by Janet Morgan
He was, however, fascinated not by soldiering but by flying; the aeroplane was just beginning to be regarded as more than a bizarre plaything and the farsighted saw it as a powerful weapon of war. In June 1912, Archie, who was practical and ambitious, paid the £75 fee (‘including breakages’) for a course of lessons at the Bristol School at Larkhill, on the ‘Special Reduced Terms’ offered to ‘those desirous of qualifying for The Royal Flying Corps’. He took a month’s leave and found where his heart and talent lay.
By June 27th he was flying solo, practising right- and left-hand turns, and on July 6th he flew alone for twenty-five minutes at the dizzy height of 300 feet in a five-mile-an-hour wind. The exercise was precarious; the official log made special mention of the fact that all landings were achieved ‘without even breaking so much as a piece of wire …’. By mid-July, flying a Bristol Box Kite, Archie qualified for the Royal Aero Club Aviator’s Certificate, a magnificent document, printed in English and French. The ranks of qualified aviators were noticeably small; Archie’s certificate was only No. 245. He thereupon applied to join the newly formed Royal Flying Corps and returned to his Brigade at Exeter.
It was three months later that he met Agatha at the Cliffords’ dance. From his photographs we can see that he was tall and well-built, with fair, crisply curling hair, cut short. He had strong features: an attractive mouth, a nose with a small crinkle in it, blue eyes, heavy brows and a look of slightly anxious intensity. He was very young and determined and fell in love with Agatha almost at once. They danced together a great many times. In his scrapbook Archie pasted the programme and next to it a newspaper cutting of a jolly verse, ‘The New Romance’, which began:
When first she fell in love with Frank,
’Twas not the latter’s youth and rank,
Nor yet his balance at the bank
That won the heart of Elsie;
’Twas not the whiteness of his soul
That made her lose all self-control,
But ’twas the way he kicked a goal,
When playing ‘back’ for Chelsea.…
Whether in Archie’s case it was his dancing or his heart-stopping profession as an aviator that attracted Agatha we do not know, but he felt sufficiently confident to appear at Ashfield shortly afterwards, on his motor-bike.
Agatha was playing badminton with the Mellors, who lived opposite; she used to go across to their house whenever their son was at home, to try out the latest intricate dance steps, a joke that had begun years before when they had practised waltzing, in the fashion of popular operettas, up and down the staircase. Clara, always exasperated at finding herself left to entertain Agatha’s young men unaided, summoned her home on the telephone. Rather cross, because she thought this was the ‘dreary young naval lieutenant who asked me to read his poems’, Agatha returned. There was Archie, pink and embarrassed, with a story about being in Torquay and thinking he might drop in. (Agatha spotted that he must have gone to some trouble to ask Arthur Griffiths for her address.) The afternoon passed; Agatha, Clara and Archie continued to talk, evening came, and the two women silently telegraphed to each other that he was to be invited to stay for supper.
Archie did indeed come, like Dermot, ‘in a whirlwind’ into Agatha’s life. Her Autobiography describes this important meal as taking place both ‘a week or ten days’ after the Cliffords’ dance (that is, on about October 20th) and ‘soon after Christmas, because I know there was cold turkey in the larder’. Archie then roared off into the night, returning several times during the next few weeks (or, in Agatha’s understandably shaky chronology, days). Books were exchanged, though not for reading, Archie invited Agatha to a concert at Exeter, where they decorously drank tea at the railway station (Clara judged an hotel to be too compromising), and Agatha asked Archie to the New Year Ball at Torquay. The dance was on January 2nd. Archie was moody and Agatha puzzled. Two days later, after listening to Wagner at the Pavilion, she learnt the reason. When they returned to Ashfield, Archie announced that he was soon to leave Exeter for Farnborough, since his application to the Royal Flying Corps had been accepted. He begged her to marry him. She explained about her understanding with Reggie Lucy; Archie waved it aside. He wanted to marry her immediately and Agatha knew she wanted to marry him. They were ‘poles apart in our reactions to things’, but she believed, and continued all her life to believe, that this was what fascinated both of them. It was, she said, ‘the excitement of the stranger’ and, as she remembered years later, it was at this time that she had awoken from a dream to find herself saying: ‘The stranger from the sea, the stranger from the sea.’ A poem she wrote then, ‘The Ballad of the Fleet’, indicates her state of mind. It is about the people who first inhabited the hut circles of Dartmoor, living a spare but secure life, until the coming of the Vikings in their galleys. In her verse the leader of the invaders – ‘the Stranger from the Sea’ – takes their Priestess for his own, and both die for it.
