Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days Read online

  After the wedding was over Nan’s parents returned to their hotel and Agatha’s mother retired to her bedroom at Ashfield, exhausted and weeping with happiness. Much to their surprise Agatha and Nan discovered they liked each other enormously. Upstairs in the school room they had a glorious time steeplechasing over furniture with Gerald, Lyonel and Miles. The springs on the chesterfield sofa were broken beyond repair. The day was rounded off with a visit to the theatre to see The Pirates of Penzance.

  The Watts family lived in a splendid Victorian Gothic pile called Abney Hall in Cheadle, Cheshire (now part of Greater Manchester). Agatha’s regular visits there over the years provided her with the experience of lavish living that she was to make use of in her future country-house murders. Abney Hall had been in the Watts family since 1849, and in the past they had offered hospitality to Prince Albert and other famous aristocratic and political figures. Complete with gargoyles, it contained numerous corridors and passageways, ornate carved staircases, mullioned windows, suits of armour, marble busts and more than three hundred oil paintings, including ones by Holbein, Gainsborough and Ansdell. A stuffed lion that had once killed a missionary guarded the main hallway. Outside, the manicured gardens contained a small lake in front of the house and a larger one at the back. An archway with a clock tower opened on to the enormous walled kitchen garden where a Gothic-style ventilating shaft wafted warm air towards the fruit trees. Agatha considered Abney Hall ‘marvellous’, and it would later surface, lightly disguised, as the setting for a large number of her mysteries, including The Secret of Chimneys and Hercule Poirot’s Christmas.

  The Wattses also owned farms and estates in excess of 3,000 acres, including the massif of Kinder Scout, in Derbyshire. The family fortune was derived from a hugely successful textile business, S. and J. Watts, founded by Nan’s and Jimmy’s late grandfather Sir James Watts I who had been Mayor of Manchester between 1855 and 1857. Situated on Portland Street in Manchester, the firm’s five-storey warehouse, which is now the Britannia Hotel, was designed in the form of an elegant Venetian palazzo, with each floor decorated in a different style: the ground floor was Egyptian; the first was Italian; the second was sixteenth-century Dutch; the third was Elizabethan; the fourth was based on the Galerie de Glaces at Versailles in France; and the fifth featured four roof pavilions with large Gothic wheel windows. Sir James Watts I had been knighted by Queen Victoria on the steps of Manchester’s town hall in 1857, and after his death in 1878 his fortune had passed to Nan’s and Jimmy’s father James Watts II, who now ran S. and J. Watts with Jimmy’s help.

  The relationship Madge forged with her new mother-in-law Anne Watts was not a happy one. Madge offended Nan’s mother by being rude and demanding. Anne Watts never ceased to opine: ‘Madge is the worst thing that’s ever happened to this family.’ Despite these tensions, the good manners of Agatha and Clarissa ensured that they were always welcome in the Watts household; moreover, Anne Watts and Clarissa were already firm friends because they had been at school together in Cheshire as children.

  The straitened circumstances under which Agatha grew up at Ashfield had little effect on her as a teenager, since Clarissa ensured that their home remained a bastion of love and security. She also arranged for her daughter to take arithmetic and literature classes two days a week at a school run by a Miss Guyer in Torquay. Agatha was to attend for a year and a half. Her religious beliefs received a jolt one day when one of her teachers insisted that every one of them would at some time in their lives face despair and that until that time they would not truly know what it was to be a Christian. The real test, she was told, was to know, as God did, what it was like to feel that all your friends had forsaken you, that those you love and trust have turned away from you. The teacher explained that the way to survive was to hold on to the conviction that this was not the end and to remember that if you love you will suffer and if you do not you will never know the meaning of a Christian life. Agatha never forgot this lesson.

  An undoubted highlight of Agatha’s rather staid life as a teenager was when Nan visited Ashfield. Agatha revelled in organizing their social activities. A favourite game was to cram themselves into a wardrobe packed with clothes and fall out of it. The fact that Nan was an heiress meant that Agatha often became the recipient of her cast-off clothes.

  Christmases were invariably spent at Abney Hall. Agatha and Nan like to drink a mixture of milk and cream on the estate farm, where Nan once painted all the piglets green. It was an established routine for the Wattses and their guests to dress up for dinner, and a photograph exists showing Nan made up to resemble a Kentucky minstrel. Agatha and Nan were irrepressible together, and after dinner they often performed pantomimes in a room known as the Council Chamber. An enormous curtained alcove in front of the fireplace made an excellent stage, and, on account of her porcelain features and dreamy manner, Agatha was nicknamed ‘Starry Eyes’ by the Watts family.

  Years later, after the disappearance, Agatha developed agoraphobia, a nervous reaction to crowds and strangers that led many to suppose that she was pathologically shy. Yet those who knew Agatha before the incident remembered her as an extremely attractive young girl who, when she grew older, had no shortage of male admirers. Her reticence, which arose from her pleasure in observing others and her disinclination to part with information except on her own terms, meant that she was often mistaken by those who did not know her well as either aloof or shy.

  Nan’s father, James II, used to make Agatha feel self-conscious by asking her, ‘What is our dream-child thinking of?’ He would encourage her to play the piano and sing sentimental songs to him, which she found easier to do than talking to him. She much preferred Nan’s mother, Anne, whom she found brisk, cheerful and completely factual. At this time Nan went in for being an enfant terrible and firing off damns and blasts at her mother, which upset her a great deal.

  In addition to Jimmy, Nan had three other brothers: the sensitive and charming Humphrey (Ughtred had died at the age of two), the gifted and precocious Lyonel and the shy and handsome Miles. They all loved acting with the exception of Jimmy. Humphrey eventually owned his own theatre in Manchester and ran a firm called Fitups, later known as Watts and Corry, which supplied scenery and stage equipment to amateur societies and did camouflage work during the Second World War. Lyonel married three times and had one daughter Pamela, known as Merelina, by his first wife, the actress Jean Blomfield, who was related to the actor-manager Sir Nigel Playfair. During the 1920s Lyonel helped Sir Nigel run the Lyric Theatre at Hammersmith in London. In addition to acting professionally on the stage, Lyonel also appeared in several films, including Outward Bound and So Well Remembered with John Mills and Trevor Howard. Humphrey and Lyonel also became the inspiration for the two brothers Alex and Stephen Restarick in Agatha’s 1952 novel They Do It With Mirrors.

  The youngest brother Miles, despite being shy all his life, was very good with children and used to play a game called ‘sitting on books’, which endeared him to Agatha and Nan. He was easily the most handsome of all the brothers – tall, with clean-cut features and very fair hair – and he duly boasted of this in a piece of verse.

  Miles once pondered in a deep reverie,

  And the gist of his thoughts he confided to me.

  Which were that he thought in the whole family

  There was no-one as handsome or as clever as he.

  Despite his retiring nature Miles joined the Grenadier Guards as a private spoke fluently. He often carried messages behind enemy lines and his work resulted in him being awarded the French Croix de Guerre medal. In 1927 he took his capital out of the family firm S. and J. Watts and bought a fruit farm that was only intermittently successful.

  On Boxing Day Agatha accompanied the Wattses to a pantomime in Manchester. A love of pantomimes stayed with her all her life. She and the family returned home on the train singing all the songs they had heard, with the Wattses rendering the comedians’ songs in broad Lancashire accents. One song they bawle
d out together went, ‘I was born on a Friday, I was born on a Friday, I was born on a Friday when my mother wasn’t at ’ome!’ Humphrey sang the supreme favourite in a melancholy voice, ‘The window, The window, I’ve push it through the window. I have no pain, dear Mother, now, I’ve pushed it through the window.’

  Back in Torquay, when she was not helping Clarissa run Ashfield, Agatha’s activities included reading, embroidering cushion covers, tennis, croquet, roller-skating, swimming and riding her horse side-saddle. She made up for the general lack of excitement in her life by taking part in a number of amateur theatricals. While performing in The Blue Beard of Unhappiness she met a young man called Amyas Boston who became for a time the object of Agatha’s affections and an ardent admirer. However, her passion was music, and when Clarissa sent her to finishing school in Paris she took piano and singing lessons and Amyas faded from her life.

  Over the next two years finishing school awakened in Agatha the idea of making a career in the performing arts. Sadly, her dream was not matched by sufficient discipline or ability. Her teachers undermined her confidence, and she eventually concluded that she did not have enough talent to appear in public as a solo pianist. Once she realized that she did not possess the volume of voice needed for opera she gave up the idea of performing in public, since becoming a concert singer fell short of her musical ambitions.

  During this period Nan was attending a finishing school in Florence. The former tomboy had turned into a demure, apple-cheeked brunette whose mischievous sense of humour readily attracted would-be suitors. Agatha kept in touch with her friend by visiting the Italian city during her school holidays.

  After Agatha returned from Paris Clarissa rounded off her education by arranging a coming-out season in Cairo. By now Agatha had developed into a highly attractive blonde of almost Scandinavian appearance: tall and slim, with a radiant smile and an oval face. The one feature that made her self-conscious was what she called her ‘Roman’ nose, and it has been said of her, unfairly, that she was never photogenic. In fact most of the best photgraphs taken of her as a young woman were informal ones taken when she was caught unawares or when she was enjoying herself in a group of friends.

  During her time in Cairo a series of enjoyable flirtations took the edge off Agatha’s natural reticence. But her suitors were more ardent in their pursuit of her than she of them, for none of them had the adventurous qualities she craved, and so she returned to England.

  Agatha recalled that she was ‘gloriously’ idle back at Ashfield, but the tranquillity was undermined by her growing feelings of restlessness. She was recovering from influenza one winter’s day when her mother suggested that she follow in her sister Madge’s footsteps and write a short story to alleviate her boredom; this and other stories that followed were rejected by publishers. With her mother’s encouragement Agatha sought the advice of their neighbour, the celebrated author Eden Phillpots, who, after reading her first attempt at a novel, Snow Upon the Desert, suggested she should refrain from moralizing so much. The novel, written around 1908, was followed by several stories, including Vision and the novella ‘Being So Very Wilful’. Eden Phillpots considered the later showed ‘steady advance’, but it was some years before Agatha’s literary promise would be recognized, for her romantic disposition and attractive looks ensured that her energies were taken up for the most part by courtships in which she did all the rejecting.

  As far as Agatha was concerned, the life led by her friend Nan seemed far more glamorous and exciting. Nan had recently become attracted to a highly undesirable suitor, and her parents had sent her on a round-the-world trip with her Uncle George and Aunt Helen to prevent the romance from developing.

  On 4 January 1910 the unforeseen occurred. The steamer Waikare, on which Nan was travelling with her guardians, struck an underwater rock pinnacle in the Dusky Sound and they were shipwrecked without loss of life on Stop Island off the coast of New Zealand. The two-day ordeal of the 210 passengers and crew was relieved by the fact that they had managed to salvage food supplies, luggage and a grand piano before the ship went down. A cat that was rescued gave birth to four kittens, and Nan, unfazed by the incident, made use of her Kodak camera to photograph her fellow victims sheltering under the tarpaulins.

  Years later Agatha would use the shipwreck in her story ‘The Voice in the Dark’. The incident made front-page news in the Otago Witness, and Nan triumphantly bore copies of the newspaper back to England to show her disbelieving family. On the return sea voyage she became romantically attached to a man from Belfast called Hugo Pollock whom she would marry two years later, and she happily regaled Agatha with the details of their liaison.

  Agatha demonstrated her physical bravery on 10 May 1911 when she and her mother attended an aeroplane flying exhibition. The pilots were offering members of the public £5 to go flying with them, and Agatha begged Clarissa to pay the fee so she could take her first aeroplane flight. Although aviation was in its infancy and aeroplanes frequently crashed, Clarissa gave her consent because she did not wish to disappoint her daughter. After returning safely to earth Agatha described her five-minute flight as ‘fantastic’.

  Around this time the most serious of Agatha’s romances was with the modest, kindly and happy-go-lucky Reggie Lucy, a major in the Gunners, who later became the model for Peter Maitland in her autobiographical novel Unfinished Portrait, which was published under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. Clarissa approved their engagement, and when Reggie Lucy returned to his regiment in Hong Kong their courtship continued by post.

  Despite Reggie Lucy’s lazy charm there was one thing he was unable to offer Agatha: she had a secret desire to be conquered by a stranger, ‘the Man from the Sea’, as she termed him in her autobiography. The need to be swept away by a stranger became a romantic obsession.

  Reggie Lucy, despite his devil-may-care attitude, had missed out on many things in life, and his suggestion that Agatha should keep her options open gave her an escape clause. The romance and adventure that Agatha craved suddenly materialized on 12 October 1912 in the form of Archibald Christie, the man who would change her life for ever then break her heart.

  Chapter Two

  The Man from the Sea

  Agatha was just twenty-two years old when she met the dashing and assertive Archibald Christie at a dance given by Lord and Lady Clifford of Chudleigh at their home Ugbrooke House in Devon. Twenty-three years old, he was tall and handsome, with wavy fair hair, a cleft chin, an unusually upturned nose and intensely blue eyes. He had been born on 30 September 1889 in Peshawar in northern India.

  Archie’s Irish mother, Ellen Ruth Christie, was alive, but his English father, Archibald Christie Senior, a former divisional judge in the Indian civil service, had died some years earlier after falling from his horse following his return to England. Ellen Christie, known within family circles as Peg, later married William Hemsley, a schoolmaster from Clifton College in Bristol, where Archie had been head boy. There was another son from the first marriage, Campbell Manning Christie, four years younger, who ended his military career as a major-general. He was a paler version of his brother, with artistic leanings that reached fruition after the Second World War when he wrote a series of highly successful plays.

  Archie had trained at the Royal Woolwich Military Academy after leaving Clifton and was a lieutenant stationed at Exeter in Devon. He encouraged Agatha to cut several partners so that she could dance with him on their first meeting, but Agatha wistfully assumed theirs had been a passing encounter. Much to her surprise he turned up at Ashfield several days later on a motor cycle.

  Agatha was quickly drawn out of herself by Archie’s charm, intelligence and impetuosity. Here was someone who promised romance and adventure in equal proportions and could challenge her reticence and seek out her hidden depths. Archie was that romantic figure of whom she had dreamed, her ‘Man from the Sea’. His profession was as adventurous as it was exciting: he was one of a small band of qualified aviators who had joined
the elite ranks of the recently formed Royal Flying Corps.

  Archie, in turn, was mesmerized by Agatha’s radiant attractiveness, as well as her femininity and her reticence, which made him feel even more decisive. A whirlwind courtship ensued. Archie tipped the scales in his favour and set Agatha’s heart lurching two and a half months into their relationship when he said he wanted to marry her straight away. Despite recognizing they were poles apart in many ways, Agatha desperately wanted Archie to be her husband.

  She knew that, in part, her fascination for him derived from the fact that he was still a stranger to her, and around this time she woke from a disturbing dream, distractedly murmuring: ‘The stranger from the sea, the stranger from the sea . . .’ She was so affected by this that she wrote a poem, ‘The Ballad of the Flint’, in which Archie was cast as the Leader of the Vikings whose fleet raids the peaceful inhabitants of Dartmoor in Devon. She cast herself as the Priestess of Dartmoor, and her feeling of helplessness over their circumstances was measured in the fact that after the Leader of the Vikings claims the Priestess as his own they both die tragically.