by Janet Morgan
John Lane accepted The Secret Adversary, as Agatha eventually called her second novel, for publication in 1922. It earned her £50, although what proportion of this came from the sale of serial rights and what from an advance on royalties is unclear from the ambiguous sentence in her draft Autobiography. More encouraging than cheques from John Lane and the Weekly Times was the praise she received from Bruce Ingram, editor of the Sketch, who commissioned her to write a series of Poirot stories for his paper. She began to compose these in 1921, together with another full-length detective novel, Murder on the Links, which was based on her recollection of a complicated case of murder that had happened in France not long before and on a number of French detective stories she had been reading. At this point, however, there were two interruptions.
The first was the prospect of the return to England of Agatha’s brother Monty, who had been living in a precarious, harum-scarum way in various parts of the Empire. After Frederick’s death in 1901 he had come home on leave and had then gone back to his Regiment in India, where, having come of age and into his inheritance under Nathaniel’s will, he proceeded to enjoy his legacy. It was quickly exhausted. Monty seems to have resigned his commission when his debts became too embarrassing and, unable to settle down, to have taken himself to Kenya to try his hand at farming, where, however, he neglected the tract of land he was granted, preferring to spend his time hunting elephants and other game. Apart from sending his mother and sisters lavish presents of silks and embroidery on his departure from India, and occasional telegrams requesting the urgent despatch of funds to Africa, Monty communicated rarely with his family. At the end of 1910 they endeavoured to trace him and learnt that he had moved to Uganda, where he was ‘enormously popular’ and frequently destitute. In 1911 he conceived a brilliant scheme for running small cargo boats on Lake Victoria. He sent Madge letters of support from enthusiastic friends and appealed to her to stake him. Thinking that at last a career for Monty had been found, Madge wired him his fare to England, and did what she could to help him finance the building of the first boat, the Batenga, in a boatyard in Essex. Monty threw himself into the project with alarming keenness: the Batenga was fitted with teak, ebony and ivory, special fireproof china and engraved wine glasses were designed, and a captain’s uniform for Monty ordered from the tailor. Between visits to supervise progress on the boat’s construction Monty would come to London and stay in an expensive hotel in Jermyn Street, lavishing treats upon himself – sets of silk pyjamas, a bonsai tree, and the like – and upon his family – a sapphire bracelet for Madge, and a petit point evening bag, acquired, of course, with the money she had put up in the first place. His family despaired of the Batenga’s ever being completed, let alone its arriving on Lake Victoria.
The venture might have succeeded but war broke out just as the boat was to be shipped to Africa, and it was sold for a song to the Government. Monty returned to the Army and enlisted in the King’s African Rifles. He was known to his fellow officers as ‘Puffing Billy’ and, years later, Agatha heard from one of them about his exploits in the War. Monty had nearly been court-martialled for insisting that his convoy of mules halt at a spot which he declared a perfect place for battle with the Germans. His commanding officer disagreed and was protesting against Monty’s insubordination when a large force of Germans actually arrived, was engaged and decisively defeated in what became known as ‘Miller’s Battle’. There was no court-martial. Monty was wounded in the arm during the African campaign and was later transported to hospital, with great difficulty, since he repeatedly climbed out of the ambulance train; according to the Colonel, who told Agatha about him, ‘Every time they put him in one side he got out of the other.…’ He escaped from the hospital after three days and, though frail, eventually resumed his rough and tumble existence: ‘mad as a hatter,’ said Agatha’s informant. Now, four years after the end of the War, Monty was coming home and preparations would have to be made for his reception. It seemed, however, that Agatha would not be there to welcome him, for the other interruption to the smooth course of her life with Archie and Rosalind was a scheme that would take her out of England: a tour of the Empire, lasting an entire year.