Agatha and Archie were mesmerised by one another; Clara, taken aback by Agatha’s announcement that ‘Archie Christie has asked me to marry him and I want to, I want to dreadfully,’ brought them back to earth. The understanding with Reggie was ended but Clara insisted that they wait, since Archie could not hope to support a wife on a subaltern’s pay, supplemented only by Agatha’s allowance of £100 a year from her grandfather’s trust. Archie, determined they should not wait a day longer than they could help, was momentarily bitter, but reflected that in any case the Royal Flying Corps preferred its young men to be single, in case they crashed. Agatha, too, was desperate at the thought that they might have years of delay. She was twenty-two and full of turbulent emotion. It is not surprising that for the next year and a half their relationship was stormy, first one and then the other wanting to break things off.
Archie, at least, had his training to occupy his time and attention. Shortly after the end of January 1913 he passed the RFC examination and was posted to Larkhill, in a squadron commanded by Major Brooke-Popham. His flights became ever higher (1,800 feet on April 22nd, 2,000 feet on April 24th), longer (45 minutes on April 17th), further (90 miles on April 22nd), gustier (20 miles an hour wind on April 29th), and more hazardous (April 2nd: machine wrecked; April 29th: dropped passenger engine; May 5th: bent chassis strut, goggles oily). He described his manoeuvres to Agatha: making spirals, observing artillery fire, swerving, firing double rockets from a Very pistol. She was appalled. On that first afternoon at Ashfield, when Archie had described his chosen career to Agatha and Clara, they had been enchanted. It was new and thrilling, and Agatha was fascinated by the aeroplane. She had enjoyed the hair-raising drives in fast motors; the magic of flying was still more entrancing. She had herself already flown in one of those rickety early machines, for in May 1911 Clara had taken her to see a flying exhibition where for the sum of £5 visitors could be taken up in the air for a few minutes. As Agatha acknowledged, Clara was wonderful, not just for agreeing to spend what was then, and for them, an enormous sum, but also for subduing her fears that the aeroplane, and Agatha, might hurtle to the ground. Agatha never forgot that experience. Her small straw hat firmly wedged on her head, she was taken up, the plane circled round and round and then, ‘with that wonderful switch-back down’, it ‘vol-planed’ back to earth.
None of this, however, resigned her to the perilous activities Archie was undertaking as his daily routine. She wrote begging him to give it up. Archie replied with a charming, though not wholly reassuring, letter:
I was so glad to get your note today, but I can’t give up flying yet.
For your sake, more than my own, I am taking no risks and feel perfectly confident that no harm can come to me. That poor fellow who was killed was not safe in any machine and the Cody biplane is very unstable and carries much too great a weight on the elevator. He hated flying it but did not like to refuse when he was asked to, showing a lack of moral courage.
I am terribly sorry for his family – so much so that I will give up this Corps if you really
are unhappy about it but I know I am perfectly safe – I always carry St Christopher with me. It does make one morbid reading about these accidents – still more so seeing them – but confidence soon returns.
He came to see Agatha whenever he could, first from Larkhill and then from Netheravon, to which he was posted at the end of 1913. His letters to his ‘dearest Angel’ reflected the doubt and despair they were both feeling. ‘The reason why I was unwell last week,’ he wrote, ‘was that I was so worried because I thought that it would be best for you if I never saw you again and hated telling you so. Now I have not a trace of pessimism left and feel sure that all must come right.… I was only doing in a clumsy way what I thought would be best for you …’. Then, more cheerfully, ‘To return to Aviation …’.
At other times their spirits were more buoyant. After three days’ leave with Agatha in Torquay, Archie wrote that ‘One day we will have our cottage which will be heavenly happiness and will never say goodbye again. You will have to be poor but I will have you to love and look after for ever so all will be well.’ They plunged into despair and out of it again. Some of their fears were exaggerated; Agatha, for instance, wrote breaking off their engagement when she learnt that Clara might lose her sight. Archie persuaded her that this was foolish, since it might not happen for years, by which time a cure for cataract might be found. But their financial insecurity was not misplaced. Archie’s pay was minuscule and, after his stepfather’s only rich relation unexpectedly left his fortune to the Charing Cross Hospital (who sent Mr Hemsley a handsome walking stick as a token of thanks), their hope of help from that source expired. Agatha’s situation was even more precarious than before. The crash of H.B. Chaflin was now complete and Clara depended for her income on an annual allowance from the private fortune of the son of one of the partners. An indication of the economies the Millers now practised is given by a letter that Clara sent in February 1914 to the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Frederick’s father was buried in the family plot. The site was valuable and its tending expensive, and Clara enquired whether the title might be sold: ‘the lot being of no further possible use to the family, they do not wish to pay for its upkeep, and also desire the money for its sale, as they are in England, and never likely to be in America and in extremely low financial circumstances.’ The application, however, was not sent off; Clara and Agatha somehow made ends meet.
As it turned out, the engagement lasted less than two years, but the delay seemed interminable to both Agatha and Archie, not least because they did not know when its end would come. Suddenly, however, in August 1914, they were swept into a drama far bigger than their own.
6
‘This waiting is rather hard but all is ready’
It is difficult to appreciate how unexpected the First World War actually was, especially to people like Agatha and her mother, who did not read between the lines of politicians’ speeches or bother with dissecting the ambitions of the Kaiser. There had been no major European wars for a generation – colonial imbroglios were not the same. True, there were those who perceived that German interests and Balkan quarrels would lead to trouble but even those responsible for running the country were surprised that things came to a head when they did. The summer months, a time when politicians and officials, like the rest of the English middle and upper classes, went to the country, the sea, Scotland, the spas, were in 1914 gloriously sunny; it seemed, afterwards, as if those weeks had been the last miraculous moment, like the pause before a wave topples over, of a world that for many had been golden and assured. Not for all; support was swelling for economic and social change. The Labour Party, formed in 1900, was growing in strength; the Liberals, despite Lloyd George’s programme of reform, were losing their grip; the House of Lords, for what was not to be the last time, teetered on the precipice of abolition. There was trade union agitation, rebellion in Ireland and disruption by women demanding female emancipation and the vote. Some time the wave would break, but not yet, not in these languid days and glowing evenings. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Serbia at the end of June was the catalyst, and war came.
The Royal Flying Corps was among the first forces to be mobilised. Archie’s last letter from Netheravon, written as they were waiting for orders to move, describes his own attempt to swell the size of the Expeditionary Force:
On Friday I took my recruit to Devizes to get him enlisted and there heard of a bankrupt Russian Baron, who was in need of a job, so as he was a good mechanic and could speak Russian, French, German and English perfectly I persuaded him in the end to enlist in the RFC too.
He tried to reassure Agatha:
This waiting is rather hard but all is ready.
I have a revolver in a holster and an ammunition pouch full of bullets, just to please you.
The last time I shot off my gun was after travelling all night from Cheadle and I fired 96 rounds and averaged 19 out of 26 so I may hit a large German if I see one which is unlikely …
You will be very brave won’t you Angel, it will be very hard to sit at home and do nothing, and I am afraid you will have money troubles too but it must all come right if we are steadfast and I will always love you more than anything on earth.
Two days later Archie’s squadron learnt that it was to move to Southampton to embark for France. He immediately wired to Ashfield for Agatha to come to Salisbury, if she could, to say goodbye. She and Clara set off straightaway; the banks were closed and all the money they had was in five-pound notes, which Clara, well-trained by Auntie-Grannie, always kept for emergencies. But no one would take a five-pound note and they were obliged to leave their names and addresses with ticket collectors all over Southern England (a trail vividly described in Unfinished Portrait). After endless complications and delays, they arrived in Salisbury on the evening of August 3rd, where Agatha and Archie had only a little time together before his departure. The next day she and Clara returned to Torquay.
On August 5th Archie left for Southampton and on the 12th crossed the Channel with the British Expeditionary Force. On landing he sent a postcard to Agatha; muddling her chronology again in the rush and turmoil of those first weeks, she maintained that it arrived three days after their parting. In fact she did not receive it until mid-September. Agatha later learnt how quickly Archie had been pitched into action. His logbook traces his progress across Northern France, until on September 12th his squadron, No. 3, moved with three others to Fève-en-Tardenous, where there was a heavy storm (which Archie and two of his friends missed, having fallen asleep on the floor of an inn). The German invaders, defeated by French and British forces at the Battle of the Marne and obliged to retreat some distance, now dug themselves into Belgium and much of the coal and iron-bearing part of France. The allied armies, retaining their direct communications with the Channel ports, poured men and weapons into that flat, muddy, occupied territory, seeking, yard by yard, to oust the Germans. This bloody trench warfare began in mid-September 1914 and was to last for four years.
Archie’s dash and bravery were soon proved; on October 19th he was mentioned in the first despatch from Field Marshal Sir John French to Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, describing the battles of Mons, the Marne and, particularly, the Aisne, and emphasising the great strain to which the RFC was subjected. In mid-November Archie was gazetted Flight Commander and Temporary Captain. More important, he was still alive and neither wounded nor shell-shocked. For the lists of dead and missing that were to mark the passage of those years were beginning to appear in English newspapers, and a dreadful procession of the physically and psychologically maimed started to make its way home. Agatha saw these men; she was now working with the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) in Torquay, to which came many of the boats carrying the wounded. She had been going to classes in bandaging and first aid for some time before the war started and now she began at the hospital as a ward-maid, cleaning and scrubbing, and, like the other novices, being more of a hindrance than a help to
the trained nursing staff. She learnt to grit her teeth and inflict painful treatment, assist in the operating theatre, cheer up wounded men and humour the doctors. It was hard, messy, evil-smelling, tiring work, which she later described in the novel Giant’s Bread. Nightmarish though this transformation was, Agatha was at least busy, with distractions sufficiently exhausting to prevent her from being overwhelmed with anxiety for Archie. She was, moreover, a good practical nurse, and the companionship of the wards and her patients’ dependence supported her. With her noticing ear and fascination with hierarchy and routine, she had a good deal of entertainment from hospital life: the deference shown by ward-maids to nurses, nurses to Sisters, and by everyone to doctors, the variations in forms of address and in manners (amicable badinage among the VADs, who called each other by their surnames, genteel whisperings by Sister This and Sister That) – all interested and amused her as much as the conventions observed in the household at Ashfield and in the carefully graded society of Torquay.
This was Agatha’s first responsible job and she enjoyed being able to do it well. Like Archie, she was wiser and wearier when they were reunited at the end of the year, on his first period of leave. They met in London, as Agatha put it, ‘almost like strangers’, for both of them had not only been living through an entirely new kind of experience, of death, uncertainty and fear, but had been doing so alone. Archie’s reaction was to behave as casually, almost flippantly, as possible, while Agatha had become more serious. The insecurity of the times had made her all the more anxious that they should be married and Archie all the more convinced they should not: ‘You stop one, you’ve had it, and you’ve left behind a young widow, perhaps a child coming – it’s completely selfish and wrong.’ Archie’s leave began on December 21st. The plan was that Clara should stay with them in London and, when she left for Devonshire, they should go to Clifton to stay with Archie’s mother and stepfather. Agatha was uncomfortable with Mrs Hemsley, who was kind but gushing and possessive, and it may have been her nervousness at the prospect of spending Christmas with her, coupled with reaction to the tension of the past five months, that caused her to quarrel violently with Archie. The immediate cause was his Christmas present, a luxurious fitted dressing-case: ‘If he had bought me a ring, or a bracelet, however expensive, I should not have demurred … but for some reason I revolted violently against the dressing-case.’ It is not difficult to see why. The gift represented frivolity – indeed, that was why Archie had bought it, in his determination to recapture some of the light-heartedness the War had swept away. Agatha, grave and responsible, was particularly touchy about any implication that she was not dedicated, serious, professional, that she did not have battles to fight as well: ‘What was the good of my going back home to hospital with an exciting dressing-case …?’ The present also disturbed her in another way. ‘A ring or bracelet’ would perhaps have represented something permanent and binding; a dressing-case, however beautiful and well-appointed, suggested transitoriness, impermanence. That was what Archie was feeling; it was what Agatha wished to dispel. But these subtleties do not dawn on people when they give and receive presents. Archie had been clumsy, Agatha was tactless, and a tremendous row ensued, of such magnitude that it reunited them far more effectively than anything else could have done.