by Jared Cade
One morning Madge entered the billiard room and saw her dog sitting quietly in his basket near an unexploded bomb. There had been much noise and confusion the previous night while everyone was up on the roof helping to put out the incendiary bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe. No one had heard the bomb fall into the billiard room. Alerted by Madge, the bomb disposal experts arrived and advised everyone to evacuate the house in twenty minutes: ‘Just take anything essential.’ A thoroughly rattled Madge removed her billeted officers’ personal belongings, her toothbrush and sponge bag and a bouquet of wax flowers from the green malachite table in the drawing-room. The bomb was duly removed, and Agatha later used the wax flowers and the green malachite table as clues in her 1953 mystery After the Funeral. The local firm of S. and J. Watts was also struck by bombs at this time. The fire brigade and police, overwhelmed by the demand on their services, intended to let the warehouse burn to the ground. But Jimmy’s employees managed to put the fire out and saved the building.
As a child Agatha had loved playing with her doll’s house, and during the course of her adult life she enjoyed acquiring real houses and doing them up and, quite often, renting them out. At one point she owned eight houses. One of her properties, 58 Sheffield Terrace on Campden Hill, where she lived briefly at this time, was bombed during the London Blitz. Fortunately she and the other occupants were away at the time. She later incorporated this incident into Taken at the Flood.
Agatha’s main concern throughout the war was for the safety of her loved ones. She was also worried that if anything happened to Rosalind and Max she would be in a similar position to that in which she had found herself before her disappearance when she had wanted to write in order to consolidate her finances but had been prevented from doing so by her deteriorating marital situation. In 1940 she produced two novels that were not published until the 1970s: Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case and Murder in Retrospect, which was retitled Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case before its release. Both manuscripts were secured in a bank vault and made over as deeds of gift to Rosalind and Max. (Max’s deed of gift was dated 14 October 1940; see Chapter Twenty-Six for further details.) Her intention was that the books were to be published only in the event of her death so that her bereaved daughter and husband would at least have some kind of financial nest-egg. Other books Agatha wrote during the war years were quickly published in order to alleviate her cash-flow problems.
Shortly before the outbreak of the war the US tax office had begun making inquiries about her financial affairs. Her literary advisers had hired a prominent tax lawyer to sort out the complicated tangle resulting from her prolific literary output. Wartime legislation meant that during this period she was prevented from receiving most of the large US royalties due to her, despite being forced to pay massive taxes on them in advance in England. What money she received after tax on her British income was not always sufficient to cover the deficit, and there were periods when she lived very much hand to mouth.
The thriller N or M?, in which the intrepid sleuths Tommy and Tuppence Beresford foil an attempted invasion of England by Hitler’s fifth column, was serialized by the American magazine Redbook in March 1941. Its patriotic message struck just the right note of optimism for Americans eager to combat Nazism. For the most part Agatha avoided specific references in her novels to the war and other current events, partly because she did not wish to dwell on them and partly because she realized her stories would date once the war was ended.
Whenever trouble had loomed in the past work had been Agatha’s best distraction, but as her financial situation became more parlous she felt as if she had been deprived of this crutch. What was the point of writing if she got no royalties? she wrote to her literary agent Edmund Cork. He consoled her with the news that Milestone, an American film company, had made an offer for the film rights to N or M? that were ‘world-wide in their scope’, which meant the money she earned would be paid directly to her in England. The film was in fact never made. Crippling taxation nearly forced Agatha into bankruptcy twice during the war, and in a desperate bid to prevent this she tried unsuccessfully on two occasions to sell Greenway, which at the outbreak of the war had become a home for evacuee children before being taken over by the Admiralty for the US Navy. She was terrified of drying up creatively and desperate to keep afloat financially.
She confided to Edmund Cork that it was nerve-racking to feel unable to write when one needed to do so to keep the money coming in. She bitterly recalled how during the breakdown of her first marriage she could have done with a manuscript up her sleeve instead of having to produce ‘that rotten book’ The Big Four and having to force herself to complete The Mystery of the Blue Train. Her remarks were not without irony given Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case and Murder in Retrospect were being held in reserve, but this nevertheless reflects the acute misery and anxiety of day-to-day living during that period.
After the outbreak of the war Nan and Judith became locked in conflict. Nan had been anxious to move from London to the country in the hope it would be safer there. Judith had refused to go, saying she would be bored. She knew she would miss London’s night life, and Nan had reluctantly agreed that she could live for a year with her Uncle Lyonel and his second wife Joan in Victoria Road, off Kensington High Street. (By this time he had divorced his first wife Jean, who remained good friends with Nan and Agatha.) Judith had no fear of bombs, her one thought being to have a good time. ‘When you’re young you never think it will be you.’ Judith recalls that in her determination to enjoy London’s nightclubs there had been many an occasion when she used the sounding of the air-raid sirens as an excuse not to return to Victoria Road until the early hours of the morning.
A major cause of conflict between mother and daughter was that Nan wanted Judith to train to become a nurse. Nan, like Agatha, had been a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment during the First World War, and it worried her that her daughter had no career. Judith confided her problems to Agatha and ended up weeping uncontrollably, since nursing did not appeal to her in the least. Agatha, who regarded Judith as a second daughter, knew that she loved children and found her a position near Greenway as a voluntary assistant at a crèche in Paignton for evacuee children. This solution satisfied everyone and enabled Judith to live first with Nan at Tor Close in Churston and later at Penhill in Brixham, both villages near Greenway.
Nan had no desire to return to London at that time; she preferred the quiet of country life. When the warehouse where she had stored her furniture from Cheyne Court was bombed in London Nan felt justified in her decision to move to Devon. It worried her that Agatha had moved to blitz-ravaged London to work in the hospital, but, as Judith put it, ‘Agatha was a woman of enormous courage and loved England too much to ever leave.’
There were happier, more relaxed times for Agatha when the bombing abated. Nan would occasionally come up to London. She found running Penhill difficult and would stay at London’s exclusive Hyde Park Hotel, where most of the guests preferred to sleep in the passageways, believing themselves to be safe from bombs that might fall during the night. On one occasion the hotel was so badly shaken, Nan later told Agatha, that she returned to her bedroom to find her wardrobe-door mirror had cracked from side to side. When Agatha met up with her friend she invariably asked: ‘For half a pound tell me who’s your latest?’
Being cut off at Penhill, Nan did not have as many admirers as before the war, although beneath her demure, lady-like appearance she had a challenging risqué sense of humour that men adored. Agatha loved listening to news of her friend’s latest conquests, and Nan became the prototype in Agatha’s novels for the rich, attractive often divorced femmes fatales, most noticeably Ruth Van Rydock in They Do it With Mirrors, and Lady Sedgwick in At Bertram’s Hotel.
In recognition of their friendship, Agatha officially dedicated her 1942 novel The Body in the Library ‘To My Friend Nan’. The second body in the story is found in a burnt-out car in ‘Venn’s Quarry’, and the disus
ed cart-track leading to it was Water Lane and Newlands Corner thinly disguised. The hotel in the novel is not based on the Harrogate Hydro, as some might suppose, but on Torquay’s Imperial Hotel.
Ironically, the publication of Five Little Pigs in the UK in 1943 has led some readers mistakenly to read veiled references to the disappearance in it. This is because the victim, Amyas Crayle, shares Archie’s initials and was murdered, apparently by his wife, sixteen years earlier for having an affair with a young woman. Despite the coincidence of the victim’s initials, Agatha in fact based the dead husband loosely on Amyas Boston with whom she had a teenage flirtation during the amateur production of The Blue Beard of Unhappiness. One of Agatha’s notebooks from this period – ‘Girl – 15 at time (now 30 odd) (a Judy?)’ – indicate the writer had Nan’s daughter Judith in mind for the character of the independent and strong-minded Angela Warren. Another entry, alluding to the character of Cecilia Williams – ‘Housekeeper – woman – reserved – practical – another Carlo’, is a reference to her secretary Charlotte Fisher. Nan’s copy of Five Little Pigs was inscribed on the flyleaf with the heartfelt words: ‘With best wishes for the New Year. Love from Agatha.’
Despite her financial worries, Agatha maintained her literary output, publishing twelve books during the war years. She found comfort in her strengthening religious convictions. Although the war seemed endless, her belief in the transitory nature of things sustained her. She found an additional source of income throughout the war by adapting for the stage three of her books, Ten Little Niggers, Appointment with Death and Death on the Nile, with varying degrees of success.
Her Mary Westmacott novel, Absent in the Spring, which was written in just three days in 1943, was both an exorcism of some of the more painful aspects of the writer’s first marriage and a projection of her fears about the durability of the second. In her autobiography she admitted that the book had been gestating for six or seven years before she wrote it.
Absent in the Spring tells the story of Joan Scudamore who experiences a crisis when she comes face to face with herself after being stranded at a railway rest-house in the desert. The book is about emotional insecurities and religious faith. Agatha’s journey towards spiritual peace of mind had been hindered by the fact she had never considered herself a sinner, so when she had needed religion to sustain her during the breakdown of her marriage to Archie she had felt forsaken by God. Likewise one of the characters tells Joan that her trouble is that she is not a sinner, which effectively cuts her off from the solace of prayer.
Joan recalls coming across a letter her father had written to her mother before he died, telling her that her love had been the crowning blessing of his life. Joan reflects that her husband Rodney has never written to her like this and wonders why. She intuits that Rodney has had an unconsummated affair in the past.
Joan remembers how Rodney successfully prevented their eldest daughter Averil from going off with a married man by pointing out to her that the scandal would undermine her lover’s promising career in medical research. Rodney had claimed that no woman’s love could compensate a man for losing his ability to do the work he was intended to do.
Joan belatedly realizes that Rodney would have been happier if he had pursued his ambition to become a farmer instead of training to be a solicitor to please her. She is forced to confront the fact that she has not always been the considerate wife she imagined herself to be. It also dawns on her that their three children do not love her, because she has been a rigid, inflexible mother who smothered them with her love and her desire to organize their lives.
As she comes face to face with these unpleasant realities she discovers she has wandered too far and is lost in the desert. She believes that God has forsaken her, and it is only when she sees the rest-house on the horizon that she realizes that this is not the case.
Unlike Agatha’s childhood nightmare of the Gun Man, Absent in the Spring recognizes people’s need to look within themselves to acknowledge their frailties so that they never need fear censure by anyone else. The story makes the point that the best one can do for one’s loved ones is to let them get on with their lives and simply be there when one is needed. Since the personal themes in Absent in the Spring were so close to her heart, Agatha was never able to articulate clearly why the book was so important to her. The conclusion she reaches in the novel is that one is never alone if one has established a relationship with God.
Significantly, the novel was written at a time when Agatha was deeply worried about whether Max would be able to resume his archaeological excavations at the end of the war. Max admitted in a letter that archaeology was an uncertain profession and he was worried about Agatha’s financial position and her ability to help finance his digs. Agatha feared he would be destroyed if he was separated from the work he loved, and the thought of how this might affect their relationship filled her with trepidation.
The plot line involving Averil’s affair with a married man was inspired by Rosalind’s friend Susan North, who in 1942 had gone to live in sin with a doctor in Bourne End. The scandal had horrified her mother Dorothy, and Agatha had offered her copious amounts of sympathy.
Nan’s copy of Absent in the Spring was inscribed by Agatha: ‘To my dear Mrs Kon from M.W. in memory of SS. Marama Honolulu.’ The two friends both shared a love of travelling, and this was an allusion to a boat each had sailed on many years earlier when she visited Australia – Agatha with Archie in 1922 and Nan with her Uncle George and Aunt Helen in 1910.
On 21 September 1943 Agatha was delighted when Rosalind’s and Hubert’s son Mathew was born at a nursing home in Cheshire near the Watts family estate. After mother and child rested at Abney Hall for about three weeks, Agatha arranged for them to have use of a property she owned in Campden Street in London. At this time Agatha’s secretary, Charlotte Fisher, was undertaking war work and living with her sister Mary in a house on Ladbroke Terrace Mews provided by the writer. Agatha resided with the two sisters, and like ‘a daily’ she visited Rosalind in the mornings to prepare breakfast and again in the evenings to cook dinner. Rosalind treated her mother in a high-handed manner and worked her to the bone. On one occasion Agatha was alluded to by Mathew’s nurse as the family ‘cook’, which angered Nan and Judith when they found out. The bombings on London grew more intense and frequent, and night after night Agatha sat anxiously with her daughter and grandson. When the sirens sounded they pushed him in his carry-cot under the heaviest piece of furniture they had: a papier-mâché table with a thick glass top. It was a relief to Agatha when Rosalind took Mathew back to the relative safety of his father’s home Pwyllwrach in Wales. The strain of day-to-day survival meant Rosalind’s close relationship with Max was all but forgotten by Agatha.
Agatha’s pleasure at becoming a grandmother was diminished by her husband’s absence. She missed Max terribly, telling him she was afraid that they would grow apart instead of continuing on a nice parallel track. Agatha longed to be with him, partly because she was haunted by the spectre of the First World War and its detrimental effects on her first marriage. Would prolonged separation change her relationship with Max? she asked herself. In October she wrote to him complaining her knees were sore, her back ached and she was ‘so tired, darling’.
In Max’s absence Agatha kept in touch with the archaeological world through a mutual friend of theirs, a married man called Professor Stephen Granville. Theirs was an unusual friendship, for Stephen had a tangled private life, and Agatha, in becoming his mother-confessor, learned much about the complexity of human relationships. Stephen’s extra-marital affairs led her to ponder in a letter to her husband whether she and Max had a tendency to idealize each other while they were apart. If so, she said she would be heartbroken.
The couple frequently addressed each other in their letters as Mrs Puper and Mr Puper. Given Agatha’s fondness for dogs the nicknames were a play on the words: pup and papa. In March 1944, Max wrote to Agatha saying he missed her a great deal and that he w
anted to ‘eat and hug Mrs Puper’; he looked forward to the fine day that would happen and envisaged there would be ‘a great deal of wagging tails’. A letter he wrote in May that year reiterated that his interest in archaeology had not diminished. He told her she was right about the future and that clever Mrs Puper knew that Mr Puper only really wanted to dig.
On Whit Sunday Agatha wrote to Max thanking him for all the love and beauty and sweetness he had brought into her life. She remembered a day in Aleppo in northern Syria when he had comforted her on the anniversary of her mother’s death. What a friend you are, she concluded, so staunch, so true. She was missing Max so much that around this time she raised her spirits by writing a nostalgic and light-hearted domestic account of the excavations on which they had worked in the 1930s, Come, Tell Me How You Live.
Agatha’s newfound religious convictions were reinforced when the war came to an end. Being reunited safely with Max in May 1945 made Agatha feel closer to God than she had ever been before. They were immensely saddened, however, by the fact that Rosalind’s husband Hubert had been killed in action shortly after D-Day during the invasion of Normandy, and although her daughter’s stoicism and disinclination to discuss the matter had left Agatha feeling helpless and anxious she let Rosalind know she was there if she needed her.
Agatha had always been self-conscious about being older than Max, and it pleased her that he had turned forty, as she considered that it closed the gap a little. They were so happy that they failed to realize that they had both changed during their four years of separation. By this time Agatha was more mature and philosophical in outlook than before. The most obvious change in her was her appearance: she was now in her mid-fifties; her hair had turned grey and her figure was stouter.