8
‘1st Class! Good oh! Right here’
The Empire Tour was, in retrospect, richly comic. It was not so much that the Empire itself was entertaining, though the places to which Agatha was conveyed were certainly outlandish and exotic and the methods of transportation various and unpredictable, as that the inhabitants of the Empire were wonderful to behold. Their appearance and manners were bizarre, they were perfectly unselfconscious, and all a little larger than life – not just the people Agatha and her companions met on their travels but also the members of the Empire Expedition itself. Its style was set by its central figure: Major E. A. Belcher. Had Major Belcher been a less colourful character, less a caricature of himself, the Expedition might have been more humdrum, even-tempered, less prone, perhaps, to catastrophe and unexpected changes of plan. But with Belcher at the helm, gloriously temperamental, marvellously disorganised, extravagant in his demands, everyone and everything associated with him became more violent in temper, more extreme in behaviour, more exaggerated in attitude. Belcher brought out the worst in nature and in people – and the best in Agatha’s writing. The account of the tour in her Autobiography is fluent and funny but it is not half as hilarious as the diary she kept, the sequence of letters she sent her family, and the two large albums of photographs and souvenirs she assembled when, at last, she and Archie escaped from Belcher’s clutches.
Major Belcher had been a master at Clifton, where he had conceived a liking for Archie, whose efficiency he came to respect and for whose wife he now felt affection, not least because she listened while he talked. His genius appears to have lain in successfully persuading people to appoint him to positions of authority, where a flair for organisation was required. During the Great War, for instance, he had first invented and then accepted the post of Controller of Supplies of Potatoes; as Agatha wrote later, the production and distribution of potatoes was fraught with complication: ‘At the hospital, I know, we never had them. Whether the shortage was entirely due to Belcher’s control of them I don’t know, but I should not be surprised to hear it.’ For Belcher was in fact unimaginably inefficient, his true bent being for what is nowadays called ‘public relations’. He was very good at self-promotion; as he had said of the potato job, ‘I didn’t know a thing. But I wasn’t going to let on. I mean, you can do anything – you’ve only got to get a second-in-command who knows a bit about it, and read it up a bit, and there you are!’ He would volunteer, full of self-importance and high expectations as to salary and conditions, for one undertaking after another where there were bound to be difficulties and disagreements. The Empire Exhibition was one of these.
It was to be held in London in 1924 as a showcase for the products of the British Empire, rather as the Great Exhibition in 1851 had been. Belcher had been appointed Assistant General Manager and invited (probably at his own suggestion) to lead a Mission to the Dominions – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and parts of South Africa – to drum up interest among the political and business leaders of the various provinces and territories. The Expedition would take nine or ten months, the costs of railway and steamship travel being met by the countries the Mission was to visit. Belcher now asked Archie to join the team as Financial Adviser: ‘You were Head of the School at Clifton, you’ve had all this experience in the City. You’re just the man I want.’ Archie’s expenses would be paid and he would receive a fee of £1,000. If Agatha were to come, her travelling expenses would be covered and Archie’s fee would just take care of her part of the hotel bills and the cost of a month’s holiday in Honolulu for the two of them.
It was a gamble, since Archie’s employer would not promise to hold his job open. The riskiness of the proposal was, however, part of its attraction. Archie was bored, for the demands of the City compared poorly with his wartime respon
sibilities; he disliked and distrusted his employer, and he was impatient for more authority. Agatha, for her part, pottered along comfortably until she was offered a test, but, energetic, perceptive and interested, she liked challenges and rose to them. She also longed to travel to the strange and remote places she knew only from explorers’ tales and watercolours and from the exotic articles and fabrics of curious design and workmanship which her family and their friends had pounced upon. Travel in the nineteen-twenties and ’thirties was slow (that was part of the joy of it) and Agatha had believed that the brevity of the annual holiday Archie was allowed would prevent her from realising her dream of going to faraway places. Now, thanks to Belcher, they had the chance. There was little difficulty in contemplating a long separation from two-year-old Rosalind, who could be sent with her nurse to Madge or Clara. Nor did Agatha feel more than passing guilt at the prospect of leaving England just as Monty was about to return. Madge, who was closer to him in age, berated her sister for wishing to leave at this important moment but Agatha, supported by her mother, was adamant. ‘A wife,’ said Clara, ‘ought to be with her husband – and if she isn’t, then he feels he has a right to forget her.’ Agatha did not in fact feel that, if she did not accompany Archie, she would lose his affections, but Clara’s convictions usefully buttressed her inclination to go with her husband rather than stay for her brother.
The Mission set off on January 20th, 1922. As well as Agatha, Archie and Belcher, the party included Mr Francis W. Bates, a tall, cadaverous young man with heavy brows and a wide and anxious mouth, who was to act as Belcher’s secretary; Mr Hiam, an East Anglian potato king and friend of Belcher’s, in the guise of agricultural adviser; and his wife and daughter Sylvia. They departed in some style: Belcher had secured for himself an audience with the King, who gave him a farewell present of two brace of pheasants from the Royal estates, and The Times had a photograph of the party on the platform at Waterloo. They are wrongly labelled, so that the nervous and diminutive Sylvia, huddled in furs and clutching a number of small packages, is designated Mrs Christie, while Agatha, beaming from beneath a cheerfully decorated hat, her coat embellished with a large bunch of violets given her by Clara and another bouquet in her arms, appears as Sylvia. Bates looks apprehensive: Archie, holding a pipe and leaning backwards, sceptical; Mrs Hiam, smart, stout and ready for the rigours of the journey and the eccentricities of foreigners; Mr Hiam, with dog, solid and successful; and Belcher, a presence in a well-tailored overcoat, the model of a confident tycoon.
The Missions embarked on a ship of the Union Castle Line, the RMS Kildonan Castle, pictured on the cover of the passenger list as a galleon, fully rigged, breasting enormous waves and fighting a gale. This, indeed, was how the seas seemed to Agatha, who was immediately prostrated by the most violent and prolonged sickness, so uncomfortable that she resolved to get off at Madeira. She wrote to Clara, on the little Corona typewriter she carried with her:
The day before we got there, I was very bad, sick without ceasing, having tried everything from champagne and brandy to dry biscuits and pickles, and my arms and legs were all going pins and needly and dead, so Archie fetched the doctor along, and he gave me teaspoonful doses of something or other, chloroform stuff, which stopped the sickness, and nothing to eat for twenty-four hours, and then Brand’s beef essence. When we got to Madeira, Archie got me up on the deck, and fed me with it, whilst I almost wept because Madeira looked so beautiful! I’d no idea of it.
From then on she recovered, her stomach lurching only occasionally when the sea was rough. She watched porpoises leaping and, to her delight, flying fish. There was plenty of ship-board entertainment – impromptu dances and concerts, a trapeze act on the struts holding up the lifeboats, a cricket match between first and second-class passengers, an after-dinner concert by ‘The Nickelodeons’, sports, and a fancy-dress dance, to which Agatha went as a Bacchante, and Belcher, in a costume hired from the ship’s barber, as Chu Chin Chow, for which he won first prize. Belcher, not surprisingly, was made Chairman of the Sports and Entertainment Committee. Archie and Agatha, who entered bravely for everything, ‘had our first contest yesterday, when to our utter surprise, we knocked out two Belgians who have infuriated the ship by hanging on to the quoits and practising all day long. It was a most popular victory. Everyone kept coming up to us and saying, “I hear you’ve knocked out the Dagoes! Splendid.’”
The Mission dined at the Chief Engineer’s table and the King’s pheasants were served, together with Belcher’s description of his visit to the King. Belcher had promised the Queen an album of photographs of the Mission and his doings, so he solemnly noted everything in a diary, including conversations with those anti-British Dutch passengers on board, of which an ‘Extract’, typed by Bates, was to be sent to the Palace.
They landed at Cape Town in the evening of February 6th and were escorted to the Mount Nelson Hotel. Agatha was enchanted by the gardens – ‘Most lovely flowers climbing up the houses, lots of mauvy blue ones, great morning glories and a kind of hawthorn hedge’ – and by Table Mountain and delicious juicy peaches. Best of all was the sunshine – she adored the heat – and surfing, or ‘bathing with planks’, as she called it in her first long letter home, written on February 8th. Agatha and Archie slipped away whenever they could to Muizenberg for surfing, or to a white sandy beach, edged with mountains, at a place called Fish Hoek. It was a far cry from the bathing machines of Torquay, but even in these blissfully primitive surroundings the visitors behaved modestly: ‘No bathing huts (and no cover!) but a kind young man offered us a hutch where he kept fishing tackle … swimming is a little tame after surfing. We are going to buy light curved boards (that don’t jab you in the middle) and absolutely master the art.’
Belcher, who had already displayed an ominous temper by complaining that African peaches were unripe, was growing irritable. He had a septic foot: ‘the doctor says he must lie up and rest it, and he says he can’t afford the time. Bates had forgotten to get him more carbolic, and he’d had a tight boot on all day, the food in the Hotel was atrocious, and the doctor has cut him down to one whisky and soda a meal, so matters nearly reached a climax last night.’ Poor Bates was having a difficult time. ‘He has been convinced ever since leaving England (which he has never left before) that he is going into deadly peril and will never return alive. He insisted on the BEE insuring his life before he started.…’ The others teased him. ‘We sent him a pc yesterday with a picture of a Puff Adder on it, and an earnest warning purporting to come from the “Society for the Protection of Visitors” and Bates has been busily looking them up in the Telephone Directory, and cannot understand why no-one seems to know where their offices are!’
Agatha was enjoying herself hugely. She went to a garden party at the Archbishop’s Palace (looking, according to the local newspaper, lovely, ‘in pale yellow beaded on the bodice with steel beads and a big black bow and ends on the left hip’), to the opening of Parliament by the Governor General, then the Duke of Connaught, and to a luncheon at Government House: ‘Belcher and Archie got on heroically with the Princess, and quite cheered her up. Belcher told her his famous lion story, and she and Archie agreed that they both hated getting up early and could never remember people’s names, to which Archie added cheerily, “But that must be rather awkward for you in your line of business.”’ The most interesting visit Agatha paid was to the Cape Town Museum. She wrote enthusiastically about prehistoric rock carvings and wall paintings and about the Museum’s collection of models of skulls, on which the Director lectured at length: ‘altogether one of the best afternoons I have ever spent.’
Agatha had hoped that the Expedition would reach India and Ceylon but sailings proved too complicated to include this diversion in their itinerary, so Belcher decided that at the beginning of April the party should go on to Australia. First, however, the Christies, Bates and Belcher were to make an excursion to Rhodesia – that is, until Belcher discovered that he and his companions were not to be t
reated with appropriate deference:
Grand crisis last night. The Union Government has given us free passes and a saloon on the Railways, but Rhodesia has been pigheaded and would only dole out three passes, and declined to have our saloon running over their lines without payment of a farthing a mile (which would work out at about £140) and … this rather tore things. The ultimatum arrived last night, and Belcher flew into a really magnificent rage, and after a few preliminary remarks as to its being everybody else’s fault for not handling the Railways properly proceeded to draft and send off vitriolic telegrams, Bates taking them down in shorthand, typing them, and dashing off to the PO with them in a taxi, and returning to do it again as Belcher thought of fresh things to say.… Our itinerary (for the ninth time) was again completely revised by the perspiring Archie, and we are now leaving by RMS Briton for Durban on Tuesday next, and working through the Transvaal from there.
A day later, however:
Rhodesia has climbed down utterly, will do anything we want! Great success of Belcher’s fierce tactics. Grand revising of the itinerary, everything being now fixed up for Durban. I think we shall do that first and Rhodesia afterwards, returning … to catch the Aeneas on the 7th April.
As it turned out, only Archie left on the Briton, for a terrific south-easter got up and Agatha decided to travel with Belcher and Bates by train to Pretoria. It was a ghastly journey: