Agatha Christie

by Janet Morgan

  An increasingly wide range of literature became available for children at the end of the eighteen-nineties and in the early nineteen-hundreds. For small children there were ingenious ‘pop-up’ books (Madge had a collection) and vividly illustrated stories, like Punch and Judy, but until Beatrix Potter began to produce short books of simply worded tales with pretty drawings (The Tale of Benjamin Bunny appeared in 1904) there was little that children aged from four to seven could easily read for themselves. For older children, however, literature brightened up considerably, the work of Edith Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett, for example, being perfectly suited to someone of Agatha’s age and circumstances. The language is exact, the sentences uncluttered, and the ideas – missing fortunes from India, tyrannical schoolmistresses, adventurous children, secret gardens, magical cities, juggling with time – just the right mixture of the fantastic and the familiar. Agatha could look up strange words and puzzling references; the Millers’ house was well furnished with encyclopaedias, atlases and dictionaries. These late-Victorian and early-Edwardian children’s books were, too, full of complex and extraordinary fantasy, reflecting the hidden themes of ‘real life’ – quests, adventures, transformations, the wish to make order out of chaos or to obtain justice, the curious effects of money, death and love. Agatha was brought up on such reveries – the weird sketches and mad verse of Edward Lear and the remarkable worlds created by Lewis Carroll (Frederick had bought Through the Looking Glass in 1885, when Madge was six), not just those explored by Alice but also the more baffling, yet perfectly comfortable territory of Sylvie and Bruno. Like dreaming, reading mirrored and assuaged a child’s subconscious turmoil.

  In spite of Clara’s notion that premature reading was injurious, Agatha received presents of books from an early age. In 1893 Madge gave her The Ballad of Beau Brocade, difficult for a three-year-old but with a jolly swing to the lines (‘Seventeen hundred and thirty-nine, that was the date of this tale of mine. First Great George was buried and gone, George the Second was plodding on …’). When she was eight Auntie-Grannie presented her with Robinson Crusoe and, two years later, with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s newly published book, Granny’s Wonderful Chair (‘Chair of my grandmother, tell me a story …’). Agatha’s family also encouraged her to read by sending her regular letters, short and easy, whenever they were parted. Frederick, whose own taste was for melancholy but uplifting American verse and for the jauntier Thackeray, sent particularly charming notes. In January 1896, when Agatha was five, her parents took Madge to America, and Frederick wrote from New York: ‘Tell Grannie it was three degrees below zero (thirty-five degrees of frost). You see all the people in the streets with fur around their throats and little covers for their ears so they don’t get frozen!’ Madge took trouble to print her letters to her ‘dear Pip’, decorating them with animals and palm trees, and during their absence Clara wrote often to ‘her sweet darling little girl’. Clara’s letters invariably bore only the vaguest of dates (Agatha inherited this habit) but postmarks on the envelopes show that when Agatha was seven she was receiving detailed instructions to help Nursie track down missing photographs and ensure that Grannie rested properly. By the time she was five, Agatha had taught herself to read by puzzling out a text that had often been told aloud to her, L.T. Meade’s The Angel of Love, a long book, full of interesting words like ‘monstrous’, ‘discomfited’ and ‘tirade’. She used a copy that Monty had given Madge for Christmas in 1885; its spine is broken and it falls open at the place where, taking pity on the little girl in the black and white illustration, whose sisters are saying, ‘We think her very ugly,’ Agatha or Madge has coloured her hair with purple crayon.

  Frederick now declared that Agatha should also learn to write. She started with pencil and by the time she was seven graduated to ink and an italic nib, in which she wrote a large, legible hand, joining up some of the letters. She had mastered reading by matching meaning to the appearance of entire words, rather than single letters, and for a long time she had difficulty in distinguishing B from R. Her spelling was always of the hit and miss sort that characterises people who remember words by ear rather than by eye. Madge encouraged Agatha to practise her writing, ruling a copybook with pencilled lines and writing out sentences for her sister to follow. Each sentence featured a different letter of the alphabet and they all had Madge’s special touch: for J there was ‘Jealousy is a green-eyed monster,’ P was represented by ‘Pork pie is made of pig and paste’ and I had ‘I was an idler, who idolised play.’

