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Agatha Christie: A Biography. Janet Morgan
Читать онлайн.Название Agatha Christie: A Biography
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isbn 9780007392995
Автор произведения Janet Morgan
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
Auntie-Grannie passed her days not in the drawing-room, ‘crowded to repletion with marquetry furniture and Dresden china’, nor in the morning-room, used by the sewing woman, but in the dining-room, its windows thickly draped with Nottingham lace, every surface covered with books. Here she would sit either in a huge leather-backed carver’s chair, drawn up to the mahogany table, or in a big velvet armchair by the fire. When Agatha was tired of the nursery and the garden, full of rose trees and with a table and chairs shrouded by a willow, she would come to find her grandmother, who would generally be writing long ‘scratchy-looking’ letters, the page turned so that she could save paper by writing across the lines she had just penned. Their favourite game was to truss Agatha up as a chicken from Mr Whiteley’s, poke her to see whether she was young and tender, skewer her, put her in the oven, prick her, dish her up – done to a turn – and, after vigorous sharpening of an invisible carving knife, discover the fowl was a squealing little girl.
This memory, like many of Agatha’s other recollections of her paternal grandmother’s house, was of fun and of eating. She described with great vividness each morning’s visit to the store cupboard; Margaret, like her stepson, was a collector but, as well as hoarding lengths of material, scraps of lace, boxes and trunks full of stuff, and surrounding herself with a profusion of furniture, she also assembled quantities of food: dried and preserved fruit, pounds of butter and sacks of sugar, tea and flour, and cherries, which she adored. (The ‘Confessions’ gives Margaret’s favourite food and drink as stewed cherries and cherry brandy and when she left Ealing thirty-six demijohns of home-made fruit liqueur were removed from her house.) She would dispense the day’s allocation to the cook, investigate any suspected waste, and dismiss Agatha with her hands full of treasure – crystallised fruit like jewels.
Mrs Boehmer, Grannie B., lived in Bayswater but made frequent visits to her sister at Ealing. Here Agatha saw her, and always on Sundays, when the family would assemble at Auntie-Grannie’s table for a large Victorian lunch: ‘an enormous joint, usually cherry tart and cream, a vast piece of cheese, and finally dessert’. Two of Clara’s brothers would be there, Harry, the Secretary of the Army and Navy Stores, and Ernest, who had hoped to become a doctor but, on discovering he could not stand the sight of blood, had gone instead into the Home Office. (Fred was with his regiment in India.) After lunch the uncles would pretend to be schoolmasters, firing questions at Agatha, while the others slept. Then there was tea with Madeira cake. On Sunday, too, the grandmothers would discuss and settle the week’s dealings at the Army and Navy Stores, where they had accounts and where, during the course of the week, Grannie B. would make small purchases and take repairs for Auntie-Grannie (who, Agatha suspected, discreetly added a small present of cash when reimbursing her sister). Agatha joined her grandmothers on some of these expeditions, which are recalled in her description of Miss Marple’s missions to the Army and Navy Stores in At Bertram’s Hotel.
Agatha’s Autobiography gives only the most general description of her grandmothers’ appearance. As widows usually did, they dressed in heavy black. Both seemed to Agatha extremely stout. Grannie B. in particular suffered from badly swollen feet and ankles, as Agatha was later to do, and her tight-buttoned boots were torture. In fact their photographs show that they were small women but to Agatha, a thin and bony child, they and the silky stuffs in which they were swathed must have appeared imposing. It was their conversation she remembered and recorded most clearly: good-natured bickering between the two sisters, each teasing the other over who had been more attractive as a girl – ‘Mary’ (or ‘Polly’, as Auntie-Grannie called Grannie B.) ‘had a pretty face, yes, but of course she hadn’t got the figure I had. Gentlemen like a figure.’ And Agatha drank in their gossip about friends who came to call: Mrs Barry, for instance, whom Agatha regarded with profound awe because she claimed to have been in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Though implausible, her story was so horrid that it fascinated the company.
These conversations were riveting to an imaginative child whose fancy careered ahead of her understanding and who was particularly susceptible to words. (On one occasion a farmer’s angry shout ‘I’ll boil you alive,’ when Agatha and Nursie wandered on to his land, struck her dumb with terror.) Especially interesting were the anecdotes of gallant colonels and captains, with whom Auntie-Grannie kept up ‘a brisk, experienced flirtation’, knitting them bed-socks and embroidering fancy waistcoats, and who made Agatha nervous with their heavy-handed archness and tobacco-laden breath. She remembered exceptionally clearly the remarks, deliberately made in her hearing, about the relationship between a retired Colonel in the Indian Army and the young wife of his best friend, who had retired to a lunatic asylum: ‘Of course, dear, it’s perfectly all right, you know. There is nothing at all questionable about it. I mean, her husband particularly asked him to look after her. They are very dear friends, nothing more. We all know that.’
Margaret seems to have been a more forthright and colourful character than her younger sister; certainly Agatha’s Autobiography contained many references to the opinions, precepts and warnings handed out by her Ealing grandmother, whereas she recalled little of the views of her quieter counterpart in Bayswater. But the serene and affectionate Mary Ann, who never remarried, busying herself with her needle and giving her attention to her three sons, and the more striking Margaret, with her pithy wit and scorn of humbug, thoroughly interested in what the world was thinking and doing, surrounded by cupboards and drawers full of bits and pieces, both provided models of what an old lady might be like. From their characters Agatha was later to draw much that was instructive and entertaining.
2 ‘… in private and in your own time’
Clara’s views on education were almost as inconsistent and ‘advanced’ as her religious opinions. Agatha was not only to be educated at home, unlike Madge, but Clara now maintained that no child should be allowed to read until it was eight years old, since delay was better for the eyes as well as the brain. This was too much to hope for in Agatha’s case. She was fascinated by words and phrases, lived among talkative adults who were natural storytellers and was surrounded by books, many of which had belonged to Madge and Monty: Walter Crane’s Panpipes, a wonderful book of songs like ‘Willow, O Willow’ and ‘Early One Morning’, with swirling art nouveau illustrations of elves, flowers and wreaths; fairy tales like The Giant’s Robe and Under the Water, the story of children who discovered an extraordinary world beneath a stream. One enduring memory was of reading The Adventures of Herr Baby while staying with Auntie-Grannie in Ealing. This book, written by Mrs Molesworth in 1881, had belonged to Madge; it is the tale of an irritatingly precocious four-year-old’s travels abroad with his family and how he is lost, found and restored to them. Mrs Molesworth’s children’s books were popular during Agatha’s childhood and she acquired them as soon as they were published: Christmas Tree Land, for instance, in 1897, and The Magic Nuts in 1898. At this time, too, Edith Nesbit was writing marvellous fantasies, all of which Agatha read: The Story of the Treasure Seekers, which came out in 1899, when she was nine, The Phoenix and the Carpet of 1903 and The Railway Children of 1906.
There was also the literature Clara had enjoyed as a child, exciting, simply written, illustrated books from New York, and the volumes she had been given later, like Louisa M. Alcott’s unfussy, family-centred Little Women, which appeared when Clara was fifteen, and Little Men, which came out three years afterwards. Some of Madge’s and Monty’s books had also come from America, including a series of startling thrillers: Mr Barnes of New York (first chapter entitled ‘A Vampire Brood’); Cynthia Wakeham’s Money; The Masked Venus; and Mr Potter of Texas (Chapter One, ‘The Deserted Hotel’: