by Jared Cade
By the end of 1962 there were reminders of the past from which no one could protect Agatha. Archie, the great love of her life, died on 20 December 1962. He was seventy-three, and the sinus problems that had dogged his earlier flying career had led in more recent years to asthma and bronchial related complications. He was not religious and in his will requested no flowers and no funeral or burial service.
However, this did not prevent Archie’s son Beau from giving his father a proper funeral. Rosalind attended her father’s service, which was made all the more poignant since she met her stepbrother Beau for the first time. Archie left in excess of £90,000.
Decades later, after her mother’s death had reawakened interest in the disappearance, Rosalind would say of her father Archie: ‘I hate the image of him as someone cold and unfeeling.’
Rosalind’s son Mathew, who was studying at Eton, never met his grandfather, although he had written to Archie and made arrangements to see him in London. Archie had collapsed shortly before the appointed day and had been rushed to hospital, where his friend Madge James smuggled in a bottle of his favourite whisky to ease his pain. It was always a cause of sorrow for Mathew that he never knew Archie, although he was very fond of his grandmother’s second husband Max, whom he regarded as a surrogate grandfather.
Agatha was also upset when she belatedly heard that her childhood home in Torquay was going to become the site of a housing development. She acted fast, but it was too late to save Ashfield. Judith recalls watching Agatha weep inconsolably after hearing that the house had been pulled down. Ashfield represented more than just childhood memories; it was where she had courted Archie and given birth to Rosalind. If Agatha had known Max would betray her she would never have allowed herself to be persuaded to sell Ashfield all those years before.
Agatha was by now the world’s best-selling novelist in the English language and had been translated into over a hundred languages. This led to her achieving a life-long ambition when she was invited to dine with the Queen at Buckingham Palace in 1964; the only other event that had excited her as much, she said in her autobiography, was acquiring her Morris Cowley car during the 1920s. Would-be biographers constantly pestered Agatha with requests for assistance in their research into her life and works. Her refusal to help was adamant, because she dreaded the thought of the disappearance being dredged up after so long. This motivated her to finish dictating into a tape-recorder the final chapters of her autobiography in October 1965. She suspected that a number of biographies on her would be written after her death, and she wanted to ensure that people could read her own posthumous account of her life. She ended her memoirs by saying that at seventy-five she wished to thank God for her good life and for all the love that had been given to her.
Agatha revised her memoirs throughout 1966. She refused to give in to suggestions that they should be published during her lifetime; she was not interested in the publicity, and she knew people would want to know why she had left out her disappearance. Despite being over five hundred pages long, the post-war years were crammed into thirty-odd pages; significantly, there was no mention of Archie’s death. Nor, obviously, was there any hint of Max’s deficiencies as a husband. Instead she concentrated mainly on recalling her pleasure at the opening night of the play Witness for the Prosecution and over the archaeological discoveries she had made with Max. History had always fascinated her, and it pleased her that in a small way she had contributed to its understanding. Despite its omissions, the autobiography is a very enjoyable read, attesting to the considerable pleasure she got out of life.
Her memoirs contained several guarded references to Nan. She paid tribute to Nan by saying she was one of the friends she missed most in her old age. With Nan, as with few others, she had been able to talk together of Ashfield, Abney Hall and the old days, the dogs, and the pranks they played, their young men and the theatrical performances they had got up to and acted in. Agatha also said: ‘Nan, for all her apparent airs of indiscretion, was not really in the least indiscreet. She could keep a secret, her own or other people’s, better than anyone I know.’
The publication in 1966 of Nimrud and Its Remains established Max as one of the foremost authorities in his field. The two-volume magnum opus featured photographs taken by his mistress Barbara Parker. Agatha’s pride in seeing her husband fêted was undermined by her knowledge of his affair, but the writer consoled herself with the fact that the mild stroke Max had suffered five years earlier had not taken him from her altogether. She increasingly relied on him to protect her privacy from over-zealous journalists and fans, and he was always a stalwart support in this respect. Despite being conceited about his achievements in the field of archaeology, most of his friends spoke of him with considerable respect.
The fans Agatha found least troublesome were those who wrote for her autograph; those who requested a photograph were firmly turned down. She continued to regret the loss of her youth. In her memoirs she refers to the fact that on several occasions in later years the opportunity had arisen for her to meet up with an unnamed beau from her past. This was Amyas Boston, and the reason she declined to see him was because she knew he would remember her as a lovely young girl at a moonlight picnic at Anstey’s Cove in Torquay, and she was anxious that he should not see how the passing of time had changed her.
As Agatha grew older her detectives stories revealed more of her personal tastes and opinions. This was partly because she no longer plotted her stories so tightly and because the use of a dictaphone led to a more verbose style. Her opinions on such diverse topics as lavatory plumbing, comfortable armchairs for the elderly, household linen and the availability of proper muffins come across clearly in her 1965 novel At Bertram’s Hotel, while her views on the dress of the young are even more apparent in her 1966 novel Third Girl. Although Agatha considered that young girls went out of their way to look dirty and unattractive, she regarded the men of the 1960s more indulgently because they had the appeal to her of ‘Van Dyke portraits with curled hair and their velvets and their silks’. Her later books are all the more fascinating for revealing the views of their aged creator.
In Third Girl Hercule Poirot is provided with a stooge called Chief Inspector Neele. Poirot talks about the title character’s reaction to her parents’ broken marriage: ‘She had what is a very natural reaction of a child – the blaming of the parent who remains for the absence of the parent who has gone. She said to herself something in the nature of “Father was fond of me. It’s Mother he didn’t like.”’ Rosalind had said almost the same thing about Agatha when her marriage fell apart.
The writer’s romantic ideals had changed little from the time she had cast Archie as the Leader of the Vikings in her poem ‘The Ballad of the Flint’. One of the young male characters in her 1967 novel Endless Night describes the temptress as a glorious and sexy Valkyrie with shining golden hair, the most lovely creature he had ever seen. ‘She smelt and looked and tasted of sex . . .’ The book conveys the message that love cannot prosper on betrayed innocence.
As people grow older they often lose touch with the younger generation. But Endless Night, one of Agatha’s best and most unusual later books, is proof that this did not happen with her. However, the world had changed, and she was disturbed by the increasing violence apparent in British society. ‘Sometimes I’m almost afraid to live in this country,’ she said, ‘because I feel there is a tendency here to enjoy cruelty for its own sake.’
In May 1967 Agatha’s adored grandson Mathew Prichard married Angela Maples. The couple moved into his ancestral home at Pwyllwrach in Wales. Prior to this, in response to Mathew’s blunt directive, ‘This is my house now. I’m giving you two weeks to get out’, his mother and stepfather, Rosalind and Anthony Hicks, who had resided there happily for many years, looked around for somewhere else to live. The couple were unable to find somewhere suitable at such short notice. Rosalind asked her mother if she and Anthony could live with her and Max in the main house at Greenway. But the esta
te was Agatha’s summer retreat, and she flatly turned down her daughter’s request.
The relationship between mother and daughter had always been tempestuous. Rosalind blamed Agatha for the breakdown of her first marriage, claiming that her mother had left her father alone too much. During her many trips abroad, Agatha had often left Rosalind for long periods with her Aunt Madge and Uncle Jimmy at Abney Hall. In 1929 a lonely and frustrated Rosalind had written from her boarding-school to her mother who was in the Middle East demanding to know when she was coming home. The gulf between them had not been measured just in miles but in emotional distance. A year later, while Agatha was abroad, Rosalind had fallen dangerously ill with pneumonia at Abney Hall. She had recovered from the worst of her ordeal by the time an anxious Agatha reached her side. Over the years Rosalind had known from first-hand experience how neglected her father Archie had felt. Agatha had further isolated herself from her young daughter to write her books. The fall-out from the disappearance had affected Rosalind, too; anyone who asked her what had happened to her mother was ostracized for life.
Yet despite all this Agatha always ensured Rosalind was well provided for and had everything she wanted. The mother and daughter were polar opposites of each other. Agatha was a romantic dreamer, full of zest with an optimistic outlook on life, whereas her daughter was practical, down-to-earth and, as a result of having no particular direction in life, inclined to be pessimistic. Their conversations with each other had often contained unnecessarily hurtful barbs. Agatha had often referred to herself as ‘missus’ when conversing with her daughter, a term that was not altogether flattering from Rosalind’s point of view since Agatha often beckoned her dogs with the words ‘come to missus’. During Rosalind’s débutante season Agatha had written to her, ‘Missus has been really active! Your dance is fixed for May 10th’, although this was something of an exaggeration since her friend Dorothy North had arranged Rosalind’s coming out season.
Where her son Mathew was concerned, Rosalind could be equally dismissive, referring to him on one occasion as ‘my poor little half-wit’. As Mathew had grown older Agatha had developed a special relationship with her grandson that was far more reciprocally loving and relaxed than her combative one with her daughter. Rosalind had often seemed to resent Mathew, perhaps because he reminded her of the husband who had been so cruelly taken from her by war and the happiness she had lost.
Rosalind had always shared her mother’s intense dislike of publicity. She resented Agatha’s success as a playwright since her plays attracted enormous public attention. Rosalind found it hard to express gratitude. When the film rights to the play Witness for the Prosecution were sold for the record sum of £116,000, Agatha had avoided being taxed on it by giving Rosalind all the money by deed of gift. Yet it was apparent that Rosalind was not proud of her mother and what she did.
While Archie had been alive Rosalind had seen her father discreetly from time to time. Occasionally word had got back to Agatha. The effect of this had exacerbated her guilt over the collapse of her first marriage and had led to her feeling inadequate as a mother. Furthermore, Rosalind had made it known to Agatha that she hated her Mary Westmacott books, especially Unfinished Portrait, because of their biographical nature and wished they had never been written; years later, after her mother’s death, she would resolutely refuse to allow the BBC to dramatize them for radio.
Concerned about her mother’s on-going problems with the Inland Revenue, Rosalind had urged Agatha more than once to sell Greenway. On one occasion a row had erupted about this while Agatha was staying at Pwyllwrach. Still simmering with anger afterwards, Agatha had defended her position in a letter to Rosalind. She had told her daughter she had a guilty conscience about Greenway – especially since Rosalind, Anthony and Mathew had Pwyllwrach and Max had Winterbrook with its books, meadow and river. She also admitted that it was only her who clung to Greenway because she loved it so.
The thorn in Agatha’s side with her daughter, the one that led to her refusing to let Rosalind and Anthony reside at Greenway house with her and Max, was Rosalind’s ambiguous relationship with her stepfather and those ‘long, intimate lunches at the Savoy’ from the late 1930s. Agatha had been immensely relieved when Rosalind had married Hubert Prichard in June 1940.
Over the years the letters Max had written to Agatha were always flattering, cajoling and reassuringly parental in tone. The ones Rosalind had received from him resonate with the directness and intimacy of two people who may have been lovers for a time and may still have feelings for each other. Max had written in a letter to Rosalind, dated 7 December 1942, that he hoped he would live long so he could shake her, argue with her, criticize her, eat with her, quarrel with her, laugh with her, exchange ideas with her and find life more and more exciting because of her. He told her she was one of the people and things ‘(for you are a thing)’ that he valued and found good in life. He wondered if this would embarrass her at all. He admitted he enjoyed trying to embarrass her very much indeed, but didn’t think he would ever really succeed. He conceded he had a ‘devilish conceit’ and recalled a long ‘ticking-off’ by her about this. On 17 June 1943, Max had written to Rosalind, who had forgotten to send him a birthday card, saying that maybe he didn’t deserve one because he had not written to her for so long. He asked her if she ever felt prickly because he didn’t write to her – or didn’t she mind? He admitted he was ‘still crackers’ about her and thought about her ‘surprisingly often, just about every day’, adding, ‘I always miss you.’ On hearing the news that Rosalind and Hubert were expecting a baby, Max had written he was glad to know that she was going to have ‘a brat’ and that it ought to be a pretty good type with her and Hubert as ancestors. He said he could imagine Rosalind when she had produced the baby putting it down by the scruff of the neck like a cat in a box of rusty nails, not unpleased. Max said to Rosalind in a letter dated 15 October 1943 that the arrival of Mathew was the best news from home that he had had in the war, though why there should be cause for jubilation at the birth of an unfortunate brat into this world, handicapped with the parental sins of its parents and hidebound with their virtues, he was hard pressed to say. Max added that he was fearfully pleased about it all, although ‘Lord alone knows why; but there it is’. At Rosalind’s request he had become Mathew’s godfather.
It will probably never be known if Rosalind’s and Max’s close relationship led to adultery. However, it is abundantly clear that in 1967 Agatha had no wish to compete with her attractive daughter for her younger husband’s attention at Greenway.
In the end, after several appeals from her daughter and son-in-law, Agatha reluctantly compromised and let Rosalind and Anthony live on the edge of Greenway’s 33-acre estate in Ferry Cottage, a small thatched dwelling by the quay overlooking the River Dart. Ironically, Agatha had assigned ownership of Greenway to Rosalind and Mathew in 1959 to ensure that her daughter and grandson did not have to pay inheritance taxes on the estate after her death. But since Agatha still held the deed of gift papers Rosalind was not in a legal position to move herself and Anthony into Greenway.
Around this time Judith and Graham Gardner sold their house and were temporarily homeless. At Agatha’s invitation the couple stayed at Greenway for a month while they looked around for a suitable property to rent or purchase. The Gardners were given the use of one of the newly renovated luxury flats in the stables a couple of minutes’ walking distance from the main house. Agatha’s favouritism did not go unnoticed by Rosalind and Anthony, who resented being exiled from the main house and the lavish lifestyle enjoyed there by Agatha and Max.
Judith and Graham, who were firm friends of the Hickses, were invited to Ferry Cottage for dinner on a number of occasions, but it was apparent that Rosalind and Anthony were unhappy living in such cramped conditions. The cottage also suffered badly from damp owing to its proximity to the river. Agatha determinedly kept her distance from her daughter, preferring to keep her marital problems to herself. What the write
r wanted more than anything was peace of mind. She knew she would not get it around Rosalind; the two had a tendency to rub each other up the wrong way and resort to hurtful barbed comments. Rosalind and Anthony kept themselves busy during the day by attending to the running of the estate and, in particular, to the large market garden that sold produce locally.
Graham recalls: ‘Agatha preferred Judith to her own daughter.’ He and Judith were always welcome by Agatha and Max at the main house, often lunching there with the couple and their guests in the dining-room and taking coffee outside on the drive overlooking the lawn and the magnolia tree. Other guests of Agatha and Max included Max’s brother Cecil and two nephews, John and Peter, and various archaeological colleagues who had excavated Nimrud, such as Jeffrey Orchard and Diana Kirkbride, whose mother Judith and Graham had heard playing the cello at a recital at Dartington Hall in Totnes.
Agatha often took Graham aside from the others and had long talks with him. The range of her interests fascinated him; she was a woman who embraced new ideas and could converse authoritatively with him on such divorce topics as art, poetry, music, theatre, archaeology, horticulture and photography.
The Gardners were members of the Torquay Yacht Club and owned their own yacht. Agatha’s grandson Mathew accompanied them on their sailing excursions off the coast of Torquay and, to a lesser extent, so did Rosalind and Anthony.
After renting a property in Paignton for a short while Judith and Graham purchased a former water mill known as Higher Bickleigh Mill in the valley of Stoneycombe near Newton Abbot in Devon. The move coincided with Judith’s birthday and a card from her aunt-once-removed: ‘With all good wishes for happiness on your birthday and all through the year. Success to life in the Mill House, with love from Agatha.’ When Graham fixed the name of the dwelling in gold letters on the front gate he only had enough to call it Bickley Mill, and it has been known by this name ever since.
