by Jared Cade
One person Archie was unable to win over completely with his confident manner and his charm was Agatha’s mother. It was not just possessiveness of her much-loved daughter that led Clarissa to oppose the idea of their marrying straight away but the practical concern of how Archie might support a wife. Archie earned a modest subaltern’s pay, and beyond this the only money he had was a small allowance from his mother. The £100 Agatha received each year from the legacy of her paternal grandfather, Nathaniel Miller, was clearly not a sufficient supplement to Archie’s income.
Clarissa recognized, too, a certain ruthlessness in Archie’s character which gave her forebodings; she knew also that her younger daughter’s sensitive temperament made her vulnerable in the face of misery and hardship. Furthermore, Clarissa’s instincts – which could at times amount to something like clairvoyance – told her that Archie would not be a faithful husband. But Clarissa loved Agatha too much to cause her pain, and confronted by her daughter’s stubbornness she allowed the couple to become engaged.
Agatha plucked up the courage to write to Reggie Lucy to tell him their engagement was off. She would later ponder, after Archie had turned against her, that she might have been secure and happy with Reggie, although she knew she would never have loved him as much as she loved Archie. Quite early in their relationship Archie made it clear to her that he could not bear it when people were unhappy or ill, and an adoring Agatha only appreciated the significance of this matter later.
Their tempestuous engagement, which lasted a year and a half, was filled with ups and downs, with both Agatha and Archie often despairing as to whether their adverse circumstances would ever allow them to marry. No man in love, certainly not one of Archie’s temperament, likes to feel he is playing second fiddle to his prospective mother-in-law, but Clarissa’s precarious health was another reason the engagement was called off several times by Agatha.
Agatha’s love for Archie continued to grow, because in some ways he remained a stranger to her. Everything he did or said seemed somehow exciting and unfamiliar, and he felt the same about her, exclaiming once, ‘I feel I can’t get at you.’ In moments of uncertainty Agatha had the feeling of ‘wanting to go back’, to have ‘a safe foot on the shore’. But, where Archie was concerned, the lure of the ‘Man from the Sea’ was too strong, and she was aware that she had of her own accord swum out into deep water.
The advent of the First World War provided them with an incentive to grasp at happiness while they could. Archie was on three days’ leave and they were staying with his mother in Clifton. The decision to marry was undertaken so precipitously that they had to apply for a special licence. Archie’s stepfather, William Hemsley, proved fatherly and supportive as usual and helped the couple to finalize their plans.
The same could not be said of Agatha’s future mother-in-law, Peg Hemsley, who had once been described by her other son, Campbell, as a dangerous woman, for hers was the sort of gushing affection that could rapidly change into hate. While at the beginning of their relationship she had warmly received Agatha into the family circle for Archie’s sake, Peg had never considered Agatha a suitable spouse for her son. Agatha wore the new Peter Pan collars – then considered very modern and daring – and Peg regarded her son’s fiancée as ‘fast’. Peg had consoled herself with the thought that Archie was too young to marry and that nothing would come of the unhappy alliance. She had not reckoned on her son’s determination. There were many occasions when Peg alternated between demonstrating ostentatious displays of affection towards Agatha and making her antipathy clear to her future daughter-in-law. Agatha suspected rightly that there would be trouble from Peg over their decision to marry.
However, not even Peg’s attack of hysterics and refusal to attend the ceremony at the parish church of Emmanuel, Clifton, could sway Archie or Agatha, who were married on Christmas Eve 1914. Agatha’s initially angry and disappointed family only learned afterwards that she had become Mrs Archibald Christie. Thus the marriage got off to a bad start, and Agatha later recalled of their wedding day that all the people she and Archie were most fond of had been annoyed with them.
Two days later Archie was posted to France. Agatha returned to her mother. Ashfield’s upkeep had become increasingly difficult for Clarissa, but a second source of income improved matters, since Agatha’s aged and increasingly infirm grandmother from Ealing was now living with them. When Agatha was not helping with the running of the household she devoted her energies to the war effort as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse at the Torquay Town Hall Red Cross Hospital.
She found that reading detective stories eased her worries about Archie, for beneath the conventional elements of menace and sudden death there was always a comforting morality tale. Towards the end of the war Archie was prevented from flying in further combat owing to worsening sinus problems, and he was given a desk job in France. Agatha passed her apothecaries’ examination and went to work in the Torquay hospital dispensary.
Agatha’s decision to write her first detective story was rooted in her complex feelings about Madge. Agatha both admired and felt a strong undercurrent of jealousy for the elder sister who was dubbed ‘the clever one’. Madge had married into an extremely wealthy family, her looks and wit were widely praised, and she and her husband Jimmy had travelled to such exotic places as the Italian Alps and St Moritz. While frequently argumentative, Madge could be highly entertaining. The fascinating stories she told about herself and others were often heavily embellished but always contained a grain of truth. Much to Agatha’s awe and chagrin Madge had had a series of short stories published in Vanity Fair, making Agatha’s own literary rejections even more disappointing and humiliating.
After this, around the time of Agatha’s romance with Reggie Lucy, the sisters had got into a heated discussion on what made a good detective story. Madge made a bet with her sister that she could not write a detective story where the reader was not able to guess who was responsible for the crime that had been committed, despite having the same clues as the detective.
Goaded by jealousy, Agatha planned The Mysterious Affair at Styles during idle moments in the dispensary. The ingenious murder method for her story was inspired by her newly acquired knowledge of poisons, while the many Belgian refugees proliferating in Torquay suggested to her the background of her little detective with the egg-shaped head, Hercule Poirot.
Her married life really only began in September 1918, two months before the war finally ended. Agatha gave up her war work in Torquay and moved to London to be with Archie. Her husband had been posted to the Air Ministry in Covent Garden where he served as Chief Technical Officer of the South-Eastern Area. He had returned from France a much decorated war hero, for in addition to having been mentioned in five dispatches he had received three medals: the DSO, the CMG and the Order of St Stanislaus Third Class with Swords. Archie no longer intended pursuing a career in the Royal Air Force, because he had become convinced there was no future for him in the armed forces, and he was determined to find a job in the City of London in order to make a lot of money.
Agatha’s weekends were lonely, and initially she avoided her well-off friends in London. She was embarrassed by the financial gulf that separated her and Archie from them. Nan Watts had recently moved to 10 More’s Gardens in Chelsea, and after Agatha had plucked up the courage to get in touch she regretted not having looked her up sooner.
Nan’s marriage to Hugo Pollock in 1912 was not a success. She had borne him a daughter, Judith, four years later, but he had had no time for the child and often told her to ‘hop it’ in Arabic. Shortly before Agatha visited Nan he had gone off on a walking holiday and had not bothered to return. Rather than brood, Nan had moved to London in search of a more cosmopolitan lifestyle. Agatha was so impoverished that one of her greatest pleasures when visiting Nan was to be invited to examine the contents of her affluent friend’s wardrobe.
It was while Archie was looking for the right opportunity to come along in this difficult post-
war period that Agatha discovered that she was pregnant. Archie was subdued on hearing the news and he expressed a desire for a daughter, saying he would be jealous of a son. His reaction was not altogether surprising, for after their marriage much of his boldness and audacity had evaporated to reveal a diffidence and boyishness that met the child in Agatha. Archie also was very concerned that his wife should regain her physical attractiveness after the birth. On 5 August 1919 they became the proud parents of a daughter, Rosalind, whom they nicknamed Teddy.
That same year Archie resigned his commission when he received an offer to join the staff of the Imperial and Foreign Corporation, deeming this to be the stepping-stone for which he had been looking. In the joy and excitement of being reunited with Archie and starting their life together – in a succession of cramped flats across London – Agatha had given up on The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which over the previous few years had been rejected by five publishers. When the Bodley Head publishing house wrote towards the end of 1919 requesting a meeting it seemed a promising omen.
Agatha met John Lane of the Bodley Head in January 1920 and, after agreeing to alter the last two chapters, she eagerly – too eagerly – signed a contract there and then to have her manuscript published. What she did not realize was that the terms of the contract were very much in the Bodley Head’s favour. Nor did she take in the fact that she was obliged to offer her new publishers a total of five books.
After fulfilling her agreement to alter the courtroom setting of the book’s dénouement to a drawing-room bristling with tension, she received a rare distinction for a début novelist of having The Mysterious Affair at Styles serialized in the Friday supplement of The Times Weekly Edition from February to June that year. Agatha’s real desire, however, was to see her story published in book form. The Bodley Head had advertised that the book would come out in August. When it had still not appeared by October Agatha was disappointed and frustrated. In a letter to her publishers she expressed the desire to see her book released before Christmas in order to coincide with the Greenwood trial. In November there was much press interest when the Kidwelly solicitor, Harold Greenwood, was acquitted of poisoning his wife. It was Agatha’s hope that her tale with its poisoning and courtroom drama would strike a similar chord of interest in the public.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles eventually appeared in America at the end of 1920 and in Britain at the beginning of 1921, selling just over 2,000 copies, which was then considered a good sale for a first detective story. But since the contract she had signed was so much in her publishers’ favour all she made was £25, which was her half-share of the serial rights.
Agatha’s next book, The Secret Adversary, would earn almost twice as much and introduced an idealized version of Archie and herself in the characters of the recently demobbed Tommy Beresford and Prudence ‘Tuppence’ Cowley, two bright young things whose decision to place an advertisement in The Times hiring out their services – ‘No unreasonable offer refused’ – would lead them into an espionage conspiracy involving missing papers and a mysterious girl who eludes her enemies by faking amnesia.
Agatha was hoping to succeed at her writing to alleviate the financial constraints of her married life and also because, once again, it had become difficult for her mother to maintain Ashfield on only one source of income following the death in 1919 of Agatha’s grandmother from Ealing.
Once Agatha realized that the Bodley Head had taken advantage of her, she determined to fulfil her contract with them as quickly as possible so that she might find a new publisher. Her contract did not stipulate that the five books she owed the Bodley Head had to be detective stories, and she seized on this loophole, after delivering the manuscript of The Secret Adversary, to offer the Bodley Head a long mystical story she had written some years previously called Vision.
Agatha was quite rightly convinced that the company would not accept it, but because her publishers had treated her so unfairly she felt no compunction in the matter. The Secret Adversary was brought out by the Bodley Head in 1922 and fancifully dedicated ‘To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure’, by which time the Christies had embarked on their own adventure.
Agatha accompanied Archie in his capacity as Financial Adviser on the British Empire Mission of 1922, which took them to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States to promote the forthcoming British Empire Exhibition to be held in 1924 at Wembley on the outskirts of London. It was one of the most exciting experiences of their lives. Although the tour turned out to be an arduous publicity campaign that involved meeting numerous government officials from each country, it offered moments of respite such as when Archie and Agatha spent two weeks together in Honolulu, where their fascination for each other and their delight in surf-board riding resulted in a mood of companionable playfulness all too often dampened by Archie’s struggle to create a niche for himself in the business world. On the negative side, there was the irascible Major Ernest Belcher, whose fierce temper tantrums made him a volatile leader of the tour, and separation from their daughter Rosalind, who was being looked after by relatives. Their major problems, however, were to come on their return to England.
Chapter Three
Adversity and Prosperity
As soon as the Christies returned to their London flat things started to go wrong. The Imperial and Foreign Corporation had not kept Archie’s position open, and he found himself unemployed and unable to get a job. The couple had known before they started on the tour that it was highly likely that this might happen, but they had never believed in playing safe and had been determined to see the world and risk the consequences.
May 1923 saw the publication of The Murder on the Links, a new Poirot tale about a millionaire found stabbed on a golf course in France. Before the book’s publication Agatha won a major row with her publisher, resulting in some ill feeling, over the proposed book jacket, which was to have featured a misleading illustration. Despite their continued financial hardship and Archie’s dark moods Agatha was convinced he would eventually find the right job since he was fiercely ambitious and had a drive she had always admired.
