by Janet Morgan
From this moment, too, Agatha began to make a number of local friends. She saw, for example, a great deal of Dr and Mrs Huxley’s five daughters, whom she joined in the singing class they shared with three or four other girls, under the tutelage of the happily named Dr Crow. The Huxley girls were unusual and enterprising, shocking older Torquay society by their lively behaviour, which included the fact that they did not wear gloves. They merrily carried Agatha along with their plans, inducing her to take part in The Yeomen of the Guard, of which three performances were given in the Parish Rooms, to the vast amusement of the family and friends in the audience. James Watts in particular never forgot this exhibition. ‘Of course,’ Agatha reflected years later, ‘it must have been very funny. A large quantity of weak girls with squeaky breathy voices, producing the scene in the Tower of London, practically all in male roles.’ She always remembered with special hilarity her own difficulties with the middle-aged governess, drafted into the performance at the last moment to replace someone who was ill, whom she had to clasp around the waist while addressing loving phrases to her – ‘a kind of feeling of lèse-majesté’ was how Agatha described it.
The Yeomen of the Guard, Agatha maintained, was ‘one of the highlights of my existence’. Tall, with a clear, thin soprano voice, she played Colonel Fairfax, and her confident performance surprised her family. Agatha felt no stage-fright and later ascribed to this apprenticeship her lack of nervousness when it came to singing before other people. In all other respects, however, she remained very shy. It is difficult for people who are naturally outgoing to appreciate the agonies of someone who, as Agatha confessed, ‘can hardly bring herself to enter a shop and has to grit her teeth before entertaining a large party’. Madge inherited Auntie-Grannie’s chattiness, Agatha the reserve of Grannie B. and Clara. In her quiet childhood, she grew up to be a listener rather than a talker; obliged to show her paces before other people, she could be overcome by nervousness. Before the end-of-term concert at Mademoiselle Cabernet’s she was beset by anxiety, dreaming at night of the piano being transmuted into an organ, of notes sticking, or of being late, and, self-protectively, fell ill with such high fever that she was forbidden to take part. The Gilbert and Sullivan performance with the Huxleys was different; it was delivered with friends before people she knew. Outside a circle of those she trusted, she would never be entirely comfortable and her early solitude had something to do with that. Agatha learnt to work by herself and to discipline herself; she liked to make her own pace. As she was later to write, ‘the most blessed thing about being an author is that you do it in private and in your own time.’ Perhaps the company and competition of other children would have changed her; perhaps not. At any rate, she made the best of her instincts and inclinations.
3
‘… a possession that is yours to do what you like with’
Although Agatha lacked companions of her own age, her childhood was happy and secure. The adults in her world were kind and thoughtful; her parents did not quarrel; the servants were equable and stayed for years; the household kept to a stable routine; her grandmothers, slow and massive, dispensed wise words and regular treats; birthdays and other anniversaries were properly celebrated and the progress of the seasons was marked with appropriate entertainments – sea-bathing, picnics, Christmas pantomime – and feasts – asparagus, strawberries and salmon, game, turkey and plum pudding. There was a comfortable order and predictability to life; in Agatha’s recollections of her childhood there are unexpected pleasures but no broken promises. Her world was private and safe: Ashfield and Ealing were large enough and the family sufficiently small for her to have her own quarters with her possessions around her. She was given responsibility for amusing herself and looking after her animals and birds, but the management of her surroundings was in the safe hands of sensible adults. She could see clearly where authority lay: her father was, as she put it, ‘the rock’ on which the family rested; her mother’s wishes shaped the management of the house and its members’ behaviour to one another; each grandmother was in charge of her domain at Ealing or in Bayswater; Nursie supervised Agatha and the Nursery; Jane’s sphere of influence was the kitchen; and the parlourmaid too had her own territory. These were, moreover, all adults whose authority Agatha could venerate because she respected both their characters and their professional skills. They took her questions seriously and considered her requests carefully; there were no absurd rules. Only when Agatha went to her pensions did she find regulations enforced for regulations’ sake; by then she had some self-knowledge and the support of more confident contemporaries to help her tolerate rather than be awed by people in charge. As a child she never found the grown-ups around her pettily tyrannical and the only example of injustice she later recalled was the scolding she and her friends in Pau were given when they were caught walking along a parapet at the hotel, an exploit that had not been specifically forbidden because no one had thought of it before.
Agatha was not entirely untroubled. From time to time she had a particularly disturbing dream, which she described in her Autobiography and in the novel Unfinished Portrait which she published, as ‘Mary Westmacott’, in 1934. The nightmare varied only slightly: she would dream of some sort of festivity, a family party or a picnic, at which she would suddenly be conscious of the presence of someone who was not supposed to be there. This was the ‘Gun Man’, frightening not because he carried a gun but because of his strange and terrifying way of staring at her with his pale blue eyes. Originally the Gun Man had the look of ‘a Frenchman, in grey-blue uniform, powdered hair in a queue, and a kind of three-cornered hat, … the gun … some old-fashioned kind of musket’. In later dreams Agatha, among her family and friends, would suddenly realise that, though they seemed familiar, one of them, perhaps Clara, was really the Gun Man. The manifestation described in Unfinished Portrait is even worse: ‘You looked up in Mummy’s face – of course it was Mummy – and then you saw the light steely-blue eyes – and from the sleeve of Mummy’s dress – oh, horror! – that horrible stump.’
Agatha was never able to fix on the source of this nightmare, maintaining that it resembled nothing she had overheard or read. Perhaps the picture in her mind came from something she had forgotten, an advertisement on a hoarding, or the illustrations of ‘The Man That Went Out Shooting’ and the horrid ‘Scissor-Man’ in ‘Little Suck-A-Thumb’, two stories in her copy of Dr Hoffmann’s appalling Struwwelpeter. Her terrors may have been intensified by adults’ talk, or Madge’s game of the mad ‘Elder Sister’, but her dream must have had some underlying cause. Its form – of someone familar and loving suddenly transformed into a hostile stranger – suggests that she may have doubted whether those who were supposed to love her actually did. This may seem odd. Clara and Frederick did not neglect Agatha (indeed, according to Madge and Monty, she was petted and spoilt) and she herself emphasised how close she and Clara always were. But relationships between parents and children are intricate and strange: even when profound and genuine love is demonstrated in innumerable ways, one, both or all can feel insecure and excluded. Later in her life Agatha was often to write about the destructive power of love, about possessiveness, the relations between mothers and daughters and the nature of the maternal instinct, while the theme of an adopted son or daughter or a distant relation’s joining the household occurs repeatedly in her detective stories. These are the preoccupations of someone acutely aware of the complexities of family life. Serene on the surface, Agatha’s childhood was vaguely, but not unmanageably, disturbed beneath. Her idea of misery, as she wrote in the ‘Confessions’ at the age of four, was ‘Someone I love to go away from me.’
Two shadows fell over the Miller household, of which Agatha was dimly aware: anxiety about illness and about money. By the time she was five, Frederick’s business affairs had fallen into a sorry state, and it was then that the mishandling of Nathaniel’s trust obliged the Millers to economise by letting Ashfield and spending a year abroad. On their return they fou
nd matters no better. Money that had been invested in leasehold property in New York City brought little or no income, being mostly swallowed up in repairs or taxation. One of the trustees, who wrote Frederick encouraging but baffling letters, eventually shot himself. Frederick took himself to New York to try to sort matters out but had no success; in any case, as Agatha wrote later, he was a trusting man whom it was easy to swindle. On one occasion, after the Millers’ return from France, Agatha overheard her parents discussing their financial difficulties, which she not unnaturally compared to the catastrophes befalling the families described in the books she read. (Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children and The Story of the Treasure Seekers were two, with the father wrongfully arrested in the first story and losing all his money in the second.) She straightway announced to Marie that they were ruined. When this reached Clara’s ears, she reproached Agatha and quickly dispelled her melodramatic visions, explaining that they were simply badly off and would have to economise. This was disappointing because it was unsensational; it was also not entirely reassuring.
Where money came from and why it came at all were in any case mysteries to Agatha. As her father did not go off each day to any sort of business, her notion of the connection between the expenditure of effort and the earning of money was vague. The amount of her own pocket money fluctuated from day to day; it was not computed according to any obvious principle – so much for each year of her age, or whatever – but consisted of what copper coins Frederick turned out of his pockets. ‘I would visit him in his dressing-room, say good morning, and then turn to the dressing table to see what Fate had decreed for me … Two-pence? Fivepence? Once a whole elevenpence! Some days, no coppers at all. The uncertainty made it rather exciting.’ Prosperity or penury, then, depended largely on ‘Fate’. This was the theme of some of Agatha’s own early inventions, like the story of Mrs Benson and the Kittens, precipitated into direst poverty when the Captain went down at sea but, with his reappearance, restored to vast wealth ‘just when things had become quite desperate’. As money arrived in some inexplicable fashion, so it could vanish away. Now Agatha could see that her parents were worried and that these anxieties were making her father ill.
Frederick had first felt seedy while the family was in France, where he had seen a couple of doctors, one of whom diagnosed kidney disease. His own doctor in Torquay disagreed and other diagnoses were then made by different specialists. He suffered from attacks of pain and breathlessness, exacerbated, it seemed, by worry about his financial affairs. None of the treatments prescribed – rest, a diet of hot water and hot minced beef, and so forth – produced any improvement. Clara, a keen reader of The Lancet and the British Medical Journal, found the variations in diagnosis and prescription extremely trying, but she continued to encourage Frederick by telling him how much better he looked.