  Agatha liked arithmetic, which Frederick taught her every morning after breakfast. He soon moved her on to questions concerning the allocation of apples and pears and the diminution of bathsful of water, problems she enjoyed enormously. Like her father, Agatha had a tidy mind and was naturally quick at sums and tables; later, in her mid-twenties, when she qualified as a dispenser, she had no difficulty in mastering the basic principles of physics and chemistry or remembering the proportions of each substance required to compound a particular drug. Her natural grasp of such concepts as quantity, scale and proportion, together with the fact that she had an ear that was more discerning than her eye, also encouraged her aptitude for music. She learnt to play the mandolin and would practise on her grandmother’s piano in the unheated drawing-room at Ealing. Frederick was very musical and could play anything by ear; with her father’s help and that of a German music teacher, Fräulein Üder, and her successor, Mr Trotter, Agatha progressed from The Merry Peasant, by way of Czerny’s Exercises, to Schumann and Grieg.

  Apart from her music teachers, Agatha had no professional tuition at home but her general education was every bit as good as, if not better than, that of her contemporaries who were formally taught. She read voraciously, devouring Jules Verne’s early science fiction and Henty’s adventure stories, and tasting the sets of bound volumes Frederick had accumulated: complete editions of George Eliot’s works, Mrs Henry Wood’s novels, Scott, Dickens, Trollope, Byron and Kipling, sets of the Cornhill Magazine, the Art Journal, The Nineteenth Century and The Lady’s Magazine, novels by the Brontë sisters and Marion Crawford, Oscar Wilde’s poetry, the French classics, thirty volumes by British essayists, Pinero’s plays and every novel of Disraeli. All these, save for some racy plays in French, she was allowed to read.

  There was, moreover, a great fashion for question and answer books, compendia of general knowledge and books of lists. Dr Brewer’s Child’s Guide to Knowledge was one, full of useful information on which a child could be tested, as in the games played by Agatha’s uncles. The Home Book of Pleasure and Instruction not only gave directions for such exercises as ‘How To Make A Rag Doll Which A Baby May Put Into Its Mouth Safely’, but also instructed the reader in ‘The Twenty-four Classes of Linnaeus’, ‘The Synopsis of Seaweed Tribes’, ‘Hints on Heraldry’, ‘The Principles of Photography’, ‘The Classification of Shells’, and so on. Such books also contained various games with words and numbers: acrostics, letter and figure charades (TELEGRAPH: I am a word of nine letters; my one to seven is a Chinese plant; my five, six, seven, one, two, is a fireside requisite; etc.), inversions, rebuses, enigmas, arithmorems, chronograms, cryptographs, and the like. These riddles provided amusement and trained the mind in what is now called lateral thinking. To her interest in order, hierarchy and proportion, Agatha added a liking for manipulating letters and numbers, interpreting codes, and playing with arrangements and sequences to hide or uncover other meanings.

  Although Agatha was always defensive about the fact that she had neither gone to school nor had teachers at home, in many ways an education of this sort was as valuable as school lessons would have been, and it was undoubtedly instructive and memorable. She acquired a great deal of general information, learnt how to look things up for herself, and browsed over all manner of subjects. For a short time, when she was about thirteen, she attended classes for two days a week at Miss Guyer’s Girls’ School in Torquay, where she studied algebra and sought to grasp the rules of gramm
ar and spelling. But, perhaps because her early education had ranged about with such lack of discipline, she was intellectually wayward. She had not been trained to work at subjects that bored her, bother with fundamental rules of spelling and grammar, or follow an argument through logical steps to the end. In itself this was no hardship; there are many ways to be creative and to manage one’s life, and Agatha’s native wit, orderliness and common-sense served her well. Indeed, she managed so well that she was inclined to think ‘education’ greatly over-rated, a common view among highly intelligent, successful people whose formal education has been slender – particularly among women who, for reasons of health or because of their social class or sex, have been discouraged from taking much formal intellectual instruction. Pleasingly, it often goes hand in hand with a great admiration for people – generally men – who have achieved academic success. Agatha, for one, held these two views simultaneously.