A minor boost to their finances came in the second week of May when she won a small prize by correctly identifying the killer of Hugh Bowden in the seven-week-long newspaper serial The Mystery of Norman’s Court. Had hers been the first correct entry received by the Daily Sketch the first prize of £1,300 would have resolved their financial difficulties, but it was not, and the second prize of £800 was divided among twelve runners-up, of whom Agatha was just one.
Shortly before the British Empire tour, after many years’ absence, her elder brother Monty had returned to England. In her autobiography Agatha does not reveal the secret shame concerning her brother and the reason her mother found it so difficult to cope with his erratic behaviour. In fact, Monty had become a drug addict. He had been expelled from Harrow because of his failure to apply himself to his studies and then served in the army in South Africa and India. He quickly squandered the legacy left to him by his paternal grandfather, Nathaniel Miller, and seems to have resigned his commission when his debts became too embarrassing. He moved to Kenya and took up farming and safari-hunting. His elder sister Madge – with money provided by her husband Jimmy – eventually financed Monty’s ill-fated plans to run small cargo boats on Lake Victoria in East Africa, but this venture had to be aborted on the outbreak of war in 1914. Monty served in the King’s African Rifles until he was discharged with a wound to his arm. The wound became infected and, although he resumed hunting, his health deteriorated. Finally, his doctors gave him six months to live because of the infected limb. Remarkably, however, he began to recover on his return to Ashfield. Like many charming people Monty was often economical with the truth, and it is not clear whether he became addicted to the morphine that would have been prescribed to relieve the pain of his injury or whether he became a habitual drug
user for other reasons.
The worst of Monty’s behaviour saw him firing pistol shots out of a window at visitors and tradesmen who called at Ashfield. His intention was not to hit or maim but to scare the wits out of his hapless victims. Madge was absolutely terrified when her brother turned his cruel game on her. Incredibly, Monty bluffed his way out of the situation to the police by insisting he was a crack shot and that there had been no real danger to his victims. The stress of dealing with her son’s irresponsible behaviour put further strain on Clarissa’s fragile health.
Agatha swiftly united with Madge to avert further scandal and distress to their mother. Their rather drastic solution involved installing Monty temporarily in a bungalow at Throwleigh on Dartmoor, where he was looked after by a doctor’s widow. Nan’s daughter and son-in-law, Judith and Graham Gardner, recall that Madge’s much put-upon husband, Jimmy – who disliked Monty as much as Monty disliked him – paid his bills for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, the strain of living with an unemployed husband became so great for Agatha that she contemplated taking Rosalind home with her to Ashfield or Abney Hall while Archie sorted himself out. Being sensitive to failure, he hated being unable to get a job. If Agatha attempted to take his mind off their worries by indulging in light-hearted chat she was accused of having no sense of the gravity of their situation; while if she was silent she was censored for not trying to cheer him up.
By November 1923 Agatha had completed The Man in the Brown Suit, a fast-moving thriller, set mainly in South Africa, involving the murder of a Russian dancer, the disappearance of some jewels and a mysterious arch-criminal known only as ‘the Colonel’. The characters of Sir Eustace Pedler and his secretary Guy Pagett were based on Major Belcher and his put-upon secretary Francis Bates from the British Empire Tour.
Agatha injected her own feelings and experiences about marriage into the character of Anne Beddingfeld, the attractive and fiercely independent heroine. She says she would not dream of marrying anyone unless she was madly in love with him and insists that sacrifices are worth it for the man one loves. She claims that the reason so many marriages are unhappy is because husbands either give way to their wives all the time or else cause resentment in their wives by being utterly selfish. She maintains that women like to be mastered but hate not to have their sacrifices appreciated, while men do not really appreciate women who are nice to them all the time. She concludes that the most successful marriages occur where a man is able to get his wife to do precisely what he wants then makes an enormous fuss of her.