. ‘I haven’t yet finished, Florence’; ‘I beg your pardon, Mrs Rowe’, was what she heard in the kitchen when a servant rose from the tea-table before Jane had finished her meal; she remembered the little interchange all her life. She liked to listen to the ladylike squabbles between Margaret Miller and Mary Ann Boehmer (whom she always described as her ‘grandmothers’, although Margaret was in fact her great-aunt). ‘Nonsense, Margaret, I never heard such nonsense in my life!’ ‘Indeed, Mary, let me tell you . . .’ She particularly liked the subtleties that bristled upon Margaret’s comfortable pronouncements. ‘Such a nice woman. Colonel L— is an old friend of her husband who asked him to look after her. There is, of course, nothing wrong about it. Everybody knows that.’20 She stored these phrases away just as Margaret, in her home at Ealing, packed her cupboards with ‘dates, preserved fruits, figs, French plums, cherries, angelica, packets of raisins and currants, pounds of butter and sacks of sugar, tea and flour’, her bedroom trunks with rich velvets and silks.

  When her parents went travelling together (Clara thought it her duty to be with Frederick), Agatha would visit the large house to which Margaret – ‘Auntie-Grannie’ – had moved, from Cheshire, as a prosperous and substantial widow. Mary Ann, or ‘Granny B’, lived in Bayswater. There was deep history between these two sisters. They were close companions in their old age, both stout, proud figures in their tight-wrapped black silk, but the difference in status was apparent. Margaret was the more assured, Mary Ann her foil. Margaret helped her sister with sums of money given ‘in return’ for errands carried out at the Army and Navy Stores in Victoria; back to Ealing Mary Ann would go with various buttons and ribbons and lengths of material, all of which would be rigorously judged and discussed and paid for out of Margaret’s bulging purse, whose innards gleamed with gold. As Agatha wrote in her autobiography, the sisters regarded the Army and Navy Stores as ‘the hub of the universe’. Occasionally she accompanied them there and, in At Bertram’s Hotel, a book written in her own old age, she has Miss Marple recollect the scene:

  Miss Marple cast her thoughts back to Aunt Helen seeking out her own special man in the grocery department, settling herself comfortably in a chair, wearing a bonnet and what she always called her ‘black poplin’ mantle. Then there would ensure a long hour with nobody in a hurry and Aunt Helen thinking of every conceivable grocery that could be purchased and stored up for future use . . . Having had a thoroughly pleasant morning, Aunt Helen would say in the playful manner of those times, ‘And how would a little girl feel about some luncheon?’ . . . After that, they bought half a pound of coffee creams and went to a matinée in a four-wheeler.

  These performances, which to her is what they were, satisfied a desire in Agatha. They embodied a kind of robust feminine certainty: the human equivalent of the ordered home. She had had a version of this with Nursie (‘After Nurse, there was God’),21 although Nursie dealt with Agatha as a child and lacked, therefore, the worldly dimension. Clara, meanwhile, was too creative and mercurial to have, as Margaret Miller did, a wonderful womanly instinct that never doubted itself. ‘Always think the worst about people’; ‘Gentlemen need attention and three proper meals a day’; ‘Never get into a train with a single man’; Waste not want not’; ‘Gentlemen like a figure’; ‘Every woman should have fifty pounds in five-pound notes in case of emergencies’; ‘Gentlemen can be very agreeable, but you can’t trust one of them’. Thus did Margaret express herself as she sat erect and dauntless among the heavy mahogany furniture at Ealing, whispering advice to Clara (‘A husband should never be left alone too long’), dealing with a young man who has impregnated a servant (‘Well, are you going to do the right thing by Harriet?’), chatting to her men friends among the tea things (‘I hope your
wife won’t object! I shouldn’t like to cause trouble!’). Her strong sane voice dealt in mysteries, rendering them murky and cosy; irresistible to Agatha.

  These rhythmic phrases belonged to a world as different as could be from the palfrey and the gleaming river. But they had, nonetheless, their own beauty. She never repeated anything she heard, however interesting, and in this she was quite unlike ‘the rest of my family, who were all extrovert talkers’.22 Instead she listened to everything, absorbing it, not understanding it, perhaps never fully understanding it all, letting it form a pattern in her mind.

  One day the Miss Marple who had sat with her Aunt Helen in the Army and Navy Stores would become a version of that aunt: wise, compassionate, unflinching from reality. This was not Agatha. She did flinch. Like most real writers, she was a stronger person in her books than in her life. But she had a constant urge to re-create the women of her childhood, the faith she had in their comforting omniscience. Miss Marple is the supreme example, and there are others, like Miss Percehouse in The Sittaford Mystery (‘I hate a slobbering female’), or Miss Peabody in Dumb Witness (‘Not the sort of young man I’d fancy if I were a young girl. Well, Theresa should know her mind. She’s had her experiences, I’ll be bound.’) Also Dame Laura Whitstable in the Westmacott novel A Daughter’s a Daughter, who is not so much a character as a magnificent mouthpiece. Her real reason for existing in the book is the pleasure that Agatha takes in her. ‘I’m old-fashioned,’ she says, puffing at a cigar. ‘I would prefer that a man should have knowledge of himself and belief in God’; ‘Nobody can really ruin another person’s life. Don’t be melodramatic and don’t wallow’; ‘Half the troubles in life come from pretending to oneself that one is a better and finer human being than one is’; ‘The fewer people who love you the less you will have to suffer.’ Nobody talks the way Dame Laura talks, yet she has artistic reality because to Agatha she is real. She is the authentic spirit of female certainty, speaking the thoughts of her creator, in a voice that Agatha always needed to hear.