Frederick, however, was very unwell. He methodically kept a list of ‘Heart Attacks’ – fifteen bouts between April 1899 and June 1901 and another thirty, mostly late at night, between June and September. He continued to seek treatment; in late October he stayed with his stepmother in Ealing and went again to see one of the most respected specialists. A letter to Clara from his Club shows how desperately they had been searching for remedies:
My darling Clara, I saw Sansom this morning & he told me very much the same thing as last time. He insisted that my trouble has more to do with the nerves of the heart than anything else and recommends very much the same thing as before – viz. plenty of fresh air, distilled water, milk after meals & later perhaps cod liver oil (emulsion) or Extract of Malt and moderate exercise. He says most positively that my heart is not dilated and is of normal size & there is nothing valvular wrong but that it is weak & irregular.… He does not think the lying up system advisable but would compromise by having me lie on a sofa a part of the day with the window open & fresh air blowing over me. I have felt wonderfully better the last two days – better in fact than I have for 3 weeks – scarcely any breathlessness & splendid nights. I don’t know whether this is owing to a prescription of Taylor’s with digitalin in it or to my doing much less walking … I have decided to return on Wednesday next 30th if all goes well. I should much prefer – between ourselves, coming down now but Mother is so kind and good that I cannot bear to disappoint her. I can’t tell you how nice she has been to me & I know she was greatly worried in the early part of the week. I didn’t tell Sansom that I had been under homeopathy.…
Ill though he was, Frederick never seemed to Agatha to become cross or irritable and, as far as he could, he lived much as before. One letter to Clara reported that he had lunched at the Naval and Military ‘with the best appetite I have had for weeks – roast beef & spinach & rice pudding’ and that his stepmother had taken him to The Silver Slipper – ‘very pretty music and fairly amusing’. That letter ended cheerfully: ‘I am now, please God, done with Doctors, & hope I may get better soon. Love to my dear ones. I hope Agatha is better today [she had a cold]. The weather is again vile today. I hope this letter will make you feel happier & I think you will see by its tone that I certainly am. God bless you, my darling.’ Less than a month later, Frederick returned to Ealing, to see friends in London who might help him to find some sort of job. He caught a chill, which turned to double pneumonia; Clara and, eventually, Madge and Agatha, were summoned. On November 26th, at the age of fifty-five, he died.
Agatha, who was eleven, fixed that moment as the end of her childhood. Her world was vulnerable; for the first time she felt responsible for someone else: Clara. Her parents’ marriage had been a good one. Hannah, the cook at Ealing, who took Agatha into the kitchen on the pretext that she needed help mixing the pastry, told her again and again, ‘They were very devoted.’ The rest of the household crept about and whispered, sighing over Clara’s prostration. She was devastated by Frederick’s death. In her Autobiography Agatha spoke of Frederick’s last letter to her mother: ‘You have made all the difference in my life. No man ever had a wife like you. Every year I have been married to you I love you more.’ With it Clara kept the notebooks she had embroidered for him, the order of service from his funeral, some beech leaves from Ealing Cemetery, the little account book in which he recorded his expenditure, with a few of his fine, pale brown hairs pressed between the pages, and the piece of Pears soap he had last used. On a card placed with this collection was written: ‘There are four things that come not back to man or woman: 1. The Spoken Word. 2. The Sped Arrow. 3. The Past Life. 4. The Neglected Opportunity.’
After three weeks in France with Madge, Clara returned to Ashfield, where Agatha was waiting alone. Monty was now abroad with his regiment. He had worked in a shipyard on the Dart in Devon and afterwards in Lincolnshire but had failed in his efforts to become an engineer. The outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 settled his choice of career. He volunteered for the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Regiment and, at the end of the War in 1902, obtained a commission with the East Surreys and proceeded to India. Madge and James lived in the North, at Cheadle, near James’s parents. Clara and Agatha were left together at Ashfield; as Agatha put it, ‘We were no longer the Millers – a family. We were now two people living together, a middle-aged woman and an untried, naïve girl.’ Her description of herself is illuminating: she was, after all, only eleven. Though written years later, it is a reminder of how vulnerable and responsible she suddenly felt. There was little money. Auguste Montant, Frederick’s executor, explained to Clara that most of Nathaniel’s estate had disappeared. H.B. Chaflin & Co., of which Nathaniel had been a partner, would continue to provide an income for his widow, Margaret, and a small income for Clara, while the three children, Agatha, Madge and Monty, would each receive an income from the trust of £100 a year. Sensibly, Clara decided to sell Ashfield and find a smaller house; she preferred cathedral towns to the seaside and rather enjoyed the prospect of living somewhere like Exeter. But her children violently protested; Monty writing from India, Madge and James offering to help with running expenses, and Agat
ha, especially, desperately begging her mother not to abandon their home. Agatha’s attitude is particularly interesting. She wrote in her Autobiography of Clara’s unselfishness in bowing to her children’s protestations and spoke of the anxiety and expense she herself was to reap from that decision. At no point, however, was she apologetic or defensive. On the contrary, she emphasised the deep importance of Ashfield in her own life and, having talked of her mother’s feelings, her tone of voice changed and she wrote only of her own love for that house, the price she was to pay for it and her emotions at their eventual parting. It was as if, having had her father snatched away, she felt it only right for her to keep Ashfield. Her sense of responsibility for her mother seems to have been matched by a feeling that it was her particular duty to protect and maintain their home.