  She was also scathing towards those who observed, later in her life, that as a girl she had lacked the company of other children. From the age of five or six she was taken by Nursie to dancing classes, where marches, polkas and dances like Sir Roger de Coverley were taught and the children taken through Swedish exercises with silk and elastic chest-expanders. Later, there was Miss Guyer’s and, after that, when Agatha was fifteen, a succession of pensions at which she boarded in Paris. The first of these establishments was Mademoiselle Cabernet’s, where Madge had crashed among the tea-things and where Agatha now learnt the history and the provinces of France and failed lamentably at dictation, having learnt French, like her native tongue, largely by ear. She made friends among the girls – French, Spanish, Italian and American. She took drawing lessons, at which she was hopeless, and an effete gentleman called Mr Washington Lobb instructed her in dancing and deportment. From Mademoiselle Cabernet’s, which Clara judged unsatisfactory, Agatha moved briefly to Les Marroniers, a sound and ‘extremely English’ school at Auteuil, and from there to Miss Dryden’s, a small finishing school in Paris kept by the sister-in-law of Auntie-Grannie’s doctor. Here Agatha learnt and recited a great deal of French drama, worked seriously at singing and at the piano with an excellent Austrian teacher, Charles Fürster, and wrote essays on such themes as ‘Qu’est-ce que les affections corporatives?’, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’esprit de corps?’ and ‘Le sublime est-il la même chose que le beau?’ – the sort of philosophical questions, simultaneously sweeping and precise, that were (and still are) typical of French education, and to which Agatha provided typical French answers: full of subjunctive verbs, following a standard pattern and falling into three parts.

  It is nonetheless true that Agatha spent much of her early childhood without the companionship and competition of other children. Madge and Monty were away at school, so that for most of the time she was the focus of her parents’ notice. She was devoted to her animals – her cat, her Yorkshire terrier, Toby, and Goldie, the canary – and it was with her pets and her imaginary companions – Mrs Benson and the Kittens, Dick and Dick’s mistress, and later, a school of invented girls and a dynasty of make-believe kings and queens – that she entertained herself in the schoolroom and the garden at Ashfield and Ealing. Though she did see other children at her dancing class and when they came to tea, there were none in the houses neighbouring Ashfield and in her first ten years or so none with whom she could regularly play and quarrel, or share adventures, books, toys, and the time and attention of adults.

  When Agatha was five, she at last found some friends. Frederick, whose income was diminishing (it turned out that his business managers in America had made unfortunate investments and disbursements of the property that supported his father’s trust), decided to let Ashfield for the winter and take the family abroad, where the cost of living was lower. The practice of moving to France or Italy was not uncommon among English upper-class people who felt the need to economise in a good climate and there were certain towns in France and Italy where it was fashionable to stay. Pau, in South-West France, looking out from a crest to the Pyrenees, was one of these. It had crisp, clean air, which in the early nineteenth century had given it the reputation of being particularly healthy, and the proprietors of its large and ornate hotels were accustomed to taking English and American visitors for long stays. There were English bookshops and tearooms, and even an English hunt. It was, in fact, rather like Torquay, with French food and, to Agatha’s amazement, since no one had warned her, the French language. Instead of sea, there were mountains, and it was there when summer came, that at the little town of Cauterets she met three or four English and American girls of her own age, with whom she could romp and explore. Like other children, she found living in a big hotel particularly agreeable, with its huge public rooms, empty at certain times of the day, long corridors for racing, interesting lifts and surprising staircases. There was more forbidden territory than at home and, precisely because it was not home, more scope for mischief. Feuds could be sustained and alliances struck with pages, maids and waiters (one, called Victor, used to carve mice out of radishes for Agatha and her friends), pacts and contests more intense than engagements with the servants at home, because, being transient figures, hotel staff could be teased with less risk. All summer long Agatha larked about with Dorothy and Mary Selwyn – putting sugar in the salt-cellars, cutting pigs out of orange peel to decorate astonished visitors’ plates – and, when the Selwyns left Cauterets, conspiring with Margaret Home, an English girl, and Marguerite Prestley, an American, whose chief attraction was her fascinating pronunciation and vocabulary and her possession of a good deal of inaccurate but ingenious biological information. In old age Agatha remembered this interlude clearly and affectionately.

  When September came her parents moved on to Paris and then to Brittany. In Dinard they found some old friends and their two sons, but the boys took scant notice of the little seven-year-old, and Agatha’s recollections were chiefly of their mother, Lilian Pirie, whom she greatly admired, and continued to see at intervals over the next forty years. Mrs Pirie’s character and habits – she was well-informed, well-read, and decorated her houses in ‘a startling and original manner’ – in some respects resembled Agatha’s own. The Millers’ last stay was in the Channel Islands, not Jersey where Clara had spent her first nine years, but Guernsey, where Agatha once again found herself playing alone, constructing stories about three exotic birds she had been given for her birthday.

  Nursie had long before retired and, after the failure of a number of unfortunate experiments with French governesses hired in Pau, Clara carried off, with one of her capricious master-strokes, the assistant at a dressmaker’s establishment there. This was Marie Sijé, a sweet-natured, conscientious twenty-two-year-old, the middle sister in a family of five children. Marie spoke no English and it was from her that Agatha learnt her idiomatic and fluent French, never accurate on the page but always intelligible and convincing in speech. The two quickly became excellent friends, Marie depending on Agatha, as much as Agatha on Marie, for stimulus and reassurance, particularly when they came home to Torquay, where the other maids thought the French girl very odd, with her plain wardrobe and simple habits, sending home the greater part of her wages and saving the rest for her dot. Agatha, who noticed Marie’s homesickness and unhappiness, admired her industry and good sense; the impoverished but determined young women who eventually appeared in some of her stories (in The Hollow one works for a sour-tempered dress-maker) are a belated compliment.

  At Ashfield, however, Agatha saw less of Marie than during their months of companionship in France. It was then that she invented the School, not, she wrote later, ‘because I had any desire myself to go to school,’ but because it constituted ‘the only background into which I could conveniently fit seven girls of varying ages and appearances … instead of making them a family, which I did not want to do.’ Their faces and figures were based on reproductions of pictures in the Royal Academy which Agatha found in Auntie-Grannie’s bound volumes and on the representations of
flowers in human form drawn by Walter Crane in The Feast of Flora, a book which now seems droopingly sentimental but which was very popular in Agatha’s youth.

  Agatha discussed ‘the girls’ at length in her Autobiography. The one about which she said least was ‘Sue de Verte’, whom she described as ‘curiously colourless, not only in appearance … but also in character’. This, Agatha said, was probably because Sue really stood for herself, being the character the author assumed in order to take part in the story, ‘an observer, not really one of the dramatis personae’. This was appropriate because, although she did not say so, when Agatha invented the girls she was naturally unclear about the sort of person she was or might become. Any tentative ideas she entertained were embodied not in Sue de Verte but in the seventh girl to be added to her collection, ‘Sue’s step-sister, Vera de Verte’, aged thirteen, who was to grow up into ‘a raving beauty’, her ‘straw-coloured hair and forget-me-not blue eyes’ being already more impressive than the vaguer features of Sue. There was also a mystery about Vera’s parentage (as girls of Agatha’s age often wish there might be about their own). For want of any better ideas, Agatha ‘half planned various futures for Vera of a highly romantic nature’.

  More real girls, luckily, broke into Agatha’s life when she was twelve. At the beginning of September 1902, Madge, now twenty-three, married James Watts, the quietest and steadiest of her many beaux but the one on whom the perceptive Marie, with whom Agatha used to assess their chances, had firmly placed her bet. In the unpublished first draft of Agatha’s Autobiography she recalled with much animation the fun and excitement she enjoyed with her fellow bridesmaids. All their names are there: Norah Hewitt, who dashed out into the garden, a mackintosh and tarpaulins protecting her from the rain, to cut marguerites and daisies for the church; Constance Boyd, another friend of Madge’s; ‘Little Ada’, the adopted daughter of Great-Uncle Jack; and, Agatha’s greatest discovery, the bridegroom’s younger sister, Nan. It was with Lionel and Miles, Nan’s younger brothers, and Gerald Boehmer, Agatha’s cousin, that she and Nan inflicted ‘every variety of torture’ on the newly married couple – rice in suitcases, a notice on the back of the carriage proclaiming ‘Mrs Jimmy Watts is a first-class name’ – and with these other children that she let off steam by steeple-chasing round the schoolroom. Nan, a tomboy of fifteen to whom Agatha had been held up as a model of politeness, and Agatha, to whom Nan had been presented as the epitome of wit and sociability, immediately liked each other; each went to stay with the other, Agatha acquired Nan’s cast-off clothes, Nan learnt to drink a cup of cream.