LITMIR.BIZ

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played the same game twice; as Agatha wrote of her mother’s tales and games, their unpredictability sometimes shocked her but she also felt the enchantment of the perpetually unknown. Nursie’s religious beliefs were firm. She was a Bible Christian, devoutly keeping the Sabbath by reading the Bible at home. Clara, by contrast, experimented with various schools of religious thought: she had nearly been received into the Roman Catholic Church; next she tried Unitarianism, which in turn gave place to Theosophy and then, briefly but keenly, to Zoroastrianism. She was at one point deeply interested in Christian Science and occasionally attended Quaker meetings. Clara broke the rules – she and Agatha would gaily gather up all the towels in the house to play with – while Nursie enforced them. When Agatha was four or five, Nursie returned to Somerset. Agatha missed her desperately, for she had been the centre of order, calm and stability.

      So was Jane, who presided over the kitchen. There she was, massive, placid, always gently munching on some delicious scrap, providing regular meals at regular times, and bits and pieces in between. It is not surprising that food was always a pleasure and a solace to Agatha and that she is remembered for the ample meals she offered, the expertise with which she would make éclairs and mayonnaise, and the delight she took in food that was served to her. Jane taught Agatha to make cakes, ‘some with sultanas, and some with ginger,’ as she wrote proudly to her father when she was eleven, ‘and we had Devonshire cream for tea.’ She was passionately fond of cream: Devonshire cream on its own, eaten with a spoon; double cream mixed half and half with thick milk and drunk from a cup; or clotted cream put together with treacle to make ‘Thunder and Lightning’. This was real Devonshire cream, as thick as butter and as smooth, with a yellow crust and palest gold below, a simple but matchless taste, a slippery consistency and a flavour bland yet unlike anything else – just the sort of dish for which a lonely child might yearn.

      Agatha was, moreover, energetic and intelligent; she got hungry and bored, in spite of the games and stories she invented, and she remained a skinny child. Monty called her ‘the scrawny chicken’. Meals, punctually served, were benchmarks in the day and the ceremonies of presenting and consuming food were fascinating, especially since she was orderly and fond of ritual. Throughout her life she served formal meals as they were composed in her childhood, with silver and glasses correctly placed, flowers arranged, napkins folded, course succeeding course. A meal was a celebration.

      Liking the way things were arranged, Agatha was also interested in the way people were ordered. She was to discover as she grew up the fine gradations of Torquay society but her first inkling of a hierarchy was in the household at Ashfield. With her sharp ear for words and phrases, she noticed forms of address: cooks were always ‘Mrs’, housemaids equipped with ‘suitable’ names (even if they did not arrive with them), like Susan, Edith, and so on, and parlourmaids, who ‘valeted the gentlemen and were knowledgeable about wine’, had names sounding vaguely like surnames – Froudie was one of the Millers’ parlourmaids – to go with their ‘faint flavour of masculinity’. Duties, too, were clearly allocated and, while there were few complications in Ashfield’s small household of three servants, from time to time Agatha would be aware of friction between the nursery and the kitchen. Nursie, however, was ‘a very peaceable person’.

      As the servants deferred to Agatha’s parents (Jane, when asked to recommend a dish, would not dream of suggesting anything except, non-committally, ‘A nice stone pudding, Ma’am?’), so the lower servants genuflected to those in higher authority. Agatha was deeply impressed, as a child, by the reproof which Jane (addressed by the other servants as Mrs Rowe) administered to a young housemaid who rose from her chair prematurely: ‘I have not yet finished, Florence.’ A sensitive child, she could spot where power lay and, as children do, grew skilled at managing complex relations with a number of adults with whom she had understandings of varying degrees of complicity. Agatha knew about the servants’ world, not only because these were the adults with whom she spent a fair amount of time but also because she needed to keep her wits about her in order to avoid trouble and interference, obtain attention and titbits, and know what was going on.

      Like most children, too, she was interested in the execution of practical tasks – the way pastry was made, ironing done, fires laid, boots blackened and, as Agatha observed, ‘glasses washed up very carefully … in a papier-mâché washing-up bowl’. She acquired a proper respect for the efficient exercise of these domestic skills, enhanced by Clara’s instilling into her that servants were highly trained professionals, versed not only in the intricacies of whichever part of the household they managed but also in the correct relations that should prevail between themselves and the people for whom they worked. Agatha emphasised this point in her Autobiography, since she was aware that the world before 1939 which she was describing was quite different from that of many of her readers, who might be baffled by the nuances of these domestic relationships.

      To Agatha her mother was an extraordinary and magical being. Now in her late thirties, Clara supervised her household and her husband with natural authority, reinforced by experience. She knew and thought about her husband and children sufficiently keenly for them to believe that she had second sight (Madge once said to Agatha that she didn’t dare even to think when Clara was in the room), an impression that must have been fortified by her fickle but profound interest in various bizarre philosophies. She still wrote poetry; one of her stories, with Callis Miller as a pseudonym, survived among Agatha’s papers. The narrator of ‘Mrs Jordan’s Ghost’ was the unhappy spirit of a dead woman, manifesting itself whenever a particular piano was played. The preoccupations of this forlorn soul – rippling music, an ominous verse, guilt and purification, a vaguely apprehended unknown Power, ‘the unwritten laws of this mysterious universe’ – were exactly what one would expect in a story by Clara. An exotic figure, looking in her later photographs drawn and astonished, she seemed to Agatha a charming mixture of waywardness and dignity, certainty and vagueness.

      Agatha saw her mother at special times: when she was ill or upset; when she needed permission to embark on some rare adventure or wished to report on one; and after tea, when, dressed in starched muslin, she would be sent to the drawing-room for play and one of Clara’s peculiar stories – about ‘Bright Eyes’, a memorable mouse, whose adventures suddenly petered out, or ‘Thumbs’, or ‘The Curious Candle’, which Agatha later dimly remembered as having had poison rubbed into it (this tale too, came to an abrupt stop). It was then that she could study her mother’s ribbons, artificial flowers and jewellery. Small girls (as she recalled in Cat Among the Pigeons) are not immune to the spell of jewels and those belonging to an older woman are especially magical, for they represent all sorts of mysteries and transformations. In her Autobiography Agatha described Clara’s ornaments, although her list is thin in comparison with the pile of jewellers’ accounts among Frederick’s bills: for lockets and stars, brooches and fans, buttons, rings, scent bottles and card cases, and two of the items Agatha remembered, a diamond crescent and a brooch of five small diamond fish, bought, endearingly, during the last weeks before Agatha’s birth.

      In Nursie, Jane, Clara and Madge, Agatha was surrounded by strong and influential women. Her father, kindly and interested in his daughter’s progress, had his own detached way of life. In the morning after breakfast he would walk down to the Royal Torbay Yacht Club, calling en route at an antique dealer’s, to see his friends, play whist, discuss the morning newspapers, drink a glass of sherry and walk home for luncheon. In the afternoon he would watch a cricket match, or go to the Club again and weigh himself (preserved among his papers is a sheet of Club writing paper, with such records of stones and ounces as: August 9th, p.m., blue suit, 14.0; September 13th, a.m., Pep. Salt., 14.0), before returning to Ashfield to dress for dinner. Frederick’s photographs show him stout and contemplative, and, in part because of his fashionable moustache and beard, he looked older than his years.

      There were two other important and impressive women in Agatha’s childhood: her grandmothers Margaret and Mary Ann. Margaret, Clara’s aunt and Frederick’s step-mother, was known as Auntie-Grannie, while Mary Ann, Clara’s mother, was known as Grannie B. It was at Margaret’s house that the family gathered. After Nathaniel’s death she had moved from Cheshire to a large house in Ealing, filled with a great deal of mahogany furniture, including an enormous four-poster bed curtained with red damask, into which Agatha was allowed to climb, and a splendid lavatory

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